The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

visceral love of Charlie Parker that I still have, listened to

“K. C. Blues” covers wherever I could find them. When I was

a teen, I also came across Bil ie Holiday, and her voice haunts

me to this day - I can hear it in my head anytime - and with

“Strange Fruit” and “God Bless the Child” she sounded more

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Heartbreak

like a blues singer than a jazz woman; but the bulk of her

work, which I heard later, was jazz. It was her voice that was

blues. When her voice wasn’t blues, it meant the heroin had

dragged her way down and she couldn’t go lower. “Strange

Fruit” was worth anything it took from her, and so was “God

Bless the Child. ” I’m not happy with art as necrophilia, but I

think these two songs, and “Strange Fruit” in particular, were

worth her life. They’d be worth mine.

My brother, Mark, and I both had a taste for the Ahmad

Jamal Quartet. I loved the live jazz in the clubs, the informal

jazz I found live in the apartments of various lovers, and I

wanted to hear anyone I was lucky enough to hear about. I

craved jazz music, and the black world was where one found

it. There was a tangle of sex and jazz, black culture and black

male love. There was a Gordian knot made of black men and

Jewish white women in particular. Speaking only for myself,

I wasn’t going to settle in the suburbs, and New York City

meant black, jazz meant black, blues meant black.

Philadelphia, in contrast, had folk music and coffeehouses

with live performers. Most were white. I liked Dave Van Ronk

and in junior high school stole an album of his from a big

Philadelphia department store; or maybe it was just the bearded

white face on the album cover, an archetype egging me on.

My best friend in high school liked the Philly scene with its

scuzzy, mostly failed musicians and its folk music. I'd go with

her when I could because Phil y promised excitement, though

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Music 3

it rarely delivered. She and I flirted with a small Bohemia, not

life-threatening, whereas when I was alone in New York City

there was no net. In the environs of Philly I went to hear Joan

Baez, whose voice was splendid, and I listened to folk music

on record, Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Ramblin’ Jack Eliot,

who rambled in those days mostly in Philadelphia. These took

me back to Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and Cisco Houston.

By the time Bob Dylan came along, I was uninterested in the

genre altogether until some friends in college made me sit

down to listen to Dylan soi-meme. Even then, it was his politics that moved me, not his music. That changed. It changed the first time because he was an acquired taste, and after