Singing New Songs

Coltrane's birthday, plus early love for the new book

September 23 was the anniversary of the birth of John Coltrane, born in 1926 in Hamlet, NC. The piece below was previously published in slightly different form in The Porch, an online magazine and a series of in-person gatherings organized by co-conspirator Gareth Higgins.

You hear a train before you see it. The whistle pierces the air to warn anyone nearby: a thousand tons of cargo are hustling through. You might see the train soon after hearing it, exhaust billowing from the engines as it chugs down the track. But even if the whistle is broken or your vision is obscured, you know when the train passes because you feel it. The ground rumbles for several blocks in every direction. Tons and tons of steel reverberate bass tones up through the foundations of buildings and down toward the bedrock of a place. Things shake and rattle while the train rolls. Stuff falls off shelves. Vibrations slide up through your feet. The vibrations are sound in your body.

Seventy-five minutes east of Charlotte, NC, train tracks bisect a little town fittingly called Hamlet. Nowadays, passersby mostly do not notice Hamlet, except for the signs on the superhighway just south of town. But before the bypass sliced up the countryside, Hamlet was a stopping point for travelers on the way to and from the coast. US Highway 74 went right down the main street of town. For many harried vacationers, that often meant a stop to wait for a train to pass. The tracks cut through, dividing neighborhoods by race and class, using geography to reinforce ideas of difference, and difference used to justify violence and oppression.

The trains still bisect Hamlet today, but the bypass took the highway, and the traffic, and the commerce, out a couple miles from town. The automobiles do not back up at the railroad crossing anymore, waiting for oil tanks, coal cars, and cargo carriers to roll down the tracks. The mills have shuttered and emptied out the little town of many of its cars and the people that belong to them. But at the corner of Hamlet Avenue—that’s the main street—and Bridges Street, a small granite plaque sits enshrined in a brick wall. It looks like this: 

“Messiah” is an uncommon description, but then, Coltrane was an exceptional man. And in that little, nearly unnoticeable spot, he lived his earliest days. “Trane,” as he would later be called, born by the tracks.

For most of the 1960’s, the United States was shaking at its foundations. In an act of terrorism, white supremacists killed four young Black girls at church in September 1963. Only two months later, President Kennedy was assassinated. The Civil Rights Movement won milestone victories with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, but those legislative victories failed to undo the systemic nature of poverty and oppression in Black and Native American communities. By the end of the decade, the country was in an uproar over Vietnam.

Coltrane did not generally take a direct approach to activism in his music. His quest was driven by the union of music and spirituality. Interviews [links footnotes?] make clear that he did not see music and spirituality as divorced from the political situation of the 1960’s, the time when his popularity[footnote] and his mastery as an improviser were on full display. The links between his musical and spiritual quest and the context of social upheaval were inside his compositions and his improvisations, but without lyrics, the connections were not always overt. 

One exception to his more indirect approach is “Alabama,” recorded in November 1963. The bombing of 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham had occurred just two months prior. The suggestion is plain for those with ears to hear. The track appears on the album Live at Birdland, a record where half the tracks were recorded at that legendary New York jazz club. By 1963, Coltrane’s playing, which was already dense, was growing increasingly complex. He played long improvised solos with unrelenting passages moving as fast as humanly possible. He might work a single idea over and over, in every permutation and configuration, for half an hour.

Against that backdrop, “Alabama” makes an immediate contrast. It moves slowly, without the motor of a walking bass or the driving and crashing of drums. The melody is a chant—simple, speech-like. Its source is clear. This music is the music of the elders, a song heard in the hush-harbor, or the rhythmic prayer of a chain gang. 

The sounds themselves tell the story. No name would be needed to draw the connection between the cruel bombing in September and this recording in November of the same year. But the name of the piece thickens the meaning of the music. The timing hints at the story behind the song, the name deepens and expands its meaning. Coltrane’s lament is for four little girls, but it is also for generations upon generation who lived with brutality and terror and learned to sing songs of despair and hope in the midst of it all.

The ground rumbled on the morning of September 15, 1963 in Birmingham. It had long been that way in Alabama and North Carolina, as well as in Massachusetts and Illinois. But Coltrane’s first songs, while still nurtured in his mother’s womb, were heard above a rumble. While the trains shook her side of the tracks, she sang to baby John, sending through the vibrations of her body songs of woe, songs of courage, songs of hope—“There’s a freedom train a’coming, get on board.” John learned his first music over that rumble, heard his grandfather’s sermons over it. When it continued—when the ground of the whole world shook—he knew how to sing. He knew how to write new songs that connected back to a time far before he could remember. 

Folks bypass the train tracks in Hamlet now, but its vibrations still move through the bedrock of this land divided by race and class and neighborhood. There are more songs to sing, songs of lament, of hope, of courage, of determined resistance and resilience. There may be moments ahead when singing is about all anyone has left. But sing we must, for who knows what child may be ready to birth new songs into our rumbling world? 

Early Love for Our Trespasses:

Our Trespasses uses a fascinating story about one family, one piece of land, and one church to get us to think about housing inequalities in the US. What if we could point to the people and institutions who are responsible? Would we be brave enough to hold them accountable? Would they be courageous enough to hold themselves accountable? The book is sociological in its conception, historical in its details, and theological in its profoundness. And most impressively, it is deeply personally reflective. To use the words of Charles Mills, Greg Jarrell is a white renegade and a race traitor who has thought a great deal about resisting and refusing the racial contract. Our Trespasses is a one-of-a-kind book, an enlightening read.

—Joseph C. Ewoodzie, Vann Professor of Racial Justice, Davidson College, and author of Getting Something to Eat in Jackson

Order your copy now for delivery in February. If you use the link below for Park Road Books, I’ll sign it with an inscription of your choice before shipping it.

One last note: The North Carolina Musician Murals Project consists of nine murals by artist Scott Nurkin. They feature well-known NC musicians in their hometowns, including Thelonious Monk in Rocky Mount and Nina Simone in Tryon. The Coltrane mural in Hamlet is a stopping point/pilgrimage site for my family on the infrequent occasions when we travel to the coast. Here’s a photo of it from a trip in 2022: