Muhammad Ali is quoted as saying, “I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was. ” And he is even a bigger star than James Brown. We watched “Soul Power” at the George Eastman House’s Dryden Theater over the weekend. It’s really the outtakes from “When We Were Kings” which Peggi and I saw at the Little Theater with my father a few years back. But these outtakes are all music scenes from the 1974 concert and championship fight in Zaire, Africa. And it just when you think it couldn’t get any better than James Brown at his peak performing in Africa Muhammad Ali steals the scene.
Why didn’t we go hear Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings when they were in town last week because we are spoiled. We saw the Godfather of Soul (GFOS) a few times (Red Creek and the Auditorium Theater). In this movie James wore a wide scarf-like garment wrapped around his waist with “GFOS” printed on it and Peggi and I kept thinking of of Rochester’s “AKOS”, Mike Allen. But Mike could never get away with performing “I’m Black and I’m Proud” like James does here. I loved that song when it came out but that was easy. Duane went to a mostly black high school on Rochester’s west side and he said it was too much. James Brown even stopped performing the song because the song cost him a lot of my crossover audience. I noticed in the credits that Rochester’s Pee Wee Ellis gets co-writing credits for “I’m Black and I’m Proud”.
We finished our MySQL job and succesfully linked the first column of this page to a drawing with specs that come from the data base. Amazing. Of course we had help from Bill Jones and the flute player.
2 Comments
When he played Rochester at the time “Say it Loud” was a hit, all the blacks at West High had the precursor of the large boom box, a similar sized player that slid 45s into it like a toaster & then popped them out when they were done. They were all playing that song in the halls between every class. They had bought buttons at the show that were the size of coffee cup saucers which said “Say it Loud I’m Black & I’m Proud!” which they were all wearing. The few whites who went to the show were wearing equally large buttons that said “Say it Loud I’m White & I’m Glad the Black Man is Proud!” tribute to the GFOS – http://www.click2vu.com/ArchivePages/12_2006_GFoS/GFoS_index.htm
nice work on that MySQL thing … so much data, so little time.