African song / Fatu Gayflor • War and wealth - Philadelphia Folklore ...

y Elizabeth Sayre
SEKU NEBLETT:
music as a tool for liberation
A few minutes of conversation
reveal Seku Neblett’s grace,
good humor, and deadly serious
sense of purpose as activist and
artist—not to mention his
wealth of life experiences. Ever
since he came to Philadelphia in
2006 to teach at the renovated
Cecil B. Moore Recreation
Center at 22nd and Huntingdon,
Neblett has contributed to
cultural and political organizing
here. His life story and his Pan-
Africanist politics shed light on
the challenges facing artists in
African dance and music in
Philadelphia and North America.
With more than 45 years of
organizing to his credit,
Seku Neblett purposefully
articulates the connections
between African creative work
and political struggle.
Music has always been part of
Neblett’s life and work, and his
art has always been intended to
inspire political unity. He and
older brother Charles Neblett,
along with Bernice Johnson
Reagon and others, were
original members of the
Freedom Singers, created in
1961 in Albany, Georgia. (His
brother still coordinates the
group today.) In the 1960s, the
Freedom Singers toured the
United States to raise money
and organize support for the
Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee
(SNCC), a key organization in
the Civil Rights / Black Freedom
movement. Years later, in 1991,
a chance encounter while
performing with the Freedom
Singers led Seku to play the
bougarabou, the signature drum
of the Jola people in the
southwest of Senegal and the
Gambia. Performing traditional
African music forms as they were
taught to him, he has joined the
ranks of the twentieth-century
“African Cultural Renaissance”—
men and women like Katherine
Dunham, Pearl Primus, Chief
Bey, Nana Dinizulu, and
Philadelphia’s own Baba
Crowder, who have researched
African music and dance and put
them to creative use in the
American environment. In
Philadelphia, Neblett’s passion
for creating unity through
cultural work has found a rich,
historical environment in which
to continue growing.
Mr. Neblett was born in 1943
in Simpson County, Kentucky,
the fifth of six siblings in a
sharecropping family. Of his
early life and early experience
with music, he says:
“We lived in the country
without electricity, without any
of the utilities. Our primary crop
was tobacco, but we grew
everything that we ate. We only
had to buy at the store spices,
sugar, salt, pepper, that kind of
thing… During the day, the work
was very hard. We didn’t have
tractors, [or] mechanical tools at
first. I actually learned how to
plow with a mule and to
cultivate the crops with animals.
I think it was about 1956, ‘57,
when we got our first tractor…
There was a lot of music in my
home. My father played the
guitar and the rhythm bones.
The rhythm bones [are] cow’s
ribs put in the fingers back to
back, and with your wrist action
you get a polyrhythm that’s
traditionally African. My oldest
brother played guitar. My
mother sang common meter
hymns in church and in the
home. My second-oldest brother
played the trumpet and the trap
drums. My second-oldest sister
played the French horn, and is a
tremendous singer… When my
family moved to southern
Illinois, still sharecroppers, in
about 1956, the high school that
we went to was segregated, but
it was the only school in the
county that had a band. The
band director, Mr. Stanley F.
Thomas, whom I will admire
forever, actually taught us music
theory, which was unheard of for
a high school student in those
days in a rural setting like that.
So my brother played trumpet;
we organized a little dance
band. I was trying to play the
trap drum set, which I never
quite mastered. I played a little
saxophone. I didn’t really come
into my own until I started to
play the traditional African
drum, much later in life. But we
had a wonderful experience
with music. And the music
[Continued on p. 26 > ]
2007-2008 Winter WIP 23