Back to black

Yesterday evening I listened to the Sunday Feature on BBC Radio 3 with the intriguing title: Bayard Rustin - Activism and Early Music. On so many levels it was a 'who knew?' moment.

Obviously not me, even though Early Music has been an interest of mine since I joined a consort of singers in 1969 when the Early Music Revival was really beginning to take off. My political activism also began at around the same time (well, it was the late '60s) but I never saw those two interests as being in any way linked until listening to tonight's radio broadcast. After fifty-five years I guess one could justifiably call that a revelation or epiphany.

Bayard Rustin was, in so many ways, a formidable figure and if this radio programme helps promote his achievements to a more niche audience it will be a job well done. It will complement a docu-drama film, Rustin, which was released last year on Netflix to favourable reviews and will have introduced him to a wider audience. It had not, however, impinged on my consciousness until, my interest piqued by the radio programme, I Googled his name to discover more about him. The film has added further biographical dimensions to his extraordinarily multi-faceted life. 

He truly was a Renaissance Man - and we're not talking Harlem Renaissance here. Small wonder, then, that he was such a passionate, if seemingly anomalous, exponent of the music of the Renaissance, which, even today, is seen (wrongly) as the exclusive preserve of white artists. In 1946 he recorded a 10-inch LP, Elizabethan Songs and Negro Spirituals, on which he sang, accompanied on the harpsichord by Margaret Davison - a truly eclectic programme. 

An African-American born in Pennsylvania in 1912, he became a leader in movements for civil rights, socialism, nonviolence and gay liberation. He partnered with Dr Martin Luther King in the massive civil rights rally, the March on Washington, on The Mall in Washington DC in 1963, which he addressed alongside King. He was hugely influenced by the non-violent activism espoused by Mahatma Gandhi, which he employed himself and advocated to his civil rights colleagues, not all of whom understood or welcomed it.

His devotion to early music and 'negro' spirituals may seem an incompatible mix, but so too did the man himself. Raised by Quaker/Methodist grandparents he was not to experience the joyous ebullience of Black church services and gospel choirs until later life, when it had a profound effect upon him. In so many aspects of his life he refused to abide by the stereotypes imposed on Black men by society, both black and white. The reality of a black out-gay pacifist socialist activist who sang Elizabethan madrigals must have been incomprehensible to most people in his own lifetime and would probably be considered unusual even today.

But black musicians in Renaissance Europe, though a rare phenomenon, certainly did exist. John Blanke was a black African trumpeter who came to England in 1501 in the retinue of Catherine of Aragon and remained a prominent and well-paid musician in the court of Henry VIII. At around the same time King James IV of Scotland employed a More Taubronar or Moorish drummer in his court. Vicente Lusitano, a Portugese musician and composer of African origin, was living and working in Germany in 1550 and from around the same period there is a North Italian charcoal drawing of a black African male singer with three white female companions. 

Bayard Rustin's was clearly a complex character yet he managed to reconcile in his own life many apparently irreconcilable strands. His fearless refusal to conform to societal norms of what a black man could be, how he should live and what he could aspire to, is surely a lesson to us all. He was a man ahead of his time yet, paradoxically, harking back to an earlier one.

He died in New York in 1987.

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