Just Wanna Be Free
Race records, urban music, Hot R&B/Hip-Hop — whatever it’s been called in history, music made by African Americans has often come with the expectation of giving the listener some version of journalism. Rap music has often been called a newspaper for the neighborhoods it comes from — Tupac and Ice Cube famously sampled news reports, and rappers such has Cam’ron have out-and-out given themselves the job title of “reporter”. This role has often defaulted to musicians, considering how actual media have made a habit of staying away from the poorer places from which rap often comes. But that wasn’t the case for two very different murder cases based out of St. Louis, separated by over a century: the trial of Frankie Baker in 1899, which would be made famous by murder balladeers of the time, and the murder of Michael Brown, which would be made famous through social media and buttressed by songs. Though their stories are radically different, they are drawn together not only by physical location but by the fact of their narratives not being their own. Dead or alive, acting in self-defense or begging for mercy, their lives would become claimed, reclaimed, and fought over by others.
“Frankie and Johnny” is the most common title given to Frankie Baker’s murder ballad, which she did not write, and is more accurately known as “Frankie and Albert”. Anthropologist Cecil Brown, in an essay in the book The Rose and The Briar, proposes that street musician Bill Dooley did, saying that the “night after the murder, Dooley had already had a version of the ballad performed, another observer reported; he was playing it himself on street corners”. Dooley’s song was simple: Frankie was a good girl turned bad when she discovered her man, Albert Britt, cheating on her, and she shot and killed him. Dooley came up with an irresistible refrain: “He was her man, and he done her wrong”.
Ballads, especially murder ballads, were for a large time a hugely popular form of media. Beyond the macabre and schadenfreude, the medium often acted like social media does today: spreading smaller stories, such as heavy flooding in Mississippi or train wrecks in Virginia, that would not have caught on with the national media otherwise. The St. Louis area produced some of the most violent and popular, including “Stagger Lee” and the story of Frankie Baker and Albert Britt. Brown notes that there are at least three hundred variants on “Frankie”, a situation which led folklorist John Lomax to call for “a ‘doctor’s thesis’ to study them”. The challenge was accepted in 1962 by Bruce Redfern Buckley, who “examined 291 versions, of which 186 are complete, thirty-one are fragments, and eight are parodies”. Changes include: names, what exactly made Frankie a ‘good girl’, how Frankie discovers her man is cheating, how the judge lets Frankie go free, who the narrator of the story is, if the story has a moral. The songwriters of the time, including the white East Coast professionals from Tin Pan Alley, did not bother to look into the facts. They were simply concerned with spreading their story to as wide an audience as possible. Dooley, who made a business of selling lyric sheets for ten cents a pop, was out on the streets the day after the murder, signing about how Frankie shot Albert down.
He didn’t know, and later musicians either didn’t have access to or curiosity about, the facts of the case. The song often incorrectly states the nature of their relationship: Frankie and Albert had the professional relationship of a prostitute and a pimp, as opposed to a romantic one. And none of the songs mention that both Frankie’s statements and a coroner’s report proved beyond a doubt that she acted in self-defense. Dooley’s loose understanding of the situation was enough for a narrative to be laid down: jealous woman shoots down playboy. The song haunted Frankie for the rest of her life: she started hearing it in St. Louis around two months after her trial, and she eventually tried to flee to Portland, Oregon, but the song found her there too. Film studios made adaptations of the song, including a meta version starring Elvis Presley as an actor playing Johnny in a Vegas musical.
When Frankie sued, they bribed musicologists to take the stand and say that “Frankie” songs existed long before the shooting. Nothing would slow the narrative, and Frankie Baker died alone in an asylum.
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As journalists from around the world entered the Greater St. Louis area to capture the tense protests resulting from the death of unarmed teenager Michael Brown, a carnival-like atmosphere emerged: journalists coming to network, journalists willing to assist the police in arrests, and in general, making the stories about themselves. The story also shifted from the isolated, historic problem of black men getting murder by white cops in America to the larger, all-colors-affected issue of police militarization. There was terrific coverage of the events as well, but the very nature of both reporting and protest has a sense of ego involved within it: I deserve to have my voice heard above the others, the traditional thinking goes.
Songs, like the murder ballads or protest songs of the Sixties, once offered a counter to these narratives. But Frankie Baker’s story shows that their success rate was mixed, at best. The song quickly spiraled out of St. Louis into the greater world, where Frankie became “Frankie”, a mythological figure. No longer. Social media fragmented all pre-existing culture, and music became less institutionalized and more personal. In the immediate aftermath of Ferguson, songs became part of this social media, more emotional sounding boards than stories or myths.
The response to the shooting of Mike Brown and the Ferguson protests is evolving and changing by the day, both musically and otherwise. But it’s worth paying special to a song created in the crucible of the moment: “Be Free”, by rapper J. Cole was released on August 21st, the same day Gov. Jay Nixon recalled the National Guard from Ferguson, was released as quickly as “Frankie and Albert”.
Reached by Complex in Ferguson, he looks uncomfortable on camera and says as much, saying “I didn’t come down here to do no interviews”, and says that he’s only doing this one as a favor for a friend. Caveats aside, he goes on to say “When you come out here, you feel the humbleness. You talk when it’s time to talk. Really, you come out here to listen to what your people have to say. I talk when it feels like it’s time to talk. Most of the day I’ve been out here like this,” as he stops talking and folds his arms into a listening pose.
Cole’s show, don’t tell is also seen on “Be Free”. Using a simple, repeating keyboard beat, he starts off by singing, “and I’m in denial!” Already, the listener is in the middle of a conversation. He starts to repeat himself, “All I wanna do is take the chains off, all we wanna do is break the chains off, all we wanna do is break free.” Cole’s repetition calls to mind another protest song, avant-garde composer Steve Reich’s “Come Out”. Reich took the voice of a black teenager, Daniel Hamm who had been falsely arrested on counts of murder and beaten by police during the Harlem Riots of 1964. Using his trademark phasing technique, Reich takes one phrase and creates an out-of-sync loop which makes Hamm’s voice reverberate so it sounds larger than life and inhuman, everywhere and nowhere at once.
Cole’s repetition has a clear purpose as well: it’s that he can’t think of anything else to say. Like Reich’s piece, Cole uses spoken word, telling short stories of intimidation: ‘So it’s like, the officer is trying to pull inside the car, he’s trying to pull away, and at no time the officer said he was gonna do anything until he pulled out his weapon, his weapon was drawn, said ‘I’ll shoot you” or “I’m going to shoot”, and in the same moment, the first shot went out. We looked up, he was shot, blood coming from him, we took off running.” Who is this person? Who is the ‘we’? Did this happen to J. Cole, friends of his, did he read about it happening? “All, we all alone” is as close to an answer as Cole gets.
The song’s release is clearly related to Ferguson. Yet there’s no mention of Ferguson, or Michael Brown, or any topical specifics at all. This technique is often used to give political art a sense of timelessness (Vince Staples’ later “Hands Up” operates under this principle, invoking the Brown-specific “Hands up, don’t shoot!” phrasing for a universal effect), but is not the case here. “Be Free” is a song that is directly anchored to August, 2014. Cole describes its creation in a blog post accompanying a link to it’s SoundCloud embed: “We become distracted. We become numb. I became numb. But not anymore. That coulda been me, easily.”
Cole doesn’t need to raise awareness by trying to find a lame rhyme for “Ferguson” because anyone listening to this song knows what its about. They know what it’s about because of the influential role social media, especially Twitter, has played in anyone learning about Ferguson. It’s a new murder ballad, but it doesn’t give the listener an education or try to play the role of reporter. Instead, it’s a place for the effected to mourn and breathe before their next steps. “Be Free” exists as a place of raw emotion to counteract calcifying emotions, to the way spirits can die out when protests lead to lengthy policy hearings, as an ever present reminder. The old murder balladeers tried to find the angle in any story they could so they could shout it out as loudly as possible. Cole understand the value of leaderlessness, how being preached to about problems isn’t nearly as effective in 2014 as is trying to listen. “Be Free” need to mention Ferguson because they understand that Ferguson is already all around us.
