Happy 100th Birthday Jacob Lawrence!

by Gregg Chadwick

100 years ago today, the seminal artist Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey. When Lawrence was in his teens his family moved to Harlem in New York City, where he studied art with Charles Alston at the Harlem Art Workshop.

When Lawrence graduated from the American Artists School in New York he became a participant in the WPA Federal Art Project.  The young artist broke new ground in 1941 with The Migration Series which garnered national attention.

I find the video below from the Phillips Collection in which Lawrence discusses The Migration Series fascinating:



During World War II, while in the United States Coast Guard, first as a public relations specialist on the USS Sea Cloud, and then as a combat artist on the USS Gen. Richardson, Lawrence created a series of artworks documenting his vantage point on the war.

 
Jacob Lawrence
No. 2 Control Panel, Nerve Center of Ship,
gouache and watercolor on board
Collection USCG Museum

Shipmates and Jacob Lawrence with one of the paintings
he made while serving in the US Coast Guard during WWII.

After the war Lawrence was invited by Josef Albers to teach painting at Black Mountain College. Lawrence's exposure to Albers’ Bauhaus-inspired theories and teaching methods greatly influenced his artistic explorations.  Lawrence wrote, “When you teach, it stimulates you; you’re forced to crystallize your own thinking … you’re forced to formalize your own theories so that you may communicate them to the students … you go back to your studio and think about this again.”

Faculty of the 1946 Black Mountain College Summer Art Institute,
including Jacob Lawrence and his wife Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center collection

In 1949, Lawrence  and his wife Gwendolyn returned to New York where Lawrence continued to paint. Lawrence, aware of his depression, checked himself into Hillside Hospital in Queens, where he stayed for 11 months and painted as an inpatient.

Jacob Lawrence
Depression
Tempera and Watercolor on Paper  1950
22 3/4"x31"
Whitney Museum

 After many years in New York, in 1970 Lawrence and Knight moved to Seattle when he was invited to teach at the University of Washington. Lawrence was an art professor at UW until his retirement in 1986.  He continued painting until just a few weeks before his death in June 2000 at the age of eighty-two. Lawrence's last commissioned public work, the mosaic mural New York in Transit, was installed in October 2001 in the Times Square subway station in New York City.

 Lawrence's powerful artworks grace numerous collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum. The vibrant paintings of Jacob Lawrence tell stories of liberation, resistance, and resilience.

More:
Why the Works of Visionary Artist Jacob Lawrence Still Resonate a Century After His Birth

The Gospel and Blues of Rocky Ground

by Gregg Chadwick

Rocky Ground

(Song by Song Review of Bruce Springsteen's New Album - Wrecking Ball)

 ''The verses are the blues, the chorus is the gospel."

- Bruce Springsteen in Conversation With Jon Pareles in The New York Times July 14, 2002

Gregg Chadwick
The Luminist
12"x12" oil on linen 2010 

As if reaching out from the past into the present, Bruce Springsteen's song Rocky Ground (Listen Here) opens with a  ghostly voice calling out the refrain "I'm a soldier."

This verbal fragment was culled from a historical performance of the Church of God in Christ Congregation's rendition of  I'm A Soldier In The Army Of The Lord,  recorded by musical historian Alan Lomax in Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1942*. 

The song then shifts to the chorus, sung by the gospel singer Michelle Moore:

We've been traveling over rocky ground, rocky ground

We've been traveling over rocky ground, rocky ground

Only after this spiritual initiation does Springsteen sing the first verse:

Rise up shepherd, rise up

Your flock has roamed far from the hills

The stars have faded, the sky is still

The angels are shouting "Glory Hallelujah"

Springsteen's voice is yearning, soulful, bluesy. The music behind the singer brings to mind Springsteen's mournful song Streets of Philadelphia. Understated piano, a looped, patterned drum rhythm and atmospheric guitar wash across Rocky Ground. Mournful horns set a Van Morrison vibe.

Jacob Lawrence's magnificent Migration Series comes to mind. These paintings documented the African American movement from the rural south to the urban north between the World Wars. From his small studio in Harlem, Jacob Lawrence let loose with a flurry of deeply resonant and poignant words and images that encapsulated the hopes, fears, and dreams of a community moving into the unknown; often bolstered only by faith. The promise of a new day was coming, but the road was hard.

Jacob Lawrence

The Migration Series, Panel no. 3:
From every southern town migrants left by the hundreds to travel north.
12"x18" tempera on gesso on composition board 1940-41 
The Phillips Collection, Washington DC

As if to mark in music the history of this Great Migration, Springsteen's Rocky Ground moves from a folk recording from 1940's rural Mississippi, to Michelle Moore and the Victorious Gospel Choir to a more contemporary musical style: rap.  

Jacob Lawrence
The Migration Series, Panel no. 58:
In the North the Negro had Better Educational Facilities
12"x18" tempera on gesso on composition board 1940-41 
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Moore's rap flows smoothly into the structure of the song setting us up for a powerful dose of spoken word blues:

You use your muscle and your mind and you pray your best

That your best is good enough, the Lord will do the rest

You raise your children and you teach 'them to walk straight and sure

You pray that hard times, hard times, come no more

The lyrics turn from hope to fear and doubt:

You try to sleep, you toss and turn, the bottom's dropping out

Where you once had faith now there's only doubt

You pray for guidance, only silence now meets your prayers

The morning breaks, you awake but no one's there

The intoning voice from the 1940's attempts to give strength. The choir provides a chorus of resilience.  Springsteen returns and sings, "There's a new day coming." But as this morning breaks we are alone in our struggles. This existential moment at the abyss is chilling. No one's there. 

Gregg Chadwick
Under the Copper Sky
30"x22" monotype on paper 2011 

In 2002 Springsteen explained to Jon Pareles in The New York Times that in his music he has to "come to grips with the real horrors that are out there. And that all people have is hope. That's what brings the next day and whatever that day may bring. "

Springsteen goes on to explain that "hope is grounded in the real world of living, friendship, work, family, Saturday night. And that's where it resides. That's where I always found faith and spirit. I found them down in those things, not some place intangible or some place abstract. And I've really tried to write about that basic idea my whole life.''

Unknown Fiddler from Southern US Field Trip, 1959
photo by Alan Lomax

In Rocky Ground Springsteen adopts the traditional sounds and imagery of gospel, but for Springsteen faith and spirit are not found in the realm of angels but instead in the doggedness of daily life. Rocky Ground poignantly reminds us that hope is found in the courage to live each day to its fullest, in the sacrifices that parents make so that their children perhaps will have a more fulfilling life, and in the loving community of friends and family that brings meaning to our shared existence.

*NOTE:

 Alan Lomax was one of the great field collectors of folk music of the twentieth century, recording thousands of songs in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain. Lomax recorded in the plantations, levee camps, prisons and railroad yards where the men and women of the blues came from and the music was born. 

All lyrics from Rocky Ground -  Copyright © Bruce Springsteen (ASCAP)

More Song by Song Reviews of Wrecking Ball:

1. We Take Care of Our Own

2. Easy Money

3. Shackled and Drawn

4. Jack of All Trades

5. Death to My Hometown

6. This Depression

7. Wrecking Ball

8. You've Got It

9. Rocky Ground

10. Land of Hope and Dreams

11. We Are Alive

More at:

"Bruce Springsteen's widescreen vision of America on Wrecking Ball is filled with terror, tension, tenacity and above all else, triumph which may not replenish your bank account, but it will replenish your soul."

-Anthony Kuzminski, Bruce Springsteen - Wrecking Ball, antiMusic

"What was done to my country was un-American."

Shackled and Drawn

Jack of All Trades

Death to My Hometown

From Down Under: Sean Sennett Talks With Springsteen About Wrecking Ball

All Things Shining by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly

The Working Man's Voice - The Wall Street Journal

A More Chaste Review of You've Got It by Jonathan Lack

Parsing the Samples and Quotes on Wrecking Ball

Bruce Springsteen, Théatre Marigny press conference, Paris, February 2012

Don't Miss This Upcoming Event on NPR:

NPR Music will broadcast Bruce Springsteen's keynote speech from the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, Texas. The live webcast of that address will take place on NPR Music on March 15 at noon Central time.

The Gospel and Blues of Rocky Ground

by Gregg Chadwick

Rocky Ground

(Song by Song Review of Bruce Springsteen's New Album - Wrecking Ball)

 ''The verses are the blues, the chorus is the gospel."

- Bruce Springsteen in Conversation With Jon Pareles in The New York Times July 14, 2002

Gregg Chadwick
The Luminist
12"x12" oil on linen 2010 

As if reaching out from the past into the present, Bruce Springsteen's song Rocky Ground (Listen Here) opens with a  ghostly voice calling out the refrain "I'm a soldier."

This verbal fragment was culled from a historical performance of the Church of God in Christ Congregation's rendition of  I'm A Soldier In The Army Of The Lord,  recorded by musical historian Alan Lomax in Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1942*. 

The song then shifts to the chorus, sung by the gospel singer Michelle Moore:

We've been traveling over rocky ground, rocky ground

We've been traveling over rocky ground, rocky ground

Only after this spiritual initiation does Springsteen sing the first verse:

Rise up shepherd, rise up

Your flock has roamed far from the hills

The stars have faded, the sky is still

The angels are shouting "Glory Hallelujah"

Springsteen's voice is yearning, soulful, bluesy. The music behind the singer brings to mind Springsteen's mournful song Streets of Philadelphia. Understated piano, a looped, patterned drum rhythm and atmospheric guitar wash across Rocky Ground. Mournful horns set a Van Morrison vibe.

Jacob Lawrence's magnificent Migration Series comes to mind. These paintings documented the African American movement from the rural south to the urban north between the World Wars. From his small studio in Harlem, Jacob Lawrence let loose with a flurry of deeply resonant and poignant words and images that encapsulated the hopes, fears, and dreams of a community moving into the unknown; often bolstered only by faith. The promise of a new day was coming, but the road was hard.

Jacob Lawrence
The Migration Series, Panel no. 3:
From every southern town migrants left by the hundreds to travel north.
12"x18" tempera on gesso on composition board 1940-41 
The Phillips Collection, Washington DC

As if to mark in music the history of this Great Migration, Springsteen's Rocky Ground moves from a folk recording from 1940's rural Mississippi, to Michelle Moore and the Victorious Gospel Choir to a more contemporary musical style: rap.  

Jacob Lawrence
The Migration Series, Panel no. 58:
In the North the Negro had Better Educational Facilities
12"x18" tempera on gesso on composition board 1940-41 
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Moore's rap flows smoothly into the structure of the song setting us up for a powerful dose of spoken word blues:

You use your muscle and your mind and you pray your best

That your best is good enough, the Lord will do the rest

You raise your children and you teach 'them to walk straight and sure

You pray that hard times, hard times, come no more

The lyrics turn from hope to fear and doubt:

You try to sleep, you toss and turn, the bottom's dropping out

Where you once had faith now there's only doubt

You pray for guidance, only silence now meets your prayers

The morning breaks, you awake but no one's there

The intoning voice from the 1940's attempts to give strength. The choir provides a chorus of resilience.  Springsteen returns and sings, "There's a new day coming." But as this morning breaks we are alone in our struggles. This existential moment at the abyss is chilling. No one's there. 

Gregg Chadwick
Under the Copper Sky
30"x22" monotype on paper 2011 

In 2002 Springsteen explained to Jon Pareles in The New York Times that in his music he has to "come to grips with the real horrors that are out there. And that all people have is hope. That's what brings the next day and whatever that day may bring. "

Springsteen goes on to explain that "hope is grounded in the real world of living, friendship, work, family, Saturday night. And that's where it resides. That's where I always found faith and spirit. I found them down in those things, not some place intangible or some place abstract. And I've really tried to write about that basic idea my whole life.''

Unknown Fiddler from Southern US Field Trip, 1959
photo by Alan Lomax

In Rocky Ground Springsteen adopts the traditional sounds and imagery of gospel, but for Springsteen faith and spirit are not found in the realm of angels but instead in the doggedness of daily life. Rocky Ground poignantly reminds us that hope is found in the courage to live each day to its fullest, in the sacrifices that parents make so that their children perhaps will have a more fulfilling life, and in the loving community of friends and family that brings meaning to our shared existence.

*NOTE:

 Alan Lomax was one of the great field collectors of folk music of the twentieth century, recording thousands of songs in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain. Lomax recorded in the plantations, levee camps, prisons and railroad yards where the men and women of the blues came from and the music was born. 

All lyrics from Rocky Ground -  Copyright © Bruce Springsteen (ASCAP)

More Song by Song Reviews of Wrecking Ball:

1. We Take Care of Our Own

2. Easy Money

3. Shackled and Drawn

4. Jack of All Trades

5. Death to My Hometown

6. This Depression

7. Wrecking Ball

8. You've Got It

9. Rocky Ground

10. Land of Hope and Dreams

11. We Are Alive

More at:

"Bruce Springsteen's widescreen vision of America on Wrecking Ball is filled with terror, tension, tenacity and above all else, triumph which may not replenish your bank account, but it will replenish your soul."

-Anthony Kuzminski, Bruce Springsteen - Wrecking Ball, antiMusic

"What was done to my country was un-American."

Shackled and Drawn

Jack of All Trades

Death to My Hometown

From Down Under: Sean Sennett Talks With Springsteen About Wrecking Ball

All Things Shining by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly

The Working Man's Voice - The Wall Street Journal

A More Chaste Review of You've Got It by Jonathan Lack

Parsing the Samples and Quotes on Wrecking Ball

Bruce Springsteen, Théatre Marigny press conference, Paris, February 2012

Don't Miss This Upcoming Event on NPR:

NPR Music will broadcast Bruce Springsteen's keynote speech from the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, Texas. The live webcast of that address will take place on NPR Music on March 15 at noon Central time.