Dick Gregory is not a musician, but he is an artist. He's a comedian, and both he and Chuck Berry attended Sumner High School, an African American high school in St. Louis. Now, I suppose I've purposefully broken my blog's bylaws by covering a comedian when it's clearly called the Musical History Tour, but I think I've always intended on doing so. Although I mostly cover music (and so far a very specific kind of music) and wish to branch out as far as possible within the realm of recorded music, organizing and connecting to artist's through albums predisposes me to a sort of foundational failure. I want to cover composers, for example, but simply getting to them through my system of connections is difficult. Organizing and sifting through the recordings of the composers would prove just as troublesome. It's already proven tedious with the recordings from pre-1957 folk singers I've covered so far, and they don't have their work performed by orchestras across the world. Foreign artists and bands are difficult to get to as well, and I know I've heard a couple requests to delve into the contemporary American and British music scenes. The system also sticks me in long stretches of "movements" or "categories". So far, I've gotten "stuck" in Australia, the punk movement, and several folk/blues movements; the last from which I finally see the light of day. For all of my system's failings, I feel it does open the door to all recorded materials whether it's music, comedy, sound effects, or field recordings (the last two of which have recently been possibilities). The thing is: I don't see where I'm going. I try not to plan ahead, and in doing so, I can use this blog to arrive at unexpected new places or old familiar stations. I just might not have given the blog the most appropriate name.
To cut a long rant short, one new place to discover is the comedy of Dick Gregory. In the early sixties, he was one of a small group of black comedians that began distancing (very quickly) their stand-up performances from what used to be considered black comedy, minstrel shows. He started performing stand-up in the military and eventually took his routine to black audiences after his tour of duty. His jokes could be about anything but almost all of them had an underlying theme of social justice. He made light of segregation, integration, voting rights, the Ku Klux Klan, his Negro Jewish friend Sammy Davis, Jr., and racist behavoir, but made the topics so personable, matter-of-fact, and funny that you can't help but laugh along. His comedy acted as a form of escapism for his black audience as they could remove themselves from the issues he casually brought up, issues they faced every day, and see them from an non-traditional and hilarious perspective if only for a moment.
Greg also made a surprising connection with white audiences as well despite confronting them with these same issues. In his words, he was "the first Negro comic permitted to work a white night club. That had never happened before because no black person was permitted to stand flat-footed and talk to white America." In his case, he talked directly to White America, made them laugh and made them think while pushing the contemporary Civil Rights Movement to the front of their minds. In 1961, Hugh Hefner hired Greg to performe at the Chicago Playboy Club. Soon after, he furthered his success by performing on Jack Paar's The Tonight Show, a financial blessing for any young comedian. After his success with growing and diverse audiences, he recorded his debut album In Living Black & White some time after his Tonight Show performance.
Here is the discography surrounding Dick Gregory's debut album:
In Living Black & White
If you have any ideas for where the tour should go next, please give a shout. I'm open to whatever as long as the artists are historically related in some way and go in an artist's chronological order.
Pass the Headphones!!
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