Public Employee Press

Black History Month
Local 2627's Cody Childs
Songs of politics and race

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

Off his job as a Computer Specialist (software), Cody Childs often turns into a storyteller.

His chosen medium isn't the book. It's song. With his beautiful baritone voice, Childs has become a regular at Data Processing Employees Local 2627's Black History Month celebrations.

But his shows are much more than musical entertainment. They tell the story of the politics of music and race.

You can't appreciate black music without appreciating the historic black struggle for equal justice, says Childs, a member of the Local 2627 Executive Board.

Working with the all-female Soul Legends Band - keyboardist Roxann McDade, bass player Debra Robinson and drummer Peaches Smith - Childs presents musical tributes to Nat King Cole, Curtis Mayfield and the legends of gospel. One of their top shows is about the lives and music of Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye.

"They were both socially conscious men," Childs said. "That's why I like to sing their songs - there is a story behind their music. They are real singers who can sing from pain."

As with so many African-Americans, Childs grew up singing in the church. He also took courses in jazz vocals at City College while studying there for his master's degree in information systems in the late 1980s. Today, he sings at St. Marks AME Church in Queens.

"The Music of Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye" show includes the famous hits of the two artists, with Childs covering such standards of Cooke's songbook as "A Change is Gonna Come," as well as "You Send Me," "Twistin' the Night Away," and the 1960 hit "Chain Gang."

His Marvin Gaye covers include, "What's Going On?", one of the great protest songs of all time, and selections from his duets with Tammi Terrell, including Nicolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" and "Ain't Nothing Like the Real thing."

Throughout the chronological show, Childs recounts the life stories of the singers.

He tells audiences that Cooke, who came from a working-class union household, was grounded in gospel and started out professionally in the 1950s with the famous Soul Stirrers. With the Soul Stirrers Cooke personally felt the sting of racism in the segregated South when they couldn't eat in whites-only restaurants or drink from whites-only water fountains.

"A Change is Gonna Come" came to Cooke one night in 1963 after he was he was jailed for trying to register at a hotel in Shreveport, La. It was partly inspired by Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" (with its poignant lyrics, "How many years can some people exist, Before they're allowed to be free"), which captured the frustrations of young whites.

Released at the height of the civil rights movement, "A Change is Gonna Come" expressed in song the pain and aspirations of African Americans in the 1960s and became a movement anthem that President Barack Obama referred to in his 2008 victory speech in Chicago.

Childs likes how Cooke combined a lament about racism with hope:

Oh there been times that I thought I couldn't last for long

But now I think I'm able to carry on

It's been a long, a long time coming

But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will.

Gaye also came from a working-class family, Childs noted. His parents listened to Nat King Cole on the radio and Gaye sang doo-wop with friends on the sidewalks of Washington before he wound up at Motown Records, where he enjoyed a lot of independence and eventually married founder Berry Gordy's sister, Anna.

Childs says both artists spoke to his interests as a teenager and young adult.

Gaye's 1971 album "What's Going on?" had its title track as well as "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)" and "Inner City Blues" in which he sings "Bills pile up sky high, Send that boy off to die." His anti-Vietnam-war sentiments stemmed from his brother's experience in Vietnam.

"This guy is deep," Childs said of Gaye.

"He was in tune with the world's problems. He was into sending a message. When I heard 'What's Going on?' I knew how socially conscious he was."