Public Employee Press

Soul’s Freedom Songs

Participants in Local 2627’s Feb. 14 Black History Month celebration enjoyed a show about legends of black music — a return engagement for singer Cody Childs and The Soul Legends Band, who paid tribute to Marvin Gaye and Sam Cooke at the local’s black history event last year. This year, they expanded their show to include Curtis Mayfield.

“Everybody enjoyed hearing the classics of African American music and the show helped the audience learn about the experience of struggle, which is so important in this music,” said Local 2627 President Robert Ajaye.

“The Musical Legacy of Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye and Sam Cooke” was as much a history lesson as a musical performance. Childs, a Local 2627 executive board member and chair of its Black History Committee, interspersed performances of the music of the three artists with his observations about how they overcame racial barriers in the music industry and used song to protest racism and injustice.

Childs learned to sing in the church as a youngster and studied jazz vocals at City College. Now the Queens resident sings at St. Marks AME Church. In addition to its serious notes, the show simply filled the union hall with music that sounded good and felt good.

The Soul Legends Band — including keyboardist Roxann McDade, bass player Debra Robinson and drummer Peaches Smith — ran through wonderful covers of the hits of Cooke, Gaye and Mayfield, and the audience sang along, danced and applauded.

The Feb. 14 show included Mayfield’s “It’s All Right,” “I’m So Proud” and “People Get Ready,” Gaye’s “I heard it Through the Grapevine” and “What’s Going On” and Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come,” Chain Gang” and “You Send Me.”

Sam Cooke, Childs told the audience, “experienced a lot of misery when he went into the South. He’d go on tour and find out he couldn’t stay in a hotel.” The sit-ins against racial segregation and the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Mississippi inspired “A Change is Gonna Come.”

Similarly moved by social ills, Gaye wrote “What’s Going On?” as an expression of outrage over the madness of the Viet Nam War: “Mother, mother, There’s too many of you crying, Brother, brother, brother, There’s far too many of you dying, You know we’ve got to find a way, To bring some lovin’ here today.”

Mayfield achieved mainstream solo success before he made his way into the film industry, writing the soundtrack for the blaxploitation film “Super Fly,” which highlighted urban poverty, Childs recalled. “He wrote from the heart. He wrote about the negatives of the day. He was a musical genius about social consciousness.”

— Gregory N. Heires