THE STATE OF INDEPENDENCE

WAYS OF TROPICAL BEING

Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, August 18, 1969

A few years ago, when I directed the Carnival Institute of Trinidad and Tobago, I posted on our social media page a video of the “Star Spangled Banner” (hereinafter referred to as the SSB, except when it’s not). It was being performed on pan at some sporting event or other in the US and not a news item of any great importance; I posted it as just a gentle ego massage for the nation’s panmen. I wanted to show them how far pan had reached.

It attracted a comment: “nearly as good as hendrix star spangled banner...at woodstock.”

I gasped. Nothing’s wrong with pandering a bit to national vanity I felt, but the comparison seemed egregious. I decided to use the moment to intellectually uplift the commenter and whoever else perused the page, because the Institute was intended to be educational. Accordingly, I suggested that to compare an SSB on pan to Hendrix’s 1969 version, the pan had to sound like Black men being beaten and killed by the police, and Black mothers wailing at their sons’ murder.

The commenter responded: “I don’t really understand the analogy.”

That was 2018. The Black Lives Matter movement formed around 2015 in response to the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Rekia Boyd, among others. In 2016 Colin Kaepernick knelt during the SSB before a pre-season match to protest racial injustice and police brutality against Black people. It cost him his career as a professional footballer, not unlike Muhammad Ali, who in 1967 preferred jail to fighting the Vietnamese. He lost his world title and was banned from boxing for three of his peak years.

In 1969 Jimi Hendrix performed the US national anthem at the Woodstock Art and Music Fair, which was held from August 15-18 on a dairy farm 60 miles from the town of Woodstock, New York. It was one of the largest musical festivals in history and a symbol of the sixties counter-culture that was now realizing that the struggle to end the invasion of Vietnam was equally a fight for their own cultural and political liberation in the US. It was a leap of consciousness from the 1967 “Summer of Love” that predated Martin Luther King’s assassination in April, 1968. Black people had to burn a hundred cities to make the point. That year’s Democratic Convention in Chicago saw massive anti-war marches in response to which the police ran riot against peaceful protesters.

In 1969 the festival audience stood just below a half million in the open, sometimes sodden air. Of Woodstock’s thirty-two acts only three were Black although most of the music was. The first Black artist, Richie Havens, was badgered into opening the show at 5 pm on Friday, August 15, because it was late and the carded act was delayed by the miles of snarled traffic. The unexpectedly large audience was uncomfortable and irritable and nobody wanted to risk their ire. The electronic equipment wasn’t all set up yet and it had to be an acoustic act. The promoters shoved the Black man into the spotlight like a sacrificial lamb.

Havens stepped (was pushed) on to the stage with Paul “Deano” Williams on guitar and Danielle Ben Zebulon on percussion. Havens later recalled his performance as two and a half hours but it was barely one. His strenuous, percussive guitar strumming must have extended the minutes. Either way, they played until Havens, dripping with sweat and exhausted, ran out of songs. He walked off the stage.

The promoter begged him to play some more, so Richie turned around and returned onstage. Zebulon began pounding his congas and Richie began strumming hard once again, stalling for time to think of what he could play, stretching it out. The audience clapped along. He asked for a guitar mic to buy a minute more. He began singing “Freedom, freedom”, repeating it eight times. In the midst of it the idea occurred to him that he could sing a traditional spiritual song from the days of slavery. He launched into “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child”.

The mostly white audience would have had no ancestral memory of being torn away from family and home, but perhaps they were alienated enough to sense their need to break from the values of their parents. Havens would use that riff in 2003 to open a demonstration against the invasion of Iraq. It would be even more topical now, where the country with the world’s highest proportion of people behind bars is increasing those numbers daily.

Sly and the Family Stone, the second Black act, came onstage at 3 am on August 17, mid-way through the festival. The band’s standout performance blended rock, r&b, funk, soul and pop on songs that are as relevant today as in 1969, including “Stand!”, Everybody is a Star”, and “Everyday People”. The musicians embodied the hopes and possibilities of young America, by including two white drummers in a black band, and two black women on piano and trumpet respectively, not as backup vocalists.

The final Black act, Gypsy Sun & Rainbows, Jimi Hendrix’s six-piece, barely-rehearsed band, took the stage at 8.30 on the morning of Monday 18th August to close the festival when only around 40,000 hippies remained. About five songs into the muddy morning Hendrix launched a half-hour medley. Then in the middle of it, he attacked a long instrumental interpretation of "Star Spangled Banner”.

Hendrix had been a paratrooper assigned to the 101st Airborne Division from May 1961 up to June 1962, when he was honourably discharged because of a minor injury but really for lack of interest in the army and his obsession with playing the guitar. That was the year before Kennedy sent 15,000 troops to Vietnam. By 1969, when the Woodstock festival was held, well over a half million American soldiers were fighting in Vietnam, and anti-war protests raged throughout the US.

In that melee Hendrix transformed the Star Spangled anthem into a cry of pain. It was as appropriate to the US firebombing of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos as Goya’s Third of May, 1808 was to Napoleon’s murderous war machine in Spain; and as Picasso’s Guernica was to the fascist bombing of the eponymous Basque farming town.

Hendrix’s SSB opened as a segue from “Voodoo Chile”. The guitarist coasted close to the original melody until “the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air”. Then his guitar shrieked like a bomber diving from the stratosphere. The next line, “the flag was still there”, morphed into “Taps”. His guitar wailed like someone overcome by their suffering. It rumbled like the napalm bombs that set alight Vietnamese civilians, including children. Mitch Mitchell’s drums hammered like a machine gun’s staccato.

Even more today I would love a Trinidadian to reinterpret the US anthem on pan because it is a song forged from the love of slavery, a paean to the American racism that’s today running rampant under Trump 2.0. Its star-spangled words were cobbled together in 1814 by Francis Scott Key, an attorney and slaveowner.

Early that year Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, on taking over the command of British forces, began recruiting black soldiers from the enslaved population. He issued a proclamation, which was distributed in the Chesapeake region:

All who may be disposed to emigrate from the UNITED STATES will, with their Families, be received on board His Majesty's Ships or Vessels of War, or at the Military Posts that may be established, upon or near the Coast of the UNITED STATES, when they will have their choice of either entering into His Majesty's Sea or Land Forces, or of being sent as FREE Settlers to the British Possessions in North America or the West Indies, where they will meet with due encouragement.

Thousands from Maryland, Virginia and later Georgia fled the plantations. Six companies of ex-slaves were formed into a Corps of Colonial Marines. Their transformation into soldiers would have outraged slaveowners in the region, including Key, who owned slaves in Maryland. As a District Attorney he suppressed abolitionists. harassing them as late as 1836, when he launched an unsuccessful claim against one whose publications he claimed incited slaves to rebel.

Key was aboard an English ship in September 1814, seeking the release of a friend captured in August. The English had already taken Washington DC, torched the White House, and were gunning for Baltimore. The attorney negotiated his friend’s freedom but they were not allowed to return home just yet. They had overheard the English plan of attack. As a result Key had a spectacular view from the English fleet of the 24-hour bombardment of Fort McHenry and its ragged little flag, starting on the morning of September 13 and continuing throughout that night.

In the dark Key couldn’t tell how his countrymen had fared or which side had won the battle until, in dawn’s emerging light he saw a new, oversized stars-and-stripes flag triumphantly fluttering above the fort. He was immediately inspired to write a defiant poem:

O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watch’d were so gallantly streaming?

The next day, after the British had abandoned their attempt to capture Fort McHenry and Key was allowed to return to land, he completed the four triumphant verses of “Defence of Fort M’Henry”, borrowing heavily from an earlier verse he’d written and set to a popular English tune. Key’s third, gloating stanza mentioned the former slaves who had run away to British side.

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a Country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and the slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

After the British defeat most of those ex-slaves moved to Canada. The rest joined the Corps of Colonial Marines in Bermuda. A few were stationed at a fort in Spanish Florida. That fort, referred to as the “Negro Fort” by General Andrew Jackson, was placed in the hands of ex-slaves and their native allies to operate as a centre of resistance against slavery. It was overrun in 1816.

The Black corps based in Bermuda were resettled with their families, 574 men and about 200 women and children, in Trinidad. The island was still a British slave colony but the soldiers were free men and women in the dense Moruga forest. There were six companies and the soldiers settled on the land given to them in their companies. The second company’s land was barren and so they called it Hard Bargain, according to legend. Its inhabitants petitioned the British for better land, which they received and called New Grant. That’s why the villages are named First Company, Hard Bargain, New Grant, Third to Sixth Company. “Merikins” (Americans) each received a month’s supplies and sixteen acres of forested land.

Those black men and women built thriving free communities two decades before slavery was abolished in Trinidad, a half century before America’s Emancipation Proclamation. They were the hirelings and slaves Francis Scott Key threatened with the “terror of flight and the gloom of the grave”, but who nonetheless started with subsistence farming and soon moved to producing cash crops. They practiced African spirituality, herbal medicine and the Baptist religion, which in time evolved into our indigenous Spiritual Baptist belief system.

The African Americans and Native Americans who fought to the death in Florida rather than return to slavery, and the Merkins who carved their five Company Villages out of the solitude of the Moruga forests, created the true land of the free and home of the brave.