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      Black Folk Musicians Are Reclaiming the Genre

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      TRAY WELLINGTON KNOWS that many will take the title of his 2022 album, “Black Banjo,” as an oxymoron. The banjo, and with it an entire body of folk-based music, is now so thoroughly associated with whiteness as to obscure its origins in Black musical tradition. “One of the first things I heard when I started playing banjo was, ‘You’re not supposed to be doing this,’” says Wellington, 24, whose father is Black and mother is white. But for him, playing the banjo has become an act of reclamation.Contemporary audiences still tend to associate the banjo with white Southern traditions of bluegrass, old-time and what record labels used to market as hillbilly music, but its roots are in Africa, in stringed instruments like the akonting, the buchundu and the ngoni. During the 19th century, the banjo became inextricably linked to minstrelsy: variety shows in which white performers (and, increasingly after the Civil War, Black performers) “blacked up,” grotesquely caricaturing Black facial features. The minstrel show, which persisted onstage and onscreen well into the 20th century, accounts for the banjo’s conflicted legacy — both part of the visual vocabulary of white supremacy and a point of creative contact between Black and white musicians.Wellington’s interest in the banjo was stoked by his maternal grandfather’s love of classic country, which he’d play for Wellington on fishing trips or while working in the backyard garden of the family home in Ashe County, N.C. After some cajoling, Wellington’s mother (a hip-hop fan) took her 13-year-old son to a pawnshop, where they purchased one on layaway. Playing banjo eventually led Wellington to East Tennessee State University’s renowned Bluegrass, Old‑Time and Roots Music program, where he learned the history and practice of folk music and joined a community of mostly white teachers and students. Many of his classmates welcomed him (he plays with fellow E.T.S.U. grads in his current band); a few subjected him to scorn. “People would often ask me, ‘How does it feel to be Black in this music?’ I would put if off because I didn’t want to talk about it,” Wellington says. Recording “Black Banjo” during the pandemic lockdown and amid protests for racial justice, however, occasioned an awakening. Being a Black banjo player is “kind of a rare thing,” he says. “It’s who I am.”The folk musicians Dom Flemons, Kara Jackson, Amythyst Kiah and Tray Wellington discuss the complications of being a Black performer working in a genre now commonly associated with whiteness.Justin FrenchToday Black folk performers have reached a critical mass and level of exposure not seen since the early decades of the 20th century, when Black bands like Cannon’s Jug Stompers and the Memphis Jug Band were among the most commercially popular in the country, touring in medicine shows and playing vaudeville stages. In a 2013 essay about Gus Cannon, the banjo-playing frontman of the Jug Stompers, the multi-instrumentalist and cultural historian Dom Flemons writes that it was only out of an “absurd racial insensitivity” that a “legitimate Black art form developed.” Flemons, 41, who goes by the name the American Songster in tribute to the players of the past, believes we’ve now entered “a postmodern contemporary folk period” in which new and more expansive definitions of traditional music are taking root. He’s among a new generation of Black folk musicians that includes Rhiannon Giddens, Valerie June, Amythyst Kiah, Allison Russell and many others who are returning to songs that are decades (even centuries) old. They play fiddles and jugs, bones and guitar — and most of all the banjo.Some of these performers veer into activism. For Hannah Mayree, 34, a Northern California-based musician, “playing banjo as a Black person is not enough.” That’s why she founded the Black Banjo Reclamation Project, which supplies instruments to Black musicians and holds workshops where participants learn to make banjos for themselves. “The knowledge of how to build a banjo lives inside my body,” she says. Other musicians are folklorists, introducing listeners to source recordings that testify to an unbroken tradition of Black folk music in America. Still others see reclaiming the past as a means of creating a future. “As opposed to someone who is the caretaker of an archive, I think of my role as a living musician as a member of a future archive,” says Jake Blount, 28, a banjo and fiddle player from Washington, D.C. His most recent album, “The New Faith” (2022), presents an Afrofuturist refiguring of traditional songs. Black Americans, Blount says, have “had to be a forward-facing people because the past has been denied to us.” Part of that history is recoverable through sheet music and source recordings, but much is lost to memory.IN THE BROADEST sense, folk music is a multiracial, working-class tradition, stretching across time and continents. In the United States alone, it comprises a repertoire of ballads and work songs, blues and breakdowns, songs of love and songs of protest. Folk is a body of simple tunes played by beginners — “Tom Dooley,” “Oh! Susanna,” “Down in the Valley” — and a platform for the greatest virtuosity. For some the term conjures a cinematic shorthand: the dueling banjos of “Deliverance” (1972) and George Clooney mugging his way through “O Brother, Where Art Thou” (2000). Folk’s history over the past century or more is best told through revivals, periods of intensified interest and participation in the music. In moments when the notion of a shared cultural heritage is most desirable — during the Great Depression, or the Red Scare paranoia of the ’40s and ’50s — people have often returned to what the 20th-century folklorists John Lomax and his son Alan once described as “the big song bag which the folk have held in common for centuries.” During a 1956 live performance of the spiritual “This Train (Bound for Glory)” — a song that’s now been recorded by scores of artists, including Louis Armstrong, Alice Coltrane, Bob Marley and Sister Rosetta Tharpe — the guitar legend Big Bill Broonzy teased an audience of earnest college students swept up in the latest revival. “Some people call these ‘folk songs,’” he said while noodling on his guitar, with the singer-songwriter Pete Seeger playing banjo onstage beside him. “Well, all the songs that I’ve heard in my life was folk songs. I’ve never heard horses sing none of them yet!”Rhiannon Giddens at Cecil Sharp House, an arts center in London named for the English folklorist.Justin FrenchFolk is indeed the people’s music, yet early efforts to market it ended up, to borrow the historian Karl Hagstrom Miller’s phrase, segregating sound. In the 1920s, with the advent of the modern recording industry and broadcast radio, music executives, most notably Ralph Peer of Okeh Records, leveraged emergent technology to define marketable genre categories along racial lines. Out of this came so-called race records (which first appeared at the beginning of the 1920s, aimed at Black Americans) and hillbilly records (which arrived a few years later, geared toward Southern whites). Even as folk crossed racial boundaries — as in the Lomaxes’ recordings of Lead Belly for the Library of Congress — white song hunters often constrained Black performers inside narrow presumptions: attributing virtuosity to natural gifts rather than to musical skill; soliciting songs of protest and lament rather than those of love and happiness; and conjuring a mythic authenticity instead of making space for the real thing (as happened when the Lomaxes, after helping to secure Lead Belly’s release from Angola prison in 1934 in Louisiana, made him perform thereafter in a prison jumpsuit).Over the decades, race records gave way to more coded genre designations, like R&B and soul. Hillbilly morphed into country and western and finally simply into country. By midcentury, folk was widely considered a genre, too, a narrow term to define acoustic, string-based music, mostly by white musicians and often with a political bent. Folk songs inspired generations of singer-songwriters like Seeger, Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, whose global fame the term “folk” was too small to contain. Folk, at least for some, became a backward glance to a distant past, nostalgic and reverential. It became Southern and working class and, in the minds of many, it became white.Amythyst Kiah in front of her father’s home in Johnson City, Tenn.Justin FrenchTHE RENAISSANCE OF Black folk music can be traced back to a single event nearly 20 years ago. In April 2005 in Boone, N.C., some 30 Black string-band musicians and dozens of other attendees came together for fellowship. Black Banjo Then and Now, as the gathering was called, began as an online community of over 200 members (only a small percentage of whom were Black), formed the year before by Tony Thomas, a Black banjo player from Miami. Among the group’s most junior members were Flemons, an Arizona native, then 23, and the then-27-year-old Rhiannon Giddens, a classically trained soprano from Greensboro, N.C. After graduating from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 2000 with a bachelor’s degree in music performance, Giddens found her way back home, working two jobs — one as a singing hostess at Romano’s Macaroni Grill — until she earned enough money to buy her instruments, and calling contra dances, a form of line-based group folk dancing with roots in the British Isles.Giddens sought a way to embrace her love of folk music and her Blackness, too. It’s a central paradox of folk today: How can a music so thoroughly identified with whiteness that, for the better part of 50 years, found definition in contradistinction to Black music and even Black people be so Black? She found her answer at the in-person gathering of Black Banjo Then and Now. At the time, she told the Greensboro News & Record that old-time was “something that really spoke to me, and it was OK that the people who were playing it were white. But when I discovered my people had so much to do with the music, and the string bands at the turn of the century were Black, well, this is a part of history.” The four-day event, held on the campus of Appalachian State University, drew musicians from afar, including the New York-based old-time string band the Ebony Hillbillies, and living legends from close to home, like the then-86-year-old North Carolina old-time fiddle virtuoso Joe Thompson. The experience was unforgettable, with epic jam sessions and intergenerational camaraderie. “It changed my life,” Giddens says. Out of this gathering, she, along with Flemons and, eventually, a third member, Justin Robinson, formed a modern Black string band called the Carolina Chocolate Drops.The Chocolate Drops were both interested in history and utterly contemporary. All members sang and played multiple instruments, with the banjo at the center of their sound. Their style of performance owes a debt to Thompson (who died in 2012). “We had a pure mission to expose this music to as many people as possible and to tell Joe’s story,” Giddens says. On their 2010 album, “Genuine Negro Jig,” which won a Grammy Award for best traditional folk album, they covered the 2001 R&B song “Hit ’Em Up Style (Oops!)” by Blu Cantrell, taking a time-bound pop hit and making it feel nearly as timeless as “This Train.” The group disbanded in 2014, at which point, as Giddens says, the project had done “exactly what it was meant to do: inspire a whole generation of young people of color to say, ‘Hey, I see myself.’”Tray Wellington with his banjo at the Pour House, a music venue and record store in Raleigh, N.C.Justin FrenchTHE CAROLINA CHOCOLATE Drops and many others have now ensured that future generations can see themselves onstage but, once up there, such Black performers rarely see themselves in the crowd. Do Black artists need a Black audience? It’s a longstanding debate that sometimes pits the artistic against the sociopolitical functions of song. The writer Amiri Baraka once defined Black music as “American music expanded past the experience of the average American.” “It gets down,” he wrote. “It is about the life of the downed, yet its dignity is in the fantastic sophistication even at the moment of would-be, should-be humiliation and actual despair.” Giddens, who once described her music as “Black non-Black music” and now prefers to call it simply “American music,” understands this implicitly. “All the good things that come from American music [come from] mixture,” she says. “Hiding in plain sight in all the different types of American music is cross-cultural working-class collaboration. It’s people making music because that’s what they’ve got.”The most powerful folk music has always addressed points of tension: between Black and white, rich and poor, sophistication and humiliation. Cannon’s 1927 song “Can You Blame the Colored Man?” tells the story of Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, dining with President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House in 1901, the year Washington’s best-selling autobiography, “Up From Slavery,” was published. “Could you blame the colored man for makin’ them goo-goo eyes?” Cannon sings, after describing in detail the lavish dinner at the president’s table. Likewise, today’s best folk music still confronts issues of race and class. In 2019 Amythyst Kiah, now 36, a guitarist and banjo player from Tennessee, joined Giddens, along with Leyla McCalla and Allison Russell, in a string-band collective called Our Native Daughters. They decided to excavate American history, going back to the trans-Atlantic slave trade to find inspiration for new songs. One of the songs that came of that process was the startling and soulful “Black Myself.”I don’t pass the test of the paper bag’Cause I’m Black myselfI pick the banjo up and they sneer at me’Cause I’m Black myselfYou better lock your doors when I walk by’Cause I’m Black myselfYou look me in my eyes but you don’t see me’Cause I’m Black myselfThe brown paper bag test, as the literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. has written, was born out of colorism within the Black community, in nightclubs and house parties in New Orleans where anyone darker than the bag taped to the door would be denied entrance. In a song that confronts the experience of being shut out of traditionally white spaces — such as contemporary folk and country music — Kiah’s lyrics build toward resistance and joy: “I’ll stand my ground and smile in your face / ’Cause I’m Black myself.”Addressing her race so explicitly in her music was a departure for Kiah. “I’ve always written songs in a way where anybody can put themselves in that position,” she says. Throughout her years of playing, she’s subscribed to the theory that the more specific and personal a song’s perspective, the more a listener — any listener — will relate to it. Just as Kiah, no poor white Southern girl from rural Kentucky, could relate to Loretta Lynn’s 1970 single “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” she says, so she hopes that listeners, whomever they may be, will relate to “Black Myself.”Bluegrass and country, the music first marketed a century ago as hillbilly, might seem inhospitable to Black listeners and musicians. But there’s a longstanding tradition that binds Black people, both personally and aesthetically, to these sounds. “The way I talk is with an accent, so the way I sing is with an accent. And that has always needed to be explained because I’m in the skin I’m in,” says Valerie June, 41, whose voice carries the cadences of her native Jackson, Tenn. “There are [Black] people from where I’m from that talk like me. And if they started singing, they would probably sound like me.”Flemons at FitzGerald’s.Justin FrenchThis rootedness in place, particularly a rural Southern place where many Black Americans no longer live but that they never left behind, is central to Black folk music’s endurance. When Kara Jackson was a child, during the first decades of the 2000s, in Oak Park, Ill., just outside of Chicago, characters from her father’s hometown of Dawson, Ga., populated her imagination. “I grew up knowing these nicknames, hearing these stories from this small Southern town of 4,000 people,” she says. “It almost felt like hearing superhero tales.” She reveled in the stories she heard in songs as well, be they Wu-Tang Clan tracks that her older brother played or ballads from Dolly Parton LPs in the family collection. It wasn’t long before she began to write songs herself, composing by voice, then on guitar, then using the banjo that her father gave her when she was in high school. She wrote poetry, too, so well that she was named the national youth poet laureate in 2019-20.Earlier this year, Jackson, 24, released her debut album, “Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?,” with songs that partake of folk and jazz, blues and rap. Her lyrics layer sound and simile: “I wanna be as dangerous as a dancing dragon / Or a steam engine, a loaded gun,” she sings on “No Fun/Party.” Her music is sometimes playful, sometimes searing; above all, it’s story driven, like the nearly eight-minute ballad “Rat,” in which Jackson assumes the role of troubadour from the opening couplet: “Take the story of Rat who’s headed west / His buddy once told him he likes the girls there best.” Memorializing the lives of people both real and real enough for Jackson to imagine is what her music does best. “I love songs that tell stories,” she says. “That’s what folk music is for me.”After composing many of her songs in the isolation of her bedroom during the pandemic, she’s now growing accustomed to playing them for an audience. She recalls a recent performance where the energy was great, but the crowd was mostly white, which left her conflicted. “I am so grateful for anyone who listens to my music,” Jackson says. “But I secretly and very selfishly do want my music to reach my own people. And to prove that this is our music also. It’s not even like I’m doing something subversive. I’m just making the music that we came up with in the first place.” More

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      Tracy Chapman’s ‘Fast Car’ Named CMA Awards Song of the Year

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      She is the first Black songwriter to receive the honor from the Country Music Awards. Her 1988 hit reached a new generation of fans as a cover by Luke Combs.Tracy Chapman won song of the year at the Country Music Awards on Wednesday for “Fast Car,” a folk ballad that topped the country charts more than three decades after it was first released thanks to a cover by the singer Luke Combs.Chapman, 59, is the first Black songwriter to win that award, Rolling Stone Magazine reported. She did not attend the awards ceremony in Nashville but thanked the crowd in a statement that was read onstage by Sarah Evans, a co-presenter of the award.“It’s truly an honor for my song to be newly recognized after 35 years of its debut,” Chapman’s statement said. “Thank you to the C.M.A.s and a special thanks to Luke and all of the fans of ‘Fast Car.’”Combs, an unassuming star known for his irrepressibly catchy and relatable country anthems, also won single of the year for “Fast Car.” He began his acceptance speech on Wednesday by thanking Chapman for writing “one of the best songs of all time.”“I just recorded it because I love this song so much,” he said. “It’s meant so much to me throughout my entire life.”The original version of the song reached No. 6 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in 1988. It won Chapman three Grammy Award nominations in 1989, including for song of the year. She won for best female pop vocalist.Combs’s cover climbed to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart in September, after 19 weeks in the No. 2 spot. It also reached No. 2 on the Hot 100 chart over the summer.As covers go, the vocals and acoustic guitar riffs on Combs’s version hew relatively closely to those on the original “Fast Car.” But other elements, including his North Carolina twang and a pedal steel guitar, give it more of a country feel.Combs was not the first artist to cover the song by a long shot, but the success of his version this year has been a catalyst for many young people to discover Ms. Chapman’s music.Nominations for the Grammy Awards, the premiere prize for popular music, will be announced on Friday, and industry watchers are waiting to see if Chapman will be among the nominees for “Fast Car” because of the cover. More

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      ‘Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project’ Review: An Afrofuturist Space Odyssey

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      The experimental documentary is punctuated by Giovanni’s poetry, read both by her and the actress Taraji P. Henson. But the film offers only what the poet is willing to give.Nikki Giovanni wants to die in zero gravity.“We don’t have any poets in space,” she says in a speech featured in “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,” a documentary about the elusive artist, directed by Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson.Giovanni would like to travel to the space station to record what she sees, adding that, when it’s time for her to go, she can simply be released into the ether. This desire — part jest, part genuine — drives the biographical project, in which the directors try to capture Giovanni’s legacy and her Afrofuturist vision for Black women.“Going to Mars” combines archival footage of Giovanni and moments in Black history, images of space and present-day interviews and speeches to paint an expansive picture of the poet’s evolution from young firebrand to elder. Giovanni posits that viewers should turn to Black women to learn about surviving in space because of our ability to survive all the hardships thrown at us on Earth. Throughout, the scenes are punctuated by her poetry, read by both Giovanni herself and the actress Taraji P. Henson.The documentary offers only what the poet is willing to give. And Giovanni is a challenging subject: She has firm boundaries, and there are questions she refuses to answer. “You want me to go to someplace that I’m not going to go, because it will make me unhappy,” she says in response to a question about her childhood. “I refuse to be unhappy about something I can do nothing about.”Yet other times Giovanni’s work speaks for itself. She won’t discuss how she felt after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, for instance, but what follows is a powerful rendering of her poem “Reflections on April 4, 1968,” in which she expresses anger over the injustice. Here, and in general, viewers must fill in their own blanks.Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni ProjectNot rated. Running time: 1 hours 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Kanye West and Adidas: How Misconduct Broke a Lucrative Partnership

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      A year ago, after producing hundreds of shoe styles and billions of dollars together, Adidas broke with Kanye West as he made antisemitic and other offensive public comments. But Adidas had been tolerating his misconduct behind the scenes for nearly a decade. B35309 2015 AQ4832 AQ2659 AQ4830 AQ4831 AQ4829 AQ4828 AQ4836 AQ2660 BB1839 AQ2661 BB5350 […] More

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      A Landmark of Black Cinema, Restored for a New Age

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      The British director Horace Ové struggled to get his 1975 film, “Pressure,” made and released. Now, weeks after his death, a new restoration is celebrated in New York and London.On a recent, rainy evening in London, movie fans gathered at the British Film Institute theater for a much-anticipated premiere, though the film was made nearly 50 years ago: Horace Ové’s newly restored “Pressure,” considered the first feature by a Black British director.Ové died last month, just weeks before his film was set to be celebrated internationally with screenings at both the London and New York Film Festivals. Herbert Norville, who starred in “Pressure” when he was 15, said in a speech at the London screening that he hoped the audience saw “what it was like being Black, being British and growing up in an era where racism was rife.”A roiling social-realist drama shot in 1974, “Pressure” follows Tony, a young Black Londoner looking for a job and a sense of belonging. He is pulled in several directions: by his activist older brother, by his pious West Indian mother and by white British society, which refuses to embrace him.Gradually radicalized by encounters with potential employers, a friend’s landlord and the police, Tony reaches a boiling point. In an interview after the screening, Norville, who played Tony, described the film as “pulling no punches” in its depiction of the reality of Black life in London in the ’70s. In an earlier Q. and A. with the audience, he had noted that the film’s themes of “institutional racism and police brutality” were still relevant in Britain today.In recent years, mainstream cultural institutions including the Tate museums and the BBC have been giving work made about Black British, and specifically Caribbean, lives more attention. The restoration of “Pressure” is accompanied by a major British Film Institute retrospective, “Power to the People: Horace Ove’s Radical Vision,” though in prior decades, the director struggled for recognition from the establishment.Oscar James and Sheila Scott Wilkinson in scene from “Pressure.” The film features professional and nonprofessional actors. BFI National Archive/The Film FoundationThe journey to get “Pressure” made was fraught. In 1972, Robert Buckler, who produced the film, was working as a script editor for the BBC, looking for stories about “the struggle for ordinary people,” he said in a recent interview. Buckler, who is white, spent part of his youth in the racially mixed London neighborhood of Peckham, and felt that the BBC’s programming wasn’t “reflecting fully the way our society was changing around us,” he said.In Britain in the 1970s, the Caribbean Artists Movement was thriving and Black British artists, poets, playwrights and theater directors were making work — just not for mainstream film or TV. Buckler said he approached Ové, a documentarian and photojournalist from Trinidad, to develop a script, but was unable to convince the BBC to fund a film “about a Black Englishman.” He recalled executives asking, “‘Well, who on earth would be in it?’”Instead, the British film Institute, or B.F.I., eventually financed “Pressure,” in 1974. Ové cast a mix of professional and nonprofessional actors, and the movie debuted at the London Film Festival the following year. But “Pressure” did not receive a theatrical release until 1978. “Banned is technically the wrong word,” said Arike Oke, a B.F.I. executive responsible for the organization’s archive; the delay in reaching movie theaters was more to do with “bureaucratic cul-de-sacs.” But the B.F.I. didn’t “proactively champion the film” at the time, Oke conceded.Its themes, however, were prescient. In “Pressure,” Tony is beaten by the police and arrested after attending Black Power meetings and marches; in 1976, a riot erupted following Notting Hill Carnival in west London, and as Buckler put it, “a sort of warfare between the youth and the police” broke out.Horace Ové in 1987. After making “Pressure,” he worked prolifically in TV.John Nobley/Fairfax Media, via Getty ImagesIn the same way that New York Magazine would later argue there could be “violent reactions” to Spike Lee’s 1989 film “Do the Right Thing” from Black audiences, Buckler said he wondered if the theatrical release of “Pressure” was delayed because of concerns it would heighten racial tensions.The British movie industry remained tentative about investing in Black talent for decades after the “Pressure” release, and filmmakers that followed Ové, like John Akomfrah and Isaac Julien, worked mostly in gallery spaces, while Ové worked prolifically in TV. He made only one other theatrically released movie, the 1986 comedy “Playing Away.”Zak Ové, the filmmaker’s son, said “Pressure” showed “exactly where we’ve come from and the kind of determination that was necessary.” He added that his father’s “honest depiction of a gritty reality” was a part of history at risk of disappearing if it was not honored.If it wasn’t for Ové, said Ashley Clark, the curatorial director at the Criterion Collection, that history “may not have been captured” at all. The director carved out a space “for Black people to speak for ourselves, in a landscape where a lot of those conversations were being had for us,” he said.Clark, who is British, but lives in the United States, has championed “Pressure” for several years. He said that Criterion plans to release a Blu-ray edition of the movie in 2024, and recalled programming screenings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the film played from “a rickety 16-millimeter print.” With the movie’s cerebral Black Power advocates campaigning for Black rights, Caribbean immigrants striving for middle-class security and disenfranchised Black British youths driven to crime by a lack of opportunity, “Pressure” offers “a meeting of different ideas and forms and embodiments of Blackness,” Clark said.At the New York screenings of the film, he said, there were “young, trendy Brooklyn people from across the diaspora” asking: Where has this been all my life? More

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      Richard Roundtree, Star of ‘Shaft,’ Dies at 81

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      Richard Roundtree, the actor who redefined African American masculinity in the movies when he played the title role in “Shaft,” one of the first Black action heroes, died on Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 81.His manager, Patrick McMinn, said the cause was pancreatic cancer, which had been diagnosed two months ago.“Shaft,” which was released in 1971, was among the first of the so-called blaxploitation movies, and it made Mr. Roundtree a movie star at 29.The character John Shaft is his own man, a private detective who jaywalks confidently through moving Times Square traffic in a handsome brown leather coat with the collar turned up; sports a robust, dark mustache somewhere between walrus-style and a downturned handlebar; and keeps a pearl-handled revolver in the fridge in his Greenwich Village duplex apartment. As Mr. Roundtree observed in a 1972 article in The New York Times, he is “a Black man who is for once a winner.”In addition to catapulting Mr. Roundtree to fame, the movie drew attention to its theme song, written and performed by Isaac Hayes, which won the 1972 Academy Award for best original song. It described Shaft as “a sex machine to all the chicks,” “a bad mother” and “the cat who won’t cop out when there’s danger all about.” Can you dig it? The director Gordon Parks’s gritty urban cinematography served as punctuation.A fictional product of his unenlightened pre-feminist era, Shaft was living the Playboy magazine reader’s dream, with beautiful women available to him as willing, downright grateful, sex partners. And he did not always treat them with respect. Some called him, for better or worse, the Black James Bond.He played the role again in “Shaft’s Big Score!” (1972), which bumped up the chase scenes to include speedboats and helicopters and the sexy women to include exotic dancers and other men’s mistresses. In that movie, Shaft investigated the murder of a numbers runner, using bigger guns and ignoring one crook’s friendly advice to “keep the hell out of Queens.”In “Shaft in Africa” (1973), filmed largely in Ethiopia, the character posed as an Indigenous man to expose a crime ring that exploited immigrants being smuggled into Europe. The second sequel lost money and led to a CBS series that lasted only seven weeks.But the films had made their impact. As the film critic Maurice Peterson observed in Essence magazine, “Shaft” was “the first picture to show a Black man who leads a life free from racial torment.”Mr. Roundtree in a scene from the 1972 movie “Shaft’s Big Score,” the first of two sequels.Stanley Bielecki Movie Collection/Getty ImageRichard Arnold Roundtree was born on July 9, 1942 (some sources say 1937), in New Rochelle, N.Y., the son of John and Kathryn (Watkins) Roundtree, who were identified in the 1940 census as a butler and a cook in the same household.Richard played on New Rochelle High School’s undefeated football team and, after graduating in 1961, attended Southern Illinois University on a football scholarship. But he dropped out of college in 1963 after he spent a summer as a model with the Ebony Fashion Fair, a traveling presentation sponsored by a leading news and culture magazine for Black readers.He moved back to New York, worked a number of jobs and soon began his theater career, joining the Negro Ensemble Company. His first role was in a 1967 production of “The Great White Hope,” starring as a fictionalized version of Jack Johnson, the early 20th century’s first Black heavyweight boxing champion. A Broadway production starring James Earl Jones opened the next year and won three major Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for drama.After “Shaft,” Mr. Roundtree made varied choices in movie roles. He was in the all-star ensemble cast, which also included Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner, of the 1974 disaster movie “Earthquake.” He played the title role in “Man Friday” (1975), a vibrant, generous, ultimately more civilized partner to Peter O’Toole’s 17th-century explorer Robinson Crusoe.In “Inchon” (1981), which Vincent Canby of The Times described as looking like “the most expensive B movie ever made,” he was an Army officer on the staff of Gen. Douglas MacArthur (Laurence Olivier) in Korea. He starred with Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds in “City Heat” (1984) and with a giant flying lizard in “Q” (1982).On the small screen he played Sam Bennett, the raffish carriage driver who courted Kizzie (Leslie Uggams), in the acclaimed mini-series “Roots” (1977). That show was transformational, Mr. Roundtree said in an ABC special celebrating its 25th anniversary: “You got a sense of white Americans saying, ‘Damn, that really happened.’”Richard Roundtree in 2019. He remained busy as an actor for more than four decades after his first big role.Celeste Sloman for The New York TimesMr. Roundtree’s name remained associated with the 1970s, but he was just as busy during the next four decades.He was an amoral private detective in a five-episode story arc of “Desperate Housewives” (2004); appeared in 60 episodes of the soap opera “Generations” (1990); and played Booker T. Washington in the 1999 television movie “Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years.” He was a big-city district attorney in the film “Seven” (1995) and a strong-willed Mississippi iceman in “Once Upon a Time … When We Were Colored” (1996).After the year 2000, when he was pushing 60, he made appearances in more than 25 small-screen series (he was a cast member of or had recurring roles in nine of them — including “Heroes,” “Being Mary Jane” and “Family Reunion”) and was seen in half a dozen television movies and more than 20 feature films.In 2020, he starred as a fishing boat’s gray-bearded captain in “Haunting of the Mary Celeste,” a supernatural maritime movie mystery. In 2022, he acted in an episode of “Cherish the Day,” Ava DuVernay’s romantic drama series.Mr. Roundtree married Mary Jane Grant in 1963. They had two children before divorcing in 1973. In 1980, he married Karen M. Cierna. They had three children and divorced in 1998.Mr. Roundtree is survived by four daughters, Kelli, Nicole, Taylor and Morgan; a son, John; and at least one grandchild.The Shaft character, created by Ernest Tidyman in a series of 1970s novels, endured — with Hollywood alterations. Samuel L. Jackson starred as a character with the same name, supposedly the first John Shaft’s nephew, in a 2000 sequel titled “Shaft.”In 2019, another “Shaft” was released, also starring Mr. Jackson (now said to be the original character’s son) and Jessie T. Usher as his son, J.J. Shaft, an M.I.T.-educated cybersecurity expert. The film felt something like a buddy-cops comedy, but the smartest thing it did, Owen Gleiberman of Variety noted in a review, was to take Mr. Roundtree, “bald, with a snowy-white beard,” and “turn him into a character who’s hotter, and cooler, than anyone around him” and whose “spirit is spry, and tougher than leather.”Orlando Mayorquin More

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      Book Review: ‘Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography,’ by Staci Robinson

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      Access to the late rapper’s journals gives Staci Robinson’s authorized biography a rare intimacy, without delving deeply into his music.TUPAC SHAKUR: The Authorized Biography, by Staci RobinsonLast month, after 27 years, a suspect was charged in the murder of Tupac Shakur. A firecracker and crusader as sharp as he was brusque, Tupac reached megastar status in 1996, when his fourth studio album, “All Eyez on Me,” went five times platinum. Often hailed as one of the greatest rappers of all time, he was a magnet for controversy during his life, and became a martyr for hip-hop militance after his death.Though anticipated by those familiar with the case, the arrest may provide long-awaited closure that aptly comes in conjunction with Staci Robinson’s poignant “Tupac Shakur.”The Tupac story has been told many times over, but this is the only authorized biography, meaning Robinson was granted nearly unprecedented access to the Shakur family and to Tupac’s many journals and notebooks. Along with scores of interviews, the book is stuffed with photocopies of the rapper’s personal writings. As if tucked between the pages, these hand-scrawled poems, raps and musings provide windows into his mind.For Robinson, this is a personal undertaking. She and Tupac were in the same high school social circle in Northern California, and over time she fielded calls to work on writing projects for him. With Shakur’s aunt she collaborated on “Tupac Remembered,” a 2008 collection of interviews, and was an executive producer on “Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni and Tupac Shakur,” the 2023 docuseries about the rapper and his mother.Robinson writes in an introduction that she took up the biography at Afeni’s request in 1999, but that the project was put “on hold” a few weeks after she submitted the manuscript. Called on decades later to complete the work, Robinson spends its pages advocating not only for Tupac’s integrity, but for the spirit of Black resistance he embodied.“He wanted to relay stories that needed to be told,” she writes. “It was time to tell the truth about America’s history, about its dark past and especially about the oppression and disparities that were plaguing communities.”“Tupac Shakur” is a touching, empathetic portrait of a friend. Even familiar stories achieve new intimacy at closer range. And small moments help clarify longstanding narratives, coloring in the outlines of this well-known tale of the actor-rapper-activist who died at 25. The book attempts to contextualize the sadness and paranoia beneath the charisma; throughout his life, we learn, “van Gogh would come to be a touchstone for Tupac.”As in “Dear Mama,” Robinson’s biography sees the rapper’s legacy as inextricable from his mother’s, and the book begins not with Tupac, but with Afeni — her exposure to racism in the Jim Crow South, her arrest in New York as a member of the Black Panthers and her standing trial while pregnant.Afeni, we are told, was the bedrock of Tupac’s moral mission. “Ingrained from birth and into his upbringing were both Afeni’s fears and her dreams for her son — the expectation that he would carry on her dedication to the Black community and the will to help others achieve freedom from oppression,” Robinson writes.The book posits that Tupac inherited an antagonistic relationship with the police from the Shakurs — his mother, her first husband, Lumumba, and Tupac’s stepfather, Mutulu. Yet it astutely chronicles his life as a microcosm of the ongoing Black American struggle. Robinson often draws direct parallels between Tupac’s creative life and his run-ins with law enforcement. She notes that he was assaulted by Oakland police officers only weeks after shooting the video for “Trapped,” a diatribe against police brutality; filming on the 1993 movie “Poetic Justice,” in which he starred, was put on pause during the L.A. riots.Black cultural responses to injustice were early fuel for a sensitive, boisterous would-be artist. We hear of him furiously riding his tricycle around the apartment as Gil Scott-Heron plays on the turntable; he “entered a new realm” portraying 11-year-old Travis Younger in “A Raisin in the Sun” at a Harlem fund-raiser for Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign.We get what feel like firsthand peeks into his turbulent rise to stardom, too; Robinson recounts how his mother would send Tupac traveling with care packages that included condoms, vitamins, prayer cloths and phone numbers for bail bondsmen.Though there are frequent references to his prolific output, “Tupac Shakur” doesn’t focus much on music, which undersells him as an artistic genius. The book mostly considers his songs as ways to explain his behavior; it is not overly concerned with how they were made or whether they succeeded aesthetically. Lyrics either underscore a caring nature or are vehicles for public controversy.In this way, the narrative plays into a longstanding Tupac binary — the sensitive revolutionary and the hair-trigger thug — though it insinuates the latter was primarily a construction of a sensationalist press. And while offering a valiant defense, Robinson excuses Tupac of many provocations. It spends very little time on his 1994 sexual-abuse conviction, and absolves the rapper in an earlier incident at an outdoor festival that left a 6-year-old boy dead, even though the gun in question was registered to him. It doesn’t even consider that he might be culpable, accidentally or by proxy.Robinson does not stand at a historian’s distance. Her writing radiates admiration, and at times she even speaks on Tupac’s behalf. Even so, this is far from hagiography. At its best, the book feels like a plea to re-examine the world that made Tupac Shakur so angry.TUPAC SHAKUR: The Authorized Biography | By Staci Robinson | 406 pp. | Crown | $35 More

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      A Spike Lee Joint via Movie Posters and Sports Jerseys

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      Lee, the director of “Do the Right Thing” and “Malcolm X,” donated more than 400 items for a Brooklyn Museum exhibition.The first image to catch your eye in the Brooklyn Museum’s new exhibition about the director Spike Lee could be a wall projection of “Malcolm X,” the 1992 movie staring Denzel Washington. Nearby hang artworks of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Trayvon Martin, whose killing inspired the Black Lives Matter Movement.Elsewhere, a sign from the segregation era reads “Colored Waiting Room.”The Black History and Culture section is a jarring opening to an exhibition that guides visitors through themes, concepts and objects that inspired Lee, 66, as he became a defining figure in the Black community. He donated more than 400 items for the show, “Spike Lee: Creative Sources,” which opens on Saturday and runs through Feb. 4, 2024.Lee’s “Malcolm X,” from 1992, starred Denzel Washington. Amir Hamja/The New York Times“You don’t have to really be an art aficionado to appreciate so much of this exhibition, because Spike is not only one of those but he’s a bibliophile, he’s a sports fan, he’s a lover of history,” Kimberli Gant, the exhibition’s curator, said.Lee has been nominated for five Academy Awards, winning the best adapted screenplay Oscar for “BlacKkKlansman” (2018). In addition to his popular films — he labels them “joints” — such as “Do the Right Thing” and “Inside Man,” Lee has become a staple in the courtside seats at Madison Square Garden for New York Knicks games.At the Brooklyn Museum, walls splashed in eye-popping bold colors contrast with the wood accents and paneling that turn gallery spaces into what resembles a movie set. Visitors can walk through seven sections divided into categories such as music and sports that Gant said she hoped would appeal to a broad group of people.“I don’t want this show to be so heavy that you’re leaving depressed,” Gant said. “There’s a lot of heavy material, but there’s joy here, too.”New YorkA Brooklyn section of the exhibition includes the Dodgers jersey that Lee wore as the character Mookie in “Do the Right Thing.”Amir Hamja/The New York TimesAn 8-year-old Lee on the cover of New York magazine.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesLee, who was born in Atlanta but raised in Brooklyn, has set many of his movies in New York’s boroughs. One section of the exhibition features news articles about Lee in The Daily News and The New York Times, as well as a photograph of him as a child on the cover of New York magazine.The room emphasizes “Do the Right Thing,” the 1989 film that examines racial tension between Black people and Italian Americans in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Memorabilia from the movie, which was nominated for two Academy Awards and has been preserved by the National Film Registry, includes the Brooklyn Dodgers jersey that Lee wore as the character Mookie.MoviesThe exhibition’s walls are splashed in eye-popping bold colors.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesLee has an Oscar for best adapted screenplay, for “BlacKkKlansman,” as well as a lifetime achievement award.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesLarge film posters greet visitors in the section dedicated to movies and cinema, where Lee’s Oscar trophy for “BlacKkKlansman,” as well as the honorary one he received in 2015 for lifetime achievement, can be found in a glass case mounted on the wall.Also on display are gifts from other celebrities, including signed posters by the “Jurassic Park” director Steven Spielberg and the “Boyz N the Hood” director John Singleton. An adjacent room focused on photography has a letter written by former President Barack Obama.SportsOne room is devoted to New York Knicks memorabilia, including a net from the 1970 N.B.A. finals, when the team won its first title.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesMichael Jordan autographed a pair of sneakers he wore during the “flu game” in the 1997 N.B.A. finals. Amir Hamja/The New York TimesThe largest section in “Spike Lee: Creative Sources” is reserved for sports, with a small room solely for Knicks memorabilia. Those souvenirs include a jersey signed by Carmelo Anthony and a net from the 1970 N.B.A. finals, when the Knicks won their first title by defeating the Los Angeles Lakers in seven games.A larger room holds autographed items from LeBron James, Serena Williams, Jim Brown and Michael Jordan, as well as news articles signed by Stephen Curry after he broke the N.B.A. record for most career 3-pointers, a 2021 game that Lee attended at the Garden.Aligning with the social justice theme of the exhibition’s entrance, large portions are dedicated to Jackie Robinson, the first Black player in Major League Baseball, and the boxer and activist Muhammad Ali. Near the exit is a signed jersey of Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback who in 2016 ignited a fierce debate on athletes’ rights to protest by kneeling during the national anthem. More