The Real Black Magic

"Healing Session" (2003), by Babatunde Olatunji

We’re taking a longer journey than usual to get to the point today because I want to emphasize the power of context. Even when you aren’t aware of the history behind an idea or an attitude, it can still impact you and change the way that you think.

The Thread We Weave

I’m sure I’ve told this story before.

I was about twelve when Mom and Dad gave me a record. I loved that record and played it all the time. Grandpa Russ, a Southern Baptist minister, heard it in our living room and he gave me a stern lecture about that kind of music and the danger it presented.

He told me, “Those drum beats they use come from Africa. They use those patterns to summon demons, and when you listen to that music, you are opening yourself to be possessed by those demons through those drums.”

I was listening to this:

For those who don’t know, the Continental Singers were part of the rising tide of contemporary Christian artists who incorporated pop music into their acts as they spread their message. This album, Dreamer, was their response to Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s hit musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

You can’t get much further removed from “African drum patterns” than this watered-down and whitewashed Christian pop confectionary, and yet, my Grandfather felt uncomfortable enough with it to give me that stern—and absurd—warning.

This happened in 1984, during the Satanic Panic, and Grandpa was not alone in spreading these ideas. The concept that music was a weapon wielded by unseen forces who could magically control the minds of our youth was all over the place. The popularity of heavy metal music emphasizing occult themes fed into the righteous fury of the Christian right. The infamous “Chick Tracts,” mini-comics printed to spread Christian nationalist message to youths, were a part of the Panic, and panels like this one captured the paranoia:

from Chick Comics Theater: Rock Music…Inside Satan’s Boombox

And you probably noticed amongst the many stereotypes and conspiracy theories packed into these panels, there is a reference to “the voodoo of the islands” thrown in. That hint of Black magic from the islands, born in Africa, a threat woven into legend and baked into the fears and fever dreams of white Americans for centuries.

Where does that come from?

Leaf Caught In A Tide

Babatunde Olatunji was born in southwestern Nigeria in 1927, two months after his father, Zannu, died. Olatunji was considered to be a reincarnation of him. His maternal grandmother and great-grandmother were priestesses of the Vodun and Ogu religions, and he grew up speaking the Gun (Ogu/Egun) and Yoruba languages.

Long before Olatunji was born, the West African Vodún religion was brought to the Caribbean and North America by enslaved peoples from Benin, Togo, Ghana, and Nigeria. Vodún teaches the existence of a supreme creator divinity, under whom are lesser spirits called vodúns. Enslaved people often practiced their traditional religion alongside the Christianity of the enslavers, interpreting Jesus Christ, or saints and figures from other religious systems, as vodún. In this way, vodún influenced the development of new religions such as Haitian Vodou, Louisiana Voodoo, and Brazilian Candomblé Jejé.

When Olatunji grew up, he applied for the Rotary International Foundation's scholarship program and went to the United States in 1950 to attend Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. His musical career began as a collaboration with the Morehouse Glee Club on a Nigerian Christmas carol. After graduating, Olatunji went to New York University to study public administration and he started a percussion group to earn money on the side. By 1958, he had performed with the Radio City Orchestra, and Columbia Records signed him to their label.

Olatunji’s career is worth digging into. He worked with dozens of well-known jazz musicians in the 1960s, from John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley to Quincy Jones. Carlos Santana had a hit in 1969 covering "Jin-go-lo-ba" from Olatunji's first album, which Santana recorded on his debut album, Santana, as "Jingo".

Here is Santana performing the song in 2011:

In a sense, Grandpa’s tale of African rhythms finding their way into rock music is “true”—and you can see the influence and inclusion of Olatunji’s music on a lot of popular music. But the sinister version of the story shared by Jack Chick, my grandfather, and generations of people who considered jazz and rock to be “degenerate jungle music” is not correct.

Loving the Spin I’m In

After he died in 2003, Narada published a collection of Olatunji’s recordings called Healing Session - a high-quality collection of pieces described as meditation music. While none of those performances are available on YouTube, this “Incantations” video comes close.

Anyone who studies religions from around the world will quickly learn about the commonalities that all religions share. One thing that all human beings do is tell themselves stories that help make sense of the world and our place in it.

Olatunji’s childhood religion is no different in that sense from any other religion. The tracks on Healing Session tell some of these stories. “Edunmare” names “the Lord, the Creator” who “provides for the snail that has no hands and no legs but gently crawls in search of his food” and repeats these elements like a prayer. “Adura” is a chant pleading for healing from three aspects of the “only Savior, the one and only source” using evolving rhythms and call and response to drive the meditation.

I am a nonbeliever, and I don’t believe that anything mystical is happening when people do this. What I recognize is that we humans use these group prayers, rituals, and meditation techniques to build a sense of community and to deal with personal problems. Contemplating the universe and attempting to understand “the Divine” is universal to people of faith. But because “voodoo” was so closely associated with enslaved people, it took on a darker role in the stories that the Christian enslavers told themselves.

Religious differences have a long history of being used to reinforce power structures that benefit one group at the expense of another.

That Old Black Magic Called Love

My grandfather, and many like him, grew up in Appalachia during the Great Depression. Like today, they were people who felt caught between a wealthy robber baron class and the mass movement of former slaves from the South to cities in the North, where jobs had been. He saw the New Deal policies that sought to end the Depression as a scheme by the wealthy to extract taxes and labor from people like himself and give it to the “undeserving poor”—and while my grandfather insisted he wasn’t “racist” it was clear who he thought was “undeserving.”

When you are afraid of someone else, you fear their power. Grandpa felt that his power, as a preacher, came from God, and that anyone who didn’t listen to him and respect his power or authority over him was a literal devil. Telling me that African music, like that of Olatunji, was part of a dark, nefarious plot by Satan to control the minds of (white) American youths has a name. Associating someone’s cultural heritage with demons has a name: demonization.

And so he came into my room and tried to warn me about this threat—out of what he saw as love. But by spreading a lie about people like Olatunji, he was trying to convince me to fear what he feared, and to demonize what he saw as a danger.

I was lucky he chose as ridiculous a target as the Continental Singers to make his case. If I had been listening to an artist like Santana or one of the jazz greats that infused their records with Olatunji’s Nigerian rhythms, 12-year-old me might have been fooled into thinking he had a point. I was still a believer then.

Instead, I began to question the ideas that adults like Grandpa took for granted. Questioning biases and learning where his fear and hostility came from led me to conclude that religions have no basis in reality. Instead, by studying the stories, the music, and the rituals that human beings use to make sense of the world, I learned to be watchful for the poisonous ideas that perpetuate conflict.

The irony is that there really was a dark and sinister force at work, trying to control my mind. It just wasn’t there in the music—it was in the head of someone who loved me. A dark alchemy that turns universal human behavior into a Satanic plot.

I just wish that I had learned how to get through to someone like Grandpa, to convince them to see the error of their ways. It seems like that would be a useful skill.

---

The eagle-eyed reader may have picked up on the references in my section titles to “That Old Black Magic”—here’s a little reward for you, and for anyone who read this far!