Amiri Baraka once wrote that Black music, “to retain its freshness, its originality, its specific expression of its own history and contemporary reality in each generation creates a “new music.” This was yet another articulation of what Baraka once called the “changing same”—the thing that links Black expressive culture to a commitment to innovation, while remaining wedded to the traditions that birthed it. No one understood that better than Nikki Giovanni, when she went into the studio in 40 years ago to record Truth is On Its Way. At the time, Giovanni was one of the most visible and provocative poets of the Black Arts Movement—Baraka, Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti), Sonia Sanchez and the late Henry Dumas are some of the others. The Black Arts Movement was premised on the idea of an art “for the people,” thus many of the movement’s artists sought to make an explicit connection to folk up on the boulevard (you can’t be on the boulevard if you don’t talk like you from the boulevard). For Giovanni though, it wasn’t just about the folk up in the club on Saturday night, but also the folk in the pews on Sunday morning.

I was five years old when my mother walked into the house with a copy of Truth is On the Way. I’ve listened to the recording hundreds of times since then; indeed Giovanni’s cadences are incorporated in the rhythms of my own writing style. At the time I didn’t fully understand the genius of Giovanni’s vision—she was blatantly trying to bring the profane in conversation with the sacred, two decades before Kirk Franklin and later Kanye West would bring ghetto theodicy to the top of the pop charts. Truth is On Its Way features recordings of some of Giovanni’s signature poems, mashed over classic gospel recordings performed by the New York Community Choir (under the direction of Benny Diggs).

READ THE FULL STORY HERE:

http://newblackman.blogspot.com/2010/06/god-parent-of-hip-hop-nikki-giovannis.html

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