Desert Island Discs: To Be Young, Gifted and Black

Young, Gifted and Black - Aretha Franklin (1972)

Stories and selections

Listening through the back catalogue of Desert Island Discs on the BBC Sounds app has been a journey into enlightenment and recognition. Whether the stories told or the selections of music chosen by the guests, not only do you learn something about them, but you might also come away with insight and inspiration.

It was not until I was listening to the episode where Yvonne Brewster was a guest in 2005 that I began taking notes. I felt I should do a once-over of everything else I had listened to, but I did not have the presence of mind to do so.

This was before I went back to the beginning of the existing recordings, of which many have been lost or barely rescued in the first 25 years of broadcasting the programme.

It is a shame that no one at the BBC of that time thought this cachet of guests and interviews, many speaking with a received pronunciation accent harking back to a bygone age, should be recorded and preserved.

Pioneering, gifted and black

Yvonne Brewster was a pioneer as the UK’s first Black woman drama student; born to an upper-middle-class Jamaican family, she came to England to attend drama school at the Rose Bruford College where the proprietress thought she would unlikely find dramatic work in Britain, only for her to go on to achieve a distinction in drama and mime at the Royal Academy of Music.

Her achievement is exemplified in the third track she chose, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, which was recorded by Nina Simone in 1969. I was more familiar with the cover version by the Jamaican duo Bob and Marcia, however, the version recorded by Aretha Franklin won her a Grammy. [Wikipedia: Young, Gifted and Black]

While I knew of the music, I was not as familiar with the lyrics until I heard it clearly, a few weeks ago. From the 1950s onwards, we began to see such amazing talent and achievements from the global Black community, even as the civil rights movement took hold, and many African nations pursued the goal of independence from colonial rule.

We must remind ourselves

Blacks became known beyond the field of entertainment to academia, science, engineering, business, and politics. This was both a shock and a surprise to many Caucasians who thought otherwise.

I recall that my father’s white colleagues in the late 1960s sought to be derisive of his becoming a chartered accountant, having excellently passed his exams and had come third overall in England and Wales, along with winning the Foulks Lynch Prize. They sneeringly said they didn’t think he was that brilliant.

Yet, against all odds, we have striven, risen and shone, but that fact still needs to be instilled in us and our children, at every turn, it needs to get well beyond James Brown’s Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud, to the point that we know without a doubt from within ourselves, what it is To Be Young, Gifted and Black.

That is who we are, and too many times, we forget that we each have to be reminded, “Your soul's intact, And that's a fact!” No matter what age in life, this is our truth, one to live by and live out.

To Be Young, Gifted and Black

Young, gifted and black
Oh what a lovely precious dream
To be young, gifted and black
Open your heart to what I mean

In the whole world you know
There's a million boys and girls
Who are young, gifted and black
And that's a fact!

You are young, gifted and black
We must begin to tell our young
There's a world waiting for you
Yours is the quest that's just begun

When you feel really low
Yeah, there's a great truth that you should know
When you're young, gifted and black
Your soul's intact

To be young, gifted and black
Oh, how I've longed to know the truth
There are times when I look back
And I am haunted by my youth

Oh but my joy of today
Is that we can all be proud to say
To be young, gifted and black
Is where it's at

Is where it's at
Is where it's at

Songwriters: Nina Simone / Weldon Irvine – Source: Musixmatch

YouTube: Nina Simone - To Be Young, Gifted and Black (Audio)

YouTube: Bob & Marcia Young, Gifted & Black (Official Audio)

Desert Island Discs: Connecting stories

Their Interesting Stories 

I began this blog days ago after weeks of wondering how to approach the subject. Over time, it dawned on me that what I had to say might not fit into just one blog; there were simply too many interesting things to discuss before the blog began to resemble a soporific treatise. 

How people have lived their lives and how they have impacted others or humanity always fascinates me. Friday evenings represent a time to reflect on the lives of the recently departed when, on BBC Radio 4, I play back the latest episode of Last Word. 

This is a weekly obituary programme that highlights the life stories of four people, along with notable mentions of two or three others. After an introduction, people shed light on the lives of these personalities, eliciting interesting facts about who they were, what they did, and the significance of their existence among us. 

Music for Solitude 

A couple of months ago, during one broadcast, a rather unfamiliar but interesting name came up. I cannot remember which name it was, but upon searching for it, the first result was their appearance on another BBC Radio 4 programme, Desert Island Discs. 

Desert Island Discs was first broadcast in January 1942. A guest is invited to imagine being a castaway on a desert island like Robinson Crusoe but with the provision of eight chosen audio recordings, the complete works of Shakespeare, and a religious book of their choice. 

This programme follows an interview format interspersed with the guest's chosen music or audio recordings. It can be quite intrusive, and the light banter allows for probing and interesting questions. Even the choices may hold intriguing stories about the person’s life. At the end, guests are asked to choose just one of the eight audio recordings to take with them, along with a luxury item, a tradition that has been in place since the late 1950s. 

Over 3,400 episodes have been recorded, but some are lost. Others can be recovered or contain fragments from episodes previously thought to be lost, sometimes as brief as two minutes, while typical episodes run around 40 minutes. 

An Event of Propinquity 

I recently started playing back the episodes from the very beginning of those that could be found, and what an experience it has been; it is like a history of popular culture told from the perspective of individuals, many of whom, including some of the earlier hosts of the show, have passed on. 

I plan to cover this in subsequent blogs, but I was inspired to complete this blog because I am now in the middle of 1971. Earlier this morning, I heard the Desert Island Discs episode featuring Clodagh Rodgers, only to log on to the BBC News website to learn that she had just passed on. [BBC News: Eurovision singer Clodagh Rodgers dies aged 78] 

It is quite remarkable how the various ideas, events, and individuals that shape history can have a significant impact, create memorable moments, or become notorious. These elements weave together to form a fabric of the human narrative that deserves greater appreciation for its instructional value or as cautionary tales. 

I have begun to take detailed notes and establish connections between different observations, sounds, and memories. These reflections may be incorporated into future blog posts.

Save us from the Carbon Nazis

The earth is changing

It is getting relentless and distracting, switch on your television and the chance is you are watching a drying up river, a depleted forest, marooned polar animals and wayfaring icebergs.

Amongst us, it is reports of severe drought in Australia, desert encroachment in Africa, floods in Asia, forest fires in America, severe hurricanes in the Caribbean or heat waves in Europe.

The sum of it all, global warming, or at least that is what we are beginning to believe it is.

We do need to do something about it, however, I do wonder if the way we are going about it has not been hijacked by a more sophisticated erstwhile membership of the anarchist Animal Liberation Front.

Offsetting your footprint

So, we have to measure our carbon footprints, reduce our carbon generating activities and consider carbon offsetting if our nominal carbon footprint is extended for satisfying out luxurious tastes.

Now, I naturally cannot sleep with my lights off or without having some sound playing in the background, I would be travelling to Berlin in the weekend and the choice between a 2-hour round-trip and a 12-hour journey is obvious if I want to maximise my holiday time, travelling by air than by train.

I would like to switch off my television, DVD recorder, video tape player, stereo player and microwave oven instead of leaving them in standby mode, but I would loose channels, time, settings such that getting the systems up and running would be an utter inconvenience, it should be manufacturers creating systems that retain all that in non-volatile memory.

Have to keep them going

Forget my fridge and alarm clock, and I need a night light; I have not been able to eat enough carrots to see in the dark. The supermarket on the ground floor brings food from all corners of the world, I am spoilt for choice and it closes at 9:00PM. If I want local produce, I have to go to the market, which is open till about 4:00PM when I would still be at work.

Supermarket food contains enough additives to keep for a while, fresh produce whilst tasteful has to be consumed sooner which means more inconvenient trips a week for foodstuffs.

Anyway, that is my selfish attitude to Global Warming, mind you, I do not have a car, and I mainly use public transport and do not directly use any fossil fuels in my house.

The march of the Carbon Nazis

But it is getting a bit too far, a whole lot of sanctimonious tree-huggers are now saying we should stop flying - now, I am no fan of no-frills air travel, they have rubbished the quality of travel one was once accustomed to hardly 10 years ago.

However, I would not squeeze into a cattle-class seat for the price of an imperial suite on QE2, it is annoying enough that the cost of flights is just 60% of taxes when it comes to European travel.

Then some people who desperately need to get a life queued up from 03:00AM for the £5.00 "I'm not a plastic bag" bag at Sainsbury's, this green thing might just gain traction if such interesting people were composted for plant nutrition.

They have also co-opted the Queen of England into this outrageous carbon trading scam, no, she would not be kayaking across the Atlantic to America, rather her courtiers would be finding ways to offset her carbon footprint - the last time I looked, though her feet were in shoes, they were hardly half the size of my long boats. Green Queen, they say - give me peace!

Gosh! I forgot, she was 81 on Saturday - Belated wishes, Ma'am.

The march of the carbon army is like some marauding pillage of our heretofore sacred liberties, that I am now screaming - Save us from the Carbon Nazis.