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Oh, I wish I could fly
Like a bird up in the sky
And then wake up one morning
To find out for myself, oh
You don't even have to die
Listen, I'd fly if I could fly, you see
To the sun and then down
To the deep blue sea
Then I'd sing, yes
I'd sing about freedom
-Solomon Burke ("I Wish I Knew")
Toni Morrison has written often about the relationship between her writing and black music. In "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation," the novelist explains that "[f]or a long time, the art form that was healing for Black people was music. That music is no longer exclusively ours... Other people sing it and play it... So another form has to take its place, and it seems to me that the novel is needed by African-Americans now in a way that it was not needed before" (58). Morrison does not specify when that shift occurred; Craig Werner, however, hears it happening in the mid-1960s. In A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America, he tracks a key change from Mahalia Jackson's soulful gospel performance at the 1963 March on Washington to Diana Ross's unprecedented commercial "crossover" success in the final years of that decade. Nina Simone provides backup for Werner's claim in her autobiography, 1 Put a Spell on You, effectively connecting this key change to shifts in political vision. Simone identifies 1963 as a pivotal year in the civil rights movement, a time when activists like her felt compelled to choose between two very different ways forward-the integration and passive resistance model advocated by Dr. King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the black power vision promoted by Stokely Carmichael and other young militants increasingly at odds with SCLC as well as members of their own group, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). It is into this space-a crossroads in the freedom struggle-that Morrison's Song of Solomon enters.1 And it does so by referencing slavery and Jim Crow, linking characters to historical figures in the civil rights movement, and conjuring up the spirit of a gospel singer named Solomon Burke.
A Pulitzer Prize-winner and Nobel laureate, Toni Morrison has occupied a wider circle of influence than...