Oscar Brown, Jr. to Gain CLHOF Induction (Saturday, July 12 at Woodson Regional Library)

by Arthur Ade Amaker

The word according to Oscar:

“Here’s how it is: how I became a living legend I will never know. For 40 years, I’ve tried to make a public spectacle of myself with a paucity of publicity. This is interesting considering where I come from...I had a fairly uneventful upbringing in Chicago, Illinois where I was born in 1926. I was smart enough to have been ‘double promoted’ twice in grade school, so I was only 16 years old when I enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in the fall of 1943, where I preceded to flunk out of that institution and five other institutions of higher learning. However, through this process I had discovered my unusual talent for English composition and was determined to become a creative writer.”

These words are typical of the talent of Oscar Brown, Jr., words full of wit, humor and undressed honesty. Oscar Brown, Jr. was a master of the spoken word and one of a long lineage of poets in the griot tradition (more properly known in the original Bambara, Mandinka, or Soninke Mande languages as “Djeli”) -- the West African poets who often would recite the history and legends of a nation through a seamless combination of words and music. This speaks to a form of literacy that is more ancient than the written word. Oscar is firmly embedded in this tradition—where creative writing is synonymous with the creative spoken word, where one cannot exist without the other.

This fascination with spoken words and their power started for Oscar when he worked as a radio actor during his years as a student at Englewood High School and then during his college years with the Negro News Front, where he spent five years as the “world’s first Negro Newscaster.”

After two unsuccessful attempts at running for political office in Illinois in 1948 and 1952, Oscar decided to dedicate his talents full-time to show business and began his career as a songwriter. He wrote his first full musical called Kicks & Co. in the late 50s and Nichelle Nichols and Burgess Meredith, of Star Trek and Rocky fame, respectively, starred in its 1961 premiere in Chicago.

Oscar also went on to become a successful singer and was able to land a contract with Columbia records where he recorded classic albums such as Sin & Soul, Oscar Brown Jr. Tells It Like It Is and Between Heaven and Hell. On the Fontana label he recorded Mr. Brown Jr. Goes to Washington and Finding a New Friend. These are just some of the many records that Oscar has recorded, along with a prolific output of over 1000 lyrics and poems, penning famous jazz lyrics for such well-covered jazz standards as “Dat Dere,”“Work Song,” and “Afro-Blue.”

The 60s into the early 70s were Oscar’s most prolific years. Not only did he pen the lyrics to hundreds of famous songs but also produced musicals like Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow, based on the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and featuring the music of fellow Chicago legend Phil Cohran. He produced Joy 66, Summer in the City, and Opportunity Please Knock, done with the participation of the Blackstone Rangers street gang as well as the Jackson Five and the actor Avery Brooks. Muhammed Ali starred in Oscar’s play Buck White, off-Broadway in the 70s, when Ali was banned from fighting. He pioneered the idea of musical revue with a social message. Politics were often at the forefront of his art.

Oscar’s work continued into the 70s, 80s and 90s. He appeared on TV and in movies as an actor. In the early 2000s, he had a revival of sorts with a new generation through his several appearances on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. His last produced musical was Great Nitty Gritty; his only published collection of lyrics and individual poems was entitled What It Is: Poems and Opinions of Oscar Brown, Jr.

Like several of the Black Arts Movement poets and performers of his generation, Oscar was a “poet of the people.” He was trying to impact the man on the street just as much as the man in the academy. If one looks at the history of literacy in the world, one will discover that more people in the world are “literate” who cannot read a single word written on the page, but yet they memorize and process information through symbol, through feeling, through rhythm and song. The Black Arts Movement sought to tap into this traditionally African form of “literacy” but translate it to the Western world on the page as well. Oscar Brown, Jr.’s work is the bridge between these other ways of “writing” and ways of “knowing.”

His literary value all depends on the lens determining what is literature -- is it only defined from a perspective which says that it cannot be performed and must only be consumed by reading, or is it something more broad, something that can be consumed even by those who can’t read? Oscar’s work was accessible to these people. And it is because he approached his creative writing in this manner that his words stick in our soul today. He is a testament to the power of the spoken word, the elder brother of the written word.

According to Oscar’s contemporary and fellow spoken-word artist Kent Foreman:

“Oscar understood better than anyone else that rhyme teaches: that a poem is almost as much a thing of rhythm as it is of words, and sometimes rhythm matters more than the meaning. When the tempo is more important than the text, you get Rap. Oscar is the shade that shelters today’s rappers.

“Every time an MC raps a rhyme, and every time a jazz singer gives us unforgettable lyrics to a melody, and every time a slam poet enthralls an audience with their mastery of inflection and prosody, we are giving tribute to Mr. Kicks himself, Oscar Brown, Jr. -- Chicago born, Chicago bred, and thoroughly rooted in the people and pulse of this city.”

* Excerpts taken from What It Is: Poetry and Opinions of Oscar Brown, Jr. edited by Arthur Ade Amaker and published by Oyster Knife Publishing, 2005.

Arthur Ade Amaker is an English and African American Studies professor, poet, writer and activist residing in Chicago. As a writer, his work has appeared in In Defense of Mumia and Roll Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art. He is the founding editor of Oyster Knife Publishing and has edited What It Is: Poems and Opinions of Oscar Brown, Jr. and Sons of Lovers, An Anthology of Love Poems by Black Men. He most recently published works are an essay in Third World Press’s Not Our President, an anthology of political essays about life and politics in the age of Donald Trump and a poem in American Gun: A Poem by 100 Chicagoans. He is currently at work on a memoir about his father, civil rights attorney Norman C. Amaker, an anthropological / historical study of maroons in Louisiana and Northeastern Brazil, and a collection of poetry.