The following article is a chapter from Charles Tighe's book, We Would Do Well to Listen. In the late 60's and early 70's, Memphis was a cauldron of culture. A group of enterprising young Orff teachers, including Shirly McRae, were tasked with developing a music education plan for the Memphis City Schools. This is part of the story. 

We Would Do Well to Listen

The years surrounding the Tanglewood Declaration (August 1967) were tumultuous, with the race riots in Watts (1965), Newark, and Detroit (both 1967); the assassinations of Martin Luther King (April 1968) and Robert F. Kennedy (June 1968); protests against the war in Vietnam; and the 1968 Democratic Conference and the presidential election. Society had changed, and social unrest throughout the country over issues of race altered how music was perceived. No longer relegated to entertainment or academic study, music became a force for change. Jimmy Hendrix at Woodstock; Joan Baez; Peter, Paul, and Mary; and Bob Dylan were just some of the musical performers who commented on societal issues. In Memphis, soul and R&B evolved as social and political forces addressing racial and economic discrimination issues. 

This multicultural mixing bowl spilled over from the world of music into the reality of national socioeconomics and race. The tensions of race became the central political, cultural, and social force in 1968. Following King’s assassination in April, Stax musician and member of Booker T. & the M.G.’s Steve Cropper (a White member of the band) said,

You know, Memphis was a refuge for black people, it really was. Blacks were Blacks, and Whites were Whites, and everybody was cool. We all loved each other. The Black people were perfectly happy with what was going on. I don’t think anywhere in the universe was as racially cool as Memphis was until Martin Luther King showed up. That just set it off for the world, basically. What a shame. There must be something political about that. Let’s go to the one place in the South where everybody is getting along and blow that fuse. That’s the only way I can see it.

Cropper and Booker T. Jones were close friends who had played together, recorded, and toured for a decade before this interview. Cropper’s statement clearly articulates the sentiment against which Black music became racialized and politicized as an expression of political protest and despair. What Cropper fails to acknowledge is that as a White musician, he collected producing and composing royalties for the songs produced at Stax. Black musicians such as Jones were paid by the session and retained no ownership of composing or producing royalties of songs they created. Before King’s assassination, many Black musicians viewed themselves as Black musicians playing pop music, not pop musicians playing Black music. Following the deaths of King and Kennedy, political and racial tensions intensified. 1968 brought a marked change; artists such as James Brown recorded Say It Loud, I’m Black, and I’m Proud (recorded in Compton in 1968), and I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (recorded in Atlanta in 1969). This profound “Africanized” approach to music offered social commentary that helped shift Black music away from the smooth pop sounds exemplified by Motown of the mid-sixties to music more strongly associated with racial identity. By the late 1960s, many in the Black community viewed music as an essential conduit of cultural identity. In his autobiography Time Is Tight: My Life, Note by Note, Jones acknowledges this and relates a series of events happening shortly after King’s assassination in which militant Black men expressed their displeasure of Jones performing in an integrated band. In 1969, Jones left Memphis permanently for Los Angeles.

In 1969, the Music Educator’s National Conference (MENC) issued a call for papers addressing responses to pressing social issues in the contemporary music classroom. In January of 1970, Music Educators’ Journal (MEJ) featured a Special Report titled Facing the Music in Urban Education, which contains articles by many of the leading music pedagogues of the day which address the paradox between classical music and popular music, folk, and jazz in instructional settings. The issue also contains essays arguing the continued importance of Classical music and discussions of why popular music, jazz, blues, and other music in the vernacular should or should not be in a child’s formal music education. 

In April 1970, Shirley McRae, then completing her Masters of Education and teaching part-time at the University of Memphis, responded to the MEJ Special Report.

The most frequent complaint I hear from prospective teachers is that the music that they are required to study, to know, to do, is unlikely to be of any value to them in a real classroom with real children. Often, they contend, this is the fault of instructors who haven’t even conversed with a child in years. It is interesting to note that many of the young students quoted in this issue make the same charges that the curriculum is irrelevant. 

I realize that education must do more than meet immediate needs and that students are not always equipped to make valid judgments about what may or may not be relevant. But it appears that teachers at all levels have indeed failed to listen to their students and meet them honestly, on their own ground. This is especially true in music, where one is tempted to impose his own tastes and knowledge upon students without giving them equal time, or almost.

I believe that all children may be brought to an appreciation of great Western music if guided by a competent and human teacher. “Human” here means a willingness to accept the student for what he is, listen to him, and learn along with him. This acceptance requires personal security that some teachers do not have. It also requires that the teacher learn more about rock, jazz, or ethnic music, which may be the child’s only music. Perhaps we, the teachers, steeped in music of a more respectable type, are as culturally deprived as the students we propose to teach. 

There is one other component to this crisis. As music educators, we are not convinced that all children have a right to music, that is, to develop skills and understandings. This uncertainty, too, is genuine at all levels. It is easy to find teachers for the talented student. But who cares about the unmotivated or the “unmusical” or the grand army of “average”?

Fortunately, some do care, judging from the dramatic testimony in the January issue, and these are the ones who are making progress. There are no easy teaching positions, but surely those persons working in our strife-ridden urban schools are making an extraordinary contribution to the lives of youngsters. What they are saying is relevant, and we would do well to listen. [Emphasis added.]

Shirley McRae’s husband Frank was Memphis District Supervisor of the Methodist Church in Memphis, the youngest supervisor in the country. Frank McRae, who had grown up across the street from Memphis City Mayor Henry Loeb, was socially and politically well-connected to many of the city’s leaders. Throughout the Sanitation Worker’s Strike that brought Martin Luther King to Memphis, McRae was at the forefront of the discussions among the clergy with Mayor Loeb and other city officials encouraging the city settle. Following King’s assassination on April 4, McRae, along with Rabbi James Wax, led a march of clergy and church officials from St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral to the Mayor’s Office demanding the city give in to the workers and end the strike. McRae went on to be a leader for racial, economic, and social justice both in Memphis and on a national level. 

Continuing her response to the Special Report, Shirley McRae reflected on her journey as a preacher’s wife, musician, and an Orff teacher.

My husband was not of the school that I was viewed as his assistant; he gave me a lot of freedom. I went back to school in the second or third year of our marriage. I have always been pretty independent. Fortunately, he didn’t require me to be [always at his side], and most of all, the congregations didn’t expect it. Maybe the first little place we were at, it was really out in the country, and maybe they probably did, but I wasn’t teaching then anyway. I did what I wanted to do in the church, and that was that. I sang in the choir and stuff, but I wasn’t about to be the second in command, nor was I the music director or accompanist. I sang in the choir and led the children’s choirs as a volunteer; these were my interests and talent. He encouraged and supported my independence, my continued education, and my professional activities.

Also responding in April to the MEJ Special Report, University of Memphis Elementary Music Education Professor and founder of Memphis Musicraft, publisher Michael Donald Bennett wrote: 

I greatly appreciated your extensive effort in compiling the January 1970 Journal. For many of us, your “open window” exposed hidden inadequacies and misdirected energies. 

However, the statement on p. 38 troubles me considerably: “Music educators probably cannot hope to do very much about poverty, segregation, and bankruptcy. They can, and they must, do something, however, to understand these problems and cope with them more effectively.”

I wonder what was meant by “cope” if we cannot hope to do very much about these circumstances. The suggestion appears to be that we do a superb job at bringing music to inner-city youth to lift their spirits out of physical conditions that we have no ability to change: poverty, segregation, and related social imbalance. 

I cannot accept the implicit philosophy that separates professional concerns from social justice concerns. It is this philosophy that helps maintain the imbalances. On the surface, great concern is shown for the inner-city child, yet by brushing off the necessity of music educators of getting involved with civil rights, social action, politics, and business ethics, we are encouraged to be content with balming the wound, rather than seeking a cure for the cancer. If music educators are exempt from personal involvement in securing social justice for all, why not all teachers, all professionals, all?

Examine the priorities. Are we using our professionalism as a protective shield against the festering truth? 

Bennett asserted that teaching requires personal involvement and that securing social justice is a fundamental tenet of public education. His use of the term balming is interesting, suggesting the Negro spiritual There Is a Balm in Gilead, soothing over an injustice rather than addressing the injustice head-on. For those who taught in the Memphis Public Schools during the second half of the 20th century, issues of desegregation, White flight, and public school funding required a commitment beyond the classroom as teachers sought to create meaningful engagement with students, their families, and their communities.