Roberta Flack - “Hush-A-Bye” from FIRST TAKE: 50th Anniversary Edition

“Hush-A-Bye” is a previously unreleased track from the SoulMusic.com expanded release FIRST TAKE: 50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION. You can get your copy here - https://store.soulmusic.com/first-take-50th-anniversary-deluxe-edition-1.html At its most basic level, the travesty of racism when seen through the lens of a mother singing to her baby with both hope and despair illuminates the importance of connecting history’s shameful cruelty to our current understanding of the imprisonment of oppression. Roberta Flack was a featured performer in the “Soul to Soul” festival in Ghana in 1971. She included “Hush-a-bye” in her set. This is her introduction to the song that night: "This is a song that is listed in the Library of Congress, with the catalog heading, ‘Negro Folk Music.’ It tells a story of a young girl in the early days of slavery who is about to give birth to her first child. She stands in the fields, rows and rows of cotton fields, and for a brief moment she closes her eyes and pictures her son as he might appear several years into the future. The fields become a playground for her little boy. She promises him very tenderly, as only a young mother could, all of the things that she thinks he’d like to play with, and among them she promises him horses, of all kinds, and she names them for him, she promises him blacks and bays, dapples and grays, all the pretty little horses. In a very stark moment of reality she opens her eyes to see the rows of cotton field unchanged and she ponders the truth, considers the fact that she was mated like cattle, to produce hopefully a strong young buck. And in a very tender yet fierce moment of reality, she screams out, lashes out in anger, and she selects as the target of her anger, the most delicate creatures of God’s creation. She screams ‘way down yonder in the meadow lies my poor little baby. Bees and butterflies are picking out its eyes, the poor little thing is crying ‘Mammie’”. It’s called ‘Hush-a-bye’.”