Smooth

A WHITE MAN’S TEARS

Acknowledging my sadness about American race relations

The Voice of Hope

Tonight, I watched CNN’s special about Marvin Gaye. It brought some tears for me. Along with Whitney and Stevie and Luther, Marvin has been my favorite singer since I was a young man.

Marvin was innovative (the first to voice over his own lead), and his voice was to die for. But more important, his best music could take a person to another reality.

What’s Going On is considered by some to be the best album ever made. Marvin demonstrated in that album that he was a poet, and man of great kindness and compassion, and a lover of all mankind. In singing of his own pain, he highlighted for millions the soul that many had lost, every bit as much as his contemporary, Martin Luther King.

Mother Mother

There’s too man of you crying.

Brother Brother Brother

There’s far too many of you dying.

My sadness tonight was not so much about his early death (which was crushing), or the fact that he could make no more music for us. No, my sadness is that with all the wisdom he offered us fifty years ago, so few people seem to have heard him. The faces of so many black people tell it all, that aside from a few anecdotes here and there nothing has really changed.