Mingus was so disgusted by bad news wafting up from below the Mason-Dixon line that he broke his career’s mold and wrote a song with lyrics, the kind of loose barroom call-and-response that his hero and former collaborator Charlie Parker swaggered through on the lighthearted Dizzy Gillespie and Kenny Clarke tune “Salt Peanuts.” Mingus’ content was grave and his exclamations thick with bile: “Oh Lord, don’t let ‘em tar and feather us/Oh Lord, no more Swastikas/Oh Lord, no more Ku Klux Klan.” Then he asks his drummer, “Name me someone who’s ridiculous, Dannie!” Richmond hollers back, “Governor Faubus!”
As the song progresses, Mingus and his band ratchet up the intensity, calling out “Nazi Fascist supremacists” and reciting the names of a litany of depraved politicians who crossed party lines and geographical divisions, among them then-New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and President Eisenhower. “Two, Four, Six, Eight!” Richmond yells, and in unison with Mingus, “They brainwash you and teach you hate!”
These lyrics, though, did not appear on Mingus Ah Um. They were purportedly censored by Columbia, with whom Mingus had just signed a recording contract. He first laid them to tape in October 1960 for Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus, bankrolled by a smaller and more adventurous label, Candid, with Nat Hentoff in the producer’s chair—best known as a jazz critic and a feisty political commentator for The Village Voice. The band simulated a club atmosphere for the studio session, with Mingus reminding his fake audience not to applaud, “rattle ice” in their glasses, or “ring the cash register.”
Titled “Original Faubus Fables,” this version, to many, is unbeatable for its agit-prop energy. Yet the lyricless Ah Um version remains the composition’s definitive take. Mingus employs a wider breadth of horn players on this track—a trombonist, two tenor saxophonists, and one alto. Together, they seem to talk through their variations on the melody, contrasting staccato bleats and deep, soulful pulls as they bleed in and out of harmony. “Fables Of Faubus” lumbers forth, defiant and punch-drunk, before it gains speed, as Mingus handles his gut strings with heavy fingers and pianist Horace Parlan navigates a seasick solo. Phrases alternate between the satirical and sorrowful. The composer, unwilling to give listeners relief from his music’s emotional complexity, offers a more eloquent statement with this instrumental arrangement than he would with words.
The song was a forecast. Soon after Mingus finished Ah Um, Nina Simone delivered the performance that became the basis for her towering Live at Town Hall, which stressed themes of Black empowerment that marked her music throughout the 1960s. The next year, Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln recorded their monumental We Insist!, perhaps the most direct melding yet of jazz and the messages of the Civil Rights Movement. This was protest music before it was defined and commodified by jingle-jangle white folkies with acoustic guitars (a couple of whom famously signed to Columbia). Mingus was a few years ahead of musical trends, but right on time for addressing a country in distress. A decade of rage and change burned in his wake.
