Wintley Phipps - Amazing Grace

Continuing with this month's theme, here's a video you need to watch from start to finish. You'll never forget it.

Calixto Ochoa - El Africano

While we're on the subject of race, here's the original version of a song I heard in Bogota this June. There are lots of versions of it, the most famous being by Wilfrido Vargas.

The song is controversial, for reasons discussed at some length here. But it's also very catchy and versions of it keep cropping up. One by Sonora Dinamita is here, a hip-hop version by Pitbull here, the Vargas version here, and a fragment by Chico Che here.

And here's an interview (in Spanish) in which Ochoa discusses the song he wrote and first performed:

Carolina Chocolate Drops - Cornbread and Butterbeans

See my last post for an explanation...

Pomplamoose - Single Ladies

Haven't posted anything for ages but just came across this via Andrew Sullivan's blog and couldn't resist. Interesting take on the Beyonce song... also check out their version of September here.

Andrew Sullivan, by the way, is a national treasure. His blog is always interesting, often surprising, and occasionally reaches vertiginous heights of brilliance. In responding a recent rant by Pat Buchanan about "traditional" Americans losing their nation, he started a thread under the title Whose Country? in which he made the provocative claim that "white Americans do not realize how black they are." This was followed up by a post on the African origins of the banjo (including a memorable video clip from Deliverance), an excerpt from an extraordinary 1970 essay by Ralph Ellison entitled What America Would Be Like Without Blacks, a link to Saul Bellow's 1952 review of Ellison's Invisible Man, and a video clip of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Rod Dreher dived into the conversation here, as did a reader discussing Huckleberry Finn here; other readers chimed in here, here, here and elsewhere.

When most people speak of "The West", they usually have Europe and the United States in mind, perhaps together with some of the countries of the old Commonwealth (Australia, New Zealand, Canada). For many years now I have objected strenuously to the inclusion of America in this group. This country is as African as it is European, not simply because of a vibrant black subculture, but also because mainstream American culture itself has been shaped by the black experience in so many ways, large and small. The video clip at the top of this post is in some ways a metaphor for this.