#frank johnson

From Damage Control Vol. 4 #002, “Honey, Pym Shrunk the Kids”

Art by Will Robson and Ruth Redmond

A quick thing I made for Father’s Day.

Abbott And Costello #022

“Double Labor Trouble!”

Rhiannon Giddens to Receive Inaugural Legacy of Americana Award

- Antebellum folk singer Frank Johnson to be honored posthumously

Rhiannon Giddens, the classically trained opera singer who founded the Carolina Chocolate Drops and now plays with Our Native Daughters alongside her solo career, will receive the inaugural Legacy of Americana award.

Established by the Americana Music Association and National Museum of African American Music, the award recognizes artists “who (have) either made a lasting impression through music or inspired art to recognize the legacy of Americana music traditions,” according to a news release.

Antebellum folk singer Frank Johnson will receive posthumous recognition during the Sept. 11 ceremony at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville.

Writing on Facebook, Giddens said she is “so humbled” and added: “It’s important to remember that we’d know nothing of Frank Johnson had he not been painstakingly unearthed by (writer) John Jeremiah Sullivan.”

African American musicians have made lasting contributions to “the tapestry of Americana music” and must be recognized, museum President and CEO H. Beecher Hicks III said.

“We hope to shine a light on forgotten artists like Frank Johnson, whose stories may have been lost to history, and on innovators like Rhiannon Giddens, who is pushing Americana and American music forward by exploring the past,” Hicks said.

Pilots of the Takali Wing pose for the camera in August 1942. They are, from left to right, Sgt Stan Shewell, Plt Offs Vincent ‘Junior’ Moody and George Beurling, Flt Lt George Swannick, Wg Cdr Arthur Donaldson, Plt Off Frank Johnson and Sqn Ldr Bill Douglas. (Author)

"To grasp the significance of what the twenty-first-century folksinger Rhiannon Giddens has been attempting, it is necessary to know about another North Carolina musician, Frank Johnson, who was born almost two hundred years before she was. He was the most important African-American musician of the nineteenth century, but he has been almost entirely forgotten. Never mind a Wikipedia page—he does not even earn a footnote in sourcebooks on early black music. And yet, after excavating the records of his career—from old newspapers, diaries, travelogues, memoirs, letters—and after reckoning with the scope of his influence, one struggles to come up with a plausible rival.

"There are several possible reasons for Johnson’s astonishing obscurity. One may be that, on the few occasions when late-twentieth-century scholars mentioned him, he was almost always misidentified as a white man, despite the fact that he had dark-brown skin and was born enslaved. It may have been impossible, and forgivably so, for academics to believe that a black man could have achieved the level of fame and success in the antebellum slave-holding South that Johnson had. There was also a doppelgänger for scholars to contend with: in the North, there lived, around the same time, a musician named Francis Johnson, often called Frank, who is remembered as the first black musician to have his original compositions published. Some historians, encountering mentions of the Southern Frank, undoubtedly assumed that they were merely catching the Northern one on some unrecorded tour and turned away.

"There is also the racial history of the port city of Wilmington, North Carolina, where Johnson enjoyed his greatest fame. In 1898, a racial massacre in Wilmington, and a subsequent exodus of its black citizens, not only knocked loose the foundations of a rising black middle class but also came close to obliterating the deep cultural memory of what had been among the most important black towns in the country for more than a century. The people who might have remembered Johnson best, not just as a musician but as a man, were themselves violently unremembered.

Vintage Comic - Underdog #07