Parable of the Sower

Posted on January 18, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

“…the plant of freedom has grown only a bud and not yet a flower.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

“God is your first and your last teacher. God is your harshest teacher: subtle, demanding. Learn or die.” — Octavia Butler, (from “The Parable of the Sower, 1993)

I woke up before dawn annoyed that January 20, 2025 is inauguration day for Felon 47 and it is also the federal holiday celebrating the birth and life of Martin Luther King, Jr. I also could not help thinking about how our abuse of the earth has contributed to the fires in California.

A week ago, I re-read Octavia Spencer’s prescient novel “Parable of the Sower.” Butler’s protagonist Lauren, the daughter of a preacher, lives in a safe and comfortable, walled-up cul-de-sac. Outside those walls are desperately poor people, racial and economic inequality, and drug addicts that use a drug called “pyro” that makes its users want to set fires.

Lauren tries to convince others to accept that the world has changed and will continue to change. The others prefer to pretend nothing has happened to the earth and its inhabitants.

Butler predicted ecological disaster by fire coming over 30 years ago, and named her novel after a biblical parable. Right after I finished reading the book again, I thought about how M. L. got his name.

Many people do not know that M. L. (what we called him here in Atlanta) was born Michael King, Jr. I knew many elderly Black Atlanta citizens who called him “Mike” their entire lives.

His father, best known as “Daddy King,” attended a World Baptist Conference in Germany in 1934. Reborn and rejuvenated after he learned more about the philosophies of Protestant reformer Martin Luther, Daddy King soon renamed himself and his son “Martin Luther King, Sr. and Jr.”

In 1957, “Michael King, Jr.” was officially changed to “Martin Luther King, Jr.” on his birth certificate. There are other stories about why and when Daddy King changed their names, but I like this story the best.

I bring this up because another story goes that when the German Protestant leader Martin Luther was asked what he would do if he knew the world was going to end tomorrow, he allegedly answered, “I would plant an apple tree today.”

While I am a believer in Goddess/God, I am not particularly religious. I know too well how organized religion has failed us in so many ways. I am, however, a historian who finds truth and sustenance in some parts of the Christian Bible that the incoming administration and so many preachers and billionaires have totally corrupted.

In the Bible’s Parable of the Sower, Yeshu’a ben Yosef (bka Jesus) tells a story about a farmer who sows seeds in four different types of soil. It is not until the farmer’s seeds are sowed in good soil that he yields a good crop. In this parable, which has many lessons, Yeshu’a emphasized that we must pay attention to where we plant our seeds if we expect anything to grow. We yield a good harvest when we take responsibility for how and where we do our planting.

To place seeds in the ground is an act of faith. When you plant, you do so with the faith that you will yield something. You do it with the belief that you, or your loved ones, will live long enough to reap the reward, be it vegetables or fruits or flowers or justice or equality.

On this Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, may we go forward intentionally, reminded that we are obligated to be good stewards of the earth that we do not own. California’s fires are the result of our excess and failure to clean up the earth which is the only home we have.

May we plant in the best soil, in the best social and educational policies, in the best radicalism, in the truth. May we sow our seeds in our gardens and farms and tend them with a faith that tells us we will reap a good harvest and that we will have enough to sustain us in order to stave off the worst excesses of the incoming administration. May we humble ourselves, unlike Felon 47 and his underlings, and remember that we live on this earth that we did not create and will die whether we are paupers or billionaires. May we learn the life lessons of one of the best sowers, namely Martin Luther King, Jr.

©️Leslye Joy Allen

King’s Papers are located at the King Institute at Stanford University. I urge you to visit and explore: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/message-director

(Martin Luther King, Jr. photographed in 1964 by Dick DeMarsico for World Telegraph and Sun. Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

All blogs written by Leslye Joy Allen are protected by U. S. Copyright Law and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Any partial or total reference to any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen, or any total or partial excerpt of any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen must contain a direct reference to this hyperlink: https://leslyejoyallen.com with Leslye Joy Allen clearly stated as the author. Postings or blogs placed here by other writers should clearly reference those writers. All Rights Reserved.

Aretha: A Mini-Multi-Ethnic History Lesson

Posted on August 17, 2018 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by Leslye Joy Allen

Aretha is/was international and global and pro-Black and pro-people of color long before those phrases became buzz words. But you already know Aretha. She’s part of the soundtrack of my/your life. If you were paying attention, you know about her activism, her once offering to pay Angela Davis’ bail; and the hurt in her voice at Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral. My Dad was there.

When he got home he said, “This is the only time I’ve ever heard Aretha sound so destroyed.” But let’s consider the setting at Atlantic Records that nurtured her after her dad, the Reverend C. L. Franklin decided that Aretha’s voice was as secular as it was sacred; that her piano-playing was as inventive as anyone out there. I always, always wanted Aretha to make an instrumental album of nothing but her on piano, but I digress…

Ahmet Ertegün, our brother from Turkey, along with Jerry Wexler, founded Atlantic Records with the mission to produce some of the best Rhythm and Blues and Soul music ever. They succeeded. Not long after they made Ray Charles a household name, they signed Aretha Franklin, who reigned as Queen on a record label that had no shortage of music luminaries: Big Joe Turner, Ruth Brown, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, The Drifters, The Spinners, The Pointer Sisters, The Modern Jazz Quartet, Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, Donny Hathaway, Roberta Flack, The Bee Gees, and the list goes on.

The early days for Aretha consisted of recording sessions with musicians, the majority of whom were young white men from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a tiny town that still does not have 15,000 residents. The Black brothers in the band grew up with Rhythm and Blues, but these white musicians took a turn toward the Blues and Soul Music and never, ever looked back. These cats backing Aretha produced some of the most poignant, memorable, timeless, and soulful music in the twentieth century.

Beginning in the early 1960s, Arif Mardin served as Aretha’s principle producer for over two decades at Atlantic Records. Mardin, another musical genius from Istanbul, Turkey impressed the hell out of Dizzy Gillespie and Quincy Jones, so much so that after meeting these two Black American musical giants in 1956 after a State Department-sponsored concert, he became the first recipient of the Quincy Jones Scholarship at the Berklee School of Music in Boston. After Mardin graduated in 1961, he went to work for Atlantic Records. Aretha acknowledged him as the positive turning point in her career. Together they churned out the hits all of us already know. He produced that incredible gospel album “Amazing Grace” that everybody still talks about, and still plays.

So what is my point? Well, the whole concept of globalization has always existed in music and the arts; and it, for damned sure existed with Aretha; and for people of color. That multi-ethnic colored world that some white folks fear, the one that seems to be suddenly upon us has always been here. You’ve been grooving to it, remember?

But know this: I don’t just know my people when I see them; I know them when and where I hear them. Marinate on that for a while. Rest in Paradise Queen of Soul, Aretha Louise Franklin.

This blog was written by Leslye Joy Allen and is protected by U. S. Copyright Law and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Any partial or total reference to this or any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen, or any total or partial excerpt of this or any blog by Leslye Joy Allen must contain a direct reference to this hyperlink: https://leslyejoyallen.com with Leslye Joy Allen clearly stated as the author. All Rights Reserved.

A New Definition of Brother…

Posted on February 19, 2016 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

Copyright © 2016 by Leslye Joy Allen. All Rights Reserved.

“Self Portrait” by Copyright © 2015 Leslye Joy Allen. All Rights Reserved.

I had to learn the hard way not to rely solely on

American-born brothers who

talk plenty smack and talk plenty righteousness about

how we Black folk have work to do, but at the same time demand

that I keep my mouth shut about the mess that affects me as a woman and all

that infects us/we as a people…

I had to learn the hard way that many of my brothers did not

arrive speaking with American accents, but

some had/have foreign accents so thick that I

need(ed) someone to decipher what they were saying, but

what they said mattered less than what they did…

I learned that plenty Josés and Juans and Ahmads and Maliks and

Etiennes and Lúcios and Willies and Sams

of my world

and my hemisphere

weighed in on matters that affected my life as a Black woman when

so many other so-called brothers assumed that my problems as a Black female

would be handled by someone else or

handled by me by myself…

I had to learn the hard way that my definition of “brother” needed to remain

outside of my typical geographic boundaries of what I/We call the USA

and we either grab hold of each other as kith and kin

or we drown in the waters waiting for

some definition that none of us could live with anyway.

This blog was written by Leslye Joy Allen and is protected by U. S. Copyright Law and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Any partial or total reference to this or any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen, or any total or partial excerpt of this or any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen must contain a direct reference to this hyperlink: http://leslyejoyallen.com with Leslye Joy Allen clearly stated as the author. Postings or blogs placed here by other writers should clearly reference those writers. All Rights Reserved.

Saying Goodbye to Dr. Kuhn

Posted on December 12, 2015 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

By Leslye Joy Allen

I am writing this tribute now, because I have to mentally recalibrate, take a brief break over the holidays and get back to work on writing my dissertation. Dr. Kuhn would not want anything less than that. Dr. Clifford Matthew Kuhn, Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University and the first Executive Director of the Oral History Association joined the ancestors the second week of November. He was 63-years-old…he was also my Dissertation Advisor…

He was…there is that word: was. You would think that as a historian I would be accustomed to the past tense. Yet, referring to him as anything other than vibrantly and intellectually alive is difficult. Preparing for the Georgia State University Memorial for Dr. Clifford Matthew Kuhn on December 13, 2015 is harder than I ever could imagine. I first met him when he was preparing the centennial of the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot back in early 2006…

Dr. Glenn T. Eskew introduced us because he recalled my telling him that my late maternal grandmother, born in 1886, was a 20-year-old student at then Clark Normal School (later Clark College, now Clark Atlanta University) when the campuses of Atlanta’s Historically Black Colleges became the refuge for so many of the Black victims of the Atlanta Race Riot. Dr. Kuhn was delighted to find a graduate student such as myself that had a personal story that I could tell about this particularly painful moment in Atlanta’s history. Dr. Clarissa Myrick Harris, who partnered with Dr. Kuhn, interviewed me while filmmaker Ms. Bailey Barash filmed it for posterity. I was proud and humbled to contribute my grandmother’s story.

Nearly everything I know about Oral History, I learned from Dr. Kuhn: how to get people to talk about their lives; how to make sure they know that they are not obligated to tell their stories; how to make sure that I, the historian and interviewer, did not and will not ever exploit their memories; how to truly listen. I remember everything he taught me.

One of the last things he said to me was that he was so proud of a brief and recent assignment I had in the Georgia State University Library’s Digital Collections where I conducted four interviews for the Planning Atlanta Project. He recommended me for that position and I was glad that I did well and did not let him down…

As I prepare myself, as best I can, to attend Georgia State University’s Memorial Celebration for Dr. Kuhn, I fondly recall a conversation where we discovered that both of us loved Jazz. Not long after that conversation, there were a few times when we were supposed to be doing something academic, but we drifted into a deep discussion about everyone from Duke Ellington to Nina Simone to Wayne Shorter to Ahmad Jamal. Yet, that is natural for us historians. WE have to be aware of everything, so we often look at and listen to everything. Our conversations were often mixtures of him talking lovingly about his wife Kathie Klein and his two sons Josh and Gabe Klein-Kuhn and History and Jazz. I will miss that…

So, below is one for the late, great historian and scholar Dr. Clifford Matthew Kuhn: a video of the great Jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal playing the classic “Poinciana.” When the percussionists in Jamal’s quartet go into full swing around the time 4:53, I found myself ferociously patting my foot to the infectious rhythms and crying at the same time. Àṣé.

This Blog was written by Leslye Joy Allen and is protected by U. S. Copyright Law and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Any partial or total reference to this blog or any total or partial excerpt of this blog must contain a direct reference to this hyperlink: http://leslyejoyallen.com with Leslye Joy Allen clearly and visibly stated as the author. All Rights Reserved.

Guide My Feet…

Posted on June 22, 2015 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by Leslye Joy Allen

“Guide My Feet”
(Traditional Negro Spiritual)

I am grateful that my late Mama and Daddy taught me our old African tradition of ancestor worship. That worship was as much a part of my childhood as was the old Western Judeo-Christian tradition…Now, for those who know me well, you know that I can be the most severe critic of ministers and organized religion(s) that too often fail to act in the best interests of the flocks they claim to serve, lead and protect. Yet, that is another blog. Save your breath. I am only responding to the message(s) sent to me…

I occasionally re-read the poem that my friend actor-poet-writer Charles Reese wrote immediately following the death of my nearly 92-year-old mother in early 2013. In homage to her, he referred to my Mama as “a Queen,” but he also referred to her as “our newest ancestor.” — Nothing in “Syble’s Poem” struck me as much as that line about her becoming an ancestor. For people who know my late Mama, they know that certain songs remained in her repertoire right up to the very end of her days here on earth.

I do not need to recount the tragedies that have happened to Black folk in the last few weeks or even over the last year. Yet, for the last couple of days I have been unable to get the old Negro Spiritual “Guide My Feet” out of my head. Composed and sung in the caldron of American chattel slavery and passed down from generation-to-generation by my people, I have been singing it and humming it off-and-on for the last couple of months. At first, I thought I was going crazy. I must confess that I had a similar experience with “You Gotta to Move,” a Gospel/Blues song composed by Mississippi Fred McDowell. A few months earlier in the year, I was singing “You Gotta Move” in an impromptu singing session that followed a gathering of my Sistahs that was a combination of good coffee, prayer, testimony, and truth-talking with each other at Dream Café…A few days after that meeting, I ran into a brother in a wheelchair who was singing the same song on a corner in downtown Atlanta. That had to mean something, I thought…

When I went to my cousin Dexter’s graduation from Morehouse College this past May 2015, the class Valedictorian and Summa Cum Laude graduate Jerek Sharrod Brown burst into “Guide My Feet” before he began his inspirational and spellbinding Valedictory address. His voice in song was an unexpected, but welcome and perfectly poetic pleasure. I felt something inside of me shift and move when Brown sang and when he spoke. I felt something shift again when my cousin Dexter’s name was called as a new graduate of Morehouse College. After all, I remembered when I first held him in my arms when he was still an infant…

Today I decided to see whether the lyrics to “Guide My Feet” would come up in a general search on Google. It did. Now, usually when something comes up in an internet search, I typically download it and then email it to myself just to make sure that I have a couple of copies of my research findings in two different places. Yet, something strange and beautiful happened after I performed my usual ritual…

When I clicked the email button to send my Google search findings to myself, the email did not pull up my personal email address. Instead, it opened my late Mama’s email address which was and remains a secondary email account affiliated with my own primary account…Sometimes the Creator knows that you need a little help. Sometimes the ancestors are talking to you…

There are moments when no matter how bad things are or may seem, you simply do not worry and you no longer expend energy on people who do not work in your and your own people’s best interests. I have reached that moment. More than we know or acknowledge, the ancestors speak to us in small but important ways if WE only listen, if WE only listen…So, Thank You Mama and Daddy and all the known and unknown ancestors and saints…Thank You Goddess…Thank You God…Peace and Blessings. Àṣé…

Guide my Feet,

while I run this race.

Guide my Feet,

while I run this race.

Guide my feet,

while I run this race,

For I don’t want to run this race in vain.

Leslye Joy Allen

Social Commentary, History, Theatre, Jazz, and the Environment

Category Archives: Vocals