Marlena Shaw - Woman Of The Ghetto

ORIGINATION found on LP in April 2000
LAST LISTENED TO ages ago
CHANCE OF WAKING TO IT low
RATING

This morning's song is a little bit of a cheat. What i woke up to this morning was not, strictly speaking, the song above. I in fact woke up with a tiny portion of a mash-up in my head. To the uninitiated, this is music for those afflicted by attention deficit disorder. Almost the logical extension of sampling, it is the name given to the jamming together of whole chunks of song. So, rather than just using a small piece of a song as sampling does, here whole songs are placed on top of each other, chopped around and generally messed with. These pieces of music stretch from the shortest single track effort, through to entire cd-length kaleidoscopic pieces. There's a whole messy sub-culture based around this practice. It's even encroached on mass consciousness through the likes of 2ManyDJs.

What, you may wonder, am i doing having this sort of bastardised music in my head? Well, let's just say that i've been known to have the odd spell of short attention and that i will try new things of a time. I'll blame the internet and Limewire and leave it at that.

So, this morning i woke with a fragment of a song in my head, essentially just two lines of lyrics, followed by the intro to 'Woman Of The Ghetto'. The former lyrics i have been completely unable to trace, so let's just forget those and deal with the latter.

Marlena Shaw has been singing soul jazz since the 60s, but has never really achieved as much fame as some of her contemporaries. She has recorded for some of the biggest names in field, including Blue Note, Cadet and Verve. This song is probably her most famous.

Recorded in 1968 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, this song is a powerful message of consciousness:

"How do you raise you kids in the ghetto?
Feed one child and starve another"

Musically, the song has a fantastic groove, that all springs from the bass that kicks off the track. There's some nice, restrained organ, a guitar briefly pretending to be a sitar and Marlena even scats through part of the track, without causing irritation. but chiefly it is the superb lyrics that stay with you. Have a listen.