Desert Island Discs: To Be Young, Gifted and Black

Young, Gifted and Black - Aretha Franklin (1972)

Stories and selections

Listening through the back catalogue of Desert Island Discs on the BBC Sounds app has been a journey into enlightenment and recognition. Whether the stories told or the selections of music chosen by the guests, not only do you learn something about them, but you might also come away with insight and inspiration.

It was not until I was listening to the episode where Yvonne Brewster was a guest in 2005 that I began taking notes. I felt I should do a once-over of everything else I had listened to, but I did not have the presence of mind to do so.

This was before I went back to the beginning of the existing recordings, of which many have been lost or barely rescued in the first 25 years of broadcasting the programme.

It is a shame that no one at the BBC of that time thought this cachet of guests and interviews, many speaking with a received pronunciation accent harking back to a bygone age, should be recorded and preserved.

Pioneering, gifted and black

Yvonne Brewster was a pioneer as the UK’s first Black woman drama student; born to an upper-middle-class Jamaican family, she came to England to attend drama school at the Rose Bruford College where the proprietress thought she would unlikely find dramatic work in Britain, only for her to go on to achieve a distinction in drama and mime at the Royal Academy of Music.

Her achievement is exemplified in the third track she chose, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, which was recorded by Nina Simone in 1969. I was more familiar with the cover version by the Jamaican duo Bob and Marcia, however, the version recorded by Aretha Franklin won her a Grammy. [Wikipedia: Young, Gifted and Black]

While I knew of the music, I was not as familiar with the lyrics until I heard it clearly, a few weeks ago. From the 1950s onwards, we began to see such amazing talent and achievements from the global Black community, even as the civil rights movement took hold, and many African nations pursued the goal of independence from colonial rule.

We must remind ourselves

Blacks became known beyond the field of entertainment to academia, science, engineering, business, and politics. This was both a shock and a surprise to many Caucasians who thought otherwise.

I recall that my father’s white colleagues in the late 1960s sought to be derisive of his becoming a chartered accountant, having excellently passed his exams and had come third overall in England and Wales, along with winning the Foulks Lynch Prize. They sneeringly said they didn’t think he was that brilliant.

Yet, against all odds, we have striven, risen and shone, but that fact still needs to be instilled in us and our children, at every turn, it needs to get well beyond James Brown’s Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud, to the point that we know without a doubt from within ourselves, what it is To Be Young, Gifted and Black.

That is who we are, and too many times, we forget that we each have to be reminded, “Your soul's intact, And that's a fact!” No matter what age in life, this is our truth, one to live by and live out.

To Be Young, Gifted and Black

Young, gifted and black
Oh what a lovely precious dream
To be young, gifted and black
Open your heart to what I mean

In the whole world you know
There's a million boys and girls
Who are young, gifted and black
And that's a fact!

You are young, gifted and black
We must begin to tell our young
There's a world waiting for you
Yours is the quest that's just begun

When you feel really low
Yeah, there's a great truth that you should know
When you're young, gifted and black
Your soul's intact

To be young, gifted and black
Oh, how I've longed to know the truth
There are times when I look back
And I am haunted by my youth

Oh but my joy of today
Is that we can all be proud to say
To be young, gifted and black
Is where it's at

Is where it's at
Is where it's at

Songwriters: Nina Simone / Weldon Irvine – Source: Musixmatch

YouTube: Nina Simone - To Be Young, Gifted and Black (Audio)

YouTube: Bob & Marcia Young, Gifted & Black (Official Audio)