In 1972, hard bop trumpeter Donald Byrd recorded “Black Byrd,” a song whose lyrics began: “Walking along. Playing a song. Walk along. Start us off.” Then, in 1974, Byrd released “Stepping into Tomorrow” on an album from the same name. That same year, the Blackbyrds, a band of his comprised of students from Howard University in Washington, D.C., released a suite of songs that similarly mentioned the pleasures of walking and the possibilities afforded by public space. Examples include “Walking in Rhythm,” “I Need You,” “Rock Creek Park,” and “City Life.”
Donald Byrd liked to walk. He said as much in a song of his from 1972. That year, while teaching at Howard University in Washington, DC, he recorded “Black Byrd” for the eponymous album of the same name. The song begins with a bassline reminiscent of the “luxepop” style of Isaac Hayes’s Shaft soundtrack or Hot Buttered Soul album.1 Accompanied by some vibraslap interjections, the beat propels forward in a typical jazz-fusion manner. Electric piano creeps in alongside sparse congas and bongos. A wah-effected chicken scratch guitar provides a constant rhythmic current. The horn section plays a series of short and syncopated punctuations. Then the lyrics enter.
“Walking along. Playing a song. Walk along. Start us off.”
The lyrics would seem rather unremarkable were it not for the fact that several of Donald Byrd’s songs focus on walking, movement, strolling, and public space. Two years after Black Byrd’s recording, Byrd released “Stepping into Tomorrow” on an album from the same name. Then there’s a suite of recordings from the 1970s by The Blackbyrds, a band composed of Byrd’s students at Howard. Several of their songs mention the pleasures of walking and the possibilities afforded by public space. There’s “Walking in Rhythm,” “I Need You,” “Rock Creek Park,” and “City Life”, to name a few.
Walter Fauntroy also liked to walk. Although, the contexts in which he walked were often somber and serious. As director of the Washington Bureau of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he helped organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. He also helped coordinate the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965 and the March Against Fear in 1966.2
Then, when he formed the Model Inner City Community Development Organization (MICCO) in the late 1960s, he helped others walk. MICCO was primarily dedicated to the development of Shaw, a neighborhood in DC roughly bounded by M Street to the south, Florida Avenue to the north, North Capitol Street to the east, and 15th Street to the west.3 The neighborhood was home not only to Langston Hughes and Duke Ellington but also to Howard University—the same university where Donald Byrd taught and his bandmates studied. In the late 1960s, Fauntroy began querying Shaw residents in hopes of understanding what improvements they would like to see made in their neighborhood.
These residents liked to walk as well. Darien C. Small, writing in The Hill Top, Howard’s student newspaper, offers a glimpse at that preference. Small’s article promoted parks such as East Potomac, Rock Creek, and Fort Dupont. They were places where you could “walk with a friend,” “escape into a world unbound with tension,” and “mellow your mind.” Such “well-kept parks” are easy to “walk through” and serve as hideaways to “drift in.”4 Small’s thoughts were echoed by thousands of Shaw residents during the 1970s. Fauntroy and MICCO’s urban plans catered to such wants. And Donald Byrd and The Blackbyrds gave such needs a sound.
In this article, I focus on the intersection of music, walking, and urban design. Specifically, I place the music of Donald Byrd and The Blackbyrds within the cultural context of 1970s Washington, DC. Analyses of urban walking stretch from discussions of Charles Baudelaire’s nineteenth century flâneur to the arcades theorized by Walter Benjamin to the derives and détournements of the Situationist International.5 Between the 1960s and 1980s, urban theorists such as Jane Jacobs, Henri Lefebvre, and Michel de Certeau posited that walking was an important aspect of everyday life.6 It offered individuals an alternative to top-down automobile-centric urban plans prominent in the postwar period. Despite the fact that these theorists championed the liberatory aspects of walking, geographer Jennie Middleton argues that such canonical arguments are vague and overly romantic. Instead of taking the emancipatory and democratic possibilities of walking as given, Middleton encourages scholars to document the multiplicity of ways individuals walk in their daily lives.7 This article answers the call and provides a study that shows how residents living in—or otherwise associated with—the Shaw neighborhood of the late 1960s and early 1970s conceived of walking as an urban and civil right.
Citizens of Shaw—Byrd and his band included—continued the tradition of walking as a form of Black political expression. In 1961, Jet magazine promoted “walk-ins” (“walk into every tax-supported institution”) alongside other modes of protest: pray-ins, stand-ins, swim-ins, drive-ins, play-ins, and sit-ins.8 In Brooklyn, walking merged with community activism as African Americans and Black Caribbean residents marched while eulogizing the murder of Kimani Gray and protesting police brutality.9 As Amber N. Wiley notes in a study of New Orleans, “processional walking is a cite of resistance” amongst Black New Orleanians who play in second line parades.10 Even when walking does not accompany a specific protest, it can certainly be understood as a political act that articulates what Wiley considers “counterhistories” and “counterhegemonic” spatial possibilities.11 Public political protest is part of the landscape of Washington, DC, argues geographer Paul R. Watts—a landscape frequently defined by walking.12 As this article shows, DC residents highlighted walking in their vision of what an equitable city looked like during the 1960s and 1970s.
This article also intervenes in the theory of “hip hop architecture.” For architectural scholar Craig L. Wilkins, such a concept employs “a specific spatial understanding of hip hop culture as it reverberates from rap music into the built environment.”13 Examples given by Sekou Cooke include designers taking concepts like flow, layering, and rupture—concepts that Tricia Rose hears prevalent in hip hop—and applying them to building lines and boundaries.14 Other “hip hop architects” render graffiti pieces in three dimensions to create interior and exterior space.15 This article riffs on a term adopted by Wilkins, Cooke, and others to suggest that Byrd and The Blackbyrds were practicing a “soul jazz/rhythm and blues/jazz-rock fusion architecture.” What might this urban plan look and sound like? How did they put their walking plan into action?
The answer to these questions lie in a comparison between Donald Byrd and The Blackbyrds and Walter Fauntroy and MICCO. In this article, I first lay out the economic, social, and political conditions of DC. Such background shows why Shaw needed a new and bold neighborhood plan during the late 1960s and 1970s. I then compare the compositional process of Donald Byrd and his band to the planning process of Fauntroy and MICCO to show how both groups foregrounded community and collaboration. I also compare their aesthetics, demonstrating how both the musicians and the planners strove to blend old and new musical and architectural styles. Finally, I focus on the element that they foregrounded the most: walking and easy access to public space. By making these comparisons, I argue that Donald Byrd and his bandmates were akin to urban planners. They did more than simply describe or document Black city life. They forwarded a vision of what Shaw, Washington DC, and urban areas across the country could look and sound like during the 1970s. In a gentrifying city such as DC where Black residents are currently being priced out of walkable neighborhoods, Donald Byrd and The Blackbyrds’ music is a timely reminder of a different era.
Shaw in the 1970s
When Donald Byrd began teaching at Howard University in 1968, the surrounding Shaw neighborhood was struggling. Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz had recently stated that the unemployment rate in a small section within the neighborhood had reached “grim” proportions. It was 8.1 percent in contrast to 3.7 percent for the country and 2.2 percent for the Washington Metropolitan Area. The rate of unemployment among teenagers was 20 percent. The Department of Labor even argued that many people in Shaw were considered within the “sub-employment” category. They were poorly paid job holders, persons forced to work part-time, and persons who had simply given up. The numbers of men who fell into the latter group was staggering. Six percent of men aged 25-44, 11 percent of men 45-54, and 21 percent of men 55-64 were too discouraged to find work. Nearly a third of Shaw’s residents lived on less than $3,000 a year, qualifying them as chronically impoverished. Half of residents had less than a ninth-grade education. There were some 5,000 residential buildings in Shaw. More than half had been officially appraised as deficient. The neighborhood saw more than three times as many fire calls than the city average. It had half the recreational space per capita recommended by planners. The neighborhood required welfare and health services two to four times that of the entire DC population.16
Then Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Urban Black communities across the nation felt anger and disillusionment. In cities like Baltimore, Chicago, and Kansas City, residents took to the streets, voiced their frustrations, and destroyed property and looted businesses.17 Washington, DC, was one of the cities that saw the largest uprising. Shaw was profoundly impacted. The Safeway at 14th and Chapin and the Empire Super Market on Clifton were looted and set ablaze on the first night. Large sections of the neighborhood went up in flames.18 “Most of 14th Street [was] gone,” historian J. Walker Samuel notes, with about 75 percent of all damage impacting the 7th and 14th Street NW corridors.19
There was somewhat of a silver lining to the destruction, though. “When the smoke cleared,” historian Kyla Sommers writes, “Washingtonians rebuilt the capital as a more just society that would protect and foster Black political and economic power.”20 In the mid-1970s, the Adams-Morgan Organization relied on a 1974 rent control law to block evictions and purchase previously rented homes.21 The same organization successfully lobbied the DC government to purchase a plot of abandoned land to create a public park for locals.22 Black residents in DC formed broad coalitions that ultimately help instigate home rule. As a federal district, DC’s laws, politicians, and spending were long under the purview of Congress. However, the passage of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act in 1973 meant that DC’s residents were finally able to elect their own mayor and city council. The newly formed DC City Council, alongside other organizations like the Black United Front and the Public Safety Committee on Police-Community Relations, demanded police reform. Residents created community aid networks.23 They successfully halted the construction of highways through the district.24
And they created urban plans focused on community control and collaboration, a merging of old and new musical and architectural styles, and walking and easy access to public space.
Community Control and Collaboration
Enter The Blackbyrds. The band formed when the Howard University Music Department was in a state of flux. Founded as an outgrowth of Howard’s theology school in 1914, the department initially prioritized classical repertoire over jazz. Musicians like Benny Golson, Andrew White, and Charlie Hampton, who all attended the famed institute between the late 1940s and early 1960s, lamented the fact that there were no jazz classes. Jazz music was frequently “frowned upon” by administrators. Teachers discouraged the practice of improvisation.25 Slowly, but surely, the tides changed, though.26 In 1961, The Hill Top included advertisements for discounted student rates at jazz clubs like Abarts. Located at 1928 9th Street NW, right in the center of the Shaw neighborhood and a short walk from Howard, Abarts provided students opportunities to hear Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and other big names.27 As the 1960s went on, student demand for jazz grew and Donald Byrd helped fill the void.
On the one hand, Byrd’s time at Howard, which lasted from 1968 until 1975, was rocky. As jazz historian Mark Stryker notes, Byrd fought conservative leaders over curriculum and resources “at a school where Western classical music still ruled.”28 Yet, his tenure there had a profound impact on Howard. By 1970, he helped establish a full-fledged jazz department that offered courses in electronic music and music and legal protection.29
Control over one’s music was particularly important to Byrd. “It seems that our blackness is up for grabs,” Byrd wrote in the journal The Black Scholar in 1972, and “can be utilized by anyone from the entrepreneurs to the critics to the performers.”30 Future Blackbyrds band members even recalled that Byrd included some of them in his production company. “We’re artists and writers and through that connection, we got our break, a recording contract. It was his whole creation,” pianist Kevin Toney remarked.31
Byrd’s focus on community development brought a political bent to the music department. He sponsored the Black Students for Political Power and went to Alabama in 1970 to help set up day care centers, distribute leaflets, and do everything necessary to “bring about the general atmosphere of Black political awareness.”32 In 1972, the Liberal Arts Freshman Community Involvement Committee sponsored a “Tribute to Lee Morgan” concert that featured Byrd and drummer Max Roach. All profits obtained were donated to the Ben Lewis Academic Center for Kids, one of the freshmen class’s pilot projects.33 As Byrd stated in an interview, “This is the only Black music department in the country. I want to make it better than any of the white schools and I think I can do it.”34
Byrd was blessed to have many talented students in his classrooms. In fact, he formed a band with them. Some of The Blackbyrds’ regular members consisted of Detroit natives like Kevin Toney and Allan Barnes who followed Byrd to Howard. They were joined by several DC natives: Orville Saunders (guitar major), Keith Killgo (education major and drummer) and Joe Hall (double bass major). It was Byrd teaching at Howard that initially drew Toney’s attention to DC. “It’s really part of his DNA to be a teacher and the idea of him kind of raising young people is natural to him,” recalls pianist Herbie Hancock.35 At first, Byrd would ask him and Saunders to gig a bit around town. Then, as students passed through his classes, they were incorporated more into the band.36 There was always a rhythmic section core of Killgo, Hall, and Toney. However, other musicians like Barney Perry, Ray Armando, and Stephen Johnson performed with the group as well.
The musical process was often collaborative and based on what Toney called “band grooves.”37 The Blackbyrds developed “Rock Creek Park,” for instance, during the sound check at a show in Camden, N.J. They were just goofing around. Some were even playing instruments they typically did not play. Keith Killgo was on bass. Joe Hall was on drums. They taped it and then showed it to Byrd. “Yeah, let’s cut this,” he said in response.38 The group then collectively generated the lyrics using a technique that Toney called “group vocal hooks.”39
The lyrics to the song were based on a shared sense of geography. “Doing it in the park/doing it after dark/oh yeah/Rock Creek Park,” the band sings, referencing the national park located in the Northwest quadrant of DC. “I grew up right up the street. We call kinda grew up really near the park. That’s where we went in the summer,” Killgo recalls.40 Others songs were composed similarly: “Funkie Junkie” and “Do It Fluid” featured collective grooves and group vocals. But “Rock Creek Park” was most overt in its placebuilding.
Walter Fauntroy was similarly interested in placebuilding built upon collaboration and community control. He was pastor of the New Bethel Baptist Church, which, located at the corner of 9th and S Streets NW, is less than a ten-minute walk from Howard. It was while working as a pastor that he launched the “Year of Evaluation and Preparation,” a program that assessed the church’s outreach programs and developed a twenty-year plan for ministry in the community. During this year of “evaluation and preparation,” Fauntroy reached a vital conclusion. He needed to give the residents of his neighborhood some leadership in the planning process. As he noted, his ideas were rooted in the philosophies of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. “King,” Fauntroy wrote, “believed that the only way to end slums is to take the profit out of them.” Similarly, “Malcolm X fervently taught that the essence of revolution is the ownership and control of land.”41
Fauntroy blended the philosophies of MLK and Malcolm X to create what he called “non-violent land reform.” He put his ideas to action in the fall of 1965 when he received a government grant that enabled him to hire his own city planners and engage in a meaningful process of rebuilding and redeveloping Shaw.42 By 1967, the Model Inner City Community Development Organization (MICCO) was born. It was an organization staffed by people living or working in the community and, as Fauntroy boasted, an organization “with, by, and for the people.”43 The bylaws made their purpose quite clear: “to give the people…a voice and a hand in the rebuilding of their community…and to ensure representation of the people throughout the planning and execution of the renewal and rehabilitation process.”44 One of their first tasks was sending out questionnaires to the residents living in the 1.1 square miles who called Shaw home.
Merging Old and New Musical and Architectural Styles
What emerged from this communal compositional and planning process was often a focus on walking and public space that combined tradition with newness. For The Blackbyrds, this regularly meant combining jazz with Black popular musics of the 1960s and 1970s. Such direction came from Donald Byrd. “He brought in all the bebop, the lines, and the education. Long studies of Boulanger…We brought the young boys that attract the young girls,” recalls Keith Killgo.45 Pianist Kevin Toney similarly remembers wanting to study straight ahead jazz when he went to Howard. However, after his first year, Byrd showed him artists like Stevie Wonder and Billy Preston.46 “What made us different out the gate was that we had r&b sensibility songs—r&b rhythms, r&b grooves. It was contemporary. We had synthesizers. But we played jazz over it. And Donald would let us solo. You could really play and stretch out within the context,” recalls Toney.47
A brief description of “Walking in Rhythm” shows this mixture in action. Midway through the song, Allan Barnes takes a flute solo. Meanwhile, the rhythm section eschews the walking bass and swung ride patterns typical of jazz. Instead, Hall and Killgo play funky syncopated basslines and heavy backbeats typical of contemporary soul, funk, and rhythm and blues.48 It was a successful mixture. “Walking in Rhythm” made appearances on four charts: pop, easy listening, jazz, and r&b.49 “On one weekend, we could be playing with Earth, Wind, and Fire, Parliament Funkadelic, Rufus, Graham Central Station, The Temptations, and all the r&b groups of that day,” recalls Toney. “Then the next weekend we’d be on a show with the top jazz fusion groups of the day: Herbie Hancock and the Headhunters, Grover Washington, Kool and the Gang, Chick Corea. We had this dichotomy.”50
This aesthetic focus that blended old (particularly medieval and Victorian architecture) with new (modernist and Brutalist designs) appeared in MICCO’s plans as well. William C. Spinks, a graduate of Howard University and architect for MICCO, best articulated this merger. In an interview he gave for Washington Post in 1970, he called Washington’s recent development efforts such as L’Enfant Plaza and the F Street Mall “complete busts.” The mall, in particular, irked Spinks because the “pedestrian area is isolated by automobile traffic and anyone who uses it feels conspicuous and out-of-place.” He instead proposed autonomous pedestrian blocks and drew inspiration from medieval cities that contained inner courts, arcades, and passageways that made walking and shopping easy while letting “automobiles keep the streets.” Buildings arranged around a courtyard would create a “natural space” where “people work and shop and eat lunch.” There would be no conflict between the “quietude of these spaces and the continual push-pull of the vehicular routes that run through the area.” His printed design proposal shows this in action: “Martin Luther King Jr. High School” and “Malcolm X Library” are neighbored by a restaurant, clothier, and cinema. Meanwhile, swaths of individuals make use of the canopies, benches, and green space that these buildings circumscribe.51
Much of the architectural renderings found in the MICCO archives at George Washington University Library also show such fusion in their walking plans. A document titled “Shaw School Urban Renewal Area” contains proposed sketches of the redevelopment of fourteen different residential and commercial parcels.52 Amber N. Wiley’s work on the construction of Shaw’s Dunbar High School during the 1970s shows how Black architectural firms such as Bryant & Bryant relied on open floor plans, Brutalism, and monumental modernism to convey a new and progressive educational moment.53 MICCO’s plans similarly included new modernist designs. However, they also frequently merged such architecture with the revitalization of Shaw’s nineteenth-century Victorian rowhouses and the construction of pedestrian-friendly spaces. Renderings contain depictions of individuals walking along sidewalks and pathways. Automobiles are rarely seen in the architectural plans.54 The “Shaw Construction Goals” from 1971 to 1972 articulate this preference for pedestrians in prose. “The exceptional width and openness of the streets and places should be retained,” the document states, and “the use of trees and plantings and generous pedestrian areas should be emphasized to preserve the character of the city in a park.” In addition, the integrity of form and design of “special streets and places” should be maintained and “protected as much as possible from conversion to traffic channelization.”55 Not unlike The Blackbyrds, Fauntroy and MICCO merged old and new aesthetics to foreground a vision of walkable city life in DC.
Walking and Public Space
MICCO developed its urban plan principally based on responses to their “Family Survey” questionnaire that was completed by 9,000 individuals in the late 1960s. When the “MICCO man came to the door,” some of the promotional materials for the survey stated, “tell it like it is.”56 And residents had a lot to say, much of it pertaining to walking. By the early 1970s, being a pedestrian in DC was quite dangerous. As Ebony magazine reported, a 1972 national study revealed that 49 percent of its non-white respondents were afraid to walk alone at night. In Washington, DC, the Urban League “found that two of three Blacks in low-income areas say they walk in fear of neighborhood crime.”57 Such fears were founded. In October 1978, John Reiley, a Howard University student, was shot while jogging through Malcolm X Park.58
The questionnaire results showed how invested residents were in creating walkable neighborhoods. First and foremost, they wanted to limit automobile use. In the late 1960s, more than 600,000 cars passed through Shaw every day.59 Most of these were not driven by locals. Around 65 percent of households in Shaw had no car, 22 percent had one car, and two percent had two cars. Of the residents of Shaw engaged in the workforce, only 25 percent commuted via their own car. Most took the bus (62 percent) while 13 percent walked.60
Instead, Fauntroy argued that most of the 600,000 automobiles that passed through Shaw were shuttling between the suburbs and downtown. They stopped in the neighborhood only for traffic lights.61 “Almost every other street is filled with cars,” he wrote in a summation of the MICCO questionnaire’s findings. “Our children can’t walk to school safely and none of us can get from one place to another as easily as we’d like. In some neighborhoods, it’s necessary for friends to cross as many as three busy streets just to visit each other’s homes. This is one reason why it’s so hard for Shaw to have any real community life,” he added.62
To address these concerns, 97 percent of respondents (8,177 individuals) were in favor of limiting through-traffic to a few major streets. They also advocated for increasing the number of schools in the area. “Some small children walk six or seven blocks, crossing dangerous streets to get to school,” Fauntroy summarized, and MICCO proposed creating a pedestrian parkway that would link new and refurbished schools like Shaw and Seaton as well as the possible replacements for Slater-Langston, Cooke, Grimke, and Cleveland.63 Bridges would link Cardozo High School with Malcolm X Park. Eighth and Sixth Streets would be similarly linked, making it easy to get from Howard University to the new Federal City College. “Ideally, your child should be able to ride a bike from one school to another across Shaw without having to cross a single street,” Fauntroy hoped.64
The Blackbyrds similarly embraced walking and much of their music continues a tradition of Black musicians referencing various mobilities: notably trains and automobiles. Musicologist Andrew Berish highlights how modes of travel—particularly trains—were frequent sources of inspiration for bandleader Duke Ellington.65 Trains feature prominently as a means of escape in Robert Johnson’s music, exemplified by songs “Rambling on My Mind” and “Love in Vain.”66 The blues guitarist was equally interested in automobiles. In “Terraplane Blues,” Johnson, as literary scholar Julia Simon argues, “uses the car as a metaphor to voice ambivalent attitudes toward the emotional context of labor dependency and enforced immobility in the Delta.”67 The automobile appears prominently in midcentury rhythm and blues and rock and roll where, according to Michael Docherty, the mere mention of it grants access to a sexual economy.68 Historian Brian Ward hears in Chuck Berry’s music a “fetishistic delight in cars, jetliners, trains and the thrill of sheer motion.”69 Motown Records was famously immersed in automobile culture. Suzanne Smith notes how the musical form and audio fidelity of ‘‘My Girl’’ and ‘‘Shop Around’’ were “well suited and often produced with a car radio audience in mind.”70 Black musicians historically were influenced by such modes of transport.
In The Blackbyrds music, walking—not driving or riding in trains—often takes center stage. The concept makes an appearance in arguably the band’s greatest hit, “Walking in Rhythm.” The song peaked on Cash Box Top 100 at #7, the Billboard Hot 100 at #6, and Billboard’s Adult Contemporary and R&B charts at #5 and #4, respectively. Written by guitarist and vocalist Barney Perry and released on their 1974 album, Flying Start, it tells a rather simple story about a protagonist returning to his woman. “Walking in rhythm/moving in sound” are the first two lines. Flying Start contains another walking reference as well. “Walking down the town alone/looking for a place to go home,” are the lyrics to “I Need You.”
DC residents would be quick to include two more examples in this list: “Rock Creek Park” and “City Life” from the band’s 1975 album, City Life. “Rock Creek Park” did not chart as highly as “Walking in Rhythm.” (It peaked at #93 and #37 on Billboard Hot 100 and Hot Soul Singles.) However, it has remained a popular anthem amongst Washingtonians. In “City Life,” written by Kevin Toney, the band sings that it “just ain’t safe to walk the streets/scared about the people I meet/it’s hard to go to the neighborhood park/just cannot go out after dark.” Such lyrics appear as if they could have been written by Walter Fauntroy himself.
Donald Byrd and The Blackbyrds made walking sound rather quotidian. Sometimes, they discuss the simple process of returning to a lover. In “Walking in Rhythm,” perhaps their lyrically most “complex” song, the lyrics state, “It’s been so long since I’ve seen her/I’m tired and so all alone/I’ve travelled so very far/I’ve got to get back home. It’s been so long since I’ve kissed her/And held her tight in my arms/I’ve got so far to go now/I’ve got to get back home.” A similar story transpires in “I Need You,” a song whose lyrics reference the feeling of walking after a breakup. The narratives in these two songs do not last long, however, and most of the lyrics to their music consist of short phrases that take place in what musicologist Mark Laver would call a “ceaseless, timeless present.”71 Lyrics to Byrd’s single, “Black Byrd,” merely state “listen to the horn, carry on” and “get in the groove and move.” In “City Life,” the chorus is repetitive: “city, city, city, city, city life.”
Musicologist Robert Fink hears an underappreciated and overlooked aspect of telos in African American music of the 1960s and 1970s. As he argues, the “goal directed soul” of Motown songs “Cloud Nine” and “Runaway Child, Running Wild” catered to a teleologically conscious Black middle class interested in capitalist modernity.72 Although their music lacks what Fink calls the “tonic rhythm,” The Blackbyrds provide occasional moments of musical tension and release. Naturally, themes of motion and movement appear prominently in Byrd’s and his band’s music. “Stepping into tomorrow/my destiny is back,” Byrd’s band sings on his solo release, “Stepping into Tomorrow.” The chorus to The Blackbyrds’ “Walking in Rhythm” contains a notable dominant chord over the lines “I’ve got to get back home.” The harmony then moves up a half step for the repetition of the line, creating a heightened sense of anticipation.
However, most often, the songs are defined by rhythmic and harmonic stasis. “Rock Creek Park,” “City Life,” “Walking in Rhythm,” “Black Byrd,” and “I Need You,” all end with fade outs, creating what music psychologist David Huron calls the “delay of closure indefinitely.”73 Most songs contain simple two chord loops or long one-chord vamps. Such musical decisions create the feeling of stasis and provide an interpretation of how The Blackbyrds may have understood walking. Walking was an important part of Black life, but it was so important that The Blackbyrds made it almost matter of fact. Walking was an undeniable right. It did not need much explanation or argumentation. The Blackbyrds did not bring too much attention to it musically. It was simply an act of everyday life.
Conclusion
By the mid 1970s, MICCO had closed shop but not before they completed several community renewal projects, among them the construction of the nine-story Lincoln-Westmoreland Apartments at 7th and R. Streets NW, the renovation of some Shaw family homes, the funding of the new Dunbar High School, and the beautification of the area by planting trees with the help of $9,000 provided by the Society for a Beautiful National Capital.74 By the late 1970s, The Blackbyrds had disbanded as well, largely due to financial matters related to Byrd’s breach of contract.75
Meanwhile, DC’s walkable community envisioned in the late 1960s and 1970s has not been realized—at least not for everybody. DC is the third most walkable metropolitan area in the United States according to Smart Growth America.76 Yet, the act of walking is still often denied to Black Americans. Social scientists have shown how neighborhoods with a higher concentration of Black and poor individuals lack supermarkets, pharmacies, banks, movie theaters, and other amenities within walking distance.77 Research on Atlanta shows how neighborhood walkability is encumbered by the lack of sidewalk space for higher income Black individuals and a fear of crime for those with lower incomes.78 Analysis of cities nationwide shows similar results.79
Recent studies have shown how an increase in walkability has contributed to increased housing prices as well.80 In the words of one urban planner: “I believe that walkability increases property values significantly. This would keep out groups that tend to have lower incomes like minorities.”81 As transportation scholar William Riggs summarizes, “the affordability of more walkable and bikeable housing [is] a challenge for working class and minority residents.”82 In a city like DC, such issues are acute. A report conducted by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition showed that nearly half of the city’s neighborhoods were threatened by gentrification. By 2013, 41 percent of those neighborhoods had gentrified and displaced more than 20,000 people.83
Such anxieties came to pass in late 2015 when the District’s Department of Transportation proposed installing a protected bike lane going northbound and southbound somewhere between 5th and 9th Streets NW. It would have then connected to popular east and west protected bike lanes such as M and L streets NW or Pennsylvania Avenue NW. Many Black Shaw residents were displeased, though. Robert Price III, a pastor at the United House of Prayer, protested its construction, fearing that the plan would have removed some, if not all, of the 75 parking spaces utilized by his congregants. In Price’s words, “We just think we have to protect what’s ours.”84 It was a statement surely based on the fear that walkable neighborhoods were only for rich white residents. Other members of the Black clergy weighed in as well. “This ain’t London, this ain’t Europe. The United States is built on the automobile, and we need to respect that,” said Michael Green, a deacon at New Bethel Baptist Church.85
It’s the same New Bethel Baptist Church where Walter Fauntroy got his start before forming MICCO.
*
After several decades of hiatus, drummer Keith Killgo has helped reunite The Blackbyrds. In 2024, the band, composed of both old and newer personnel, played at the Howard Theater in Shaw. “It was not a flashback; it was the real deal,” wrote Brenda C. Siler in a review for the Washington Informer.86 “The band was exceptional. Every musician got a chance to shine. Nothing about the concert felt like fifty years had passed. Every song felt current and full of energy. The spirited crowd enthusiastically gave The Blackbyrds a lot of love and appreciation,” especially since they played many of their old hits. They opened with “Walking in Rhythm.” Meanwhile, “Rock Creek Park” got an extended version. For many audience members, the music offered a nostalgic reminder of carefree times: “Happy music makes you feel good all the time. Happy music takes your troubles off your mind,” The Blackbyrds sing in “Happy Music” from 1974. “It was just catchy and infectious,” Kevin Toney recollected of his band’s music.87
This is one way to hear their music: as a fun and carefree apolitical music in a “post-civil rights” era. In this article, I have suggested there’s another way—a way that forefronts themes of walking. Killgo reminisced that he would walk all the time during the 1960s and 1970s. He would play at some clubs in Shaw or neighboring Adams Morgan, finish his set after the buses stopped running at midnight, and walk all the way to his home at 12th and Van Buren. “Walking is very contemplative,” Killgo noted. “You can see more stuff. Stop. Look. Smell the roses.”88
The Blackbyrds embarked on a European and American tour in 2023 and as much as their music can remind listeners of exuberant times, their lyrics frequently conjure up a particular moment in DC’s Black history: when walking comprised an integral part of urban life. It seems that aspect might be threatened, however. “The Cappuccino City,” as Derek Lyra calls DC, has priced out Black residents from the most walkable neighborhoods.89 Furthermore, Black residents like pastors Robert Price III and Michael Green understandably fear policies that make their neighborhoods more walkable will inevitably price them out in the future. However, The Blackbyrds offer a vital lesson for the contemporary moment. Howard University journalist Isabel Wilkerson learned it in 1980 when she remarked how listening to their music made her excited about walking and public space. “Just think! We have the opportunity to stroll in the very park that inspired The Blackbyrds,” Wilkerson wrote in a promotion of Rock Creek Park.90
The resurgence of The Blackbyrds can offer an opportunity to envision liberatory possibilities of Washington, DC’s built environment. In Noise Orders: Jazz, Improvisation, and Architecture, David P. Brown suggests that thinking about architecture as an improvisational music making activity contributes to an “architecture of inclusion that encourages original and creative actions.”91 Geographer Brandi Summers might call such practice “reclamation aesthetics.” Coined amidst the #DontMuteDC protests of 2019, this term refers to the idea that Black people not only have the right to stay in the city but should also move fluidly throughout city spaces.92 Ethnomusicologist Allie Martin embraces this right in her soundwalks of DC. She is particularly interested in the sound of gentrification and walks through the city and analyzes sounds she hears to humanize herself in a “soundscape that would otherwise disregard my sonic perceptions in favor of white hearing as the default standard of sound.”93
Songs like “Black Byrd,” “Stepping into Tomorrow,” “Walking in Rhythm,” “I Need You,” “Rock Creek Park,” and “City Life” likewise humanize Black life in an urban context. More specifically, they show how important walking was to the musical expression of Donald Byrd and The Blackbyrds. In such songs, we not only hear their compelling, happy, jovial and collaboratively made jazz-fusion music. We also hear resonances of Walter Fauntroy, MICCO, and Shaw residents. Keeping this larger context in mind, The Blackbyrds show not only what an equitable city sounds like but what it could move like as well.
Notes
John Howland, “Isaac Hayes and Hot Buttered (Orchestral) Soul, from Psychadelic to Progressive,” in Hearing Luxe Pop: Glorification, Glamour, and the Middlebrow in American Popular Music (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2021), 237–80.
Walter Fauntroy, Interview with The Honorable Reverend Walter Fauntroy, January 23, 2003, https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/honorable-reverend-walter-fauntroy.
“What Kind of Neighborhood Do You Want? The Choices for Shaw Residents in Urban Renewal” (George Washington University Special Collections, n.d.), 1, Box 26, Folder 21: Booklet, “What Kind of Neighborhood Do You Want?” and A Guide to Church & Institutions in the Shaw Urban Renewal Area, n.d., Walter E. Fauntroy papers.
Darien C. Small, “Capitol Leisure Sports,” The Hill Top, August 31, 1979, 10.
Keith Bassett, “Walking as an Aesthetic Practice and a Critical Tool: Some Psychogeographic Experiments,” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 28, no. 3 (November 2004): 397–410.
Henri Lefebvre, Le Droit à La Ville (Paris: Anthropos, 1968); Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York, NY: Random House, 1961); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984).
Jennie Middleton, “Walking in the City: The Geographies of Everyday Pedestrian Practices,” Geography Compass 5, no. 2 (2011): 90–105; Jennie Middleton, “Sense and the City: Exploring the Embodied Geographies of Urban Walking,” Social & Cultural Geography 11, no. 6 (September 2010): 575–96.
“Sit-In Movement Spreading Instead of Dying,” Jet (March 2, 1961): 3; Rebekah J. Kowal, “Staging the Greensboro Sit-Ins,” TDR/The Drama Review 48, no. 4 (December 2004): 135–54.
Evrick Brown, “Mobility Method and the Ethnic Community: Walking and Community Activism,” in Walking in Cities: Quotidian Mobility as Urban Theory, Method, and Practice, ed. Evrick Brown and Timothy Shortell (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2016), 197–212.
Amber N. Wiley, “Geography, Planning, and Performing Mobility in New Orleans,” in Walking in Cities: Quotidian Mobility as Urban Theory, Method, and Practice, ed. Evrick Brown and Timothy Shortell (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2016), 193.
Ibid., 192.
Paul R. Watts, “Walking as a Mobile Practice: Landscape and Public Protests in Washington, D.C.,” in Walking in Cities: Quotidian Mobility as Urban Theory, Method, and Practice, ed. Evrick Brown and Timothy Shortell (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2016), 213–28.
Craig L. Wilkins, The Aesthetics of Equity: Notes on Race, Space, Architecture, and Music (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
Tricia Rose, “‘All Aboard the Night Train’: Flow, Layering, and Rupture in Postindustrial New York,” in Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 21–61.
Sekou Cooke, Hip-Hop Architecture (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021).
Wirtz and Labor Department statistics quoted in “MICCO: Program Development Report. Planning for Shaw, with the People, by the People, for the People” (George Washington University Special Collections, n.d.), 2, Box 26, Folder 17: MICCO Program Development, 1967, Walter E. Fauntroy papers.
Clay Risen, A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2009).
J. Samuel Walker, Most of 14th Street Is Gone: The Washington, DC Riots of 1968 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018), 55.
Ibid., 98.
Kyla Sommers, When The Smoke Cleared: The 1968 Rebellions and the Unfinished Battle for Civil Rights (New York, NY: The New Press, 2023), ix.
Amanda Huron, “Creating a Commons in the Capital: The Emergence of Limited-Equity Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C.,” Washington History 26, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 56–67.
Amanda Huron, “Caring in Public: The Struggle for Community Park West,” Washington History 33, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 26–35.
Sommers, When The Smoke Cleared, ix.
Kristy Maddux, “‘White Man’s Road through Black Man’s Home’: Decolonial Organizing in the Metropole,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 109, no. 4 (2023): 331–53.
Lauren Sinclair, “No Church without a Choir: Howard University and Jazz in Washington, DC,” in DC Jazz : Stories of Jazz Music in Washington, DC (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2018), 132–33.
For more on criticisms of university music departments and their approach to jazz, see Tracy McMullen, “When Black Lives Matter,” DownBeat, May 2022; Dan DiPiero, “Race, Gender, and Jazz School: Chord-Scale Theory as White Masculine Technology,” Jazz and Culture 6, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2023): 52–77.
Sinclair, “No Church without a Choir,”134.
Mark Stryker, Jazz from Detroit (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2019), 87.
Barbara J. Stith, “Jazz Is Donald Byrd’s Thing,” The Hill Top, March 17, 1972, 7.
Donald Byrd, “The Meaning of Black Music,” The Black Scholar 3, no. 10 (Summer 1972): 31.
Vashti McKenzie, “The McKenzie Report,” Washington Afro-American, November 26, 1974, 11.
Danny Simms, “86 Students Depart for Ala.,” The Hill Top, October 30, 1970, 1, 12.
John Johnson, “Freshman Group Sponsors Jazz Program,” The Hill Top, March 3, 1972, 11.
Henry Anderson, “Byrd Gets Chairmanship of New FA Department,” The Hill Top, October 9, 1970, 3. For more on the intersection between jazz and radical Black politics, see Ingrid Monson, Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call out to Jazz and Africa (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Herbie Hancock, “Music Must Serve Humanity…” Herbie Hancock Interviewed, interview by Geoff Brown, In person, April 12, 2023.
McKenzie, “The McKenzie Report,” 11.
Kevin Toney, “TRUTH IN RHYTHM” - Kevin Toney (The Blackbyrds), Part 1 of 3, interview by Scott Goldfine, July 30, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCIHmwQ5MMk.
Kevin Toney, “TRUTH IN RHYTHM” - Kevin Toney (The Blackbyrds), Part 2 of 3, interview by Scott Goldfine, July 30, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-AncUoZyvY.
Toney.
Keith Killgo, A Conversation In Jazz with Blackbyrd’s drummer Keith Killgo Part 1, interview by Antonio Parker, November 15, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHB3wIk-Up8.
“Status Report: First Action Year” (George Washington University Special Collections, n.d.), no page, Box 26, Folder 1: Report, First Action Year, c. 1968, Walter E. Fauntroy papers.
Ibid.
Walter E. Fauntroy, “Letter to Mr. Jeffrey Cohen, Festival Development—August 17, 1989” (George Washington University Special Collections, 1989), 4, Box 26, Folder 25: Correspondence, Jeffrey Cohen, August 17, 1989, Walter E. Fauntroy papers.
“MICCO: Program Development Report. Planning for Shaw, with the People, by the People, for the People,” 1–2.
Keith Killgo, “TRUTH IN RHYTHM” - Keith Killgo (The Blackbyrds), Part 2 of 2, interview by Scott Goldfine, July 9, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0dDDP8Zsik.
Toney, “TRUTH IN RHYTHM” - Kevin Toney (The Blackbyrds), Part 1 of 3.
Toney.
For other styles of jazz crossing over with other Black musical styles, see Brian Felix, “Wes Montgomerey’s A Day In The Life: The Anatomy of a Jazz-Pop Crossover Album,” Jazz Times 8, no. 3 (2014): 237–58; Charles D. Carson, “‘Bridging the Gap’: Creed Taylor, Grover Washington Jr., and the Crossover Roots of Smooth Jazz,” Black Music Research Journal 28, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 1–15; Jeremy A. Smith, “‘Sell It Black’: Race and Marketing in Miles Davis’s Early Fusion Jazz,” Jazz Perspectives 4, no. 1 (2010): 7–33; Kevin Fellezs, Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk, and the Creation of Fusion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
Toney, “TRUTH IN RHYTHM” - Kevin Toney (The Blackbyrds), Part 1 of 3.
Toney.
Spinks quoted in Wolf Von Eckardt, “Maybe It’s a Better Idea Than Plazas and Malls,” Washington Post, February 1, 1970, K1.
“Shaw School Urban Renewal Area” (George Washington University Special Collections, n.d.), no page number, Box 27, Folder 1: Shaw School Urban Renewal Area, Walter E. Fauntroy papers.
Amber N. Wiley, “The Dunbar High School Dilemma: Architecture, Power, and African American Cultural Heritage,” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 20, no. 1 (2013): 95.
“Shaw School Urban Renewal Area,” no page number.
“Shaw Construction Goals: July 1971-September 1972.” (George Washington University Special Collections, n.d.), no page number, Box 26, Folder 18: Booklet, Shaw Construction Goals, July 1971-September 1972, Walter E. Fauntroy papers.
“Tell It Like It Is” (George Washington University Special Collections, n.d.), no page number, Box 25, Folder 1: Flyer, “Tell It Like It Is,” 1967, Walter E. Fauntroy papers.
“A Divided Community: Crime Breeds Mistrust, Uncertainty, Fear and Anxiety,” Ebony (August 1979), 36.
Olivia Winslow, “Howard Student Shot in Park,” The Hill Top, October 27, 1978, 1.
“What Kind of Neighborhood Do You Want? The Choices for Shaw Residents in Urban Renewal,” 21–22.
“U.S. Census 1970” (Hosted by District of Columbia and Open Data DC: U.S. Census Bureau, n.d.), https://opendata.dc.gov/datasets/DCGIS::census-tracts-in-1970/about.”
“What Kind of Neighborhood Do You Want?” 21–22.
“What Kind of Neighborhood Do You Want?” 21–22.
“Results of the MICCO Questionnaire” (George Washington University Special Collections, n.d.), no page number, Box 25, Folder 16: Questionnaire, MICCO Community Results, c. 1968, Walter E. Fauntroy papers.
“What Kind of Neighborhood Do You Want?” 20.
Andrew S. Berish, Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams: Place, Mobility, and Race in Jazz of the 1930s and ’40s (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 120.
Julia Winterston, Railways & Music (Queensgate, Huddersfield: The University of Huddersfield Press, 2021), 198.
Julia Simon, “The Significance of Cars in the Delta: Robert Johnson’s ‘Terraplane Blues,’” Popular Music and Society 44, no. 1 (January 1, 2021): 6.
Michael Docherty, “‘Please Let Me Off This Bus’: Socio-Spatial Mobility in Mid-Century Automotive Cities and African American Popular Song,” Moveable Type 9, no. “Metropolis” (2017), http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1573222/.
Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm And Blues, Black Consciousness And Race Relations (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012), 213.
Suzanne E. Smith, Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 123.
Mark Laver, “Dinner Jazz: Consumption, Improvisation, and the Politics of Listening,” Jazz Perspectives 12, no. 3 (2020): 304.
Robert Fink, “Goal-Directed Soul? Analyzing Rhythmic Teleology in American Popular Music,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 64, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 179–237.
David Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 318.
“2nd Action Year for Shaw” (George Washington University Special Collections, n.d.), no page number, Box 25, Folder 10: Pamphlet, “2nd Action Year for Shaw,” nd, Walter E. Fauntroy papers.
Stryker, Jazz from Detroit, 88–89.
David Edmondson, “DC Region Scores High on Walkability. How Could It Do Better?,” Greater Greater Washington (blog), March 21, 2023, https://ggwash.org/view/88939/dc-region-scores-high-on-walkability-how-could-it-do-better.
Dustin T. Duncan et al., “Space, Race, and Poverty: Spatial Inequalities in Walkable Neighborhood Amenities?” Demographic Research 26 (June 2012): 432.
Cassandra Johnson Gaither et al., “‘Where the Sidewalk Ends’: Sustainable Mobility in Atlanta’s Cascade Community,” City & Society 28, no. 2 (2016): 192–93.
Bradley Bereitschaft, “Do Socially Vulnerable Urban Populations Have Access to Walkable, Transit-Accessible Neighborhoods? A Nationwide Analysis of Large U.S. Metropolitan Areas,” Urban Science 7, no. 6 (2023): 1–29.
Duncan et al., “Space, Race, and Poverty,” 411.
Quoted in William Riggs, End of the Road: Reimagining the Street as the Heart of the City (Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press, 2022), 114.
Ibid., 114.
Alyssa Wiltse-Ahmad, “Study: Gentrification And Cultural Displacement Most Intense In America’s Largest Cities, And Absent From Many Others,” National Community Reinvestment Coalition (blog), March 18, 2019, https://ncrc.org/study-gentrification-and-cultural-displacement-most-intense-in-americas-largest-cities-and-absent-from-many-others/.
Price quoted in in Perry Stein, “Can Some Big D.C. Churches Fight off a Bike Lane? They Are Bringing Large Crowds to Try,” Washington Post, October 23, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/10/23/can-some-big-d-c-churches-fight-off-a-bike-lane-they-are-bringing-large-crowds-to-try/; Perry Stein, “D.C. Church Says a Bike Lane Would Infringe upon Its Constitutional ‘Rights of Religious Freedom,’” Washington Post, October 14, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/10/14/d-c-church-says-a-bike-lane-would-infringe-upon-its-constitutional-rights-of-religious-freedom/.
Green quoted in Stein, “Can Some Big D.C. Churches Fight off a Bike Lane?”
Brenda C. Siler, “The Blackbyrds 50th Anniversary Concert Confirms Longevity Has Its Place,” The Washington Informer, January 22, 2024, https://www.washingtoninformer.com/blackbyrds-50th-anniversary-concert/.
Toney, “TRUTH IN RHYTHM” - Kevin Toney (The Blackbyrds), Part 2 of 3.
Keith Killgo, Interview with Keith Killgo, interview by author, Phone, January 15, 2024.
Derek S. Hyra, Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
Isabel Wilkerson, “What’s Wrong with HU?,” The Hill Top, January 18, 1980, 5.
David P. Brown, Noise Orders: Jazz, Improvisation, and Architecture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xxxii.
Brandi Thompson Summers, “Reclaiming the Chocolate City: Soundscapes of Gentrification and Resistance in Washington, DC,” Society and Space 39, no. 1 (2020): 14.
Allie Martin, “Hearing Change in the Chocolate City: Soundwalking as Black Feminist Method,” Sounding Out! (blog), August 5, 2019, https://soundstudiesblog.com/2019/08/05/hearing-change-in-the-chocolate-city-soundwalking-as-black-feminist-method/. See also Allie Martin, “Plainly Audible: Listening Intersectionally to the Amplified Noise Act in Washington, DC,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 33, no. 4 (2021): 104–25.
University of California Press