There are the stories we tell ourselves and the stories that tell us who we are or could be. We encounter stories that either constrain or expand the categories through which we understand our place in the world. Sometimes they converge, and sometimes they conflict. Rarely are they static. Humans are narrative creatures; we see ourselves in story and song. We forge our paths as both scripted and scriptwriters and occasionally find hidden tales that, when brought to light, open up new vistas of connection and meaning.
Such was the experience of the artist Fantastic Negrito (né Xavier Amin Dphrepaulezz), whose brief dalliance with an ancestry website led to the remarkable discovery that his seventh-generation grandparents were a white Scottish indentured servant named Elizabeth Gallimore and an unnamed enslaved black man who, according to charges brought against her in a colonial Virginia court, was in a common-law marriage with Gallimore. Through the discovery, Fantastic Negrito found his narrative disrupted in exciting and creative ways, a symbolic story enfolded within the broader contested history of the United States.
A three-time Grammy award winner for Best Contemporary Blues Album, Fantastic Negrito channeled this discovery within the story of his lineage into one of his most creatively ambitious projects, 2022’s White Jesus Black Problems.
The critically acclaimed album (listed within PopMatters Best 80 Albums of 2022) was an exhilarating feast for the musical senses with its potent fusion of roots and blues, funk, rock, and jazz with occasional psychedelic flourishes. Within this album, Fantastic Negrito lets the story of his seventh-generation grandparents come to the fore. This allowed the themes of their courage, audacity, and resilient love to interact narratively and musically with the brutality of racial capitalism that is the perduring watermark on the American narrative.
The 2022 musical project and its 2023 continuation are artistic expressions of Fantastic Negrito’s consideration of the power of narrative complexity and the interplay between our personal stories and the larger contexts that both challenge and are challenged by our individual and corporate choices. Not only did Fantastic Negrito find his sense of place and story altered by the story of his seventh-generation grandparents, but he also exercised his sense of authorial subjectivity by giving his unnamed grandfather the pseudonym “Grandfather Courage.” With that descriptive flourish, Fantastic Negrito’s work foregrounds the boldness of his progenitor in the face of the forces of racial erasure on the North American continent.
Grandfather Courage is a continuation and acoustic reimagining of White Jesus Black Problems, emerging eight months after the original album’s release. While both can stand independently, Grandfather Courage illuminates fully in light of White Jesus Black Problems. It is within the conjoined albums’ similarities and contrasts that the expansive artistic expressiveness of Fantastic Negrito’s project emerges.
Technically, Grandfather Courage is—as the artist admits—a reimagining through the lens of his touring band. What results is an acoustic rendering of the original project that, as Fantastic Negrito states, is “…unplugged unapologetic reimagined”. As such, this album has a more straightforward foregrounding of the blues and roots music pulsating through both project renderings, a musical legacy that deftly moves between and within the heritage of pain and suffering while always carrying resilient, resistant hope. Blues acoustic guitar drives Grandfather Courage from start to finish, accented by jazz piano counterpoints and in ongoing dialogue with percussive drum beats.
A track-by-track comparison between White Jesus Black Problems and Grandfather Courage reveals a linear parallelism between the two albums, with minor deviations accenting the uniqueness of the latter’s reimagined effort. The trippy opener “Venomous Dogma” from White Jesus Black Problems, with its ethereal choirs, psychedelic sound effects, and electric intensity, is transformed into two acoustic numbers, “Drifting Away” and “Locked Down”, on Grandfather Courage, revealing the marrow of blues and soul grounding the project.
Also missing in the reimagined project are three interlude tracks from White Jesus Black Problems, “Mayor of Wasteland”, “You Don’t Belong Here”, and “Register of Free Negroes”. These interstices ranged from 47 to 81 seconds and combined spoken samples and loops, electronic synth effects, and drum effects to underscore how this project moves between eras and geography in tracing the interconnected mosaic of American narratives. Their absence in Grandfather Courage would seem to lessen the blurred boundaries of time and space indicative of the first album, especially with how the acoustic rendering gives this the sound of a more traditional blues and roots record.
Yet, careful attentiveness to the acoustic project challenges this surface assumption. The listener is propelled in new ways by the rhythmic emphases that emerge more forcefully here to see how space and time fold within each other as we traverse the terrain of our stories. The reimagined album continues the creative play of the original project, using spatial and temporal metaphors within the song to blur the hard and fast borders that divide us from the implications of our past.
Take the back-to-back reimagined tracks “Highest Bidder” and “They Go Low”. In advance press, Fantastic Negrito shared that reimagining this song through the lens of his touring band coincided with his listening to many African drum patterns. Rhythmic beats are the foundation of these two songs, embodying the pulsating of a life unbowed to the pressures of oppression and hate. “Highest Bidder” employs the imagery of the auction block to highlight the chords of racial capitalism running throughout the American story, lifting the destruction that reducing lives to commodities has wrought. The reimagined acoustic rendering slows the tempo ever so slightly. Whereas the original version of the song embodies the chaotic frenzy of human commodification, the acoustic version centers the depth of the blues within this struggle within a death-dealing economy and its effects.
The spatial contrast of high and low plays out in the juxtaposition of “Highest Bidder” and “They Go Low” as the theme of systemic dehumanization unfolds through tragic vignettes of those past and present living among the forces of those that go “low, low, low / ‘Til they break you down.” “You Better Get a Gun” also engages the exhaustion wrought by a legacy of violence intertwined with the narrative of racial capitalism. On Grandfather Courage, the song reemerges as an acoustic lament, a blues dirge lifting the memory of Ahmaud Aubrey and Jordan Davis among countless casualties to this legacy.
These stark realities refuse suppression in these projects. Grandfather Courage is an anchor to stark stories. Still, they ultimately weave themselves around the light of the original act of bravery that this genealogical discovery impressed upon Fantastic Negrito in his lineage. Throughout a brutal legacy, there is a pulsating resistance to dehumanization in the boldness of love. This resistance speaks its truth in “Oh Betty”, where the longing for love provides a tether of hope. This courage brought his grandfather and grandmother together in seemingly impossible circumstances and is the resistance incarnated in the legacy of the blues, where mourning is always in tension with the resistance of love of self and love of the other.
On its own, Grandfather Courage is a compelling, affecting work of acoustic blues and roots music. It speaks from and to the deep currents of blues as an American art form and a carrier of essential counternarratives. But, to fully appreciate its power, one should listen to it in connection with its predecessor, White Jesus Black Problems. The creative comparisons generated by considering them together attest more fully to the compelling artistry of Fantastic Negrito’s musical vision. In concert, they reveal that our stories are never ultimately set, and a change of tempo or chords can reveal previously unnoticed vistas.