Ballad Of Birmingham
James Sullivan
[Dudley Randall's Detroit-based Broadside Press issued a series of African-American poetry broadsides.]
The first two in the series are poems by Randall himself: "Ballad of Birmingham" and "Dressed All in Pink." Folk singer Jerry Lewis had set them to music, and to ensure his own copyright of the texts, Randall published them as broadsides in 1965. In 1966, when he met Robert Hayden, Melvin Tolson, and Margaret Walker at Fisk University's first annual Writers Conference, he asked each of them for permission to print one of their already-published poems as a broadside--Hayden's "'Gabriel," Tolson's "The Sea-Turtle and the Shark," and Walker's "The Ballad of the Free" (Randall, Broadside 23). Randall also wrote Gwendolyn Brooks, asking permission to use one of her poems. She wrote back that he could pick any one he liked, and he chose "We Real Cool" (ibid. 8). And so he had his initial "Poems of the Negro Revolt" sequence. Most of the first twenty-four issues of the Broadside Series continued to be "favorite poems" that had already been published elsewhere, but in 1968, a reviewer at Small Press Review suggested that issuing previously unpublished poems might be a greater literary service, so beginning with Number 25, "Assassination" by Don L. Lee--a response to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.--he made the series mostly a forum for new work (ibid. 2-3 ).
"Ballad of Birmingham" deserves special attention as the first broadside Randall published and also because it places the series in relation to the tradition of popular broadsides up through the nineteenth century that recount sensational events in ballad form. Printed up, like them, inexpensively for sale, it uses the conventions of the traditional broadside ballad for contemporary political goals. Two broadside versions of this poem exist. For the first publication in 1965, the graphics are simple: brown ink in a tasteful typeface on tan paper, priced...
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