“Gang Gone Good” and Opportunity Please Knock (1967)
The following selection is a series of excerpts from Oscar Brown Jr.’s memoir of producing and directing Opportunity Please Knock and working with the South Side gang the Blackstone Rangers, discovered after Brown passed away in May 2005. While sorting through his catalog of poetry, we realized the poem titled “Gang Gone Good” was actually the first page of an entire thirty-nine-page memoir he had typed out and left for posterity. This is wonderful because it is the most complete record of how it all transpired. At the time, OBJ was a certified “star,” with a twelve-month waiting list to get tickets to his stage show Joy 66 (1966), which ran at the Happy Medium on Rush Street in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood.
Oscar Brown Jr., “Opportunity, Please Knock,” from Between Heaven and Hell, Columbia CL 1774 (1962).
“Grace of God,” from Great Nitty Gritty (1982)
Oscar Brown Jr. continued to focus his attention on conducting serious work with youth in the heart of urban neighborhoods of Chicago in the 1980s and again in the new millennium when he developed Great Nitty Gritty (GNG). In his own words :
Since the early eighties I have written, produced, and directed a musical called the Great Nitty Gritty, about Chicago youth growing up in the housing projects. I love it. It’s a real grassroots project, working with kids. We recruit kids from such places as the Ida B. Wells housing development and find scores of shining talent every year. It’s amazing the talent we have in this city. Amazing.
We cannot be exactly sure of a date of creation for this piece, but can say with certainty that he would have written “Grace of God” sometime prior to 1982. He could have had some of it written and then perfected or finished it for the production staged at McCormick Place in 1983. This poem contains a cornerstone of OBJ’s philosophy: that people of African descent are endowed with a relationship to time (rhythm) which leaves a visible and indivisable connection to the “Grace of the Creator.” He also refers to this as “Sanctifism.”
Great Nitty Gritty premiered in August 1982 at Mount Hope Baptist Church in Chicago. In February 1983, it appeared for a short run in the Drury Lane Theatre at McCormick Place. In 1985, there was a brief tour of schools in and around Chicago. It was revived in 2002, 2003, and 2004 by the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs. In 2006, we were able to lead the stage direction and coproduce Great Nitty Gritty at Kennedy King College.
“Music: The Liberating Force”
This piece seems to have been written in 2001. Oscar Brown Jr. would often return to an idea or a text several times, writing versions on various computers. We see records of this piece in 2001 and 2004. Sometimes an older typewriter version of an essay or poem may already exist, but once he began transferring his writings to the computer he might make a change to the piece, thus creating a second version, if you will.
OBJ would always say, “free the music and the music will free us.” He wanted to have a website to be able to give away his work for free. He didn’t even like the copyright laws because he felt they were an abridgment to freedom of speech.
“My Mission Is To Shine a Light on the World”
It is relatively safe to estimate that this piece was written by the year 2003. Unfortunately for us, it was not the practice of OBJ to date his creations and mark his writings with his authorship. This is true when he used a typewriter as well as once things evolved into composition on the computer. Hence we are at a loss to come up with an actual “date composed” on quite a bit of material in the OBJ archive. OBJ categorized this and “Music: The Liberating Force” in his catalog as “essays” or “articles.” The archive contains quite a number of them on a wide array of subjects. It is our intention to publish a book compiling these essays and articles.
Africa and Maggie Brown on CNN discussing Donald Trump’s appropriation of Oscar Brown Jr.’s song “The Snake.” February 26, 2018.
Oscar Brown Jr., “The Snake,” from Tells It Like It Is!, Columbia CL2025 (1963).
