Driva’ Man

DRIVA' MAN è la personificazione del sorvegliante bianco ai tempi della schiavitù che spesso forzava le donne nere sotto la sua giurisdizione a rapporti sessuali.

I "paterollers" (patrollers), le pattuglie, che appaiono nelle parole di Driva' Man erano, secondo la descrizione di un ex schiavo, uomini "che ti acchiappavano e ti riportavano dal padrone. Molti di questi patrollers erano bianchi poveri. Questi bianchi dovevano ingegnarsi per guadagnarsi da vivere, quindi si mettevano al servizio dei padroni di schiavi, pattugliavano le strade di notte e ti frustavano se ti trovavano fuori dalla piantagione senza un lasciapassare."

Nella sua emozionante performance Coleman Hawkins al sax suona la controparte maschile alla voce di Abbey Lincoln.
traduzione parziale delle note di copertina di Nat Hentoff

DRIVA’ MAN is a personification of the white overseer in slavery times who often forced women under his jurisdiction into sexual relations. Many overseers were also relentlessly brutal. In Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery (The University of Chicago Press), one former slave said: “They whupped the women and they whupped the mens. I used to work some in the tannery, and we make the whups. They’d better not leave a blade of grass in the rows…Or they’d whup ‘m running away, but not so hard if they come back of their own ‘cordance when they got hungry and sick in the swamps. But when they had to run ’em down with the …dogs, they’d fit in bad trouble.”

The “paterollers” (patrollers) that figure in the lyrics to DRIVA’ MAN were described by another former slave as men “who would catch you from home and wear you out and send you back to your master…Most of them there patrollers was poor white folks…Poor white folks had to hustle round to make a living so they hired out theirselves to slaveowners and rode the roads at night and whipped you if they catched you off their plantation without a pass.”

In this intensely expressive performance, Coleman Hawkins plays the male counterpart to Abbey Lincoln. Hawkins was intrigued by the work as a whole and stayed long after his own part was finished. He kept turning to Max Roach, commenting on the strong, bold melodies. “Did you really write this, Max?” Hawkins kep asking. “My, my!” Abbey Lincoln’s fiery strength and hard clarity were a revelation to me after having heard her on several albums which lacked definition. “I feel this,” she explained, “and I’ve also learned a lot from Max Roach in recent months about being me when I sing.” It is Coleman Hawkins who solos after Abbey’s opening. There was a squeak in this, his best take. “No, don’t splice,” said Hawkins. “When it’s all perfect, especially on a piece like this, there’s something very wrong.”

original liner notes by Nat Hentoff