Umar Bin Ha**an - Introduction to “Up South in Akron 1959” (by Bill Adler) lyrics

Introduction to “Up South in Akron 1959” By Bill Adler “Up South in Akron 1959” is a fairly natural outgrowth of my friendship with Umar Bin Ha**an, which now goes back 20 years. I first met him in 1993, when I worked independently to publicize Be-Bop or Be Dead, a wonderful album he'd released under his own name on Bill Laswell's Axiom label. Of course, I'd been a fan of the Last Poets, of which Umar was a charter member, since the early Seventies. Not only were their records mainstays on the house system at the hippie record store in Ann Arbor where I earned my rent, but one of their most incendiary songs, “Wake Up n******gs,” graced the soundtrack to “Performance,” a contemporary film I loved a lot that happened to star Mick Jagger. Four years after Be-Bop or Be Dead, when I was running a little spoken word label called Mouth Almighty, we had the honor of releasing a new album by the Last Poets. It was called Time Has Come. There's plenty of reason to love Umar for his work as a Last Poet, but I've been lucky enough to get to know him personally, and I'm here to tell you that he happens to be a world-cla** conversationalist. I've been nagging him for years to set down into book form the wonderful stories that he spins out so casually only to dissolve into thin air. These days Umar's living in Baltimore with his daughter and his grandson, but we got together for lunch at a little Japanese spot here in Manhattan about a month ago. For no particular reason, he launched into a reminiscence of his days as a child shoe-shine boy in Akron in the Fifties. As ever, he was captivating. But this time I had a new idea about how to capture one of Umar's stories in more permanent form. First, I badgered him to send me his story by email, which he did, in pieces. Then, with Umar's approval, I stitched the pieces together. Then I reached out to a gent to whom I'd only recently been introduced, Ed Piskor, the cartoonist who's been creating the epic, multi-chapter “Hip-Hop Family Tree” for the last several years. Ed told me he dug Umar's story, but that previous commitments would keep him from turning his attention to it for quite a while. Instead, he recommended that we work with a young Pittsburgh-based cartoonist named Nate McDonough. Sure enough, Nate was ready to go. The finished product begins on the very next screen. And, by the way, Umar's got a million of them just waiting to be put into comic strip form.