Comin’ Down. Jackie Shane. 1963. Sue.
When Donald Trump announced, “There are only two genders,” on the occasion of his second inauguration into the Office of the US Presidency, he was only validating a long held bias in this country against nonconformists, championing a form of bigotry that, when joined to levers of official power, typifies rejection of personal freedoms by ceding essential human rights to the state. When Jackie Shane sang, “I’m coming down with a heartache,” she was ceding nothing, merely acknowledging what many of us already know to be true; with freedoms come the cost of loss and failure, often paid for with inordinately intense periods of stress and frustration, or, as Shane puts it, “I ain’t sick but I got a fever/blood pressure’s runnin’ high/pulse ain’t right/I can’t sleep at night….” Comin’ Down’s tone is impenitent, a defiance so deeply ingrained within the rhythm and blues/gospel experience that we sometimes forget how closely enjoined it is to marginalization, that chillingly segregationist dyn...