Civil rights singer to visit Purdue

Megan Finnerty
Features Editor

Some men talk and only make sounds.

Some men just sigh and speak volumes.

This second type of man will be at the Boiler Room, of all places, at 7:30 Sunday night.

As part of a tour taking him from Minneapolis, Minn., to New York and all the places nestled between, Mason Jennings will bring his folk-flavored, jazz-infused songs to West Lafayette in support of his independent sophomore album, "Birds Flying Away."

The album is one of political, social love songs. Jennings captures the misunderstood and sometimes peaceful ambitions of the Black Panthers; the non-violent suffering protest of Martin Luther King Jr.; and the quiet angst of a small town woman consumed by the railroad man she longs to marry.

Jennings is convincing and heartbreaking when singing of King’s peace and of the realization of the American dream, but when he sings of the woman he’s in love with, he’s breathtaking.

In "Ballad for my One True Love," Jennings croons "Sweetheart, this is my dream come true/God bless the babies that sleep in you/Sleeping in a motel room/Underneath a silver moon."

"That line was from when I fell in love with my girlfriend, and I woke up one morning and was so in love I just had to get it all down, those feelings," he said. "And that’s what that is; it’s being in love."

When he opens his mouth and cries out, listeners hear how he cares for his subjects, how he loves them enough to sing of them. When he shouts, scat speaks and testifies in powerful bursts of truth, audiences of college students, children, and grandparents believe him.

That is why his legions of his home-town fans send him Christmas cards, letters, countless CDs and tapes, random stuff and about 40 e-mails a day. "Writing back all those e-mails was stressing me out," he said. "You don’t want to write the same thing to the same person twice by accident."

It all started when he pressed his eponymous first album; he put his home address on the packaging. He shopped it around to 100 record companies and was rejected across the board. So he turned around and sold more than 10,000 copies of "Mason Jennings" out of the back of his van.

That’s when the letters started pouring in, along with the book and movie recommendations, the professions of love and then the recording offers from all those companies.

After that, the get-well cards showed up at his apartment.

Jennings contracted mono, his body rejecting the late nights playing at smoky clubs and the stress of paying for and arranging the design, production and sales of his second CD.

For the weeks he was bedridden, his mind filled with images of big black birds, and when he became well, he saw them flying away. Hence the name of the CD.

"It’s very Zen," he said.

Lying in bed for weeks, Jennings read some of the books his devoted fans had suggested. Some were about civil rights leaders and the groups supporting them.

"When I was younger, my parents were non-political people and they encouraged me to not write about those things," he said. "But I thought people should write about the Black Panthers in a non-violent way. They said a lot of positive things, but people never really focus on that. I grew up in fear of them in Pittsburgh and this was a way to show that they were about change for the better."

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Features editor:
Megan Finnerty

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