Consumer Guide Album

Does Anybody Know I'm Here?: Vietnam Through the Eyes of Black America 1962-1972 [Kent, 2005]
It's striking how deeply name artists and obscure strivers alike feel a war whose racial inequities they know in their bones. In order of appearance, my top half dozen picks on volume two are Tony Mason's "Take Good Care" ("Sometimes lying close to the dead"), the Temptations' "War" ("Friend only to the undertaker"), Melverine Thomas's "A Letter From My Son" ("'You know Evelyn who lives down the street?/I want you to tell her to meet me at our same old hideout'"), Inez & Charlie Foxx's "Vaya Con Dios/Fellows in Vietnam" ("And just like babies snatched from their mothers' arms/You give them a gun and you tell them to shoot/And I mean kill"), Martha and the Vandellas' "I Should Be Proud" ("He wasn't fighting for me/He didn't have to die for me/He was fighting for the evils of society"), and Funkadelic's "March to the Witch's Castle" ("For others, the real nightmare has just begun/The nightmare of readjustment"). B+