Tuesday's Musical Notes - "Black And White" (Three Dog Night)

Welcome to  the place for classic platters, intuitive insight, articles that astound, and all sorts of stuff you might be able to use in some context or another...it's Tuesday's Musical Notes!!!  (proper sound effect...choose your own, you have a great imagination!)  So glad you chose to join us on this last day of September.  Thank you so much for clicking on over!!!  

We hope you enjoy the diversity of music that is featured here each week as well as the rants, ravings, and remarks that accompany our trip into the ever changing landscape of musicdom.  We don't take lightly the  4000+ hits on the blog and over 70 email recipients each week! We realize that every Tuesday you choose to read The Notes or not...the choice is pretty much black and white...

"Black And White" - Three Dog Night from 1972's Seven Separate Fools

The story goes that aborigines in Austrailia qualify the temperatures in the winter by how many dingoes they sleep with to keep warm at night.  A cold night warrants 1 dog.  An extremely cold night will find them hunting for 2 dogs.  When it gets below freezing, well..that's a Three Dog Night....it is also the story of  how a band from the late 60's and early 70's derived their name.  The original formation of the band consisted of 3 lead singers that were backed up by organ, bass, guitar, and drums.   The band continues to tour in 2014 with 4 of their 7 original members and has an album of all new material planned to release as their touring schedule will allow them recording time.  

Radio stations were ablaze with the music of Three Dog Night in their most successful time period.  From 1968-1972, they had 12 Gold albums and 21 successive singles hit Billboard's top 40 with three of those going all the way to #1.  Each of these three featured a different lead vocalist, making Three Dog Night one of the most vocally diversified bands of that time.

 Vocalists are not the only way that Three Dog Night has defined diversity.  Since their inception in 1968, Three Dog Night has had 15 different band lineups and over 25 members.  Variety also sprang up from the songs that they recorded.  Rarely did any one in the band write their hit songs as they relied on a group of songwriters for their hits.  Today's 1972 #1 hit feature song is a perfect example of this reliance on others, as "Black And White" was written by David I Arkan and Earl Robinson in 1954 as a celebration of the desegregation actions that were being brought down by the Supreme Court.  As controversial as those decisions were, they pale in comparison to the cultural conflict that has been prevalent in our country for many years.

This past week, I read an article from Answers In Genesis that I found fascinating.  It's main premise...there is no such thing as race, other than the human race.  All of the differences we see in people can be explained by genetics and culture.  You can read the entire article here:

"Are There Really Different Races?" - Answers In Genesis

The enemy has consistently used the differences in people to drive wedges, when God obviously wanted the human race to get along.  This strategy is methodically used throughout history in fact to create some of the largest and bloodiest conflicts known to man.  Our modern era has taken perfectly good descriptive words like red and yellow, black and white, and twisted them into the nonsensical Native American, Asian American, African American, and Caucasian American.  Most of my friends, regardless of their genetic or cultural make up, were born in America...  Our enemies will use semantics such as this to divide our people, when our founding documents clearly say "We the people..." and "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness..."  (as an aside, you might notice that it is not a guarantee of happiness, just the protection of its pursuit...happiness is left up to the individual, not something granted by the government...)  

God has something to say about our differences as well...

The prophet Samuel was told to give the nation of Israel what the wanted...a king.  They desired to be like all the other nations and have a ruler over them.  God granted their wish even as they rejected His authority.  He knew what would be the outcome of having the nation's allegiance reliant upon a man.  The process of selecting the king fell to Samuel.  He was a great prophet and the last judge to lead Israel from the period of the Judges.  As Samuel followed God's leading, he found himself in the town of Bethlehem.  You can read the entire story here:

1 Samuel 16 - The Message

Let's focus on one specific area of this passage.  As Samuel is being introduced to the first of Jesse's sons, he immediately thinks he has found Israel's king based on the appearance of Eliab...but God had other plans...

⁷ But God told Samuel, “Looks aren’t everything. Don’t be impressed with his looks and stature. I’ve already eliminated him. God judges persons differently than humans do. Men and women look at the face; God looks into the heart.”

 

Saul was eventually selected to be the first king of Israel.  Not based on his culture or genetics, but by the heart that he had (at least at this point...)  God wasn't interested in the cosmetic look of Saul, He was invested in the character of the man who would rule over His people.  (Oh, that we would be THAT invested in the character of those that rule over us...)

As a challenge today, let us encourage each other to eliminate from our vocabularies words that are divisive...phrases that don't truly describe who we are or try to qualify us by our culture or genetic make up.  There is no such thing as race...other than the one in which we are all a part...the human race.  As a country we have too many other issues to work together to solve without the distractions of some who want to highlight our differences in a negative fashion.  We must look at people's hearts and character and work together to insure our unalienable Rights.  When we do this, the world will see a beautiful sight...a beautiful sight.

'Til Tuesday,

Serving HIM by serving You,

Randy