Cor Terrae

Earthy Rhythms.

Taken at the Met. Note not only the drum and dancers, but the guy to the right dancing with serpents, an ecstatic practice found from ancient Southern Italy to the American Southwest and even to the snake dancers of 20th-century Pentecostalism.

In my late 20s, I started studying the drumming techniques, rhythmic patterns, songs, and dances of Southern Italy associated with the Black Madonna, and twenty years later, I’m still entranced.

I practice several days a week in Central Park, in the Ramble, famous for its beautiful woods, gorgeous birds, that crazy white lady with Black birder Christian Cooper, and post-twilight gay sexcapades (you know you’re old when, upon seeing condoms littered on the ground, you grouse, “Take your trash with you!”). I’ll sit on a rocky escarpment or in a clearing and play, lost in this musical form of worship that dates back to when the Black Madonna was known by another name, Cybele.

On Greek-style pottery crafted and discovered in Southern Italy, you can see musicians playing a similar drum, holding it in the same way, and in the Vatican Museums, it’s easy to find Greco-Roman urns with similar imagery. Obsessed with these cultures since childhood, I’ve spent countless hours going over each shard, each shattered sculpture, each chunk of marble, decoding the stories carved over 2,000 years ago.

As I play in the park, I notice that certain types of people stop, enchanted, and others hurry by, heads down, or occasionally glance at me but quickly look away if I make eye contact. Children always stop dead and begin to move, even toddlers dragging their parents closer to me. People of color begin to dance or smile or give me the thumbs-up. Foreigners tell me the rhythm is like where they’re from. Sometimes any of these people sit down near me as I play, eyes closed, swaying to the beat; I often don’t even notice them until I stop.

White Americans? Those are the ones who avoid. So locked down is the general white American that anything which stirs something primal in their bodies and they beat a harried retreat. The notion of whiteness in the U.S. has robbed people of historical wisdom and ancestral vitality only to replace it with an insipid draught of “culture,” often nothing more than an opposition to the mores of Black/Brown people and/or an adherence to vague nazism as a cultural identity.

Oh, America.

Recently, I found a fantastic drum maker in Puglia, Quinto Drums, and my tammorra arrived last week. This is the classic Black Madonna drum, and here’s a clip of me playing it for the first time.

For more Black Madonna fun, join me, along with Perdita Finn and Clark Strand, on a pilgrimage to the Black Madonna of Loreto in Italy next fall. For information and registration, click here and join the party.