Take Me To The Shack
- Larry "Jai" Johnson
- Mar 31, 2016
- 5 min read
It is said time and time again that music and art are synonymous. The idea being that they do the same thing or have the same effect on a person. I don’t know exactly how true this is but there is a particular piece of art that references a certain song that has an effect on me that no other piece I have ever come across in my life, and I have seen a lot of art, has done. “Sugar Shack” by Ernie Barnes is the painting that I am speaking of. I first saw this painting during the opening title sequence of the hit sitcom “Good Times” in the seventies. I was only mildly interested in art at the time, but heavily into cartoons. I thought the show was going to be a cartoon about Black people. The image slowly panned across the new little color T.V. screen in our den/dining/playroom/my bedroom as I sat crossed legged on the floor. I recall feeling my body shifting trying to keep up with the rhythm that my eyes perceived to be moving the bodies in the painting. I didn’t understand the operations of composition or warm versus cool colors. I did not know that Barnes intentionally elongated the figures to keep the viewers eye moving around the canvas. I didn’t care that the lamp that cast light down slightly to the left of center is designed to feature the four central figures with expressions of pure bliss on their faces, while their hips thrust in alternating directions, which created the visual movement that imprinted the rhythm in my mind, it didn’t matter why it moved me, it moved me. And just like that the show started and J.J. Evans entered stage right to canned applause. I would have to wait a whole week to see the painting again, which seemed an eternity for an eight year old boy.
Then someone brought Marvin Gaye’s “I Want You” album in to our house, and there it was again. “Sugar Shack” right on the album cover. We owned it. At a time when I could imagine owning Basquiats, Warhol’s, or Picassos was the height of art collection; there was no more valuable work of art in the world to me. I had been exposed to the great Renaissance masters by this time during art appreciation in school. None compared to that one piece by Barnes. The romantic offerings of Monet were sugary sweet with their pastel hues, but not nearly as sweet as the thick thighs in burnt sienna at the Shack. That scene activated passion in my pre-pubescent psyche there before unknown to me. I felt the heat in the crowded room full of gyrating bodies. I could smell the drifting clouds of cigarette smoke and sweat soaked t-shirts and loose fitting dresses that clung to the hips and breasts of some many different hued sisters and brothers. As I listened to Marvin’s title track “I Want You” holding the album cover in my hand, I mentally left our multipurpose room in search for that space where they got down. I wanted to be there. I wanted to dance with them, to bump and grind, snap my fingers as we threw our hands high over our heads while the band grooved on the right side of the room, with Marvin, in a hot red two-piece suit crooning into the microphone so smoothly. The music brought the painting to life and the painting brought the song to me.

“I Want You” begins with conga drums beating an ancient message through a synthesized filter mimicking time materialized, then a haunting refrain “La–la la la–“, respond back to the drums and they fuse and opens a spiritual door bidding me “Welcome” through the speaker, inviting me into that room. I am just inches away the dance floor casing the walls looking for a partner to get on the floor with. I did not know what desire for a woman was, but I could see the effect of that desire Marvin sang about in the faces of those brothers in the “Shack”. I could feel deep down in my soul the yearning to be close to and entangled with that sinewy lady in the red dress, whose face was upturn displaying indifference due to being lost in her own rapture of music and movement. I aspired to have the kind of cool that Barnes painted on to those brothers. Their S-curved backs, low swung arms, snapping fingers and a casual dip in the knees embodied the horn section of the song. Then there is this one cat. His arms are flung high over his head, as if Marvin was an old school M.C. on the stage directing him to “Wave your hands like you just don’t care!” The Sugar Shack is that kind of place, a place where care is not admitted.
Once I became of age I began going to nightclubs practically every week. I spent the majority of my young adult life trying to get to the “Sugar Shack”. The image became a metaphysical place for me, a state of mind that was physically out of reach. Olivia Newton John sang about discoing to Xanadu in the 80’s, but my Utopia was the “Sugar Shack”. There were few nights in the club that did not include the hopes that everyone would be on the dance floor and there would be just the right amount of light cascading down upon us to reveal vividly colored clothing covering syncopating figures engaging in lustful grabs at hips of opposite sexed individuals lost in a personal paradise as on lookers from the balcony devoured the visual feast. I have looked for that sister in a blue skirt to hike it up just so, not obscenely, just trying to get a little more room to strut her stuff and shake her thang. The “Sugar Shack” brought the allure of red, blue and yellow sundresses on chocolate bodies, bald heads, sleepy eyes and blue jeans to me in a way only rivaled by the whaling guitar, moaning background vocals, and sultry bass line of “I Want You”. The painting and the song are intertwined in my memory. I cannot see the painting and not hear the song, nor can I hear the song without vividly conjuring the image of the painting in its fullness. The unbridled joy expressed in the painting and the melancholy fused passion of the song blend to make me want to be there, to be at the Sugar Shack.
Today clever music executives market their new releases to film and television projects hoping to net instant attraction and online record sales. I am not aware of a direct intent of cross-promotional strategy for Ernie Barnes and Marvin Gaye, I don’t even know if the two men knew each other prior to the licensing of the art to album, but the combination of that scene and that sound, I can not be alone, when I say it was perfect. Years later Motown celebrated its 25th-year anniversary. Michael Jackson introduced the Moonwalk to the world, but I was most satisfied with a live interpretation of “Sugar Shack” by the Alvin Ailey Dance Company set to “I Want You”. I sat as the music swelled, as it had done every time I heard it before, then curtained opened to reveal those beautiful, strong, bronze,
chocolate, caramel and butterscotch dancers perfectly posed as the figures from the painting. They began to come to life as I had imagined many times since I first focused my eyes on that little television screen twelve years earlier. The choreography was blended with the music just as the colors of oil merge together hiding the beginning of one brush stroke and the end of another. The dancers moved there bodies effortlessly across the stage and around one another, just as I envisioned Barnes pushing and pulling his brushes across the canvas. I was transfixed all over again. Then just as sudden as it began it end with all the dancers taking positions exactly as the Ernie Barnes had painted them. It was sublime and is forever etched on my heart.
Comments