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File: This is BEATRIFUL Sessions. Every beat, beautiful.

Host: No Finer Hour. SizzleC, seven songs on a Supreme Court justice. <break time="0.5s" /> And in the second chair, from Michigan, attorney Nathan White, who went to law school at Wayne State.

Nathan: Glad to be here. Somebody has to check his dates.

Host: Why him?

Sizzle: Because somebody had to. <break time="0.6s" /> I sat down with the man's life and wrote seven songs blind. <break time="0.5s" /> No outline, no help. Just the facts and a drum machine.

Host: Who was he?

Sizzle: A lawyer's son from Sand Beach on Lake Huron, up in Michigan. Judge in Detroit, mayor in the Depression, the last American governor of the Philippines, governor of Michigan, Attorney General, and nine years on the Supreme Court. He died at fifty-nine, engaged, a month before the wedding. Seven songs, and I still left things out.

Nathan: Harbor Beach, if you look for it on a map today. Sand Beach was the old name.

Host: What is the sound?

Sizzle: Every song opens in the sound of its own chapter, then it switches hard into Detroit tech house. <break time="0.5s" /> A fiddle, a blues piano, a Manila guitar, a union hall, a church organ. <break time="0.4s" /> And then the kick drum arrives like a verdict.

Host: The title?

Sizzle: His own words, from a case called Falbo, nineteen forty-four: the law knows no finer hour than when it cuts through formal concepts and transitory emotions to protect unpopular citizens against discrimination and persecution. I could not beat that sentence, so I named the album after it.

Nathan: Falbo versus United States, nineteen forty-four. Lawyers quote that line at each other when they want to sound brave.

1 · Sand Beach

Sizzle: Song one. A boy on a harbor wall, counting freighters, and his mother calling him in. <break time="0.5s" /> Irish fiddle, because the family was, and a woman's voice, because somebody has to call the boy in. <break time="0.4s" /> Then the road runs south.

[song 01 — 01-sand-beach-take1.mp3]

Host: Mary Brennan. Real?

Sizzle: His mother, by name. <break time="0.4s" /> The harbor wall and the freighters are mine. <break time="0.5s" /> A lawyer's son in a lake town in eighteen ninety-eight had to be looking at something, and it was not his phone.

Nathan: Mary Brennan is on the record. So is the captain.

Nathan: He came home from Germany a captain and went to London and Dublin to read law. The song has the order right.

Host: And the captain's bars in Germany?

Sizzle: Record. Captain, American Expeditionary Forces, occupation army. <break time="0.5s" /> Then London and Dublin to study law. <break time="0.4s" /> The man took the long way back to Detroit, and so does the song.

2 · Garland Avenue

Sizzle: Nineteen twenty-five. A Black doctor buys a house on Garland Avenue in Detroit, and the neighborhood comes over to object. <break time="0.5s" /> A man in the crowd is shot dead. Everybody inside the house is charged with murder. <break time="0.5s" /> Clarence Darrow defends, and the judge is a thirty-five-year-old named Murphy. <break time="0.4s" /> Barrelhouse piano, a muted trumpet, and then the record shows.

[song 02 — 02-garland-avenue-take1.mp3]

Host: Your chorus is let the record show. That is not a hook, that is a court reporter.

Sizzle: It is the most Detroit hook I have ever written. <break time="0.5s" /> A fair trial in a city that did not want one. <break time="0.4s" /> The first jury hung. The second tried Henry Sweet alone, and twelve white men said not guilty. <break time="0.5s" /> Nobody else was tried again.

Nathan: Two trials. The second jury took Henry Sweet alone and acquitted him, and the rest were never tried.

Nathan: The song is right, which is annoying.

Host: Two trials in one verse.

Sizzle: Songs are a compression business. <break time="0.5s" /> So is the law, they just bill more for it.

3 · Relief Line

Sizzle: Nineteen thirty-one. A hundred thousand people out of work in one city, and the new mayor is Frank Murphy. <break time="0.5s" /> This one is Detroit street rap, because a breadline in Detroit should sound like Detroit. <break time="0.4s" /> Bouncy dark piano, punchy eight-oh-eights, a man who punched a clock for eleven years and now stands in a line.

[song 03 — 03-relief-line-take1.mp3]

Host: Is the worker real?

Sizzle: He is everybody. <break time="0.5s" /> The committee is real: churches, unions, private citizens, food, clothing, even a lawyer if you were being evicted. <break time="0.5s" /> The mayors from coast to coast are real too. He got them all in one room, and then he went to the White House to say what a city needs.

Nathan: He also ran the first United States Conference of Mayors, out of Detroit.

Nathan: The man could not see a room without organizing it.

Host: Which is?

Sizzle: Not a banker's creed. <break time="0.6s" /> It is in the song. I am not reading the whole thing twice.

4 · Malacañang

Sizzle: The chapter everyone skips. <break time="0.5s" /> Nineteen thirty-three to thirty-five, he is the Governor-General of the Philippines, living in Malacañang Palace on the Pasig river. <break time="0.5s" /> In May of thirty-five the tenant farmers rise, the rifles answer, and in his last days in the job he asks for the jailed men to be let go. <break time="0.5s" /> A Filipino serenade on nylon strings, a woman's voice, and then the drop. <break time="0.4s" /> I spent twelve years in Manila myself. I owed him this one.

[song 04 — 04-malaca-ang-take1.mp3]

Host: Let them go. Did they?

Sizzle: He asked. The record says he asked. <break time="0.5s" /> What I know for sure is that his house in Harbor Beach is a museum now, and it is full of what he brought home from the islands. <break time="0.5s" /> A man does not carry a country home in a trunk unless it got to him.

Nathan: Last Governor-General, first High Commissioner. He asked for the jailed farmers to be released on his way out the door.

Nathan: Most people skip the Philippines. Noted that you did not.

Host: And the palace?

Sizzle: Still there. <break time="0.5s" /> I started a company a few streets from it. He got the palace, I got the phone bill.

Nathan: Objection. Relevance.

Sizzle: Sustained. <break time="0.4s" /> Play the song.

5 · The Guard Faces Out

Sizzle: Winter, nineteen thirty-seven. The men at Fisher Body in Flint sit down inside the plant and will not leave. <break time="0.5s" /> Forty-four days. <break time="0.4s" /> The governor has had the job for about a week. <break time="0.5s" /> Boot stomps, hand claps, a harmonica, men chanting. Then it goes industrial.

[song 05 — 05-the-guard-faces-out-take1.mp3]

Host: The title. The Guard faces out. Explain it.

Sizzle: General Motors wanted the National Guard to clear the plant. A judge ordered it cleared. <break time="0.5s" /> Murphy sent the Guard, and pointed them at the street, not at the door. <break time="0.5s" /> He would not sign the eviction. He kept both sides at the table until there was one page with the union's name on it.

Nathan: A circuit judge ordered the plants cleared. The governor declined to enforce it.

Nathan: Law students argue about that one for a week. The strikers had the plant for forty-four days.

Host: The stew through the window?

Sizzle: Record. A diner across the street fed two thousand men through the windows. <break time="0.5s" /> The hinges and the bottles on the police are record too. January eleventh. <break time="0.4s" /> They called the police bulls. I did not write that, Flint did.

6 · By Its Name

Sizzle: December, nineteen forty-four. The Supreme Court upholds the internment of Japanese Americans, six to three. <break time="0.6s" /> Justice Murphy writes the dissent, and in it he uses a word no justice had ever put in an opinion before. <break time="0.5s" /> Racism. <break time="0.6s" /> A Hammond organ and a choir, because you do not rush that word. <break time="0.4s" /> No jokes on this one.

Host: Nathan, read us the sentence.

Nathan: I dissent, therefore, from this legalization of racism.

[song 06 — 06-by-its-name-take1.mp3]

Host: The chorus quotes him.

Sizzle: Word for word. <break time="0.5s" /> I dissent, therefore, from this legalization of racism. <break time="0.6s" /> And the ugly abyss of racism, that is his too. <break time="0.5s" /> All I added was the choir and the kick drum, and he would have objected to neither.

Nathan: Six to three. <break time="0.5s" /> He was one of three who said no, <break time="0.3s" /> and the one who named it.

Nathan: The word stayed off the Court's pages for twenty years after that. He put it there first.

Host: You are sure about the first use?

Sizzle: The record says first use of the word in a Supreme Court opinion, that day, in two opinions. <break time="0.5s" /> Then the word disappeared from the Court for twenty years. <break time="0.4s" /> He wrote it down, and it waited.

7 · No Finer Hour

Sizzle: The last song is July, nineteen forty-nine. Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. <break time="0.5s" /> A wedding set for the next month that never happened. <break time="0.5s" /> Ten thousand people walked him through the city, and then they took him home to the Huron shore. <break time="0.5s" /> A funeral hymn, piano and strings, and then the brightest tech house on the album, because that is how I want to be buried too.

[song 07 — 07-no-finer-hour-take1.mp3]

Host: They called him the Saint.

Sizzle: Felix Frankfurter did, and he did not mean it kindly. Too much heart, not enough law, the clever men said. <break time="0.6s" /> History kept his name on a courthouse in downtown Detroit. <break time="0.4s" /> It kept Frankfurter's on the footnotes.

Nathan: Henry Ford Hospital, July nineteenth, nineteen forty-nine. Fifty-nine years old.

Nathan: They buried him at Harbor Beach, by the lake. The Saint went home.

Host: Where does the album end?

Sizzle: Where it began. The lake. <break time="0.5s" /> A lawyer's boy watching the freighters, and the word he wrote still making its claim.

Close

Host: Seven songs. What did you get wrong?

Sizzle: Ask a lawyer. <break time="0.5s" /> I kept the dates, the places and his words. The breadline worker, the woman at the window and the boy on the wall are mine, and I have said so. <break time="0.5s" /> If you want the whole man, read the dissents. <break time="0.4s" /> If you want to dance to the short version, I am right here.

Host: Nathan. Did he get your man right?

Nathan: Close enough that I am not filing anything.

Host: Nathan's lines in this conversation were written for him and spoken by a voice built from his recordings, with his okay.

Host: No Finer Hour.

Sizzle: The album, the covers and the videos as they finish are at beatriful dot com. <break time="0.4s" /> Court is in session.

File: This has been BEATRIFUL Sessions. Every beat, beautiful. Find it all at beatriful dot com.