War & Peace Quote by Abbey Lincoln

Memory, here, isn’t a soft-focus montage; it’s a map of access and sacrifice. Abbey Lincoln starts with a detail that sounds almost quaint - no radio on the farm - then uses it to explain how culture actually traveled in midcentury America: unevenly, through cities, through chance, through the thin threads connecting rural life to the wider world. Chicago isn’t just a location. It’s shorthand for migration, for modernity, for the places Black music could circulate and be heard.

The sentence moves like a song itself: a wandering, conversational line that suddenly drops a heavier note. “I remember hearing the song” begins as nostalgia, but the parenthetical zigzags (“it must have been... ’cause...”) tell you she’s reconstructing the past the way working people do - from scraps, from landmarks, from what was missing. That missing radio matters. It frames the song as something earned, not ambient, and it hints at how formative listening could be when music wasn’t a constant stream.

Then the war enters and the temperature changes. Lincoln doesn’t dramatize it; she underplays it, which is precisely why it lands. “Three brothers” is an inventory, almost bureaucratic, mirroring how war turns families into numbers and deployments into facts you learn to say plainly so you can keep going. The subtext is that a song isn’t merely entertainment in that context - it’s a lifeline, a signal from the larger world, a private anchor during public catastrophe. Lincoln is locating music inside history, and insisting that listening was never separate from survival.