ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the story of Brown Baby as it passed from Oscar Brown Jr to the choir of Jim Jones's doomed Peoples' Temple, to a folk record by an English band regularly accused of endorsing fascism and then to a best-of album by the ber-hip European robo act Ladytron. Brown Baby suggested that its intertextualities of the Harlem Renaissance, mythic abundance, and spiritual song itself all awaited their incipient real-world actualization. The Peoples Temple Choir was the well-liked public face of the communist, Christian-based religious movement of Reverend Jim Jones. The ensemble comprised a rotating multigeneration, cross-racial cast of touring musicians. The importance of such divergence from Brown Babyspecifically in racial and religious dimensions becomes important to the larger political context of Death In June. This core of Brown Baby has endured with curious strength and adaptability throughout the songs strange life, death, and rebirth.
