GARLAND JEFFREYS : A Singer-Songwriter Resolves Cultural Conflicts in His Life

An explanation is in order when Garland Jeffreys sings the lines, “I was afraid of Malcolm / Just like any white man.”

The reference, of course, is to Malcolm X, who these days is even a greater hero than Martin Luther King Jr. to many African-American musicians.

Yet the singer-songwriter is still not sure how he feels about the slain black nationalist. The thing is, Garland Jeffreys has a mixed heritage. “My mother’s black and Puerto Rican, and my father is black and white.”

Jeffreys, 47, embodies many of the same cultural conflicts that roil in America’s metaphorical melting pot.

As a songwriter, he’s been addressing the matter since the early ‘70s. But the recent resurgence of black consciousness heard so dramatically in rap music has stirred some of his internal confusion anew. On his new album, “Don’t Call Me Buckwheat,” his messages about racism are aimed at blacks as well as whites.

“When I hear certain things that a band like Public Enemy will express in terms of their black power point of view, they strike a chord in me that I feel is true,” he said. “(But) I’m not going to be black at any expense. . . . Black culture and black roots are terrific and it’s great that kids are tracing their roots, but the thing that bothers me is they’re doing it at the expense of integration. They’re doing it as isolationists.”

The multiculturalism is reflected in Jeffreys’ music too. The album expands on the reggae-soul-rock hybrid that Jeffreys--a bandmate of pre-Velvet Underground Lou Reed when they were students at Syracuse University in the early ‘60s--first explored with his critically lauded 1973 album, “Ghost Writer.”

What sets this album above Jeffreys’ earlier efforts is the sense of hard-earned satisfaction and contentment. He’s still at war with the world’s inequities, but he’s at peace with his own cultural complexities.

“It’s taken quite a while to learn to live with me,” he said. “But I’ve kind of reconciled my differences, and would like to see some other people reconcile theirs too.”