Artist:Ben Harper Hometown: Claremont, California Song: “Black Beauty” (from the 2020 film, Black Boys) Release Date: January 12, 2021 Label: ANTI- Records
In Their Words: “It was an honor to have been asked to write a song for this culturally vital documentary,” Harper said. “After watching Black Boys and discussing it in depth with [director] Sonia Lowman, I went immediately to work on composing ‘Black Beauty.’ I am old-school and still love getting players in a room together, so a production of this scale during a pandemic was challenging, with quarantine. I was fortunate that the incredible musicians in my circle have taken it upon themselves to become circumstantial recording engineers, and thanks to modern recording technology and some FaceTime sessions, I was able to work by sending tracks back and forth over the internet.” — Ben Harper
Artist:Annie Mack Hometown: Rochester, Minnesota Song: “Shadows of a Kingdom” Album:Testify Release Date: January 29, 2021
In Their Words: “Two years ago my daughter was fighting for her life, for her voice to be heard. No matter how much I loved her and wanted to go through it for her, this was her journey and beast to kill. And she did. I wrote this song for my daughter, but it’s really a love letter to all Black women, giving voice to the defining moments that we can use to step into our power and sovereignty.” — Annie Mack
Ma Rainey wants her Coca-Cola. The microphones have been set up in the Chicago studio, her small band have rehearsed and taken their places, the two white men who run the label have the needle ready to cut the acetate, but Ma Rainey won’t sing until she gets her ice-cold Coca-Cola. Everyone pleads with her, but she won’t relent. So two musicians are dispatched to retrieve cold beverages for her while everybody else just waits. It’s a small scene in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the new film adaptation of August Wilson’s 1982 play, but later Rainey (played with ferocious adamancy by Viola Davis) explains her reasons for delaying the session: If she has power, she is going to exert it. If she is going to let white men profit from her voice, she is going to exact as high a price as possible. Even if it’s just a Coca-Cola.
Despite populating its cast with musicians — including the brash trumpet player Levee (played by Chadwick Boseman in his final role) — Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is less about music than the business of music: how white businessmen exploit and quash Black talent, how Black men and women navigate an industry and a society that saps so much from them and gives back barely anything at all. To emphasize this point, director George C. Wolfe teases musical performances only to cut away and thwart our expectations. Rainey’s band, sequestered in the basement, talk about rehearsing more than they rehearse. When they do count off a song, Wolfe cuts to a different scene, and their performance becomes the soundtrack. When Rainey finally does perform for the camera, it’s late in the film, but the scene becomes all the more electric for all the anticipation Wolfe has stoked.
It’s a fascinating dramatic strategy, but one that created some headaches for Branford Marsalis, who not only scored the film in the style of 1920s Chicago jazz, but also crafted choreography and auditioned musicians. With barely a month to prepare, he wrote nearly two hours of music for the 90-minute film, knowing that Wolfe would only use a fraction of it. In fact, altogether there is only about 20 minutes of music in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Most of the film is given over to the sound of Black characters talking to one another, cajoling each other, joshing and joking, lying and pleading, delivering lengthy monologues — all of which is its own kind of music, especially coming from such an animated actor as Boseman.
Marsalis is a musician uniquely qualified to bring this era of Black music to life in a way that bridges the late 1920s and the early 2020s. He has spent his long and diverse career bringing the music of the past to bear on the present, first as a sideman in the early ‘80s for Art Blakey and Lionel Hampton and later as the leader of the Branford Marsalis Quartet. With jazz as his foundation, he has branched out into classical, Broadway, rock (Sting, the Grateful Dead), and hip-hop (Public Enemy). To each project — including music for Ken Burn’s Baseball miniseries in 1995 and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in 2017 — he brings a deep understanding of the attitudes and circumstances of previous eras of American popular music and lets them resonate in the present moment.
From his home in North Carolina, Marsalis spoke with BGS about finding a new appreciation for the music of that era, holding auditions from the other side of the globe, and re-creating 1920s jazz for a modern audience.
BGS: How did you get involved with this project?
Branford Marsalis: The director asked me to write the music and consult with the musicians, help with the choreography, and arrange the songs they were going to use in the movie. It was all pretty rapid. I was in Australia working on a project with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and that was in early May [2019]. And we had to be in the studio recording in the first week of June! It was not the kind of scramble I like, because everything is being done by telephone or by watching YouTube to hear musicians and hear singers. Not the normal audition process.
But it worked out. I just had to start, man. I didn’t think. To me, it’s like when you play football and the coach makes you do all of these run-throughs. No sane person likes practice! I had a good coach who said, practice is the place to think, and that’s why we keep doing the same things over and over again, so that when you’re on the field, you can just react. That to me is a very cool and very sound philosophy. All of my thinking is done before the gig starts. Once the gig starts, you have the faith that you have a vocabulary that’s good enough to get the job done.
What does all that entail? What goes into a project like this?
First, I had to find a singer to facilitate the process for Viola, and I had to write a song for the end of the movie. I would up writing two songs for the end of the movie, so George would have a pick in terms of style. I had to decide where we were going to record. I quickly decided on New Orleans, because a lot of the musicians there play outside and inside, whereas most musicians don’t play outdoors, especially with acoustic instruments. The sounds of their instruments don’t have an outside sound. The sound is different than it would be if you were playing in a street band or in a parade.
I wanted to get guys that still played in the style that had a feeling reminiscent of what it felt like in the ‘20s. So I called my brother Delfeayo, because he has a big band down there, and he put together a group of musicians for me. Some of them had a great vibe, but weren’t very good at reading music. But that was good. I kind of liked that. It gave the music a certain kind of urgency. Because these guys were scrambling. And panicked! So it had a certain kind of urgency that it wouldn’t have when you have a band full of readers who can read anything.
At what point do you start working with the actors?
That was the next part. When filming started, I met with them to make sure they physically look like they’re playing instruments. As kids, we all aspired to be in pop bands. We idolized those guys, so we had already visualized what it would be like to be on stage and do those things. But no kid dreams of being a jazz musician. No kid says to his mom and dad, “I want to be a jazz musician when I grow up.” And dad says, “You can’t do both!” So we don’t always think about what it would be like to play an instrument like the saxophone.
When people talk about it, they say, Oh, the saxophone’s so sexy, it’s so suave. But it’s not. It’s a very fucking physically demanding instrument, and if you let it, it will manhandle you. There were no saxophones in this film, but it’s the same thing with all of the instruments. There’s a physicality to playing an acoustic instrument. You can’t just be up there with your eyes closed, trying to look as sexy as possible. Because those horns will kick your ass. All of the actors did a really good job of representing physically what it’s like to play those instruments.
Chadwick Boseman was really good at that. His face transforms whenever he puts the trumpet to his lips.
Well, he was actually playing. That’s the point. The trumpet is one that you can play more authentically. It has three positions — combinations of three. You can learn that. The saxophone is crazy because you’re using all your fingers and you’re moving up and down. Chadwick developed good embouchure. His face transforms because the muscles in your face change when you’re blowing air into a little mouthpiece like that.
If an actor isn’t really playing, you can tell. He had to play, and Viola had to sing. Otherwise, the larynx doesn’t vibrate and it’s clear you’re not really singing. People see that, even if they can’t articulate it, and they know it doesn’t look like she’s singing. So everybody had to play. Everybody had to bang on the instrument. They had to be a physical presence.
You’re obviously writing in a style that reflects that era, but with the character of Levee, it’s an era that seems to be changing. How did you approach that historical aspect of the soundtrack?
The music should have an authentic sound. It should sound like the ‘20s, but I wasn’t really interested in faithfully recreating the ‘20s, because then it just becomes a kind of mimicry. I think you have to spend a lot of time immersing yourself in the sound and the style, and then you write. What it becomes, that’s what it is. I’ve been listening to ‘20s music for the last twenty years or more, but in this project I was forced to do a really deep dive. I was listening to ‘20s music from May 2019 until January 2020. A lot of the things that I wrote were based on things that I heard.
Were there any artists that stood out to you during that deep dive?
I locked in on two people: King Oliver and Paul Whiteman. After a couple of months I listened a lot to their music and their bands exclusively. I already had a sense of the ‘30s, and I knew that anything that Levee was going to be doing would be pushing everybody towards the ‘30s. It wasn’t about trying to invent some new sound of music that had never been heard before. It was about recreating a style that would have not been heard in 1927. For the song “Sweet Baby Let Me Have It All,” I used the feeling and the beat of a Jelly Roll Morton recording from the ‘30s called “Jungle Blues,” from his Red Hot Peppers group. It has this beat, and I threw in some horns and all that other stuff, and it fills in around this idea.
Was there any talk about using Ma Rainey originals or trying to recreate the scratchy quality of those early recordings?
It doesn’t make any sense to have a bunch of human beings in a room and make the song sound like a recording. Having them play together in that room would have sounded like what it sounds like in the movie. It would have sounded very different from the recordings. The recordings were so primitive. Everything is mono, and the musicians had to strategically place themselves in distance to the microphones. It must have been fascinating to be in the room with musicians turned in different directions, saxophone players facing the wall. You had to have a perfect sound, because you had at best two microphones. Usually it was only one.
All of the sound from all of those instruments is going into that one mic, so you had to strategically place the musicians in the room to offset. They didn’t have gobos and baffles and all those things they would develop once the recordings became more sophisticated. I think it would be very strange to see a bunch of people in a room and suddenly the singing starts and the playing starts and it becomes a mono recording with scratches. Because it would not have sounded like that. The thing that’s most interesting about those early mono recordings is how you hear the music is not actually how it sounded.
I was limited in a lot of re-creating because of what August Wilson wrote in the play. If you listen to the original version of Ma Rainey’s “Black Bottom,” there are clarinet players, a couple of trumpet players, a trombone, a guy playing wood blocks. There are all these sounds. But this is a play, not a musical. August Wilson wrote for a band with coronet, trombone, piano, and bass. That was it. That’s all I had, so it was like writing for a string quartet rather than a full orchestra. I was limited by that reality, and the arrangements had to reflect that.
How did this project change the way you understand or appreciate the music of this era?
I didn’t really know how great it was. Everybody calls it the Jazz Age, and everything focuses around illegal booze and chicks drinking and dancing and female independence and all these things that had not existed prior to the Volstead Act [the 1919 law enforcing Prohibition]. Most drinking was done in saloons that were like Burger Kings — they were bars that were owned and operated by the people who sold the booze. They were men’s clubs. Women were excluded. Once they passed the Volstead Act, the mobsters were like, Oh, shit, everybody can drink!
So jazz was the music they chose, and that’s what people think about. When I was listening to hundreds of songs from the ‘20s, I was listening to oratorios, comedy sketches, comedy songs, small group songs, big bands songs, string quartets. It struck me as funny how when the society was more socially primitive, there were so many varieties of music and so many ways of expressing. And now as we’ve become more socially advanced, the music becomes more stratified and more limited.
Everything is so stratified now. You can listen to a radio station that only plays the shit you know. That was unheard of in the ‘20s. They played everything, and you could hear everything. That was in the middle of a period when America was in extreme segregation, but you could hear things as diverse as Paul Whiteman’s band or Ethel Waters, Louis Armstrong. There was such a variety, and there was a level of excellence, because you couldn’t overdub back in those days. You didn’t have AutoTune. So everything you heard had to be really good, because there was no way to fix it in post-production.
There’s that great scene where they’re trying to record the kid with the stutter, and they’re throwing out all these ruined acetates, one after the other. It does such a nice job of dramatizing that idea.
There was no such thing as post-production. It was just production. If the kid fucks it up, the recording is destroyed. And that’s costing [the white label owners] money, and they’re pissed off. They don’t really like Black people. Ma Rainey understands that, and in turns she doesn’t like them. And she’s determined to have it her way. At that time in our country, there were not a lot of possibilities for Black performers to play in front of a white audience, and the white audience was the target. Black people couldn’t even come into the same theater as white people.
All of these things were a part of the time that Levee lived in, and his motivation was about ameliorating the shame and the pain of the things that happened to his family when he was a boy. All of his dreams are dashed, and as so often happens in real life, people have a grievance against a thing and they often take that grievance out on the people they’re closest to. Shit, you change the accent and get rid of the swear words, and you could say that this was a Shakespeare play: conflict, rejection, anger boils over, an ending you don’t expect.
Photos of Branford Marsalis: Eric Ryan Anderson (top) and Palma Kolansky (bottom)
This week The Show On The Road is bringing you an episode from another podcast we think you’ll really like! This episode of Under The Radar features the truly fantastic Oakland-based artist, Fantastic Negrito.
Under The Radar is a monthly music podcast by host and producer Celine Teo-Blockey. She’s a music journalist who writes for the longtime indie music mag, also called Under the Radar. She interviews indie songwriters and independent artists, going deep into their childhood memories and the musical milestones that have helped shape their most recent albums.
Committed to giving voice to a diverse host of artists, her guests have included gender non-conforming, Native American singer-songwriter and Black Belt Eagle Scout, Ezra Furman (who also crafted the soundtrack for the popular Netflix show Sex Education,). Other guests include Scottish band Travis and Caroline Rose, who started with an earnest country sound and evolved to electro-pop. The whole series is sound-immersive, using archival tape, field recordings, and music from the back catalogue of these artists.
Under the Radar will be back with new episodes in March 2021 and has some great guests lined up, including Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips and Emmy the Great, a Hong Kong-born British singer-songwriter.
Subscribe to Under the Radar wherever you get your podcasts to catch up on their first season and get ready for what’s to come in 2021.
After decades writing and performing incredible music, soul icon Don Bryant has earned his first Grammy nod in 2020. This past Juneteenth, the veteran bluesman released his newest album, You Make Me Feel, on Fat Possum Records. Nominated for Best Traditional Blues Album, the record is nothing less than a physical incarnation of rhythm and blues.
The project is also aptly titled, as Bryant’s work imparts a gamut of feelings and emotions — love and joy most predominantly shine through the timelessness of his voice and story. With production and arrangements reminiscent of an old soul record, the simplicity of the music is on display in a recent Tiny Desk (Home) Concert by Bryant. Backed by only an electric guitar and a pianist, the songs fly out of the speakers with unbridled power and emotion.
A decorated songwriter, Bryant holds deep connections to the roots of such powerful music, singing life into just about anything. With only the first few notes of this performance you’ll be entranced! Listen to You Make Me Feel wherever you get your music and watch Bryant’s Tiny Desk (Home) Concert below.
When it comes to modern blues, Shemekia Copeland is at the top of her game. Uncivil War, her newest release on Alligator Records, offers a number of topical songs, ranging from gun rights (“Apple Pie and a .45”) to LGBT affirmation (“She Don’t Wear Pink”). Yet as the album progresses, she delivers a few straight-up blues songs like “No Heart at All” and “In the Dark” that could have fallen anywhere in her decades-long career — or found a home with the generation of blues artists that inspired her. Throughout, her voice is strong, drawing you in to hear firsthand what’s on her mind.
Recorded in Nashville with producer Will Kimbrough, Uncivil War gives Copeland a chance to clearly speak her truth. From the historical narrative of “Clotilda’s on Fire” (with an electrifying guitar solo from Jason Isbell) to the philosophical title track (which features acoustic all-stars Sam Bush and Jerry Douglas), Copeland consistently comes across as persuasive, but not abrasive. The message of one of the album’s finest moments, “Walk Until I Ride,” is indeed empowering — but the fact that she needs to walk in the first place is not lost on the listener.
“You know, being angry doesn’t do us any justice,” Copeland told NPR in October. “I spent my time being angry and pissed off and mad about it. But at the end of the day, you know, that just doesn’t help anything.” That determination to channel her emotions into her music paid off in 2019 as she picked up multiple wins in the Blues Music Awards and Living Blues Critic’s Poll on the strength of her prior release, America’s Child. Since 2000, three of her albums have also received Grammy nominations.
In the weeks ahead, BGS will feature a two-part interview with Shemekia Copeland, where she reflects on the influence of her blues musician father, Texas legend Johnny Copeland, as well as the statement she’s making with Uncivil War. (Read part one here.Read part two here.) Author and journalist Alan Paul, who conducted these interviews, also provides us with the BGS Essentials playlist for November Artist of the Month, Shemekia Copeland.
Artist:Yola, with Brandi Carlile and Natalie Hemby on backing vocals, Sheryl Crow on piano, and Jason Isbell on guitar Hometown: Bristol, England Single: “Hold On” Release Date: October 9, 2020
In Their Words: “‘Hold On’ is a conversation between me and the next generation of young black girls. My mother’s advice would always stress caution, that all that glitters isn’t gold, and that my black female role models on TV are probably having a hard time. She warned me that I should rethink my calling to be a writer and a singer…. but to me that was all the more reason I should take up this space. ‘Hold On’ is asking the next gen to take up space, to be visible and to show what it looks to be young, gifted and black.” — Yola
In the winter of 2019, bona fide soul man Jerry “Swamp Dogg” Williams made his return to Nashville after nearly 50 years away from Music City. His aim was to cut a new record, and a slew of artists joined him in collaboration, chief among them guitarist Jim Oblon, singer/songwriter Justin Vernon, and the late great John Prine. The music that came from those winter sessions feels like a time machine right back to the late 1960s.
The album, titled Sorry You Couldn’t Make It, is a shade more country than Swamp Dogg’s other material, but his warm, rough voice wears his many years on its sleeve, allowing him to sit comfortably in the common core of soul, country, and blues. Portions of the album have moxie for miles while others hold abundant sincerity and sadness. NPR’s Fresh Air reviewed one song, “Sleeping Without You is a Dragg,” which was joined by two other selections from other artists classified as beautiful, comforting songs. A reminiscent sound ties the whole record together beautifully.
A Noisey mini-documentary about the star-studded recording sessions for Sorry You Couldn’t Make It shows humorous, casual, behind-the-scenes moments from the album’s creation. While Dogg had the bad luck of the COVID-19 lockdown slow its rollout, don’t let this music slip through the cracks of your social media timelines!
This week on The Show On The Road, a conversation with Nicole Atkins, a singer/songwriter out of Neptune City, New Jersey who has become notorious for making her own brand of theatrical boardwalk soul.
The Show On The Road host Z. Lupetin fell in love with Atkins’ newest, harmony-rich record, Italian Ice, which came out spring 2020 and was recorded in historic Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Both rumblingly ominous and joyously escapist, standout songs like “Domino” make the record a perfectly David Lynch-esque summer soundtrack of an uneasy 2020 scene that vacillates between fits of intense creativity and innovation and deep despair. Toiling below the radar for much of her career, Atkins is finally enjoying nationwide recognition as a sought-after writer and producer; Italian Ice was co-produced by Atkins and Ben Tanner of Alabama Shakes.
While some may try to shoehorn Nicole Atkins into the Americana and roots-rock categories, one could better describe her as a new kind of wild-eyed Springsteen, who also mythologized the decaying beauty of New Jersey’s coastal towns like Asbury Park, or a similarly huge-voiced, peripatetic Linda Ronstadt who isn’t afraid to mix sticky French-pop grooves with AM radio doo-wop, ’70s blaxploitation R&B and airy jazz rock like her heroes in the band Traffic. If you watch her weekly streaming variety show, “Live From The Steel Porch” (which she initially filmed from her parents’ garage in NJ, but now does from her new home in Nashville), you’ll see her many sonic tastes and musical friends gathering in full effect. Italian Ice features a heady collection of collaborators including Britt Daniel of Spoon, Seth Avett, Erin Rae, and John Paul White.
After playing guitar and moving in and out of hard-luck bar bands in Charlotte and New York — many of which that would find any way to get rid of their one female member — Atkins’ bold first solo record Neptune City dropped in 2007 and three more acclaimed LPs followed, including her twangy, oddball breakout, Goodnight Rhonda Lee in 2017 on John Paul White’s Single Lock Records.
Much like the tart and brain-freezing treat sold on boardwalks around the world, Atkins’ newest work is a refreshing and many-flavored thing and demonstrates that, in a lot of ways, the show-stopping performer, producer, and songwriter has finally embraced all the sharp edges of her personality.
When Bettye LaVette sings “I Hold No Grudge,” she brings the weight of all her years to it. The 74-year-old vocalist draws out certain notes, delivers certain lines almost in a speaking voice, as though she wants to show us how difficult, but also how essential, it can be to let things go. “Deep inside me there ain’t no regrets,” she declares, “but a woman who’s been forgotten may forgive but never, never forget.” She draws out that second “never” to underscore its harsh finality, to remind you that she’ll live with the memory of this slighting forever.
“I Hold No Grudge” has never been merely a song about romantic betrayal — not when Nina Simone recorded it for her landmark 1967 album, High Priestess of Soul, and not when LaVette recorded it more than sixty years later. This new version sounds like it’s addressed to anyone who stood in LaVette’s way so many years ago, in particular those executives at Atlantic Records who saw fit to shelve her debut album in 1972 without so much as explanation, much less an apology. That decision crushed her and thwarted her promising career. “That’s exactly what it is,” says LaVette. “I probably have some grudges, but they aren’t big enough to make me stop. I’ve not been defeated. I’m extending the olive branch once again.”
“I Hold No Grudge” opens her latest album, Blackbirds, which collects her interpretations of songs made famous by Black women in the 1940s and 1950s, including Dinah Washington, Ruth Brown, Nancy Wilson, and Billie Holiday. She calls them “the bridge I came across on,” referring to that era between big band blues of the 1940s and rhythm & blues of the 1960s, when these artists were pushing popular music in new directions.
With a small band led by producer-arranger Steve Jordan, LaVette runs through deep cuts like “Blues for the Weepers,” a song first sung by Ruth Brown (and later made famous by Lou Rawls). It’s a song dedicated to “all the soft-singing sisters and torch-bearing misters,” she sings. “They just come to listen and dream.” She understands that we go to songs now for the same reasons we did sixty or seventy years ago: to find sympathy and solace, but also to find a way forward, perhaps some promise of a better life.
The most familiar tune on Blackbirds is likely “Strange Fruit,” popularized by Billie Holiday ninety years ago at Café Society in New York City and covered by countless singers ever since. As a result it’s difficult to make the song sound new and urgent, yet LaVette manages to do just that. Against her band’s dolefully trudging rhythm, she tilts the melody forward just slightly, as though pulling us toward some horrific destination, and she shreds the syllables of the song’s climactic declaration: “Here is a strange and bitter crop.”
That middle word is frayed almost beyond recognition – “stra-ya-ange” – to make the song’s metaphor sound tragically real. LaVette recorded it nearly a year ago and was startled when it became so heavily relevant again. To hear her sing “Strange Fruit” in 2020 is to be reminded that the injustices so many Americans are protesting — the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many other Black men and women — are not new or specific to the current era.
In the second installment of our Artist of the Month coverage, LaVette talks about growing up with a jukebox in her living room, giving these formative artists their due, and how Paul McCartney fits into all this.
BGS: This record is rooted in the history of popular music. Can you tell me about this particular period and what it means to you?
LaVette: People — especially white people — they throw “rhythm and blues” and “blues” together a lot. And now today, they’re throwing “rhythm and blues” toward young blacks and young whites who want to sound black. When people talk about rhythm and blues, they go back about as far as Etta James, but these women are the bridge that Etta came across on as well. Rhythm and blues was a music that came from blues, of course, and from gospel. When people ask me the difference between “blues” and “rhythm and blues,” I always tell them that you can cry to blues, but you can dance and cry to rhythm and blues.
It’s a short bridge, from about 1948 or ’49 to the burgeoning of Atlantic and Motown’s rhythm and blues, which was about ’61 or ’62. That’s when I came along. We took away the saxophones and added more guitars. We took the blues guitar and sped it up and put it in our tunes. The people who took us from the late ‘40s into the early ‘60s are rarely mentioned, and that’s why I chose this group of women.
I didn’t even know there were Black women who sang, other than Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge. And then, hearing LaVern Baker and Ruth Brown and Little Esther, I don’t know whether it gave me hope or whatever, but it really surprised me. I didn’t know that women who sung in such a bawdy way even existed.
When did you first hear these women?
When rhythm and blues came about, that was when I was young and I was dancing. That was when I was coming up and my sister was a teenager. We had a jukebox in our living room in Muskegon, Michigan, which is where I was born, and it had all the current tunes of the day, which my sister played daily when she got out of school. They were all rhythm and blues songs. You know, they weren’t into jazz — they were either blues or rhythm and blues songs on the jukebox. And gospel and country-western, no less. At one point, my favorite singers used to be Doris Day and Dale Evans.
Wait, you had a jukebox in your living room?
My parents sold corn liquor in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Muskegon was extremely segregated, so if you wanted a drink after dinner or after work, you had to come by my house. These were homes that had been built for the soldiers returning from the Second World War. So they were theoretically projects, but they hadn’t started making them out of brick yet. They looked more like barracks, and everybody’s house was just alike.
It was living room, dining room, small kitchen, two bedrooms, and a bathroom. My parents sold corn liquor and chicken sandwiches and barbeque sandwiches. There was no gambling. Nobody could cuss but my mother. But they could get shots and pints and half pints. And the jukebox was there in the living room where most people’s couch probably was. I was about 18 months old when I learned all the songs on the jukebox — all of them.
How did you choose the songs for this record?
I keep several files. Or, I should say, my husband keeps them for me. I’ve got all kinds of files. I’ve got a country and western file. I’ve got a strictly George Jones file. What I do is, I offer my label two or three ideas based on these files, and they tell me which one they like best. So I have some ideas that I like, and that way I don’t have to take their suggestions. If they find one they believe in and are willing to spend money on, I’ve got the songs already in.
I had this file here of standards, some of which I had done when I did little gigs in places around, just me and a keyboard player. Some of them, like Nancy Wilson’s “Save Your Love for Me,” I had done in other venues that most people haven’t seen me in, because they didn’t come where I was. A song like “I Hold No Grudge, which I heard eighteen years ago, it’s been in my file since then. I thought, if I ever get a chance to do that kind of album, I will do that tune. I wasn’t going to throw it away.
When did you discover that song?
I was living in Detroit, and I was getting my hair done. Usually in Black salons, there’s a radio on that plays Black music, and this song came on. I had never heard it before! And because Detroit is one of the places where I can pick up the phone and call whoever is playing whatever it is and I’ll know them, I called them up and she told me it was Nina Simone. And I said, well, if I ever get the chance, I’m gonna record that tune. That was eighteen years ago.
Just a few years ago I performed at a party for David Lynch, the movie producer, and this gentleman came up to me and said, “I loved your performance. My name is Angelo Badalamenti, and I do all the music for David Lynch’s films.” My husband, who loves David Lynch’s films, was ecstatic. Angelo says, “I have a tune. Years ago, I used to work with Nina Simone, and I wrote this tune for her that I think would be perfect for you.” I said, “What’s the name of it?” “‘I Hold No Grudge.’” I said, “I know you aren’t going to believe this, but I’ve had plans to do that tune for the last fifteen years!” So when I got the opportunity to do this album for Verve, I got in touch with Angelo and sent it to him, and he said he could hear Nina listening to it, closing her eyes, and saying, “Yeah, she got it.” Of course that made me feel very good.
Another song I wanted to ask you about is “Strange Fruit,” which seems sadly very timely right now.
But it just became timely! When we recorded it back in August, it was one of the oldest tunes on the album. And then all of this mess broke out, and the tune became timely! But all of this wasn’t going on when we recorded it. That’s not why we recorded it. We recorded it to fill in the Billie Holiday slot. While we were waiting for the album to come out, all of this happened. And it was just timely — as if we went to look for a tune to describe what’s going on now. So it’s bad that it’s timely — it’s awful that it’s timely — but it’s timely.
I knew the tune had not lost any of its power, and I knew I had to do it completely different from Billie. I’m blessed to work with Steve Jordan because he doesn’t hear these songs the way they were originally recorded. He hears them the way I sing them, because his age is closer to mine. He was born and raised in Harlem, and he grew up with these rhythm and blues tunes. He knew that I wanted “Strange Fruit” to be terse and sad and black and dark, and when we finished recording the music, I said, “Steve! I didn’t want it to sound exactly like they’re standing by the tree playing this song,” but it does. It’s just haunting. That’s the thing that makes Steve so important to me.
The outlier on the album is your interpretation of the Beatles’ “Blackbird.” What made that song fit this project?
The reason that I chose it — and I chose it for the title — is because many Americans don’t know that Brits call their women birds, and Paul is talking about a Black girl that he saw standing up on a picnic table singing one night in a park. He’s talking about a Black girl singing and I thought that that would just be perfect for it.
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