Danyel Smith - Shine Bright : A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop

My love of music is intense. My commitment to it is steadfast. This project is an attempt to figure out why.

When I talk about Black women in musicat colleges, on my Black Girl Songbook show, to my husband, my friendsits normal for me to weep. My voice breaks, Im looking up because my eyes are brimming. Someone hands me a tissue. Its dramatic but its real. There are no reasons.

Im asked, Why does Tina Turner matter? Why is Mary J. Blige important? and my answers are passionate and learned because I want credit to be given where credit is due. I weep because I want Black women who create music to be known and understood, as I want to be known and understood. For so long, little that I have accomplished has felt quite mine. When folks show me love, like at a party celebrating my birthday, those glowing candles, lighting up my face, look like doom. Ive spent a careeras a reporter, editor, producer, author, hostspeaking to Black women who feel the same. But we all love music. Please read this the way Martha Wash sings it in 1990s Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now): the music is my life.

It goes back to my ashy-knees era. My climbing-plum-trees era. The 1970s in Oakland, California. Me in two long braids and a key on a ball chain around my neck.

Why speak, now, on those Kodachrome days? Because behind my picture-day smiles is a lust for loudness. I go to therapy because I still clench my fists when receiving feedback. I still smell the Vitapointe vat, and eggs frying in oleo. Hear a bus braking out front? Its a reminder that I dont need a boyfriend to, as Aretha Franklin sings, go someplace far. Recorded music? That I chose, or turned up, or turned off? Back then, it was a bright and rare thrill, up there with holding a sparkler. I liked to sing school songs with my school friends, but the real songs, on the radio or on the record player, were breathtaking. Most of the time they were sung by adult Black womeneven when they werent.

Played by my mother on a boxy portable with the speaker in the top, my earliest favorite records were 45s. We didnt have a stereo system with turntable, amplifier, eight-track player, and standing speakers. And as my mother didnt yet drive, my sister and I didnt hear a lot of radio. On the portable we listened to a lot of Jean Knights Mr. Big Stuff, and King Floyds Groove Me. My sister is a blur of hazel eyes and overalls. My mother is haze itself, and she is the DJ.

A granddaughter of Louisiana, my mother may have been responding to the fact that Knight, Floyd, and producer Wardell Quezergue all hailed from New Orleans. Both Mr. Big Stuff and Groove Me were huge pop hits, loved by millions of Americans, and listeners around the world. Both songs were recorded on the same day in 1970, in a Mississippi studio, in the very same session. I didnt know what horns were on Mr. Big Stuff, but I liked them. And the background singers had me from the first Oh-oh ye-ah.

Id expect the line to arrive, and it would. Oh-oh ye-ah. They sang it the exact same way each time. I wanted the song to go on longer than its two and a half minutes. And when the arm with the needle floated into the shiny blank part of the vinyl, I wanted to hear it again. This itch is in every wise definition of pop: young people want it over and over.

Most of the recorded voices I heard when I was a kidlet were men singing alto and soprano, vocal ranges associated with women. From Eddie Kendricks to Frankie Valli to Philip Bailey, it was the age of the falsetto. It was also the age of me riding a Big Wheel, and reading our neighbors Archie comics. Unless I saw a man singing I pretty much assumed a woman was singing. At the age of, say, six, I could not believe that the person singing Ill Try Something NewI will build you a castle / With a tower so high / It reaches the moonwas a man called Smokey Robinson, with his group of Miracles.

My brain backflipped. First of all, what names! Smokey on a man and not a bear. And why was Smokey the Man singing like a woman? Surely he had his own male voice. I did like the song, though. There was talk of playing every day on the Milky Way. But I needed more rhyming and stories and promises of fun.

I got it in morning care at Bella Vista Elementary, where my mother dropped us before her shift as an admin in the dental area of the county hospital. I was one of the free-ish breakfast kids, a gnawer of cantaloupe, down to the rind. Our morning-care teachers taught us to sing the Stylistics Betcha by Golly, Wow, Sammy Davis, Jr.s The Candy Man, and B. J. Thomass Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head. In memory, these teachers are soft. They smell like themselves. I cant recall their race at all.

We kids held sticky hands and sang. The vibrations in my body flowed through to my friends. We saw approval in the faces of our teachers when we were in unison on a series of notes: Write your name across the sky / Anything you ask Ill try. I literally had no idea what I was singing about and did not care. When we sang, the happiness was as intense as any Id felt.