I am writing this 40 years too early…..She wasn’t supposed to be gone. She was supposed to have her opportunity to have her full comeback, a true return to her glory. The type of comeback that would make all of her detractors shut up and recognize the greatness. But that wasn’t in the cards. We just didn’t realize that she would only be with us a short time, but thank God for the time that he did allow us to spend with his child Ms. Whitney Elizabeth Houston.

Past

At times like this, it is best to focus on the reason why Ms. Houston is important to us. For many, she is the woman who you grew up with. Her songs were so iconic and her influence was so far reaching that even now you can probably remember a major event that occurred in your own life during the release of “Run to You” or at the time that “Exhale (Shoop Shoop)” was released. Only a few people ever had the opportunity to come in direct contact with Ms. Houston, and an even smaller number of people knew the real Whitney Houston. I have heard that she was both extremely warm and had an amazing, down-to-earth sense of humor. You can see a display of both in the clip below.

In this clip die hard fan Quencie Thomas interviews Whitney. Whitney interacts so naturally with Quencie, as if they have been hanging out for years. The interview was arranged by MTV, but that doesn’t matter. Whitney still could have chosen to either decline the interview or to be standoffish. She chose to do neither.

There are no pretenses here, and she even touches Quencie’s hands and her back…….Who knew that Whitney loved to vacuum?

Whitney the Thespian

I loved Whitney as an actress.  In “Waiting to Exhale” she was so seamless and so natural as the girl waiting on a man who belonged to someone else to love her. In “The Preacher’s Wife”, she was just as convincing in a very different role, one in which she played wife, mother, and teased us with a friendship with a very handsome angel.

I was thinking about Whitney’s career earlier this week, and the thought hit me that even in her short time on Earth, Whitney worked with almost everyone (in the vein of heavyweights in the music and film industries).  As an actress she worked with both Angela Bassett “Waiting to Exhale” and Denzel Washington “The Preacher’s Wife”. There are hundreds of professional actors that would love to work with either Angela or Denzel, and Ms. Houston had the honor of accomplishing a major film with both actors. Skeptics would say that both of these opportunities were solely due to her star power and projected box office power. While I am sure that may have been part of the initial thought process with regards to casting, in the end Ms. Houston proved to more than hold her own in her roles. She never overacted or underacted, she was relaxed and convincing in her portrayals. It should also be noted that neither Angela Bassett nor Denzel Washington accept movie projects idly (which is why we rarely see Ms. Bassett on screen). They welcomed working with Ms. Houston, and that speaks well of Whitney’s character on set.

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It is with both extreme shock and sadness that we report that Ms. Whitney Houston has passed away. All this means is that her soul has passed from this Earth, and her soul is now at rest with the Creator.  Whitney, you gave us something that none of your detractors can take away. You gave us love, you made us dance, you made us cry, and you made us think. You truly paved the way for women in music, particularly women of color. Before your emergence, there seemed to have still been a sort of barrier that women, especially brown skinned women, could not fully cross. Yes, we already had Chaka, Patti, Tina, Gladys, and Aretha, but there was only one Whitney Houston. You served your purpose on this Earth, and now it is time for you to return home. God gifted you with a voice that was so good that it was often at times unbelievable. You will not be forgotten.

This is not the end of our recognition for Ms. Houston. Just like all of you, the Grown Folks Music family are all major admirers of both Ms. Houston and her music. We will collect ourselves and our thoughts, and we will supply a proper tribute.

Dreamer
Dreamer
Like a fool I thought
That it could be

Dream on
Dream on
Surely someone
Will understand me

Embattled with struggle and strife from the day she was ripped into this world, Etta James was knocked down time and again, but she never stopped fighting. She wore her battle scars with pride, for each one would bring her closer to the life she wanted.

The title track from her final album, The Dreamer, was a forgotten Bobby “Blue” Bland original before Etta dusted it off and gave it her own spin over a slithering, hypnotic groove. The whole album is a deep blue experience, with Etta fully exploring the darker hues of her voice, and her soulful performance on “Dreamer” deserves to be ranked among the finest recordings of her career.

Down the wrong way
On a one-way street
You’d think by now
I would have learned

I saw a little
Oh, but I learned even less
I only learned
I only learned to regret

By the time The Dreamer was released at the end of 2011, amid almost daily reports of Etta’s failing health, it had already been announced that it would be her final album; hearing a woman in her seventies, who would surely be leaving us within months, belt from deep within about looking back on a life of mistakes while still retaining a glimmer of hope for the future… The emotional power of that experience cannot be denied. It’s as though Etta recognized that depth herself—her vocals on this song are stronger, bluesier, more haunting than they had been in years.

The mighty Etta James was laid to rest yesterday. As fans around the globe mourn her passing, her music is reaching new audiences and longtime listeners are rediscovering her catalog. Since her death nine days ago, sales of her music have skyrocketed, launching three of her albums into the Billboard Top 100 and “At Last” into the Top 30 Digital Downloads as the most downloaded song of the week. Let’s hope The Dreamer doesn’t get overlooked in the shuffle. A fitting bookend to over 50 years of incredible music, it plays like a surprisingly intimate farewell letter from an old friend.

I’m going…
Oh, Lord, Lord, I’m gone…

Today, which would have been Etta James’ 74th birthday, we celebrate with the song that stands as her most enduring contribution to music: “At Last.”

1960′s At Last! was the album that gave Etta her true identity as a solo artist, and created massive crossover success that made her a household name.

The timeless title track has become a beloved classic known all around the world, from the smallest wedding chapel to the White House, and everywhere between. But many don’t realize just how genius Etta’s recording was.

The song was written for and originated by the Glenn Miller Orchestra in the 1940s, and had been a well-known standard for nearly 20 years before Etta took it on. The sweet, glowing melody, as written, is fairly straightforward and simple…and VERY little like anything that came out of Etta’s mouth in the studio.

In an excellent Time Magazine obituary, Richard Corliss wrote:

Lyricist Mack Gordon and composer Harry Warren, Hollywood’s most prolific hitmaker, had written the number for the 1941 Glenn Miller movie Sun Valley Serenade, but it was held for the following year’s Miller film, Orchestra Wives. Performed as a duet by Lynn Bari (who mouthed the words to Pat Friday’s vocal) and Ray Eberle, the piece has middling-to-good words and a stroke of genius in the opening few bars: Warren flattens “love” (“At last, my love has come along”) from a major to a minor chord. That one note darkens the tone from ecstasy to assonance, from the choir to the blues. [...] James ran with that poignant tone. The emphasis was no longer on I’ve-just-fallen-in-love but on What-took-so-long?, and Will “at last” last?

That approach to the lyrics made it perfect for Gary Ross when he directed the 1998 film Pleasantville, about two teen siblings who find themselves trapped in a 1950s sitcom where everything’s in black and white and the world is claustrophobically limited. As the two outsiders flesh out the lives of the other characters with new knowledge and experiences, things begin to fill in with color. After spending much of the movie in of drab monochrome, Ross builds a key sequence around Etta’s “At Last” as we see, for the first time, the whole screen bloom into vivid color. The result is something pretty special.

“At Last” had never been heard the way Etta did it. Her version was a wild revelation—jazz in its purest definition, a brilliantly original re-interpretation of an existing tune. She’s so sure of what she’s doing that she doesn’t even bother to establish the actual melody before decimating it—she stays true for the first three notes and then flies off into the stratosphere, no longer able to contain herself. Almost everything from there is completely her own, improvising an entirely new melody on the spot, around the chord changes the song was built on—the exact same method behind instrumental solos in every genre from blues to heavy metal to salsa.

Occasionally she touches on one or two of the original notes almost as a reference point more than anything else, but that’s about it. Etta found the heart of that song, crawled in, and rebuilt it from the inside out. And she did it with such confidence and style that now everyone thinks that IS the melody.

Nope.

If Etta or producers Leonard and Phil Chess could’ve had any idea at the time just how enduring her approach would prove, and how many times her version would be covered over the next five decades, they would’ve been smart to give Etta partial songwriting credit along with Warren and Gordon. The arrangement itself is knockout enough—positively regal, even. All these years, and still every heart in the room throbs at the heavenly swell of those strings. And to think that arrangement was written for the simple melody found on the original sheet music. Etta charged into the song like an explorer conquering an uncharted continent and fearlessly claimed it as her own. When you hear people sing “At Last” today, or even just hear people talk about it, they’re not talking about the song Harry Warren wrote in 1941. They’re talking about the melody Etta James invented.

Like turning the wheel of a kaleidoscope and finding whole new colors and images, Etta turned a simple standard over and over in her hands and shook out a spectrum of sound and emotion no one had dreamed was possible, and created something so stunning in its perfection that now, more than 50 years later, the whole world believes that’s how it always was, and there was never another before it. That is how gifted Etta James was not just as a singer, but as a musician.

Etta may not be here with us to celebrate this birthday, but her shining musical legacy will outlive us all.

The quote above was tweeted by Teena Marie the day before she passed away so unexpectedly at the age of 54.

Teena Marie leaves us with an incredible legacy of recorded music as well as being the successor in the landmark personal services contract case: Motown Record Corp. v. Brockert which changed the statutory minimum compensation for artists under contract.

Writing, singing, playing, producing Teena Marie did it all. Teena Marie has always represented to me what being a musician is all about. Her legacy goes much more beyond a good beat and a new dance: Teena was rappin’ in ’81 when all the experts said that rap was just a fad, like disco. Teena made many examine their pre-conceived notions about race, music and culture. The music that Teena Marie chose to express herself through wasn’t something she put on, she lived it.

Music is from the soul. We’ve been lead (quite wrongly) to believe that it something that we can see. You can’t. You can only feel it. Even music that is printed on the page is not music… it is only the idea/gesture of music, real music resides in the unseen.

It is in this place that the music/legacy of Teena Marie will live on in perpetuity.

Mary Christine Brockert, may you rest in peace.