Erykah Badu: The First Lady of Neo-Soul

By Joel McIver

Erykah Badu stands at the forefront of a whole new genre of music. Before Macy Gray, Alicia Keys and Angie Stone, Erykah was bringing the unique sounds of neo-soul - the classic vibes of Motown and Stax smoothed by Jazz and toughened by Hip-Hop - to the people. quite simply, there is no other artist like her.

Joel McIver's biography is a detailed and enlightening look at one of the world's great performers, accompanied with photographs, which forms a typically insightful appreciation of her magnificant music.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Omnibus Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780857124494

Book preview

Introduction And Acknowledgements

Depending on when you’re reading this, the 21st century is now at least three years old, and it’s a strange time for popular music. Almost every strand of it has undergone a shake-up in the last decade or so, with the new faces of rock, dance, metal, punk, funk and even plain old pop being so interchangeable that it’s hard to tell where one ends and another begins. The latest genre to shed its skin and acquire a ‘neo’ prefix is the warmest and sweetest of all – soul – and at the very forefront of this polished new hybrid stands one artist, a Southern beauty with the voice of an angel, the intellect of a professor and the wisdom of someone three times her age.

Welcome to the story of Erykah Badu, which is an unlikely tale of someone who came from unglamorous roots but chose to go back to them, someone who knows full well the inspiring highs and crushing shallows of public opinion and someone who became known not just as an entertainer but as a prophet and innovator. Getting to know the doe-eyed woman behind the music isn’t easy: on the one hand, she’s never seen a reason to hide anything about her background, but on the other she seems to have an eerie knack for leaving interviewers with the impression that they’ve heard much but learned little. Perhaps it’s her almost supernatural self-confidence – and perhaps it’s best that way.

This book explores the background that made Erykah who she is, the events that brought her to the public’s attention and the enormous surge of popularity that took her to the very apogee of popular music. In doing so, I believe it also reveals much about our society, our inspirations and ourselves. Keep your mind open, and enjoy the ride.

Doing her justice was no easy task, though – and it would have been an impossible one without the help of a lot of people. Like Erykah herself, those who know her best are warm, generous and pretty damn talented, and I salute them. My unlimited thanks go to the following for their help with this book:

Thor Christensen, music critic at the Dallas Morning News, who kindly permitted me to reproduce his articles from the DMN.

Chris Bell, recording engineer for many fine artists, including Badu.

Emmanuel Gillespie, who gave Erykah an early break.

Erykah’s cousin and collaborator Robert ‘Free’ Bradford, for his time and efforts.

James at Colon Online (www.colononline.com).

Gillian Clayton at the excellent fansite dedicated to Erykah Badu at www.anieclayton.freeserve.co.uk.

Vicki Meek, manager of the South Dallas Cultural Center.

Rose Glenn, for her thoughts. Good luck with all your plans – Erykah is privileged to have fans like you.

Thanks as always to: Andy, Daryl, Tim, Jack, Jake and the other inmates at Record Collector magazine, Iain, Michelle, Laura and Penny at Sanctuary, John and Jen, Babs, Billy, Dan ‘Blades’ Travis, David, Arline and Lily, Simone, Woody and Glynis, Johnny, Lucy and Henry, Phil and Kate, Christian and Anita, the Bossmann-Everitt generations, Ben and Lorraine and Quinn ‘Soul Boy’ Harrington. Love to Robin and Dad-you’re both good men.

Love to Emma – what doesn’t kill us has certainly made us stronger.

Joel McIver

September 2002

Got a comment? Contact the author at www.joelmciver.co.uk.

1 Steeped In Soul

The lights go down, and there is a moment of hushed silence.

The eight shadowy figures on the stage start their song quietly, with drums and organ beginning a gentle groove and ushering in guitar, bass and percussion. It’s a funky but subtle jam, with two backing singers picked out by a spotlight at centre stage, and though their voices are flawless it’s hard to hear what they’re singing, so perfectly do the words complement the music. After a minute, however, they pick it up a little and a chorus starts to stand out: ‘Badu… Badu… ’ they’re crooning, and the atmosphere in the auditorium suddenly feels a little more electric. In another minute or two, the crowd are on their feet. Something is about to happen.

Slowly, without any fuss, a figure appears from the shadows at the back of the stage. She’s small – hardly more than 150cm (5ft) tall – and with the dimensions of a child, it seems; but she holds herself with absolute assurance. The glowing tip of an incense stick protrudes from beneath her wide-brimmed hat, and as the singer reaches the front of the stage, the audience recognise her face.

There’s a white candle in a metal holder, placed on a small table near the microphone. Erykah takes the incense stick from her mouth and touches it to the wick. After a second, the candle bursts into flame.

The show has begun.

There’s nothing particularly unusual about the North Park district in Dallas, except perhaps for the fact that it has no park. It’s a small neighbourhood, maybe only 400m square (¼ mile square), with one or two shops but no high school, although there is a grade school for young children, and for still younger children there’s a ‘K through 6’ (kindergarten up to sixth grade, for 4- to 11-year-olds). It’s a predominantly black community surrounded by white neighbourhoods, a different situation to that of South Dallas, where most of the city’s black population lives. Take a walk down any of the streets and the impression you would get might be that North Park isn’t a wealthy community, but it isn’t a ghetto either. There are few signs of urban decay and you can hear sounds of activity in the houses as you walk past.

There’s one old house, set a little way back from the street, with more activity going on than the others. Think of a typical residence in the South – use Gone With The Wind as a reference if you like – and then imagine this house, with a big wooden front porch, a yard at the back and the front. It’s in moderate condition: not freshly painted, but nor is it dilapidated. As for the atmosphere, it usually possesses an air of peace that befits its owner.

But not today. It’s a special occasion and, while the children of the family (of which there are many) are normally told to stay in the room at the back of the house, leaving the front rooms for the older relations, today they seem to be everywhere. Walk a little closer and you’ll see that attention is focused on the parlour, where the sounds of a piano can be heard. This isn’t music as such – it’s more the sounds of someone hitting the keys irregularly and excitedly, hoping for something approaching a tune to emerge as a result. Look closer still, and all is revealed. There’s a toddler dressed in a red cowgirl outfit, sitting on a cushion on the piano stool, striking the keyboard and commanding her audience in imperious tones. ‘Sing!’ she demands. ‘Sing, y’all!’

The date is 26 February 1973, and Erica Abie Wright is two years old today. If you don’t believe in omens, now might be a good time to start.

Erica’s mother, Kolleen Gipson-Wright, and her father, William Wright Jr, moved house often when their children were small, although they always remained within the limits of Dallas. Kolleen was an actress, appearing on stage in local theatres, and was respected for her talents. These were complemented by a self-assurance that had possibly been inherited from her mother, Thelma, who had worked as a school counsellor. Kolleen’s profession might not have been the most lucrative in the world – or the most reliable – but it gave her the chance to devote her time between performances to her two daughters, Erica and Koryan (nicknamed Koko), who were born in 1971 and 1974 respectively. (Kolleen later bore a son, Eevin, in 1983.) Unfortunately, her husband William – who everyone referred to as ‘Toosie’ – was less dependable: it’s known that he was often absent and that he spent time in jail for unknown misdemeanours.

In the early to mid-1970s, the demands of Kolleen’s job and the uncertainty of Toosie’s presence meant that the Wright sisters spent a lot of time at the North Park house belonging to their maternal grandmother, Thelma Gipson. They enjoyed themselves there, within the protective circle of their family, and Thelma – along with Toosie’s mother, Viola, with whom she was firm friends – was at pains to ensure that they were shielded from the stress that Toosie’s extended absences entailed. ‘He wasn’t around very much, not nearly as much as he should have been,’ Viola later said. ‘Much to his regret, and mine, too… [We] tried to keep them busy with constructive things,’ she added, ‘so they wouldn’t miss him so much.’ Not that they needed to keep them busy so much: like all children, the two girls ran around the garden, sang songs and played games without an apparent care in the world.

In 1975, however, Toosie decided to make a permanent exit and left his wife and children. Little is known about the circumstances of his departure, although he would resurface over two decades later and bond successfully with his eldest daughter. Although the impact on Kolleen and the other adults of the separation is bound to have been profound, Erica was barely aware of it, it seems. ‘I never knew him, and I don’t know much about him,’ she later told Vibe magazine. However, when she herself became a mother a couple of years after that, her attitude towards Toosie’s behaviour refocused slightly: ‘I haven’t had the nerve to ask him why he wasn’t around. Until I became a mother I felt nothing, but when I did, I felt it all… all of my mother’s anger and disappointment,’ she said, making it clear that Kolleen had suffered deeply at the time. Like many children who are too young for a parental separation to make an emotional impact at the time, she had never felt the rejection that her mother had experienced: ‘I never understood why she was so mad,’ she added. It was with an adult’s capable point of view, which can weigh up variables, that she ultimately decided: ‘He brought me into this world and I’m grateful for that, but I’m disappointed because he was not a responsible person.’

One welcome consequence of Toosie’s departure was the subsequent closeness that developed between Erica and her mother, to the extent that she would later say, ‘My mother is my best friend. She’s always supported me, been there for me, gave me everything I ever needed, and if it was any different, I would say the same thing.’ Some of this may come from the practical advice her mother gave her – (‘I always [said], Pretty is as pretty does,’ said Kolleen. ‘What matters is on the inside, not what you look like… After that, she just naturally blossomed into the beauty that she is’) – but also from the fact that her mother never shirked from keeping her daughter aware of discipline and the importance of rules. ‘My mother used to say I had a smart mouth because I would say everything that I knew. She’d say stuff like, I’m twenty-five, you’re five. I been here longer than you. But I remember getting up in the morning and doing what I needed to do and feeling very responsible for myself.’

Perhaps the most important trait that the young Erica inherited from Kolleen was a desire to perform. This had manifested itself as early as the piano session she led on her second birthday, and would develop with almost prodigious rapidity long before her father left. In line with this was a need to control her life, which was expressed when she refused to settle into nursery school: ‘I went from my house, where I was the boss of all my toys and my little sister, to a classroom, where I couldn’t boss no one,’ she recalled. ‘I said, I need to go somewhere where I am in more control.’ It’s a measure of the strength of the Wright family circle that they were able to absorb this development (which must have been something of an inconvenience, meaning that Erica had to be looked after in the daytime), and that the child displayed no negative characteristics because of this. In future years, one of the most striking aspects of Erica’s world-view would be the security she felt was provided to her by her family and extended relations. Something was done right, it seems, in these formative years.

The combination of the need to perform and the desire for control is not unusual. Psychologically, it make sense for anyone who needs to express themselves for the benefit of others to want that expression to be competent and accurately executed – especially, say, for a theatre actor or live musician, who knows that one performance is all they have. To ensure that the performance is delivered correctly, a degree of self-control is required and, to ensure that the listeners or viewers respond correctly, the performer must know which emotional buttons to press in them. In other words, a good performer will be controlling the audience, which is an unpredictable entity with many possible responses.

Of course, Erica knew none of this as a child. She just knew that she wanted everything to go the way she wanted it – hence her command to sing at her party. Kolleen, an actress, must have noticed this characteristic in her young daughter and seen herself in Erica – but mothers always realise that their children can only be controlled to a finite degree, usually learning to be deeply patient in the process. Erica herself would learn this when it was her own turn to be a mother.

The performing bug had taken hold of Erica by the time she was four years old. Viola (whom the children called ‘Ganny’) remembered Erica’s earliest attempts to convince an audience to watch her: ‘A lot of times, she only had one in the audience,’ she later commented. ‘And that was me! But I had to sit up and take notice.’ This implies that the child was both grabbing her attention and entertaining her at the same time, a manifestation of the need to control and the need to perform. Whether acting a part or singing a song, the impulse was the same – even at this early stage – and Erica’s desire to be seen and heard took a step to another level when she appeared on-stage alongside her mother at the Dallas Theater Center in 1975. Although details of her role and the play she appeared in are now sketchy, it’s something that she and her family still remember with pride, and remains no mean feat, since the venue is a full-sized professional auditorium.

In line with her acting abilities, Erica had started to absorb the music she heard, and to reproduce it herself. Kolleen was a fan of the music of Marvin Gaye, Chaka Khan and Stevie Wonder, and would play their songs for her daughters, both of whom learned to sing and dance along with them. And this was no childish fancy: Erica in particular was quite clear in her head about what her role should be. ‘When I was little,’ she said, ‘I used to stand in front of the mirror and pretend I was a background singer for Chaka Khan’ – a surprisingly sophisticated ambition for such a young child. Her favourite artist was and remains Stevie Wonder, whose inspired albums from the 1970s became nothing less than a way of life for her. The music of Gaye, Wonder and Chaka would merge into a kind of sensory life-force, and at times she felt as if the songs were blending into a single, primal sustenance: ‘I emulated those people growing up, and I still have a deep connection to them – there are millions and millions of atoms of their music within my music,’ she would later muse. But her musical tastes would soon spread further than these three seminal artists. As she later told Soul Express, ‘My major influences in music are Stevie Wonder, Chaka Khan, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, a lot of jazz musicians [and] soul musicians, like classic soul, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, you know. People like that. People that were able to bring out emotion in people… Bob Marley.’

As music began to fill her life, Erica started to practise singing. Her favourite childhood ballad was the classic ‘The Greatest Love Of All’, a soaring tune that her family loved and that exercised her youthful vocal cords to the limit. It wasn’t long before she found that her vocal skills and passion for music complemented those of her cousin Robert Bradford, who was three years her senior and one of the children who would often come and play with the Wright sisters at Ganny’s house. The pair would sing together for the family, and they soon started to try to write songs together as well.

Robert remembers those days well: ‘It was a happy time, man. We were just the babies running around, we didn’t know whose father was whose and whatnot. I don’t know why Toosie left, I think he was just young.’ He also recalls that his young cousin would always hold fast to her beliefs, no matter what the issue was – perhaps this was the result of being the product of two generations of strong women. To this day, Erykah remembers her mother’s strength, saying that, ‘My sister and I became an extension of her power,’ and acknowledging the straitened circumstances that her mother had endured throughout her life with the words, ‘She didn’t fall prey to a lot of the addiction and a lot of the abuse that most of her peers did.’

It’s apparent to this day how important a role the women of the Wright family and their extended relatives played in the raising of Erica. She always acknowledges them all whenever she needs to give thanks in public, and has made a point on several occasions of mentioning the female dominance of her childhood. ‘There were really no men around in my family. Just uncles, cousins, younger men, but mostly older women,’ she said. She has also often spoken of her belief that she has five mothers: ‘My mother, her best friend my godmother, my two grandmothers, Mother Nature. You know, it’s just me and mothers.’ Elsewhere, she elaborated on this by saying that the first mother is her birth mother Kolleen; that the second is her godmother, Gwen Hargrove, her mother’s best friend; the third is Thelma, her maternal grandmother, whom Erykah remembers as being a strict but loving woman; the fourth, Viola, who introduced her granddaughters to religion and matters of the spirit, and, last, Mother Nature, who ‘taught me how to cry, how to breathe, how to build, how to destroy when necessary, who bakes me with the sun and who makes me all who I am’.

Perhaps the five-mothers theory is best understood by likening each to a strand of Erica’s personality. Kolleen obviously provided her daughter with her love of music and her ability to perform. Her godmother, Gwen Hargrove, was also an enormous influence on her, taking the raw need to play to an audience that Kolleen had implanted and developing it: as the goddaughter would later recall it, laughing: ‘I grew up with my godmother. She’s an artist too, a director, and an actress. Every summer she had a programme where she would put on one-act plays. I was always in them, and I would always get the lead roles – not because I was her goddaughter, but because I was good. The other kids would just look at me like I got special attention, but no, I was just better than them.’

As for Thelma, she provided her granddaughter with a sense of discipline that Kolleen had encouraged but which Toosie was not available to reinforce. Erica later remembered her as, ‘Discipline, you know, Grandma’s switches – get out of here, don’t slam the screen door, eat all your food, say your prayers!’ and that at the time she found these rules almost cruel, but she has also said that today she is grateful for having such discipline. Meanwhile, Toosie’s mother Ganny would keep the young Erica’s religious education flowing, taking the sisters to the Unity Church she attended, reading them Christian stories and asking the girls to commit the books of the Bible to heart. Erica and Koryan became accustomed to staying at Ganny’s house at the weekends and attending church: ‘I was a nice young lady there,’ said Erica, who has often talked about her relationship with religion, and seems to maintain a strong Christian belief – but with modifications from other religions and, indeed, symbols from pagan and other theologies. As she put it in her late 20s, ‘These are the dictates of my life: never have barriers, rules nor roles, and face all obstacles, which appear in front of me, overcoming them or perhaps demolishing them. Always with the help of the Lord.’

As upbringings go, Erica’s was not a bad one, despite the family’s relative poverty and the absence of her father. Asked to recall the primary images of her childhood, she responded in a kind of stream-of-consciousness style with a flow of comforting images: ‘Very quiet. Lots of sun, lots of moon. Barefoot… Not rich at all. Kind of poor, but we didn’t know that we were poor, because everything had to be very neat, clean, proud. Beautiful! Beautiful life.’

As the years passed, Erica and her sister grew taller, filled out and learned constantly. By the late 1970s Erica was attending grade school (first school), where she immediately put her acting skills to good use. A notable early appearance was in a production of Annie, where she took the lead role and adopted the famous orphan’s look by wearing a red, jheri-curled wig. Singing the song ‘Somebody Snitched On Me’ and skipping around the stage, her grandmother Ganny couldn’t hold back the tears: ‘I just started crying,’ she said. ‘I thought, her parents don’t know what they have! This girl is going places… She is not only talented, but a hard worker.’

During the long, hot summer vacations it was the job of godmother Gwen Hargrove to keep the two sisters occupied, and she accomplished this with ease by enrolling them in the summer recreation programme in South Dallas that was mentioned earlier. She also organised a place for Erica in the choir of the First Baptist Church of Hamilton Park, in which the child would hone her choral skills and learn about co-operating with fellow singers. Many professional singers credit a choir background for much of their ability, and it seems that the career of this particular performer was no exception.

Along with acting at school and in summer productions, singing in the choir and with her sister and cousin Robert, Erica began to expand her interests into the wider cultural life of Dallas. The city was a haven for festivals – a fact accentuated by its large African-American population – and one of the best was an event called the Harambee Festival in South Dallas. It was at one of these events that Erica began to take an interest in African culture and dress herself accordingly, and where the tall headwraps that she would later make her trademark were originated. She later said, ‘Growing up in Dallas, we used to have Harambee Festivals every year. So there was this big festival where everyone gathers in the park, and there was a community of people who shared a love of [African] culture, and express it every day.’ This developed into a philosophical standpoint: ‘The way I dress – I love adorning myself with my culture. And it is not a black and white thing for me, but I am very interested in the black community because there are a lot of professional artists and geniuses who dwell in that community who need to be uplifted in some kind of way… I want to be a different example of what a black woman is, what a black person is. I wear my headwrap because a headwrap is a crown, and I am a queen. A headwrap demands a certain amount of respect – it just does, and I am always headwrapped.’

The performing portfolio of Erica – still a pre-teen – was expanding rapidly and, as 1980 approached, she discovered that she could dance, too. Kolleen, with the encouragement of her friend Gwen Hargrove, enrolled Erica in a youth troupe called Mahogany, run by an instructor called Dr Van Gilbert – a well-known arts worker in the Dallas area. ‘That was a very big part of my life, because Dr Gilbert was a very spiritual man,’ she remembered. She would also go on to study formal ballet with the Etta Piper Jamison company. Both dance companies rehearsed at the Martin Luther King Jr Recreation Center, and Erica found most of her free time being spent there. ‘I never left the building!’ she says now. ‘I was always there.’

In one sense, the collective growth of Erica’s acting, singing and dancing skills was to be expected; after all, her mother was an established performer and she grew up in a protective environment where self-expression was valued. And the expansion of her activities into various arenas never seemed to strike her as unusual or over-diverse: ‘I don’t separate it. It’s all part of me, you know; it’s all one thing,’ she said later. ‘Unconsciously, that’s just how I move.’

Inevitably, all this learning would bring her to attempt to write her own material at some stage – and this came in 1978, when she was just seven years old. Surrounded by the everlovin’ soul vibes of Mayfield and Wonder, it’s little surprise that her first verse began ‘Baby, baby, there you are, You’re more precious than a star’, and was accompanied by a youthful stab at a soulful piano accompaniment. She told Soul Express: ‘My grandmother bought me a piano, a Taylor piano, and I knew weird chords, because I only played with four fingers, and it was called Baby, baby, and then you go, Baby, baby, there you are, you’re more precious than a star, oh, baby, please don’t go.’ But divine intervention in the considerable form of her grandmother Viola stood in the way of this particular precocious ballad: ‘And so my grandmother came around the corner, very religious, and said, No, you are not supposed to sing like that!… So about a week later the song was totally changed to ‘Jesus, Jesus, there you are to my grandmother’s request. So, you know, I had to do a lot of gospel songs when I was younger, but secretly I was singing good love ballads.’ Blame the sweet sounds of soul for this. Like it or not, many of the best songs to come from this or any other genre are sexual in theme (or use love as a metaphor for sex). Ganny knew this perfectly well and, aware that in a few years Erica would be singing what she damn well pleased, stepped in to try to keep her granddaughter’s mind pure while she still could.

Not that Ganny’s intervention dampened her eldest grandchild’s enthusiasm. Erica continued to perform to herself in private when she couldn’t find an audience, as she told Vibe magazine in a key interview in 1997. Asked if she performed whenever guests came to the family home, she replied, ‘No, I did that on my own. Like, Look y’all, I can do this! When you put a lot of energy into something, you get the energy back. I’ve always been the type of person who wanted to get that energy back,’ adding a comment about her ability to perform: ‘I’ve never been shy. I’m always really nervous right before I do a show. You know that natural nervousness that comes? That anxiety? But I know that it’s going to come off right because I believe in this.’ Erica’s mini-performances weren’t restricted to singing, either: ‘I used to pretend I was a horn all the time. That came from listening to Miles Davis and Bird and Al Jarreau with my uncle. Me and my brother and sister used to pretend we were a band. I’d be the horn, and my sister would be the bass. Stevie Wonder is another person I tried to imitate. But I could never get the vibrato in my voice that Stevie Wonder has, no matter how hard I tried.’

Ah yes – the voice. One of the most remarkable features of the young Erica’s upbringing was that, while she sang in a choir and learned the piano, she appears never to have taken formal singing lessons. Yet, as anyone who has heard her sing live will attest, she is capable of the most amazing vocal pyrotechnics, with a range originating with a low, sultry murmur, via a whip-strong mid-range to a very high falsetto. Natural talent, it seems, will out.

A remarkable feature of the young Erica’s development – in artistic terms, at least – is that she seemed almost to spring from the womb fully formed as a performer. She has always studied to perfect her art, of course, but so many of her capabilities seem to be inherited rather than learned that it must have been tempting for her teachers and family to regard her as a kind of Mozart-esque prodigy. She later confirmed this, remarking, ‘I’ve got tapes from when I was five years old, and I think I sound exactly the same… Nobody taught me. It was just the right situation. Now it’s effortless. The Creator does it.’ Whether the Almighty gave her these powers at such an early stage depends entirely on