Search Results for: Love

The Lone Wolf That Was Loved to Death

Longreads Pick
Author: Larry Pynn
Source: Hakai Magazine
Published: Oct 27, 2020
Length: 16 minutes (4,194 words)

How America Invented the White Woman Who Just Loves Fall

Longreads Pick

“For the past decade, the basic white girl who loves fall has become so solidified in the cultural imagination that she may as well be the season’s Easter Bunny.”

Source: Jezebel
Published: Oct 21, 2020
Length: 12 minutes (3,119 words)

For the Love of Mail: Letter Writing in a Pandemic

Longreads Pick

“To mail a letter is to send something out in the world with a faith that it will reach its destination. Writing is the same way. We write with hope that our work, like a letter, will find its way to where it needs to go.” Lauren Markham muses on the magic of the U.S. Postal Service.

Source: Literary Hub
Published: Sep 4, 2020
Length: 12 minutes (3,063 words)

A Lover’s Blues: The Unforgettable Voice of Margie Hendrix

Longreads Pick
Source: Longreads
Published: Sep 2, 2020
Length: 14 minutes (3,700 words)

A Lover’s Blues: The Unforgettable Voice of Margie Hendrix

Michael Ochs Archives / Getty / Design by Katie Kosma

Tarisai Ngangura | Longreads | September 2020 |14 minutes (3,715 words)

 

Hive is a series about women and the music that has influenced them, edited by Danielle A. Jackson. Read more at Longreads and The Believer

 

The voice of Margie Hendrix on “Night Time is The Right Time” comes at you out of nowhere, like an explosive, thunderous crack in the sky after a period of steady rain. Long after the song is over, it’s her words that stay ringing in your ear. You’ll belt out, “Babyyyyyyy!” in the shower, while out for a jog, or when giving your friends a hard time as they share their most trying relationship conundrum. On The Cosby Show, it’s her part that is most memorable when reenacted by adorable, pig-tailed Rudy, played by Keshia Knight Pulliam. In the 2004 biopic Ray, it was future Academy Award winner Regina King who played the role of Hendrix. King spoke of the difficulty in channeling the musician, as few references, visual or text, were available to use as inspiration for the role: “There isn’t a lot of information out there on Margie, so I had to rely on her voice to guide me.” The kind to stop you in your tracks, Hendrix’s voice remained unchanging, and from her earliest solo releases to her final years, it was an infallible offering from an artist who was moved to sing.

I stared at a blank page for days trying to figure out how best to begin my story on Hendrix, but nothing felt appropriate, fitting enough for the woman who had outsung Ray Charles. I’ve thought about her regularly for years, wondering how a woman with that voice could disappear from the public eye so easily, after making such an unforgettable appearance. It’s a thought that’s stayed with me, because it carries the sobering reality that someone can be incredibly talented — phenomenal even — and still find themselves omitted by history. It could happen to anybody, but it seems to happen most often to talented Black women who are bold enough to chase their dreams, then fall apart from the sheer pressure of it all. Women who are public but invisible and who are noticed without really being seen. Women like Margie Hendrix.

I stared at a blank page for days trying to figure out how best to begin my story on Hendrix, but nothing felt appropriate, fitting enough for the woman who had outsung Ray Charles.

She didn’t look like the performers most record producers wanted Black women to be. She was too dark, had a gap between her two front teeth and was a Southern girl with none of that Northern polish and glam. The music industry of today is incredibly corrosive and toxic, but it was even more so for Black musicians in the middle of the twentieth century, who dealt with nothing but no-good managers, unfair contracts, and stolen music credits. Anti-black racism and its social realities make it astounding that artists emerged who weathered through even when it seemed like everyone at some point or another crumbled, with many never making it back.  The argument could be made that had Hendrix managed to stay far from the drugs that would ravage her body, and kicked those bad habits, she would have lasted longer and achieved success rivaling that of her still living peers from that “golden” era. Yet the number of Black women uncounted and unnamed in music history makes it clear that this wasn’t only a question of sobriety. It was also about opportunity, and a perverse lack of care for the artists whose mental and physical health were secondary so long as money continued to be made. Hendrix’s death and eventual erasure from the mainstream were not simply tragic turns in a complicated life, but the outcome of a series of events that befell a woman unloved by those she committed herself to, and unprotected by those whose coffers she filled. 

Read more…

Labour of Love

Longreads Pick
Source: Maisonneuve
Published: Aug 25, 2020
Length: 18 minutes (4,743 words)

What’s Love Got to Do With It?

Photo by Alice Driver.

Alice Driver | Longreads | August 2020 | 9 minutes (2,482 words)

“We need to see the name of the person. We need to know who you want to attract,” the vendor told me as he held up a handful of dried hummingbirds, their four bodies dangling from his fingertips by red pieces of string, feathers worn but shimmering emerald in patches as if clinging to life via sheer radiance. He wanted to know the name of a man, but I was thinking of a painting.

Frida Kahlo wears a dead hummingbird around her neck. She painted Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird in 1940 just after she divorced Diego Rivera and ended an affair with photographer Nickolas Muray. The dead hummingbird is considered a love charm in Mexico, and it is one that would endure and eventually be exported to other countries.

Read more…

Letters of Love: ‘Our Father Wrote Every Day As He Waited To Be Sent To Auschwitz’

Longreads Pick
Source: BBC
Published: Jul 12, 2020
Length: 10 minutes (2,676 words)

If You Love the Music of the Carter Family, Thank Leslie Riddle

British singer and songwriter Yola (Yola Carter) performs at Afas Live, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 12th November 2019. (Photo by Paul Bergen/Redferns)

Mainstream country music isn’t overwhelmingly white because whiteness is innate to country music, it’s white because — just like any other overwhelmingly white system — it was purposefully constructed to be that way. In Rolling Stone, Elamin Abdelmahmoud digs into the history and talks to the Black artists who are breaking down those artificial constructs to redefine what country music is.

Ralph Peer was the beginning of the business of country music. Working for a struggling record company in the 1920s, the white record executive went to the American South with the sole purpose of finding competition for Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues, a black woman. In the South, he was convinced to record Fiddlin’ John Carson, in what became recognized as the first commercial country-music recording, “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane.” Peer took credit for inventing something he called “hillbilly music” — what country was known as until after the Second World War.

But if that sounds a little too tidy, it is. Peer’s greatest contribution was as an innovator of the genre as a commercial tool: He found that by marketing hillbilly records to white audiences, and “race records” to black audiences, he could sell more records. It didn’t matter that what he found in the South were white and black musicians recording the same songs and playing the same music with the same instruments. It didn’t matter that the boundaries between genres didn’t exist. It didn’t matter that black musicians were teaching white musicians the art of the string band, and the white musicians were learning fast. For Peer, the label became the tool to sell the record. Then the sell became the story.

I mention one of country music’s foundational groups — the Carter Family, a Peer discovery. “Yes, but A.P. Carter didn’t know how to write music,” she says. “So who did he take with him to gather the songs? Lesley Riddle, who could take them to black churches.”

Riddle was instrumental to the success of the Carter Family, memorizing melodies while Carter transcribed lyrics. Today, the Carters are in the pantheon of country, but there’s a good chance the last paragraph was the first time you’ve heard Lesley Riddle’s name.

The image starts to come together pretty quickly. First, you exclude black people from the festivals. Then write them out by not recording them. And pretty soon, “you have this manufactured image of country music being white and being poor.”

“But when a narrative is that clean,” Giddens warns, “somebody wrote it.”

Read the story

The New York You Once Knew Is Gone. The One You Loved Remains.

Longreads Pick

In this pandemic-inspired variation on the Goodbye to All That essay, Glynnis MacNicol writes about what it’s like to have stayed in the current ghost town version of New York City when so many other New Yorkers have departed for greener pastures, and considers the city’s, and city-dwellers’ history of resilience through hard times.

Source: GEN
Published: Apr 16, 2020
Length: 8 minutes (2,090 words)