On the heels of her 101st heavenly birthday yesterday April 21st, we give propers to the epitome of genius and one of the most important, if not grossly underrated composers and pianists of the 20th Century, the late great Clara Ward—our early Black queer icon whose cunt and camp would come to encapsulate the rock star aesthetic long before the likes of Little Richard who you can say heeded the clarion call, that elongated e flat 6th “woooooo!” he plucked straight from the mouth of legendary gospel singer Marion Williams, who was discovered by Clara Ward and her mother Gertrude, and got her start in the Famous Ward Singers.

For all the flamboyance, high bouffants, that single gold one peeking out from beneath her smile, fierce musicianship and sheer ostentation of her on-stage persona, the salacious lore surrounding her personal life and all the cutting up she was known to do (a Philly girl through and through), Clara Ward was no joke on them keys. A child prodigy for both her piano skills and singing ability, as was her sister Willarene Ward, it was Clara Ward’s superior composition and arrangement, with its signature, diasporic call and response that would become a standard emulation in contemporary gospel that made William H. Brewster’s “How I Got Over” an international smash hit when Mahalia Jackson covered it in 1951. It remains one of the best selling gospel songs of all time. And while Aretha Franklin is the definition of “she get it from her mama” given that her own, Barbara Siggers Franklin, a renown pianist and singer herself who imbued her children, quite literally, with what seems to be a genetic predisposition to musical virtuosity, Aretha may have been born twice: it is no surprise that the Queen of Soul, (in)arguably the best singer/sanger in human history and an anointed pianist herself, cites Clara Ward as one of her greatest inspirations. In much of Aretha’s religious and secular catalogue, you can see (hear) clearly that Clara Ward was more than source and reference material, but provided a major blueprint for Aretha’s performance, phrasing, belting melismas and playing style. And though Mother is one of the most exemplary instances of her influence, it would actually be reductive to stop there.

Gone too soon and not given the due, historical treatment (scholarship about Clara Ward’s work and life is severely lacking) and exultation she deserves despite a commercially successful career, Clara Ward would not live to see her 50th birthday but on this day of her 101st birthday, I hereby declare on substack, that it is Clara Ward Week where I will be doing my part to pay much needed homage, respect and retrospection to a canonical, towering figure not just to gospel, but to all American music. Please join me in doing so on today: heads, what’s ya’ll favorite song by Clara Ward and the Famous Ward Singers and why? Hit the comment section below.

On a sidenote, but not really a sidenote since Black language is music in and of itself, I’m doing a live virtual workshop, Ebonics: What It Is (ho’) and Why They Want It on Tuesday May 13th at 7:30pm EST/4:30 PST. Fall through.

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I guess I’ve put this off for too long, possibly to make it less real, though these public displays of grief seem more for the living than it is about not living, but I just ain’t had it in me to talk about you being gone in this way. Don’t wanna be writing you nothing on Facebook of all places for heavens sake, looking at unanswered texts I can no longer respond to. Sometimes you just miss yo patna that’s gone, and wonder why you remain to feel the pain of having been loved in an old way that died with them and yours was definitely the old way, father. Here go one for the archives though:

Fatha Rashad, I called you that, naturally related to you as that before I knew you were Baba spiritually and Father widely to others and after our little fun flirtation upon first meeting cus we was just fluid like that during the bygone hey days of the early 2010s when despite the dark undertow of gentrification, the town still was purple Black and damn near all of us was “in the life.” But get into the perfectly sculpted kemetic features, flawless skin, veritable ageless chocolateyness of it all that was you so our attraction wasn’t surprising but I joked with you that you wasn’t ready for this jelly. Since then, I’m a little mo’ butch now (but not by much!) and as much as you dazzled and delighted me with your good looks and savoir faire (word to your favorite song—not Chic—Prince, 7), that wasn’t our portion: it was the spirit of your friendship that got me. It seemed that you started on this journey a long time ago, that you been here before as the old folks used to tell it and that you must have run into me cus I don’t even remember us not knowing one another by the first time we met when I was just 23 years old (perhaps this owing to you being an Aquarius and my being a Gemini though I suspect other primordial forces at play). All I know is that even as we was always up under each other, dancing, clowning, running thru downtown looking for the taco salads (cus anybody that know you know you shole could eat), endin’ up moded half the time, closing up shop at the Hub as soon as Konda left and turning a coworking space into Apt C meets the Paradise Garage blasting music, I still got the sense that you was a steward of some sort, that when you came to earth you meant business, that when it came to our people, when it came to your craft, going stupid on “dem beats” as you would say, movement science, the depth and breadth of your Black musicological memory (a catalog of untold number that lived with your braintrust alone), teaching, you was no joke. For all the ki’ing we did, I knew well enough to revere you, to cherish that I was in the presence of a literal angel on earth, a God or Gods inside of you and to count my blessings that you’d call me your friend, yo patna (down), your daughter, then your son like it was nothing cus it wasn’t to you on some he not heavy, he’s my brother type shit (Donny—not none of them whites) is how you made me feel (plus, you yourself were so much more than a man), that when you began exploring indigenous African spirituality in the form of masquerade, you’d already been a masked spirit acting as an interlocutor between us and the divine in a time of war. Which contrasted sharply with your outward eternal sweetness that spoiled me so. The only person born and raised in Portland that’s actually from the twomps. And in that vein, Ima keep it lit for you at all times. You are truly an East Oakland legend through and through, a legendary artist ahead of times, beyond this space time dimension, and a legendary, stand up, stomp down, solid friend, every bit of what one should be, never faked on me not even once and while I’m down here dealing with these spatchcock chickens the lot of them, with they scary asses walking around life afraid of they own shadows, I regret giving so much of my time and energy to people who I thought were my friend as if I had forgot what one was, as if I had forgotten your example, when I could have been pouring into our relationship more, doing more for you, being there for you more but that is my own to carry now.

Here I am feeling sorry for myself at 3am which you would not want so I’ll end this with much unsaid on the internet, much from my Ori to yours as you make your way through the ancestral realm. I know you up there lindy hopping, voguing, hitting the heel toe, the bus stop, boogaloo, gigging with that house twist like only you could, making mix cds, but still preparing us for war like only you can. Until we meet again, that Cece Peniston song you turned me on to has taken on a whole new meaning:

I love you, Fatha. Thank you for everything. I miss you with much frustration and pain, your voice, your game, everything.

Rest in Power Soul Nubian Number 1, Rashad Pridgen

Top image: Excerpt from Michael’s Sporke’s 2016 essay, archived in the Library of Congress about Big Mama Thornton

Bottom image: A text thread on Instagram, featuring a categorically false claim that Big Mama Thornton was presented a cover of her own song, written by the white pop songwriting duo Leiber and Stoller, recorded 4 years before Elvis’ cover of Hound Dog and at least 3 years before Freddie Bell and the Bellboys (a white early 50s band that performed Black music, rock & roll and r&b alike though at this time the two genres are so similar that the distinction often lived as a matter of nomenclature and later, race—r&b was relegated to the status of mere “race records”, ie. Black records and rock & roll was no longer Black rebellious “devil” music to the white mainstream, but now the white teenager’s preferred soundtrack to an angst of their own—itself modeled after/molded by Black people’s postwar attitudes and the creation of “cool,” particularly the original hipsters—jazz musicians ushering a new Black sound, bebop, that like most Black African “American” artforms, was borne from our unique experiences of subjugation in the New World). Freddie and nem’s contemporaries include the ever milquetoast Pat Boone of “Tutti Frutti” fare—yes originally recorded and co-written by Little Richard and Dorothy LaBostrie, a Black femme songwriter who also penned a 1960 hit for Irma Thomas, "You Can Have My Husband But Please Don't Mess With My Man"—I know that’s right—cus ima be the one to bring it to ya, shoutout Nivea).

So, I did a little diddly on social media for my digital series, On Everything I Love: Reclaiming Black Music (which is a bit of misnomer considering that much of Black culture, folkways and the knowledge systems that produce our most coveted exports—music, art, language, dance/movement, aesthetics, ideas, signyifing, testifying, shooting the shit, waxing philosophical, rapping as it were, all the way down to our subcultures, resistance/movement building and organizing strategies, etc. are under threat of absorption into the white American mainstream culture and eventual oblivion/extinction). This episode, “From Jim Crow to Jacob Collier” is the first of a series entitled, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers: From “You Will Not Replace Us” to We Will Become You wherein I provide the scaffolding for the series’ larger (maddening) point: white people (and to an increasingly significant but comparatively lesser degree, many Non-Black POC) have bankrolled a profitable obsession, voyeuristic, exploitative and utterly othering fascination with Blackness—the heist of the (last few) centuries.

*The consequences of this plunder are much more far reaching than hurt feelings and award show snubs*

A few points to level set:

• Mainstream white society is built on fabricated racial purity

• Even progressive or liberal leaning white institutions evidence this

• Grammys and Oscars are not alt right institutions (outwardly) however they are heavily geared toward and representative of mostly white entertainers

• White peoples overrepresentation distributed across class status and occupation type indicates that though heads of record labels and major corporations might not consider themselves as racist or may not ostensibly believe white people to be better, smarter, superior culturally, intellectually and therefore more deserving of accolade, they share in the exultation and pedestalizing and gatekeeping of whiteness much in the same way that neo-nazis do

• If white people themselves don’t believe that white people are superior, watching any American awards show, golden globes, oscars, cmas, shit, even DJ content on Youtube and Tiktok, etc.—I sure can’t tell

Back to Big Mama Thornton:

Big Mama released the first version of “Hound Dog”, written specifically for her (this is not some article, this is from the songwriters’ own lips to Michael Sporke, enshrined in the library of congress).

So you can’t just Google “did Elvis steal hound dog” without taking into account the full historical record concerning the writing, publishing and recording of this record which are all significant factors that have led many to speculate, including Big Mama herself, that Elvis stole this song which even if he did not “steal” it technically, his cover of Big Mama’s original, regardless of the white writers who wrote it, should have entitled her to significant royalties which is why from the outset, this song was litigated in court for decades. Also Leiber and Stoller are part of a generation that saw them ingesting minstrelsy and vaudeville as well as co-opting, stealing and copying the language, culture and extant r and b, rock and blues music that would make them famous. It is no coincidence that Leiber grew up in Baltimore during the 30s and 40s and began his career in r and b music as a result of his contact with Black people and Black cultural, folkways that predate them.

Having been written for her specifically according to Leiber and Stoller, and parroting two white cis men’s take on a blues style popular in Montgomery, Alabama where she was from, Big Mama’s version is considered far superior than Elvis’s and it was first. She was NOT presented the song as a cover, so I am not sure how the OP read that article and gleaned that. Possibly because in the article, one of the writers, Stoller I believe, is making a claim that technically it wasn’t Elvis’s song to steal because as is common with much of recorded music, it was adapted by others, i.e., he did not “steal it” but rather covered it just as other people covered it too.

Also, Leiber and Stoller being white people writing r and b and rock songs will not help prove a moot point that Elvis was this great original artist who did not steal from and borrow heavily from Black culture and style without crediting the original source material of his theft and paying for the pleasure. It only proves that.

Black people are no better off from the open theft and proliferation of our culture by white people. More significantly, white people’s love, theft, consumption of Black cultural artistic forms, music and entertainment most notably, is contrasted sharply with our continued disenfranchisement. We are no better off for them “knowing” and “loving” our music and dances now than we were in 1845. They want to “share” in the culture but are completely unwilling to share in the profits.

In the meantime in between times, until we meet again, this one is for the most staunch adherents to the cult of whiteness who claim that analyzing the well-documented history of white people’s hatred made manifest through caricaturing of Blackness (or the tropes they believe comprise it) amounts to little more than “hating” (the irony is not lost on me that even this dialectic is a holdover of Black linguistic genius), enjoy a snippet of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in Babe’s on Broadway.