“The strongest trees have the deepest roots.”
From the mouths of some, this might seem a tired cliché, word-painting in search of profundity. It’s the kind of thing that might appear on an embroidered pillow or painted woodcut in a home goods store—the kinds of words that lose their meaning upon multiple hearings.
But from the mouth of singer Tulani Kinard, who joins Guy Ramsey’s band for the first time on Monday May 16 for The Poets & A Song, these concepts take on a different meaning. Rootedness, strength, depth are more than words and metaphors—they are terms theorized and conceptualized to do political work. She lives them. She sings them. She gives them voice and life.
The granddaughter of a Pentecostal minister in Boston, Massachusetts, Kinard grew up singing in the church from an early age. Gospel was music for her—her parents would chide friends who tried to introduce her to anything else. “I had a friend who would share music from his collection with me until my mother would hear,” she remembers. “It really became an adventure to get as much music in as I could before I was discovered.”
But other genres—jazz, reggae, calypso—crept in as the world did for Kinard, and with them came a growing realization of the kinds of social justice impact present in so much African American art, including the music she was learning in secret. In 1965, she met teacher Jonathan Kozol, who had been notably dismissed for reading the poetry of Langston Hughes (including “Ballad of the Landlord”) to a majority-black elementary school in urban Boston earlier that year. Kozol invited Kinard to Washington D.C. to testify before the U.S. Senate about the awful conditions in the city’s public schools; she obliged. She was in the fifth grade.
These kinds of moments of racial inflection dot Kinard’s life in music, which began formally after a chance meeting granted her the opportunity to audition for Sweet Honey in the Rock, a preeminent African American women’s a cappella ensemble that performs a wide repertoire of music that stretches across African American history, a little more than a decade later. She’d sung in smoky clubs as she attempted to launch her career (“That was not where I wanted Jesus to meet me,” she jokes), but found herself wanting more, believing that her voice had more work to do. After attending a Sweet Honey concert in 1978, she realized the group represented what she had been searching for. “It was a very different kind of church experience,” she jokes.
The next day, Kinard visited founder Bernice Johnson Reagon’s office at the Smithsonian Institute for her audition, “I will never forget this feeling of walking into this place,” she remembers, referencing her nerves at the history and purpose around her. “The line to her office was filled with pictures of all of these people in the movement who I’d only read about.”
Those nerves evaporated once the women began to sing, and at the close of the interview, Reagon presented her an immediate opportunity: “If you can move next week, you can be in Sweet Honey.”
Kinard came on as the group’s youngest member, performing at events such as Nelson Mandela’s first trip to America after being freed from prison in 1990 and, eventually, his memorial services in 2013. Her first show as a member of the group was maybe her most memorable one—in Wilmington, North Carolina, the site of a small city racked by political upheaval after the arrest of ten African American youth accused of arson and conspiracy in the late 1970s. That night, Ben Chavis, one of the so-called Wilmington Ten, was in the audience—in chains. “We could hear this rattling from the back of the auditorium,” she remembers, the sound fresh in her ears all these years later. “What is that?”
The image shocked Kinard and the rest of Sweet Honey, prompting them to respond to the impact of the moment in the best way they could—sing to it. “Cape Fear River runs/Right through here,” they sang in a piece that memorialized the 1898 massacre of freedmen and freedwomen in Wilmington, their bodies dumped into the river during a white supremacist revolt. The song spoke across time and space, equating the struggle of blacks a hundred years prior to Chavis and others in places like South Africa.
The imperative of the group became Kinard’s own, even after she transitioned to a guest member status with the group in the early Nineties—history should be thought of not as just the past but instead as something that impacted the present. Music—she believed—was the constant. “I believe that music stays in our bodies and in our cells forever,” she says. “It gives one an opportunity to ground ourselves and to really be in touch with who you are. When one is very clear about how to use that, then you have another way of claiming authority over your life and your expression in the world.”
She cites her performances of the classic song “Strange Fruit” as a key example of this design—in concert, she draws on trans-historical connections, invoking the killing of Amadou Diallo by the New York City Police Department in 1999. “You can use the song in terms of telling a tale—we can talk about what happened then,” she explains. “But it is very disturbing to my spirit that we’re still telling the same story now; presents and pasts are recognizably resonant. So in the middle of the song, I invoke the presence of our ancestors and spiritual deities to bring forward a sense of justice. I list out names that the audience is familiar with. There are thousands of names.”
For Kinard, being part of Sweet Honey also activated gendered connections as well. The group’s members refer to it as “she”(“Sweet Honey in the Rock has, for forty years, raised her voice to advocate for truth, justice and compassion,” the website proclaims, for instance), furthering the idea of a kind of coexistence or empathy that one arrives upon when they add their voice to a group in song. “Sweet Honey is a feminine voice in the world,” she says. She very much feels like female entity and an energy that we were upheld by to sing songs about our people, our experience, and political life to let people know what our experience has been on a global level. It is a feminine voicing. It is a feminine energy. She always has been.”
If this all sounds like preaching, it should—Kinard is an ordained Interfaith minister and an initiated priest in the Ifa/Orisa tradition, which is a West African spiritual system that speaks to the particular racial humanity of the peoples of the world. She is also one of the pioneers of the natural hair movement, opening the first comprehensive natural haircare salon in Brooklyn, developing the language for the nation’s first natural haircare license, and publishing a historical and helpful guide to black women’s hair. “That to me is just another aspect of expression of my melanated womanhood,” she says. “I get the blessing of being able to express in two very different realms the same thing: musically as well as the experience of what it means to be a woman in her natural fullness with an African cultural mindset. We are supporting a level of expression of who we look like in our own aesthetic.”
At this stage in her career, Kinard’s hope is that her work can connect these through-lines musically. She—along with one of her main collaborators Iyanla Vanzant—believes that this type of radical foundation where long histories inflect our current state of being is of the utmost importance for social justice work, whatever the profession. She now leads her own band, writing and performing original compositions and covers that touch on her wide-ranging career. She met Dr. Guy two years ago, but she’d developed a kind of musical kinship even before beginning a personal one. “I was introduced to The Colored Waiting Room through my daughter, and I could hear in his music a similar orientation to creative expression as the one I have,” she explains. “Just the creativity and everything about it…the interludes…there’s commentary all in there. I absolutely saw the waiting room.”
Kinard notes the way the bass guitar in particular is presented in Ramsey’s work as a particular place of affinity that aligns with her own vocal activism, which these days in performance centers around a concept she calls The Bottom. Each show, she has her bass player riff as she expounds the place of The Bottom in African American history. “In a lot of ways, historically it’s been used to keep us down as a people, but in keeping us down, we’ve found fertile ground in being at the bottom,” she says. “When you find yourself at the bottom it is a wonderful opportunity to really set a new foundation. Because nothing can stand unless the bottom is strong and deeply rooted.”
And as for her Blue Note debut on Monday, she believes Dr. Guy is the next in a line of fruitful collaborators for her political project. “He hears things the way I hear things,” she explains. “We both write from the bottom up.”
For more information on Tulani Kinard, check out her website, Facebook page, Twitter page, and Instagram.
See her live as part of Dr. Guy Presents The Poets & A Song on Monday, May 16 at the Blue Note in NYC. Doors open on Monday evening at 9:45 PM, with the show beginning at 10:30 PM. Guests can purchase tickets at the Blue Note for bar access or they can reserve table seating in advance. Tickets cost $10 ($15 day-of-show) and can be purchased HERE.
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