#she wrote a song based on that melody which was publicly released

[ultra-puzzlemaster]

Cold hands

A little something I wrote something for the 10th day of @descember (don't pay attention to the date time is an illusion): it's a small scene between Melina and Descole, set during the time when Melina was still alive and living on the island of Ambrosia with her father. There are a few of my headcanons as well.

Spoilers for the Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva only.

I don't know if there's a need for content warnings? There are mentions of Melina's illness and future death, but that's it I think (please tell me if there should be more I'm not used to this yet)

On a winter morning, when the night started to fade away and the first colors appeared in the sky, Melina Whistler had gone on the beach on her own. While waiting for the sun to rise, she was rubbing her hands against each other and gently blowing on them, in an attempt to keep her warmth inside of her ill body.

As the first ray appeared above the horizon, the ocean started to shine, and Melina paused to gaze at it. It was truly a wonderful moment. She felt like the whole island was awakening, and was welcoming her like an old friend. The feeling warmed up her whole body and made her forget about the coolness of the morning.

She could hear the sea singing to her. She breathed in deeply, and joined her voice to the one of the waves:

"Ah ah ah aaaah…"

"Ah ah ah aaaah…"

"Ah ah ah a-- *cough*"

Perhaps it wasn't such a good idea, she thought. Perhaps I haven't recovered enough yet.

As an answer to her question, a gust of wind suddenly blew, causing her another coughing fit. It felt like the winter wind was trying to steal her last bits of life.

When she managed to calm herself down, she heard footsteps approaching behind her. She anxiously turned her head to who she thought would be her dear father, but her eyes widened when she saw the masked man standing next to her.

"Sir… Descole, was it?"

She had heard his name only once, when her father presented her the man who owned the castle they were about to move in. They hadn't exchanged a single word since then, and even though she was extremely grateful for the chance he gave her to live on this beautiful island, she couldn't shake the feeling of unease she had every time she saw his dark castle, or her father discussing with him of things she couldn't imagine.

He slightly nodded.

"Are you alright, miss Whistler?"

His tone was calm, and his words were polite, yet a shiver ran down her spine.

"Yes, I apologized if I worried you."

"Are you cold?"

"I just—"

Before she could finish her sentence, he took off his cape and handled it to her. For a moment she starred at him, surprised, then took the piece of clothing and wrapped it around her. It was too big on her, but it shielded her from the freshness of the wind.

And it was a nice gesture, too…

"Thank you sir."

A smile appeared on his face.

"My pleasure, miss Whistler." he responded, with a bow. "Would you mind if I stayed here as well?"

"Oh, no, of course not!" she stuttered.

She didn't understand what he wanted, but she could not simply push him away. She looked at him anxiously but he simply sat on the rocks, a few feet from her.

For a moment, they both gazed at the sea in silence. The sun was still rising, spreading its light, warmth, and life on the island. The darkest tones of the sky were turning into bright hues of vivid colors, from yellow to pink, before fading to blue. An ephemeral spectacle, accompanied by the whispers of the nearby waves.

Finally, Descole broke the silence.

"If I may…"

Interrupted in her contemplation, Melina looked at him.

"Why did you come here alone, miss Whistler?" he said, harshly. "Surely you didn't think a nighttime walk in the woods would improve your health, did you?"

She felt a twitch of anger at this moment. Who did this man think he was?

And yet, what explanation could she give him? She herself could not explain that feeling, that calling, that was driving her to the sea… Nor could she acknowledge the reason why she came without her father. Not with everything he was doing for her…

She turned her head towards the sea and responded:

"I just wanted to watch the sun rise." she said with a tone sharper than she intended. "My health has improved enough for this since we moved here."

She glanced at him, hoping to decipher an emotion despite his mask, in vain. Was he angry? Disappointed? Worried?

"I understand." he simply responded in a softer tone. "My apologies, it was rude of me to ask you this. I am very glad you're feeling better, miss Whistler. I only hope you will heal soon."

It felt sincere. Something she couldn't explain was still bothering the young woman, but she started to think that she may have simply judged this man too quickly.

"It's alright." she calmly said. "And you can call me Melina."

"Very well, Melina."

Somehow, hearing her name gave her a warm feeling.

She studied him again. His costume was very eccentric, to say the least, and made him very hard to read. His mask wasn't just hiding his identity, but his thoughts and feelings as well. A barrier between the person he truly was, and the rest of the world. A shield, and a prison.

But Descole is still a person, she reminded herself, as she tightened her grasp on the cloak he gave her. Behind his facade is a living human, with a beating heart.

Maybe she could get to know him a little better today.

"Can I… Can I ask you something?"

"Hm?"

She took a deep breath.

"Why did you bring us here, on this island? Why me, of all people?"

He paused for a second, thinking.

Then a large smile appeared on his face, as he responded:

"You could say… I fell in love with your music."

Melina was completely taken aback by this answer.

"Wh-Wh-What? What do you mean?" she managed to ask.

He chuckled at her reaction.

"Hahaha, I am talking about 'The first night'. They say it's another of Whistler's work, but it was actually you who wrote it, am I right?"

"I..."

It had been the most logical decision, and she knew it. Her music would reach more people through her father's name, and he did help her composing this piece after all.

Still, it was the first time someone would recognize her work, she couldn't help but feel a sense of pride inside her chest, mixed with the guilt of having hidden the truth.

"… How did you know?"

"You father is very talented, but this song was quite… different, from his usual work. I quickly realized he could not have been the person who wrote it. However, I could hardly believe such a famous composer would simply steal the work of someone else. That's when I figured out that the genius behind this work of art could only be you, Melina."

"Impressive…"

The smile on his face grew larger. He was proud of himself, wasn't he?

Descole paused. His gaze moved back to the sea, then up to the now blue sky. Starring at the faded crescent of the moon, or at a memory he was reliving, he continued:

"I'll always remember the first time I heard it. This melody… it was like all the stars in the night sky were singing together, in perfect harmony. Truly a masterpiece."

Melina felt that warm feeling again, in her chest and now her cheeks. Or was she blushing? She had no idea her music could affect people this way…

"After this, I wanted to listen to more of your work, so I made a few researches. Unfortunately, it was then that I learned about your condition."

Suddenly, something shifted in him. His face darkened. His tone changed. His fist clenched.

"At that moment, I knew I had to do everything in my power to save you. And I would stop at nothing to make you sing again."

She starred at him, unable to move. Something was wrong. Very wrong. That feeling of unease again… It seemed that the air suddenly got a lot colder.

"This is… just for my music? Really?"

He let out a somber chuckle.

"Ha. You can't see it yet, but I assure you Melina, your music is way more powerful than you can imagine."

"I--"

The cape couldn't keep her body warm anymore, and suddenly she was seized by a violent coughing fit.

"Melina, are you—"

"I- *cough cough* I need-- *cough* I need to go back. *cough*"

"Of course. Let me help you."

The next moment he was right next to her, and offered his hand to help her stand up.

After a second of hesitation, she took it.

She froze.

His body was ice cold.

As if he hadn't received any warmth in a long time.

As if he hadn't feel any warmth in a long time.

He didn't seem to notice her reaction. Or perhaps he simply didn't care.

He helped her getting back up, and without exchanging a word, they returned to the castle.

There, she was welcomed by her dearest but extremely worried father. He seemed really distressed by her early disappearance, for which Melina felt guilty. It took her a while to calm him down by reminding him that she was fine, she was not hurt, she was not lost, she was here and everything was alright.

The father then wrapped his arms around his daughter, and held her close, as if he was afraid she would disappear again. It felt warm, comfy, and safe.

Melina returned the embrace, and for a moment, she thought of that icy contact she had with the masked man earlier. And she wondered…

Could he give such warmth? Could he accept such warmth?

…

Descole…

Which one of us… had truly stopped living?

[emotions-ew]

A Collection of Queer Country Artists and Songs for anyone who doesn’t feel like there’s country music they can relate to...

There is this idea that country music is like just Republican men singing about beer, and trucks and also Jesus,  and that is kind of fair because loads of it is but there are some cool as hell queer/lgbtq+ country artists. Finding those and finding that representation in a genre of music I was literally raised on kind of changed my life in a tiny way and I wanted to share that.

(This is by no means a comprehensive list and also I’m basing the “Country” part of this sometimes on my subjective opinion/limited music knowledge so yuh please don’t hate me if I get some wrong)

Also link below for a Spotify playlist of my favourite gay/gayish country music, some mentioned in this post some not, (with a title that isn’t obviously gay for anyone who can’t openly listen to gay stuff on their public accounts for whatever reason) so feel free to skip the massive essay and just jump straight to that. And pretty please repost if I missed anyone/ any songs you love.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7KB6PmUxnpkU7lih8Bysvw

Artists To Follow:

Chely Wright

- Right off the bat, Chely Wright is a legend and I’m in love with her. So, in the 90′s Chely Wright was kind of a huge deal. She started her career as a singer/songwriter and released her first album in ‘94, which was critically acclaimed although never reached the commercial success of her later works. By ‘97 she was really hitting her stride, dropping her breakout hit “Shut up and Drive” (a personal favourite of mine) followed two years later by the biggest hit of her career “Single White Female”. Throughout all that Chely Wright was, to the world, a good old fashioned, heterosexual southern gal. Privately it was a bit of a different story. She had public relationships with male country artists, all while pursuing a secret decade long relationship with a woman. 

I hadn’t ever really heard a Chely Wright song until a few years ago so I never knew about her music or career pre-coming out but I do know that even though by the time she came out in 2010 she was by no means at the height of her fame Chely Wright is kind of one of the biggest names in country music to be out and proud (in my opinion) and I love her like an insane amount. I literally play her music in my car when I have passengers just so I can be like “fun fact this singer is actually gay-” and then subject them to a lengthy explanation of her entire career. She came out with an album and a memoir and the album is my favourite of her work because it’s so fucking raw and because I relate to most of it immensely. Anyways Chely Wright went fucking through it in her journey to being her authentic self and now she’s out and proud and married to a woman and they have a family together and I’m a fucking sucker for a happy ending and y’all should add her to every playlist you have. And on top of that her music is genuinely good. Coming out undoubtedly damaged her career but I think that

Brandi Carlile 

- As far as I can tell Brandi Carlile has been out her whole career. I feel like this list is just going to be me saying “I’m in love with her” about a bunch of women old enough to be my mother but in my defence, I am honestly in love with her. She’s been making music since she was like, seventeen, and has had a bunch of massive hits, as a singer, songwriter, and producer. If you want to cry kind of happy tears listen to her performance of “Bring my Flowers Now” with Tanya Tucker. She’s won Grammy’s and CMT awards and she’s done it all as an out Queer woman. She’s also a founding member of The Highwomen, an all-female country music group who released their first album in 2019, comprised of Carlile, Marren Morris, Natalie Hemby and Amanda Shires. I really love this band because they’re four artists who are immensely successfully in their own right collabing, much like the Highwaymen, and their music is phenomenal while also being a fuck you to mainstream country music and their inability to properly represent women in country music spaces. 

She’s been married to a woman (smoking hot and also brilliant) since 2012 and they have two kids together and if you want to cry (again) then you have to listen to her song “Mother” about her eldest daughter. A queer country artist absolutely worth adding to all your playlists. 

Brooke Eden

- As I understand it Eden came out publicly in January of this year. She’s engaged to Hilary Hoover, who she’s been dating since 2015 apparently. I can’t even imagine the pressure that must be on a person and how stressful it would be to keep a relationship secret from the whole world for years and personally I think they’re a cute as hell couple and I wish them literally all the happiness in the world. 

Brooke Eden has a few older songs that I think are really good, my favourite being “Act Like You Don’t”, and while her new stuff isn’t my usual country vibe I am a sucker for literally anything gay and it is legally my gay duty to stream any song that she releases to support my fellow queer. It’s quite different to anything Wright or Carlile sing but I actually kind of love that because it shows that country music of all different shapes and sizes and styles can be sung by queer artists. 

Amythyst Kiah

- Okay so I am a very new listener to Amythyst Kiah, but her music is literally so beautiful it would be a straight up sin to not include her on this list. Her music is country-blues-roots esq (more roots than country, I think?) and her voice is so unique. She grew up in Chattanooga and has been playing music since childhood. She recently made her Opry debut which is fucking awesome. She also belongs to a band called Our Native Daughters, described as “A supergroup of Black women in traditional music”. Their debut album “Songs of Our Native Daughters” did numbers and I haven’t listened to the whole thing but my favourite so far are “Black Myself” and “I Knew I Could Fly” so y’all add that to your playlists along with “Wild Turkey” by Amythyst Kiah because holy hell her voice on that will blow your mind.

Steve Grand

-        The first man to make this list, he should frankly be honoured. Grand has been an out and proud gay man making country music since like 2013, and I have so much respect for an artist who chose to simply never be in, choosing instead to simply write gay ass songs about being in love with men and letting the chips fall where they man. His music is always going to have a special place in my heart and, he’s cute so if you’re into men and music by men give him a google. add him to your playlists, his All-American Boy album is literally just a dozen songs that are perfect to yell-sing along to.

Katie Pruitt

-        Not hugely knowledgeable on Katie Pruitt but her music makes me feel crazy intense emotions and is absolutely gay

 Honorable Mention Artists I haven’t Really Listened to But Who I Know to be gay thanks to google and might be your thing so totally check them out:

Brandy Clark

Ty Herndon

Shelly Fairchild

Lavendar Country

Trixie Mattel

Cameron Hawthorn

Drop any other names of artists or songs you know of 

 Specific Songs That Make Me Fucking Cry or (in good and bad ways (but always in a gay way)) or basically are just gay as hell:

If She Ever Leaves Me; The Highwomen

- So, this album came out about a week before my first (and only) girlfriend broke up with me. The general gist of the song is a woman singing about how her loved isn’t ever going to leave her but if she does it sure as hell won’t be for a creepy man in a bar. A little ironic that I felt I related to it so intensely, considering she did in fact leave me. There’s this one lyric that goes “I’ve loved her in secret/I’ve lover here out loud/the sky hasn’t always been blue” and my girlfriend and I were crazy deep in the closet so I drew her a cute little picture of a grey cloud and on the back I wrote that lyric and I gave it to her and to me it was kind of a promise that one day I’d get a chance to love her out loud and even though I never actually did this song is forever going to make me cry because of the little bit of hope that lyric gave me and the way it’s inclusion on this overwhelmingly mainstream country album made me feel like acceptance was just that little bit closer. 

 All American Boy; Steve Grand

- Definitely one of the first gay country songs I ever heard, and Steve Grand didn’t once sacrifice a scrap of country for the gay. It’s beautiful, it’s a little sad, it’s hopeful. It’s forever going to hold a special place in my heart and the music videos is kind of one of my favourites ever. I found this song before I found myself and the way it made my heart warm should have been a stronger sign than I took it to be. 

Like Me; Chely Wright

- When you love someone you kind of make it your mission to know them in a way that no one else can. This song by Chely Wright is sort of an ode to that, and how even once you lost someone, you’re still going to know every little thing about them. On top of that it sort of speaks to the idea that all these things Wright learned about this woman, she learned in secret and she knew her and loved her in secret and now that they’re gone from each other she’s left with all of this knowledge and all of these questions and no one to answer them. I love the way it’s so slow and the melody and her voice, the way it’s low and a little raspy, make this one of my favourite Chely Wright songs.

The Mother; Brandi Carlile

-        Sorry but a song about being a mother by a queer woman is going to make me cry every time and actually I’m not that sorry. It’s quite a simple song, if any song written by Brandi Carlile can ever be described as ‘simple’, it’s an ode to her daughter. My favourite line is “you are not an accident/where no one thought it through” because it speaks to the fact that in order for queer women to have a kid together they have to want it so damn bad and also I just like the way her voice sounds on that line. This song is also the perfect thing to listen to if you ever for a second feel like being gay/queer is going to stand in the way of you having a family because it absolutely doesn’t have to and if that’s something you want, you can have it. Don’t let people try and convince you otherwise.

Loving Her; Katie Pruitt

-        Unapologetic gay love. Opening a song with “If loving hers a sin, I don’t wanna go to heaven” is a fucking baller move and she went there. The lyrics are beautiful, and her voice is phenomenal. It could be a sad song, about confronting religious repression and grappling with what that means for your love, but instead its triumphant. Katie Pruitt doesn’t give a fuck if you have a problem because she’s going to write songs for her lover.

Jesus From Texas; Semler

-        Not actually totally sure this is a country song, but it has the words ‘Jesus’ and ‘Texas’ in the title so I feel safe including it in this list. Honestly, I don’t really know why I relate so hard to this song. Like, I wasn’t really raised with religion, so I don’t know what it is about this funky little tune that makes me want to sob but there’s something about this tune that makes me want to do whatever the opposite of get up and dance is, but like, in a good way.

Lovin’ Again; Steve Grand

-        Breakup song that ends kind of positively? So good to sing along to at high, high volumes. The idea that losing someone doesn’t have to mean losing yourself and just because you can’t love them doesn’t mean you’re not ever going to love again. But also kind of about how it’s hard to get over someone, I don’t know it’s just good.

Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears; Lavender Country

-        Jesus christ if this isn’t the coolest shit I’ve ever heard in my life. Sorry but a gay country group formed in 1972 who dropped possibly the first gay themed country album, and this was the title of one of the songs. God I am in love.

 Songs that (to me) are a little fruity or that I just relate to in a gay way:

Picket Fences; Chely Wright

-          Chely Wright is gay but this song came out long before she did and when she wrote it, it wasn’t supposed to be gay which is why it’s in this section and not the previous. The reason it’s included at all is because frankly ma’am, Mrs Wright, it’s a little fruity. And I feel a little bad for joking because honestly to me, the way I hear this song and knowing the context (that Wright was deeply closeted at the time she wrote and released it), it’s kind of just sad. The general gist of the song is Wright asking what’s so great about a traditional lifestyle anyways. It could be read as a woman genuinely questioning why we push that expectation that she’ll have two kids and a husband and a picket fence lifestyle, or even could be read as a woman who’s trying to deflect how much she does in fact want that, you have to listen and form your own opinion. But to me, it feels like a woman who’s desperately trying to justify why she doesn’t want that life not because she can’t have it, but she knows it will never be right for her. I don’t know it’s hard to explain I just feel like this song is a little bit gay even though I’m sure she didn’t intend that.

Sinning with You; Sam Hunt

-          Sorry but this song is gay. Sorry but you can’t write the lines “I never felt like I was sinning with you/Always felt like I could talk to God in the morning” and “if it’s so wrong why did it feel so right” and “But I never felt shame, never felt sorry/Never felt guilty touching your body” and not to mention the opening line of “raised in the first pew/praises for yeshua/case of a small town repression”, and expect to not sit in my car sobbing as I realised that while I never felt like what we did was a sin she absolutely did, and wishing I could have told her that I was sorry for making her carry the weight of both our souls but also that it wasn’t a sin and nothing in the world could feel that good and be that bad and it isn’t right that she had to be so ashamed of something that was just so good. Sam Hunt actually said after he wrote the song that while it was reflection on his own relationship with faith he genuinely hopes that people in the lgbtq community can like find comfort or whatever in his words and like go off king, we stan an ally.

  How do I Get There; Deana Carter

-          This ones easy, it’s about falling in love with your best friend and suddenly realising you want more than just friendship with them. Sorry Deana, that’s gay. In my Deana Carter of like Year 10 I played this song on repeat and screamed along to the lyrics as though singing it hard enough would make her like me back.

[girlsbtrs]

Me, Taylor, and The Search for Musical Legitimacy

Written by Lila Danielsen-Wong. Graphic by James Nida Grey.

As a child, whenever I took art classes, they were full of girls. I took group piano lessons with four other girls from my neighborhood. Any theatre I was involved in casted regardless of gender because there were never enough boys to fit a show. My middle school orchestra was about three quarters girls. 

It came as a shock that when I started getting involved in any songwriting I could do, I was suddenly in the minority. The few all-ages open mics I could go to were set up by dad-types and primarily populated by their friends of the same demographic. Teenage rock band-type boys dominated the non-classical learning spaces. 

However, this isn’t about them, this is about me, Lila Danielsen-Wong, a girl you’ve probably never heard of, and a girl you probably have heard of. Her name is Taylor Swift.

In 2010, I was a sixth-grade latchkey kid who spent a whole lot of time watching music videos on YouTube. Taylor Swift had just released her third studio album, Speak Now. Although many girls my age had been enchanted by Fearless, I was a pretentious and precocious preteen who was resistant to popular things, and was much more interested in niche Boston folk singer-songwriters like Antje Duvekot and Lori McKenna. 

However, niche Boston folk singer-songwriters don’t really make lots of YouTube content geared at middle schoolers, so the YouTube recommendations led me from my folk corner, to The Band Perry, to a song called White Horse. 

This snowballed into me listening to every Taylor Swift song on Youtube, to learning to play the piano chords to each of them, to writing complete songs of my own. Although I’d been writing simple piano melodies for years, songwriting now occupied every corner of my brain in nearly every free moment. When I learned Dear John, I decided it didn’t sound as good on piano, so I decided I needed to play it on guitar. I snuck into my mother’s room and learned to play an E chord. Soon, all I did was practice guitar and write songs. I wanted to write like she did, to articulate my feelings as well as she did, so precisely that everyone who listened understood not only me, but themselves better. However, I was not ready to publicly be someone who listened to Taylor Swift. Occasionally a YouTube comment would remove me from Taylor world and remind me “All of her fans are teenage girls.” At eleven I didn’t have the words or the context to understand why that so briskly discredited her. I knew it was an insult, and I knew it was an insult that worked. 

Flash forward two years, I was one of the youngest writers at a summer songwriter lab geared toward teens that one of the local theatres held yearly. Remember the rock boys I was talking about? This is when we became acquainted. We had just come back from writing songs in our randomly assigned groups. I had a hard time contributing, being a not-quite-high-schooler who’d never tried co-writing. One of the older girls was talking to the rock boys and I remember the conversation word for word. One of the rock boys asked her how the session went. She responded “eh, it was all girls,” to which the boy said “mine too, a lot of just-singer girls, you know cause of like, Taylor Swift.” They laughed and went on to complain about the younger songwriter girls who “don’t even know what they were doing.”

The conversation they were having, “Taylor Swift, a frivolous girly artist, is encouraging frivolous girls to come into our serious artist spaces and making them frivolous,” stuck with me through my teen years, and it wasn’t until recently that I started to understand. Taylor Swift found success because she could connect with girls like me, and I found my absolute favorite thing, my life calling, because of Taylor Swift; but Taylor Swift was being discredited because of me, and I was being discredited because of Taylor Swift. 

In older interviews, Taylor talks about how after the first time she went to Nashville to pitch herself to labels, she heard nothing. So she decided she needed to be different, and that’s when she started writing songs. At that moment, I realized that I was going to have to be (crucify me) “not like other girls” if I wanted to be taken seriously or have my ideas heard. The next day I came back to the young songwriters lab with my viola instead of my guitar, and managed to finesse my way into playing on nearly half the songs in the showcase. 

I don’t need a list of MLA cited sources to explain that art geared to girls and young women is dismissed. It is not a hot take to say that art created by young women is often instantly devalued. Taylor Swift wrote music about girls and young women for girls and young women, and she didn’t have much interest in being a sex symbol. Not that there’s anything wrong with female artists who use their sexuality, but Taylor Swift gave the men who gate-keep musical legitimacy nothing they wanted from her. Still, she wrote Speak Now with no co-writers before she was old enough to legally drink. She followed it up with Red, a diverse transition album that showed off her songwriting range. 1989 broke records, started an 80’s pop revival and seamlessly transitioned her into pop. Taylor Swift was everywhere, and yet I heard the same things echo. 

“She isn’t a real artist because she only writes about relationships.” 

“Her audience is just rabid fans who don’t know anything about real music.”

“She’s just a pop star who won’t stand the test of time.”

I spent the tail end of 2015 writing songs that emulated the rhythmic lyrics of 1989, but if anyone asked who my musical influences were, I’d often omit her and stick with niche Boston folk singer-songwriters. Me and my music were not going to get pegged as a naive and shallow fangirl.

It was my freshman year of college. I was at my local state school because I couldn’t really afford to go to any of the music programs I wanted to go to, when I ran into a friend who I knew from the songwriting labs. She invited me to the guitar club that she ran, and of course I went. Although the rock boys weren’t the majority numbers wise, they dominated the room. They asked about my beat up Guild guitar. Impressed with how I inherited it from a rocker guy my dad works with, they encouraged me to play a song. I pulled out my most meticulously crafted coming-of-age ballad, and let them hear my line, “we’re all cynics and romantics, it’s semiotics and semantics,” to which they responded “cute song.” 

With the release of Folklore and Evermore, there’s been a shift. After teaming up with Aaron Desner of the National and Bon Iver, Taylor got a bit of that male approval that she never really needed. Pitchfork commented, with surprise, that Folklore showed “some real signs of maturity.” Each album that an artist releases should probably be more mature than the last. Surprise at lyrical maturity from a 30-year-old songwriter who penned lines like “you come away with a great little story of a mess of a dreamer with the nerve to adore you” as a teen, comes across a little underhanded. 

Much of the next generation of musicians have been influenced by Taylor. Conan Grey’s TikTok hit Heather was based on Last Kiss. Rising it-girl Olivia Rodrigo is a hardcore fan. Even Phoebe Bridgers, who has been memed as “Taylor Swift for girls with crumbs in their beds” or “Taylor Swift for people whose parents still love each other” lists Taylor Swift as an influence. Although this new shift is one for Taylor Swift and not a change in the ingrained biases against women and their art, I wonder if it’s going to trickle down to the artists she influenced. 

My favorite line in Evermore, Swift’s latest studio album ft. sad dad rock, comes in the second verse of Coney Island. In this song, Matt Berninger of The National slides in and out, singing lines in less predictable blocks than in other Swift collaborations. Together, Swift and Berninger coo “do you miss the rogue who coaxed you into paradise and left you there/will you forgive my soul when you’re too wise to trust me and too old to care.” It’s funny to hear one of the world’s biggest superstars share a line so monumental to the album. I wonder if it’s because she knows how much louder it will be when a man is holding up the low ends. 

[louistomlinsoncouk]

He became a bona-fide teen pop superstar as part of One Direction, then suffered unthinkable personal loss. Louis Tomlinson talks to Guy Kelly about fame, family and what comes next.

Louis Tomlinson took part in an online video recently, in which he was tasked with answering the internet’s most-searched questions about him. It was fairly tame, as you might expect of a pop quiz thrown at a pop star. ‘How do you pronounce Louis Tomlinson?’ the first read. There’s an interesting answer to that, actually, but we’ll come to it. ‘How old is Louis Tomlinson?’ was the second. He’s 28. And then came the third. ‘How is Louis Tomlinson?’

In the video, the man himself looks a little bewildered, dismissing the query as ‘random’ before moving on. But underneath, in the YouTube comments – one of the few nooks of the internet where love and goodwill still thrives – a fan repeated it. ‘“How is Louis Tomlinson,”’ they wrote, ‘the only question that matters.’ More than 7,000 people ‘liked’ it.

Given all Tomlinson’s been through in the past four years, it seems reasonable to ask. In 2016, the band he’d been in man and boy, One Direction, went on an indefinite hiatus after six years. Since being welded together by Simon Cowell on The X Factor in 2010, ‘1D’ had enjoyed perhaps the most stratospheric rise in music (five platinum albums, four world tours) since The Beatles. It hadn’t been Tomlinson’s decision to break up the band, and he wasn’t – still isn’t – particularly happy about it.

In December of that year, his beloved mother, Johannah Deakin, died a few months after being diagnosed with leukaemia. She was 43. Tomlinson pressed on with his nascent solo career, but unimaginable tragedy struck again. In March 2019, his 18-year-old half-sister, Félicité, was found unconscious at her flat in London and couldn’t be revived. An inquest later found she had died of an accidental drug overdose. Again, he buckled down, looked after his remaining siblings, and committed himself to finishing his debut album.

Settling down with Tomlinson in the corner of a west London photo studio, then, it seems as good a place as any to start: how is he?

‘I’m good, mate, I’m feeling good,’ he says, spreading his arms across a sofa. After wearing a series of high-end outfits for our photo shoot (‘I never feel super-comfortable on shoots; I’ve got one f—king pose – moody’), he’s in a black ’90s-inspired collared jumper, black trousers and black trainers.

He pushes his fringe to one side. The Doncaster accent, which softened in his 1D days, is back to pure, unfettered South Yorks. It’s all ‘in t’band’, ‘I didn’t know owt’, and swearing like a navvy. He’s honest, funny, and if his feet were planted any more firmly on the ground he’d be unable to walk.

I tell him about the YouTube comment, which seems to reflect the genuine care his fans have for him.

‘Ah, yeah I know, they’re considerate, they are. We’ve got a special, interesting bond. They’ve grown up with me – and I’ve been through some personal stuff and they’ve always been there for me.’

Tomlinson’s album, Walls, has been a long time coming. Immediately after One Direction split, he released a couple of singles – dance-y pop collaborations – which were fine, but not what he wanted to make. Halfway through writing Walls he realised, ‘If I’m chasing radio with every song I write, I’m not going to be doing this job for very long.’

So he relaxed, and the result is a mix of strong, melody-driven pop of the kind One Direction mastered, and what Tomlinson is really into, namely guitar-driven indie and Britpop. Some songs for the fans; some nodding to the future.

‘It’s a five-album plan. There’s bits where I’ve been almost selfish, and bits where I’ve been respectful to the fan base and what they love listening to,’ he says. ‘Then the next will be a step closer to the stuff I want to make. But I’ve got to earn my stripes.’

The dominant theme, I say, appears to be resilience. On the single Don’t Let It Break Your Heart, he advises, ‘Even when it hurts like hell / Oh, whatever tears you apart / Don’t let it break your heart.’ On the rousing title track (which features a writing credit for Noel Gallagher, who gave his blessing for a chorus strikingly similar to an Oasis tune), he sings, ‘These high walls that broke my soul / I watched all come falling down.’

It could be to do with grief, professional struggles, or his relationship. He nods.

‘Yeah, I write very autobiographically and had so much going on in my head, but in the struggle I’m trying to paint the message that you’re always left with a choice: to see the glass half-full or half-empty. It’s showing there’s hope.’

Some songwriters have found grief productive, others paralysing. Tomlinson was the former. One track on Walls is the previously released Two of Us, a beautiful, simple song written about his mum (‘You’ll never know how much I miss you / The day that they took you, I wish it was me instead’).

‘What’s amazing about this job is that regardless of the situation, you get something positive at the end of it. That’s obviously an emotionally heavy song for me, but fans have come up to me in floods of tears and talked about how it’s helped in their own tragedy. It’s incredible. From the dark, you can give hope.’

For the first three years of his life, Tomlinson was raised alone by Johannah, who split from his father, Troy Austin, when he was a baby. They lived above a launderette in Doncaster, where his mother worked multiple jobs, principally as a midwife, before she married Mark Tomlinson, a van salesman who became Louis’s stepfather. The three moved into a two-up, two-down, which was soon filled with half-sisters: Lottie, now 21, Félicité, then twins Daisy and Phoebe, now 16.

‘It was mad. They’re manic, young girls…’ he says. ‘Mum and Mark had a decent income but they couldn’t spread it around [a family of] seven. At times things were really good, you’d get 20 quid in a birthday card, but others were really difficult. I remember the electricity meter – you’d get five quid on the house as an emergency when you couldn’t top it up. Sometimes it’d be a gamble when it’d run out…’

Tomlinson wasn’t particularly academic – ‘though I’m not daft or owt’ – but loved school. There, he joined a band at 16 and found he was OK at singing, so he applied to audition for The X Factor. He failed, twice, but succeeded on the third try, in 2010, performing a fairly terrible (he admits it) version of Plain White T’s Hey There Delilah.

A few months later, at the ‘bootcamp’ stage, Cowell had the idea of creating a band comprised of Tomlinson and four other solo boys: Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Niall Horan and Liam Payne. They were to be called One Direction. Tomlinson, who’d been intimidated by the standard of other vocalists in the competition, ‘bit their hand off’ at the offer. ‘I was like, “This is my ticket.”’

The show came just after his second run at the first year of his A levels. He’d failed the first time, with UUE in psychology, PE and English, which his mum had ‘absolutely ripped [his] head off’ for. The second time he’d gone one better, UEE. So he lied, telling her he got a smattering of Ds, and came up with a plan.

‘I waited until after the X Factor final, when we were all sat around drinking champagne, and told her, “By the way, I bulls—tted you on those results. I failed again, but hopefully we’ll be all right now…”’ he laughs. ‘She was fine. I picked my moment well.’

One Direction came third in the final, losing to runner-up Rebecca Ferguson and winner Matt Cardle, a former painter-decorator who now performs in the West End. But it was always felt that the group would go furthest, not least because Cowell was such a supporter (all the other boys have now left his record label, Syco, but because ‘loyalty is the biggest thing’ for Tomlinson, he’s stayed).

Eighteen when the group started, Tomlinson was the oldest member (the others were 16 and 17), ‘just allowed to drink, just allowed to drive’, but suddenly everything in his life was controlled.

‘You’re ready to be reckless and stupid, but then I was in the band and couldn’t ever act like that, especially not publicly,’ he says. They went on their first headline concert tour in 2011, and soon had fans surrounding their hotels overnight, wherever in the world they went. Naturally, they embraced partying.

‘There was a good 18 months where I was going out all the time. The press love to write about that as if it’s this chaotic thing, and at times it was, but it’s also an escape. Once you have a couple of drinks down you in a club, you’re just someone in the club, part of everyone else, and not everyone is looking at you.’

Even when he was away, he kept in contact with his mum by phone – or in person, when she could join him – as much as possible. The two were impossibly close: she had access to his emails; he told her when he lost his virginity; she knew about his finances.

‘One thing I’ve learnt since losing her is that any decision, even if I knew the answer, I’d call her,’ he says. ‘I didn’t realise how reliant I’d become on her. That was the hardest thing for me, understanding that living life after meant making decisions on my own. I thought I’d always have a sounding board. There was a different level of credibility with my mum, because I idolised her.’

Styles has recently joked that One Direction were ‘grown in test tubes’ by Cowell, but Tomlinson insists that part of their appeal lay in the fact that they all had their own personalities and talents, which weren’t forced on them. Still, it took him years to know where he fitted. Styles was cool, a heart-throb. Malik was moody and mysterious. Horan was cute and Irish. Payne was whatever Payne was. But Tomlinson wasn’t sure.

‘You’ve got to be dead cocky in Doncaster to survive – it’s either that or be picked on. So I used to walk around with a chip on my shoulder. But I’d always been the funny guy, centre of attention, so I never struggled to make mates,’ he says. ‘It was weird suddenly being in a situation where one or two members are constantly in a better position. It took me a while to understand my strengths. I was the oldest and it wasn’t until the third album when I made it my mission to write the most.’

He succeeded: Tomlinson’s writing credit appears on 39 of the 96 songs One Direction recorded, four more than Payne and dozens more than the rest. But it was intense. There were times when he considered quitting the band, if only to allow him to escape the attention, but he likens that to children running away from home. ‘By the time you get halfway down the street you regret it and go back…’

‘Directioners’ were ‘fanatical’ about the boys, to a frequently absurd degree. And not every encounter was surreally funny. The year after the hiatus began, in 2017, Tomlinson and Calder were involved in a scuffle with paparazzi and fans at the airport in LA. Fists possibly flew, and Tomlinson was arrested, only for no further action to be taken. The fans now are still loyal, still ardent, but they’ve matured with him.

What kept him grounded, as the money rolled in (I have heard that each of the boys amassed a £40 million fortune from the band, and that collectively they still earn around £38,000 a week from royalties, merchandise and so on) and the fans bayed, was keeping friends from Doncaster around. When I arrived at today’s photo shoot, Tomlinson was busy doing his singular pose at one end of the room, while at the other, near the free pastries, a young redheaded bloke in a tracksuit lurked, scrolling through his phone.

He introduced himself as Oli, Tomlinson’s ‘mate from Donny’, who has spent the better part of a decade travelling the world with his pop-star friend, and seems to operate as a walking comfort blanket. They live together when Tomlinson’s in LA.

They also live together when he’s in London. I imagine there’s space for house guests wherever he is, though: it has been reported that he put his Hollywood Hills mansion on the market last year for $6.995 million, and the previous year valued another property in California at $13.999 million, after apparently renting it out for $40,000 per month.

‘I’m hoping to do a bit of work with Louis’s tour manager this year,’ Oli says, cheerfully. I later discover he’s so ever-present with Tomlinson that he even has his own fan accounts on social media.

‘I remember bringing a mate out for our first US tour. He called from his hotel with his mind blown by being able to pick up a phone and they’d just bring you food,’ Tomlinson says. ‘I go back to Donny and hear heavy s—t – struggles with jobs, money, family, health. That humbles me, and gives me a better emotional intelligence.’

He reckons ‘eight out of 10 people have an ulterior motive’ when they meet him. Luckily he can tell if someone’s a pre-fame friend. His name is pronounced ‘Loo-ee’, but he wasn’t keen on it as a child, so had mates, like Oli, pronounce it ‘Lewis’, which they still do. Unfortunately Cowell guessed at ‘Loo-ee’ on The X Factor, so that was that for the stage name.

By 2015, some members of One Direction felt an itch to break off – or just have a break – and try their own thing. Malik had gone in March, and while a full split seemed inevitable, Tomlinson was still caught off-guard.

‘I was f—king fuming at first. We were working really hard – people [namely, Payne] have said overworked, but we weren’t overworked, that’s just what happens when you’re a band that size, though I understand. I thought I’d mentally prepared myself for a break, but it hit me hard.’

He was finally feeling comfortable in the band, and hadn’t thought about a solo career.

‘About a week after, I sat there thinking, “Strike while the iron’s hot,” but I wasn’t ready. I was bitter and angry, I didn’t know why we couldn’t just carry on. But now, even though I don’t fully understand everyone’s individual reasons, I respect them.’

They’re ostensibly all still mates, despite going in radically different musical directions, though some are closer than others. Tomlinson seems to mention Horan with most affection, and the pair performed at the same event in Mexico in November, titillating 1D fans by sound-checking together with one of the band’s old songs.

If it was up to you, I ask, would the group still be going? He considers this for a moment.

‘It if was up to me, yeah. I’d maybe have said, “Let’s have a year off.” But yeah, probably. I’m sure there’s a better analogy out there but it’s a bit like [shutting down] Coca-Cola. You don’t say, “Right, let’s hang the boots up on that,” because it’s a massive thing.’

Afterwards he muddled around for a bit, including releasing those early singles – one of which he performed on The X Factor, rigid with grief, just days after his mum’s death. Then he returned to the show last year as a judge, alongside Cowell, Robbie Williams and Williams’s wife, Ayda Field.

Did he get on with Robbie? He smiles, arching an eyebrow. ‘Why do you ask?’ Well, he came out of a boy band, went solo…

‘Oh, yeah, he was all right. He’s a good man, we were just different from each other. Certain moments I thought, “F—king hell, Robbie, just sit down for five minutes, I’ve got something to say.” I love his missus though, Ayda, she’s sound.’

Tomlinson liked mentoring, and during our conversation it becomes clear he’s fuelled by responsibility. He was the oldest sibling in his house, and although Mark Tomlinson and Johannah’s second husband (after divorcing Mark in 2011, she married Dan Deakin in 2014; they had twins Ernest and Doris) are still around, he became a paternal figure after she died. He’s particularly involved in the lives of Daisy and Phoebe, to whom he’s ‘a kind of second parent’.

‘Without being too soppy, I like looking after people, it’s cool. At the moment I’m stressing trying to convince Daisy and Phoebe to go to sixth form. They’ve been to private school near Donny, and it’s proper expensive. I’m paying for it thinking they’re staying on, but now they don’t want to go. I told them education is important. I’m like, “You’re 16, you haven’t got a f—king idea what the real world is,”’ he says.

‘What’s difficult about those two is they’ve only known the 1D craziness. They’ve grown up in this elitist way, which is very different from my upbringing and Lottie’s, and the values my mum taught us.’

He gives a ‘kids, eh?’ sigh. ‘Consistency is the big thing. I’m trying to get better at being in their heads enough so they think, “I wonder if Louis thinks this is a good idea?”’

Lottie lives in Hackney, east London. When she was a teenager, Tomlinson got her a job assisting One Direction’s make-up artist, and within a few years she’d become a ridiculously popular Instagrammer (currently with 3.4 million followers, still 10 million shy of Louis). Her big brother told her Instagram’s fine, but she must ‘become a proper businesswoman’ in case the bubble bursts. In 2018 she launched Tanologist, a successful fake-tan brand.

‘I’m so proud of her. She’s just been in Australia, where she’s stocked in Melbourne’s version of Boots!’ Tomlinson says, beaming.

Félicité, known to the family as Fizz, was also a budding Instagrammer. After her death last March, a post-mortem revealed ‘toxic’ levels of anti-anxiety and pain medications, as well as cocaine, in her blood. Six months later, an inquest heard that she had visited her GP in August 2018 and ‘gave a history of recreational drug use… on a consistent basis since the death of her mother’. She had taken overdoses and been admitted to a rehabilitation clinic.

Tomlinson hesitates to say anything was ‘easier’, comparing the deaths of Félicité and his mum, as ‘both felt very individual, and hit me with a big impact… but I think dealing with the family, how I can be there for them, that was a lot easier the second time because the first time I was grieving and didn’t know what to say. As time went on I grew to understand what to say to my sisters.’

Prioritising the feelings of your sisters in the immediate aftermath is understandable, I say, but I wonder if anyone took care of you. He looks surprised.

‘No, but friends and family, my best mate… I feel their support but I get most out of doing stuff for other people. I don’t say that to sound like a good guy, it’s genuinely what gives me strength.’

Did you ever consider grief therapy?

‘Nah, a lot of people recommended it but I’m a little bit old-fashioned when it comes to therapy. I’m sure it’s incredible, but I thought I’d be all right, and I have been till now.’ One of his many tattoos consists of the words ‘It Is What It Is’ across his chest. ‘I know the things I’ve been upset about in my life are s—t, but I can’t change them, so you have to make the best of what you’ve got.’

Tomlinson gives his own big smile. Our time’s nearly up, and he’d like a cigarette. After all you’ve been through, I tell him, people would have understood if you’d called it a day. You could have lived off royalties, enjoyed a quiet life.

‘Definitely, definitely. But do you know what? It didn’t cross my mind once. I somehow have an inability to worry, and just get on with things,’ he says, shrugging. ‘It’s definitely made me stronger. I’ve gone through every emotion, and I’m just f—king excited now.’

I think we have an answer. How is Louis Tomlinson? Hopefully, he’ll be just fine.

Walls is released on 31 January

[elceeu2morrow]

By Guy Kelly 17 JANUARY 2020 • 8:00PM

He became a bona-fide teen pop superstar as part of One Direction, then suffered unthinkable personal loss. Louis Tomlinson talks to Guy Kelly about fame, family and what comes next.

Louis Tomlinson took part in an online video recently, in which he was tasked with answering the internet’s most-searched questions about him. It was fairly tame, as you might expect of a pop quiz thrown at a pop star. ‘How do you pronounce Louis Tomlinson?’ the first read. There’s an interesting answer to that, actually, but we’ll come to it. ‘How old is Louis Tomlinson?’ was the second. He’s 28. And then came the third. ‘How is Louis Tomlinson?’

In the video, the man himself looks a little bewildered, dismissing the query as ‘random’ before moving on. But underneath, in the YouTube comments – one of the few nooks of the internet where love and goodwill still thrives – a fan repeated it. ‘“How is Louis Tomlinson,”’ they wrote, ‘the only question that matters.’ More than 7,000 people ‘liked’ it.

Given all Tomlinson’s been through in the past four years, it seems reasonable to ask. In 2016, the band he’d been in man and boy, One Direction, went on an indefinite hiatus after six years. Since being welded together by Simon Cowell on The X Factor in 2010, ‘1D’ had enjoyed perhaps the most stratospheric rise in music (five platinum albums, four world tours) since The Beatles. It hadn’t been Tomlinson’s decision to break up the band, and he wasn’t – still isn’t – particularly happy about it.

[complete article below the cut]

In December of that year, his beloved mother, Johannah Deakin, died a few months after being diagnosed with leukaemia. She was 43. Tomlinson pressed on with his nascent solo career, but unimaginable tragedy struck again. In March 2019, his 18-year-old half-sister, Félicité, was found unconscious at her flat in London and couldn’t be revived. An inquest later found she had died of an accidental drug overdose. Again, he buckled down, looked after his remaining siblings, and committed himself to finishing his debut album.

Settling down with Tomlinson in the corner of a west London photo studio, then, it seems as good a place as any to start: how is he?

‘I’m good, mate, I’m feeling good,’ he says, spreading his arms across a sofa. After wearing a series of high-end outfits for our photo shoot (‘I never feel super-comfortable on shoots; I’ve got one f—king pose – moody’), he’s in a black ’90s-inspired collared jumper, black trousers and black trainers.

He pushes his fringe to one side. The Doncaster accent, which softened in his 1D days, is back to pure, unfettered South Yorks. It’s all ‘in t’band’, ‘I didn’t know owt’, and swearing like a navvy. He’s honest, funny, and if his feet were planted any more firmly on the ground he’d be unable to walk.

I tell him about the YouTube comment, which seems to reflect the genuine care his fans have for him.

‘Ah, yeah I know, they’re considerate, they are. We’ve got a special, interesting bond. They’ve grown up with me – and I’ve been through some personal stuff and they’ve always been there for me.’

Tomlinson’s album, Walls, has been a long time coming. Immediately after One Direction split, he released a couple of singles – dance-y pop collaborations – which were fine, but not what he wanted to make. Halfway through writing Walls he realised, ‘If I’m chasing radio with every song I write, I’m not going to be doing this job for very long.’

So he relaxed, and the result is a mix of strong, melody-driven pop of the kind One Direction mastered, and what Tomlinson is really into, namely guitar-driven indie and Britpop. Some songs for the fans; some nodding to the future.

‘It’s a five-album plan. There’s bits where I’ve been almost selfish, and bits where I’ve been respectful to the fan base and what they love listening to,’ he says. ‘Then the next will be a step closer to the stuff I want to make. But I’ve got to earn my stripes.’

The dominant theme, I say, appears to be resilience. On the single Don’t Let It Break Your Heart, he advises, ‘Even when it hurts like hell / Oh, whatever tears you apart / Don’t let it break your heart.’ On the rousing title track (which features a writing credit for Noel Gallagher, who gave his blessing for a chorus strikingly similar to an Oasis tune), he sings, ‘These high walls that broke my soul / I watched all come falling down.’

It could be to do with grief, professional struggles, or his relationship – he’s happily with his girlfriend, 27-year-old fashion blogger Eleanor Calder, but they’ve been on and off over the years. He nods.

‘Yeah, I write very autobiographically and had so much going on in my head, but in the struggle I’m trying to paint the message that you’re always left with a choice: to see the glass half-full or half-empty. It’s showing there’s hope.’

Some songwriters have found grief productive, others paralysing. Tomlinson was the former. One track on Walls is the previously released Two of Us, a beautiful, simple song written about his mum (‘You’ll never know how much I miss you / The day that they took you, I wish it was me instead’).

‘What’s amazing about this job is that regardless of the situation, you get something positive at the end of it. That’s obviously an emotionally heavy song for me, but fans have come up to me in floods of tears and talked about how it’s helped in their own tragedy. It’s incredible. From the dark, you can give hope.’

For the first three years of his life, Tomlinson was raised alone by Johannah, who split from his father, Troy Austin, when he was a baby. They lived above a launderette in Doncaster, where his mother worked multiple jobs, principally as a midwife, before she married Mark Tomlinson, a van salesman who became Louis’s stepfather. The three moved into a two-up, two-down, which was soon filled with half-sisters: Lottie, now 21, Félicité, then twins Daisy and Phoebe, now 16.

‘It was mad. They’re manic, young girls…’ he says. ‘Mum and Mark had a decent income but they couldn’t spread it around [a family of] seven. At times things were really good, you’d get 20 quid in a birthday card, but others were really difficult. I remember the electricity meter – you’d get five quid on the house as an emergency when you couldn’t top it up. Sometimes it’d be a gamble when it’d run out…’

Tomlinson wasn’t particularly academic – ‘though I’m not daft or owt’ – but loved school. There, he joined a band at 16 and found he was OK at singing, so he applied to audition for The X Factor. He failed, twice, but succeeded on the third try, in 2010, performing a fairly terrible (he admits it) version of Plain White T’s Hey There Delilah.

A few months later, at the ‘bootcamp’ stage, Cowell had the idea of creating a band comprised of Tomlinson and four other solo boys: Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Niall Horan and Liam Payne. They were to be called One Direction. Tomlinson, who’d been intimidated by the standard of other vocalists in the competition, ‘bit their hand off’ at the offer. ‘I was like, “This is my ticket.”’

The show came just after his second run at the first year of his A levels. He’d failed the first time, with UUE in psychology, PE and English, which his mum had ‘absolutely ripped [his] head off’ for. The second time he’d gone one better, UEE. So he lied, telling her he got a smattering of Ds, and came up with a plan.

‘I waited until after the X Factor final, when we were all sat around drinking champagne, and told her, “By the way, I bulls—tted you on those results. I failed again, but hopefully we’ll be all right now…”’ he laughs. ‘She was fine. I picked my moment well.’

One Direction came third in the final, losing to runner-up Rebecca Ferguson and winner Matt Cardle, a former painter-decorator who now performs in the West End. But it was always felt that the group would go furthest, not least because Cowell was such a supporter (all the other boys have now left his record label, Syco, but because ‘loyalty is the biggest thing’ for Tomlinson, he’s stayed).

Eighteen when the group started, Tomlinson was the oldest member (the others were 16 and 17), ‘just allowed to drink, just allowed to drive’, but suddenly everything in his life was controlled.

‘You’re ready to be reckless and stupid, but then I was in the band and couldn’t ever act like that, especially not publicly,’ he says. They went on their first headline concert tour in 2011, and soon had fans surrounding their hotels overnight, wherever in the world they went. Naturally, they embraced partying.

‘There was a good 18 months where I was going out all the time. The press love to write about that as if it’s this chaotic thing, and at times it was, but it’s also an escape. Once you have a couple of drinks down you in a club, you’re just someone in the club, part of everyone else, and not everyone is looking at you.’

Even when he was away, he kept in contact with his mum by phone – or in person, when she could join him – as much as possible. The two were impossibly close: she had access to his emails; he told her when he lost his virginity; she knew about his finances.

‘One thing I’ve learnt since losing her is that any decision, even if I knew the answer, I’d call her,’ he says. ‘I didn’t realise how reliant I’d become on her. That was the hardest thing for me, understanding that living life after meant making decisions on my own. I thought I’d always have a sounding board. There was a different level of credibility with my mum, because I idolised her.’

Styles has recently joked that One Direction were ‘grown in test tubes’ by Cowell, but Tomlinson insists that part of their appeal lay in the fact that they all had their own personalities and talents, which weren’t forced on them. Still, it took him years to know where he fitted. Styles was cool, a heart-throb. Malik was moody and mysterious. Horan was cute and Irish. Payne was whatever Payne was. But Tomlinson wasn’t sure.

‘You’ve got to be dead cocky in Doncaster to survive – it’s either that or be picked on. So I used to walk around with a chip on my shoulder. But I’d always been the funny guy, centre of attention, so I never struggled to make mates,’ he says. ‘It was weird suddenly being in a situation where one or two members are constantly in a better position. It took me a while to understand my strengths. I was the oldest and it wasn’t until the third album when I made it my mission to write the most.’

He succeeded: Tomlinson’s writing credit appears on 39 of the 96 songs One Direction recorded, four more than Payne and dozens more than the rest. But it was intense. There were times when he considered quitting the band, if only to allow him to escape the attention, but he likens that to children running away from home. ‘By the time you get halfway down the street you regret it and go back…’

‘Directioners’ were ‘fanatical’ about the boys, to a frequently absurd degree. And not every encounter was surreally funny. The year after the hiatus began, in 2017, Tomlinson and Calder were involved in a scuffle with paparazzi and fans at the airport in LA. Fists possibly flew, and Tomlinson was arrested, only for no further action to be taken. The fans now are still loyal, still ardent, but they’ve matured with him.

What kept him grounded, as the money rolled in (I have heard that each of the boys amassed a £40 million fortune from the band, and that collectively they still earn around £38,000 a week from royalties, merchandise and so on) and the fans bayed, was keeping friends from Doncaster around. When I arrived at today’s photo shoot, Tomlinson was busy doing his singular pose at one end of the room, while at the other, near the free pastries, a young redheaded bloke in a tracksuit lurked, scrolling through his phone.

He introduced himself as Oli, Tomlinson’s ‘mate from Donny’, who has spent the better part of a decade travelling the world with his pop-star friend, and seems to operate as a walking comfort blanket. They live together when Tomlinson’s in LA, where he has a three-year-old son, Freddie, from a short relationship with stylist Briana Jungwirth.

They also live together when he’s in London, along with Calder, to whom it was recently reported that Tomlinson is engaged (his representatives denied the rumour). I imagine there’s space for house guests wherever he is, though: it has been reported that he put his Hollywood Hills mansion on the market last year for $6.995 million, and the previous year valued another property in California at $13.999 million, after apparently renting it out for $40,000 per month.

‘I’m hoping to do a bit of work with Louis’s tour manager this year,’ Oli says, cheerfully. I later discover he’s so ever-present with Tomlinson that he even has his own fan accounts on social media.

‘I remember bringing a mate out for our first US tour. He called from his hotel with his mind blown by being able to pick up a phone and they’d just bring you food,’ Tomlinson says. ‘I go back to Donny and hear heavy s—t – struggles with jobs, money, family, health. That humbles me, and gives me a better emotional intelligence.’

He reckons ‘eight out of 10 people have an ulterior motive’ when they meet him. Luckily he can tell if someone’s a pre-fame friend. His name is pronounced ‘Loo-ee’, but he wasn’t keen on it as a child, so had mates, like Oli, pronounce it ‘Lewis’, which they still do. Unfortunately Cowell guessed at ‘Loo-ee’ on The X Factor, so that was that for the stage name.

By 2015, some members of One Direction felt an itch to break off – or just have a break – and try their own thing. Malik had gone in March, and while a full split seemed inevitable, Tomlinson was still caught off-guard.

‘I was f—king fuming at first. We were working really hard – people [namely, Payne] have said overworked, but we weren’t overworked, that’s just what happens when you’re a band that size, though I understand. I thought I’d mentally prepared myself for a break, but it hit me hard.’

He was finally feeling comfortable in the band, and hadn’t thought about a solo career.

‘About a week after, I sat there thinking, “Strike while the iron’s hot,” but I wasn’t ready. I was bitter and angry, I didn’t know why we couldn’t just carry on. But now, even though I don’t fully understand everyone’s individual reasons, I respect them.’

They’re ostensibly all still mates, despite going in radically different musical directions, though some are closer than others. Tomlinson seems to mention Horan with most affection, and the pair performed at the same event in Mexico in November, titillating 1D fans by sound-checking together with one of the band’s old songs.

If it was up to you, I ask, would the group still be going? He considers this for a moment.

‘It if was up to me, yeah. I’d maybe have said, “Let’s have a year off.” But yeah, probably. I’m sure there’s a better analogy out there but it’s a bit like [shutting down] Coca-Cola. You don’t say, “Right, let’s hang the boots up on that,” because it’s a massive thing.’

Afterwards he muddled around for a bit, including releasing those early singles – one of which he performed on The X Factor, rigid with grief, just days after his mum’s death. Then he returned to the show last year as a judge, alongside Cowell, Robbie Williams and Williams’s wife, Ayda Field.

Did he get on with Robbie? He smiles, arching an eyebrow. ‘Why do you ask?’ Well, he came out of a boy band, went solo…

‘Oh, yeah, he was all right. He’s a good man, we were just different from each other. Certain moments I thought, “F—king hell, Robbie, just sit down for five minutes, I’ve got something to say.” I love his missus though, Ayda, she’s sound.’

Tomlinson liked mentoring, and during our conversation it becomes clear he’s fuelled by responsibility. He was the oldest sibling in his house, and although Mark Tomlinson and Johannah’s second husband (after divorcing Mark in 2011, she married Dan Deakin in 2014; they had twins Ernest and Doris) are still around, he became a paternal figure after she died. He’s particularly involved in the lives of Daisy and Phoebe, to whom he’s ‘a kind of second parent’.

‘Without being too soppy, I like looking after people, it’s cool. At the moment I’m stressing trying to convince Daisy and Phoebe to go to sixth form. They’ve been to private school near Donny, and it’s proper expensive. I’m paying for it thinking they’re staying on, but now they don’t want to go. I told them education is important. I’m like, “You’re 16, you haven’t got a f—king idea what the real world is,”’ he says.

‘What’s difficult about those two is they’ve only known the 1D craziness. They’ve grown up in this elitist way, which is very different from my upbringing and Lottie’s, and the values my mum taught us.’

He gives a ‘kids, eh?’ sigh. ‘Consistency is the big thing. I’m trying to get better at being in their heads enough so they think, “I wonder if Louis thinks this is a good idea?”’

Lottie lives in Hackney, east London. When she was a teenager, Tomlinson got her a job assisting One Direction’s make-up artist, and within a few years she’d become a ridiculously popular Instagrammer (currently with 3.4 million followers, still 10 million shy of Louis). Her big brother told her Instagram’s fine, but she must ‘become a proper businesswoman’ in case the bubble bursts. In 2018 she launched Tanologist, a successful fake-tan brand.

‘I’m so proud of her. She’s just been in Australia, where she’s stocked in Melbourne’s version of Boots!’ Tomlinson says, beaming.

Félicité, known to the family as Fizz, was also a budding Instagrammer. After her death last March, a post-mortem revealed ‘toxic’ levels of anti-anxiety and pain medications, as well as cocaine, in her blood. Six months later, an inquest heard that she had visited her GP in August 2018 and ‘gave a history of recreational drug use… on a consistent basis since the death of her mother’. She had taken overdoses and been admitted to a rehabilitation clinic.

Tomlinson hesitates to say anything was ‘easier’, comparing the deaths of Félicité and his mum, as ‘both felt very individual, and hit me with a big impact… but I think dealing with the family, how I can be there for them, that was a lot easier the second time because the first time I was grieving and didn’t know what to say. As time went on I grew to understand what to say to my sisters.’

Prioritising the feelings of your sisters in the immediate aftermath is understandable, I say, but I wonder if anyone took care of you. He looks surprised.

‘No, but friends and family, my best mate, my girlfriend, my son… I feel their support but I get most out of doing stuff for other people. I don’t say that to sound like a good guy, it’s genuinely what gives me strength.’

Did you ever consider grief therapy?

‘Nah, a lot of people recommended it but I’m a little bit old-fashioned when it comes to therapy. I’m sure it’s incredible, but I thought I’d be all right, and I have been till now.’ One of his many tattoos consists of the words ‘It Is What It Is’ across his chest. ‘I know the things I’ve been upset about in my life are s—t, but I can’t change them, so you have to make the best of what you’ve got.’

What he’s got is an album to launch, a world tour to prep for and, immediately, a flight to catch. He and Oli are off to see Freddie. ‘When I’m working I definitely don’t see him enough,’ Tomlinson says, ‘but he looks just like me, which is cool. I’m excited to see his big smile.’

Tomlinson gives his own big smile. Our time’s nearly up, and he’d like a cigarette. After all you’ve been through, I tell him, people would have understood if you’d called it a day. You could have lived off royalties, enjoyed a quiet life with Calder, Freddie, your sisters.

‘Definitely, definitely. But do you know what? It didn’t cross my mind once. I somehow have an inability to worry, and just get on with things,’ he says, shrugging. ‘It’s definitely made me stronger. I’ve gone through every emotion, and I’m just f—king excited now.’

I think we have an answer. How is Louis Tomlinson? Hopefully, he’ll be just fine.

Walls is released on 31 January

[blackkudos]

Ledisi

Ledisi Anibade Young (born March 28, 1972), better known simply as Ledisi, is an American R&B and jazz recording artist, songwriter, and actress. Her first name means "to bring forth" or "to come here" in Yoruba. In 1995, Ledisi formed the group Anibade. After unsuccessfully trying to get the group signed to a major label, she formed LeSun Records with Sundra Manning. Anibade and Ledisi released an album entitled "Soulsinger" (black and white cover on the LeSun Music independent label) featuring the song Take Time, which gained substantial airplay from San Francisco area radio stations. A twelve-time Grammy Award nominee, Ledisi has released eight studio albums between 2000 and 2017.

In 2000, Ledisi re-released her first major label signed album, titled Soulsinger: The Revival. Ledisi and her group toured in 2001. In 2002, Ledisi released her second album, Feeling Orange but Sometimes Blue. The album won an award for "Outstanding Jazz Album" at the California Music Awards.

In 2005, Ledisi signed a record deal with Verve Forecast and released her third album, titled Lost & Found, on August 28, 2007; it sold almost 217,000 copies and earned her two Grammy nominations, including one for Best New Artist. In 2008, Ledisi released her Christmas album, It's Christmas.

In 2009, Ledisi released her fourth album Turn Me Loose, which earned her two Grammy nominations, followed by her fifth album Pieces of Me (2011) which debuted on the US Billboard 200 album chart at number eight, becoming the first top-ten album of her career and her highest-charting album to date. It also garnered three Grammy nominations at the 54th Grammy Awards including for Best R&B Album. In 2013, she received a nomination for Best R&B Performance at the 55th Grammy Awards for her collaboration with fellow R&B and jazz musician Robert Glasper for the album cut "Gonna Be Alright" from his fifth album Black Radio (2012). In 2014, she released her sixth album The Truth to critical acclaim and moderate sales. She portrayed legendary gospel singer Mahalia Jackson in the 2014 Martin Luther King, Jr. biopic, Selma.

Early life

Ledisi was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. She grew up in a musical family; her mother, Nyra Dynese, sang in a Louisiana R&B band and her stepfather, Joseph Pierce III, (deceased) was a drummer in the New Orleans area. Her biological father is soul singer Larry Sanders, the son of blues singer Johnny Ace. He left the family when she was a baby and they did not meet again for nearly three decades.

Ledisi first began performing publicly at age eight with the New Orleans Symphony Orchestra. Ledisi moved to Oakland, California, where she attended McChesney Junior High School, now Edna Brewer Middle School. She was shy about her singing abilities and would sing only upon request when students in her gym class would implore her to sing Deniece Williams's version of Black Butterfly, bringing the entire locker room audience under the spell of her very mature, melodious voice. As she sang more publicly her music career blossomed. She was nominated for a Shellie award in 1990 for her performance in a production of The Wiz and performed in an extended run with the San Francisco cabaret troupe, Beach Blanket Babylon. She studied opera and piano for five years at University of California Berkeley in their Young Musicians Program.

Musical career

1995–1999: Career beginnings

In the 1990s, Ledisi formed a group called Anibade, alongside Sundra Manning (producer, keyboards, songwriting), Phoenix (LaGerald) Normand (background vocals, songwriting), Cedrickke Dennis (guitar), Nelson Braxton (bass), Wayne Braxton (sax), and Rob Rhodes (drums), playing a jazz and hip-hop influenced kind of soul. The group won acclaim in the San Francisco Bay Area with a cult-like following of die-hard fans who referred to themselves as "Ledites" and meet her with love at every event, singing along verbatim to songs that though unrecorded at the time, were well known by their fans. The group later recorded a demo of one of the songs from their set, entitled, "Take Time" which was played on local stations and requested non-stop. Ledisi tried to get the group signed to a major label, but had no luck. Ledisi also performed often with jazz saxophonist Robert Stewart throughout the early 1990s in San Francisco.

2000–2003: Soulsinger: The Revival and Feeling Orange but Sometimes Blue

In January 2000, Ledisi released her first album, Soulsinger: The Revival, independently on her label, LeSun Records. The album spun off four singles, "Soulsinger", "Take Time", "Get Outta My Kitchen", and "Good Lovin'". After the release of Soulsinger: The Revival, Ledisi toured with her group Anibade.

In 2002, Ledisi released her second album, Feeling Orange but Sometimes Blue, which was also released independently. The album featured the singles "Feeling Orange but Sometimes Blue" and "Autumn Leaves". During this time she also recorded commercials for the Sci Fi Channel. In 2003, Ledisi won "Outstanding Jazz Album" for Feeling Orange but Sometimes Blue at the California Music Awards.

2006–2008: Lost & Found

During her five-year hiatus, Ledisi made appearances on soundtracks. In 2007, she signed with Verve and released "Blues in the Night" which featured on the tribute album, We All Love Ella: Celebrating the First Lady of Song.

In August 2007, Ledisi's third album, Lost & Found, was released. During her hiatus, Ledisi stated that she was unsure of wanting to stay in the music industry. In response, Ledisi wrote the song "Alright" to express her life. "Alright" became the lead single and debuted at #45 on the Billboard Hot R&B chart. The album's second single, "In The Morning", debuted at #49 on the Billboard Hot R&B chart. Other songs from the album charted but were not released as singles. "Think of You" charted at #71 on the Hot R&B charts, "Joy" charted at #103 on the Hot R&B charts and #29 on the Adult R&B Airplay.

In December 2007, the album earned her two Grammy nominations, including one for Best New Artist. In 2008, Ledisi continued her tour to promote the album, Lost & Found. By January 2009, the album had sold 216,894 copies.

In September 2008, Ledisi released her Christmas album, It's Christmas, which featured the singles "This Christmas" and "Children Go Where I Send Thee". In December 2008, Ledisi's T.V. special aired on Gospel Channel, titled "Ledisi Christmas". Ledisi performed a few songs from her Christmas album. "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" and "Give Love On Christmas Day" charted on the Hot R&B charts at #113.

In 2008 Ledisi performed the song "The Man I Love" as a blues singer in the Leatherheads movie.

2009–2010: Turn Me Loose

In 2009, Ledisi's fourth studio album was announced as Turn Me Loose. The album was released on August 18, 2009. Speaking in April 2010 to noted UK R&B writer Pete Lewis – Deputy Editor of the award-winning Blues & Soul – Ledisi explained the album's title reflected its musical diversity: "The title 'Turn Me Loose' is basically me saying 'I don't wanna be boxed in! Let me be myself as a performer and singer, because I do EVERYTHING! Not just one particular style!'." She employed production from seasoned R&B songwriter-producers such as Raphael Saadiq, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, James "Big Jim" Wright, and Carvin & Ivan. The first single from the album was "Goin' Thru Changes". The second single was "Higher Than This", produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and James "Big Jim" Wright.

On May 13, 2010, Ledisi performed at Charter Oak Cultural Center's 9th Annual Gala, a fundraiser for free after-school youth arts programming in inner-city Hartford. She performed several songs from Turn Me Loose, and also performed a duet with Anika Noni Rose, a tribute to the late Lena Horne.

2011–2012: Pieces of Me

Ledisi toured with R&B/soul singer Kem on his North American INTIMACY Tour. On March 10, 2011, during her opening act in Atlanta, Georgia, Ledisi announced that she had finished recording her fifth studio album, Pieces of Me, on March 9, 2011. It was released on June 14, 2011. It debuted at number 8 on the Billboard 200 album chart, selling 38,000 copies in its first week. The album's title track served as the album's lead single.

Ledisi has performed at the White House seven times at the request of President and First Lady Obama.

Ledisi headlined her first tour to promote her album, Pieces of Me. The Pieces of Me Tour played to 22 sold out shows across North America. With this album, she received three nominations for the 2012 Grammy Awards, in the categories Best R&B Album, Best R&B Performance and Best R&B Song, for the album and the lead single "Pieces of Me".

Ledisi released her first book, Better Than Alright: Finding Peace, Love & Power on Time Home Entertainment, Inc. in 2012. The book, an innovative collaboration with ESSENCE, is filled with the singer's personal photos, quotes, lyrics, and richly detailed stories of her journey to acceptance of her beauty, talent, and power.

On April 6, 2012, Ledisi announced her second headlining tour, B.G.T.Y., with Eric Benet serving as an opening act. In December 2012, VH1 announced that Ledisi would perform at their 2012 VH1 Divas show, a concert benefiting the Save The Music Foundation charity. Ledisi performed a Whitney Houston tribute medley with Jordin Sparks and Melanie Fiona.

2014–2016: The Truth

On March 2014, Ledisi released her new album The Truth. She is also on tour with Robert Glasper in partnership with the magazine "Essence" (which featured her on one of their three April covers as well as Erykah Badu and Solange Knowles).

In April 2014, Ledisi was cast to play Mahalia Jackson in the American historical drama film, Selma, directed by Ava DuVernay and written by Paul Webb and DuVernay. It is based on the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches led by James Bevel, Hosea Williams, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In the film and on the official film soundtrack, Ledisi sings "Take My Hand, Precious Lord". Initially slated to perform at the 57th Grammy Awards as part of a tribute to the Selma March alongside Common and John Legend (who performed their Oscar-winning duet "Glory") she was ultimately snubbed by the Recording Academy and recording artist Beyoncé, who performed in her place. Ledisi's snubbing and Beyoncé's performance received mixed reaction from social media. In 2015, she received her ninth Grammy Award nomination for Best R&B Performance for the single "Like This" off of her seventh album The Truth. She lost to Beyoncé and Jay Z for "Drunk in Love".

2017–present: Let Love Rule

In May 2017, Ledisi released a single titled "High" produced by Darhyl "Hey DJ" Camper and Rex Rideout. Her eighth studio album called Let Love Rule was released on September 22, 2017. In November 2017, she received three more nominations at the 60th Grammy Awards in January 2018 including Best R&B Album, Best R&B Performance and Best Traditional R&B Performance. Ledisi won a Soul Train Award 'Soul Certified Award' for the album.

Ledisi helped the BET Awards pay tribute to Anita Baker, the Lifetime Achievement Award recipient of the night on June 24, with a rendition of the singer's 1986 ode "Sweet Love".

Ledisi was then a part of the Aretha Franklin Tribute that was put together by the annual award ceremony known as Black Girls Rock. Ledisi delivered a rendition of the hit "Ain't No Way".

In October 2018, Ledisi performed with Adam Lambert in an NBC broadcast, A Very Wicked Halloween: Celebrating 15 Years on Broadway, before a live studio audience at the Marquis Theatre in New York, singing "As Long as You're Mine" from Wicked.

Discography

Studio albums

Soulsinger: The Revival (2000)

Feeling Orange but Sometimes Blue (2002)

Lost & Found (2007)

Turn Me Loose (2009)

Pieces of Me (2011)

The Truth (2014)

Let Love Rule (2017)

Awards and nominations

Grammy Awards

Ledisi has been nominated for twelve career Grammy Awards.

BET Awards

BETJ Virtual Awards

California Music Awards

Soul Train Music Awards

2008, BET J Cool Like Dat Award (Nominated)

2008, Female Artist of the Year (Nominated)

2003, Outstanding Jazz Album, Feeling Orange But Sometimes Blue (Won)

2011, Centric Award (nominated)

2009, Best R&B/Soul Female Artist (nominated)

2014, Best R&B/Soul Female Artist (Nominated)

2017 Best R&B/Soul Female Artist (Nominated)

2017 Soul Certified Award (won)

2018 Soul Certified Award (won)

NAACP AWARDS

2012 Best Female Artist (Nominated)

2015 Best Female Artist (Nominated)

2018 Best Female Artist (Nominated)

2018 Best Traditional song - High (Nominated)

2018 Best Visual - High (Nominated)

Honors/Special Awards

2016, NAACP Awards Theatre - Spirit Award Honoree

2016, America For The Arts - Music Honoree

Tours

Pieces of Me Tour (2011)

B.G.T.Y. Tour (2012)

The Truth Tour (2014)

The Intimate Truth Tour (2015)

The Rebel The Soul The Saint Tour (2017)

Let Love Rule Tour (2018)

Ledisi Live UK Tour (2019)

Filmography

2008: Leatherheads (as the Blues Singer)

2011: Leave It on the Floor (as Princess' Mother)

2014: Selma (as Mahalia Jackson)

2016: The Tale Of Four (Short Film) (as Aunt Sara)

2020: American Soul (as Patti LaBelle) (season 2, upcoming)

[aion-rsa]

What Hamilton Doesn’t Say About His Real History with Slavery

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It was mid-October 1796 when Alexander Hamilton released the first in a string of scathing essays about political opponent Thomas Jefferson. By this point in early United States history, George Washington had announced his retirement, refusing to seek a third term as president, and the race of self-styled great men hoping to take his place was on… with none more loathsome to Hamilton than Jefferson, the loquacious, if remote, thinker on a hill in Virginia.

In this first of 25 essays, Hamilton wrote under the nom de plume of Phocion about the many hypocrisies of Jefferson, depicting the supposed philosopher as a moral and intellectual fraud, and something worse: a slave owner who knew slavery was evil but still took advantage, perhaps even of a sexual nature, of the Black people he kept in bondage.

It is moments of moral standing like this, even if Hamilton hid his name under a pseudonym, that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton hangs its hat on. While the actual incident does not technically occur in the musical’s dizzying amount of narrative events, the tour de force work of art still uses its trenchant blending of historical fact and hip hop melodies to convey much the same idea: Jefferson was a demonstrable hypocrite on the issue of slavery. Despite  being one of the United States’ brightest thinkers about the rights of men, Jefferson failed time and again throughout his life to truly fight to end slavery—or free the hundreds of people he kept as possessions at Monticello. Even on his deathbed, Jefferson freed just five slaves, relatives all to his “mistress” (if such a word is fair), Sally Hemings.

Hamilton leans into this fact when Alexander Hamilton, played in the new Disney+ movie by Miranda himself, mocks Jefferson (Daveed Diggs) for his hypocrisies in a rap battle.

“A civics lesson from a slaver,” Hamilton seethes in the show. “Hey neighbor, your debts are paid because you don’t pay for labor. ‘We plant seeds in the South, we create?’ Keep ranting, we know who’s really doing the planting.” 

It’s one of the many flashy moments where Hamilton brandishes the anti-slavery sentiments of its title character, going so far as to suggest if he hadn’t died in a duel in 1804 he could’ve done more to end slavery. Throughout the show, he’s depicted as standing shoulder to shoulder with John Laurens (Anthony Ramos), who preaches “We won’t be free until we end slavery” during the American Revolution, and is even introduced as a young man horrified in his childhood on St. Croix as he watches “slaves were being slaughtered and carted away.” It was a satisfying message when the musical opened in 2015 with its color-blind casting, and it plays even more satisfying now.

However, like much else in regards to Alexander Hamilton’s life, the contradictions and shortcomings the man displayed toward slavery were thoroughly glossed over. Despite being an immigrant with a rags to riches story, Hamilton was also an elitist with those riches, favoring big banks and commercialism to the supposed agrarian utopia Jefferson imagined. Even the night before his fateful duel with Aaron Burr, Hamilton lamented to a friend that New England Federalists were fools if they really wanted to secede from the Union. Seceding would provide no “relief to our real disease, which is democracy,” Hamilton wrote, hinting at his disdain for popular rule.

The thornier side of Hamilton’s relationship to slavery is similarly overlooked. This is a fact Miranda is now publicly commenting on ahead of the Disney+ release.

In a recent interview with NPR, Miranda said, “[Slavery] is the third line of our show. It’s a system in which every character in our show is complicit in some way or another… Hamilton – although he voiced anti-slavery beliefs – remained complicit in the system. And other than calling out Jefferson on his hypocrisy with regards to slavery in Act 2, doesn’t really say much else over the course of Act 2. And I think that’s actually pretty honest.”

So what were Hamilton’s actual views on slavery? Well, as Ron Chernow notes in his biography, Alexander Hamilton, which the Hamilton musical is based on, “Few, if any, other founding fathers opposed slavery more consistently or toiled harder to eradicate it than Hamilton.” This is probably true, but it speaks more to how little that generation did to confront what became their new nation’s original sin than it necessarily speaks to Hamilton’s trailblazing abolitionist advocacy.

Born on the Caribbean island of Nevis in 1757, Hamilton grew up in a part of the world where slavery was an everyday aspect of life. Indeed, one of the primary reasons the Caribbean islands under British rule balked at the North American colonies’ calls for independence is they relied on the British Army and Navy to keep the local slave populations from uprising. There were eight times as many Black slaves as white colonists on these islands, a far higher ratio than the white colonists outnumbering Black slaves four-to-one in the North American colonies.

Hamilton saw this in his everyday life. After his father walked out on him, he went with his mother and older brother to stay with their in-laws, the Lyton family. Yet the Lytons were sugar planters who owned a vast amount of slaves, and one of the reasons they soon turned the Hamiltons out is because a relative stole 22 of their slaves and ran off to start a new life in the Carolinas—keeping those with dark skin in bondage, of course.

During this period in his life, Hamilton developed a strong distaste for slavery, which he considered barbarous. He even developed rather progressive opinions for an 18th century white man in the Caribbean, noticing there were no genetic differences in mental or physical ability between Black and white men. His ability to express vocal outrage over slavery impressed merchants early in his career, who eventually helped fund his education toward the mainland.

But what did he do with this knowledge? As Manuel said in 2020, clearly not enough. Upon reaching New York and quickly asserting himself as a brash intellectual leader in the Revolutionary generation, Hamilton supported anti-slavery causes, but they were never a high-priority. His dear friend John Laurens did speak out against slavery and even radically attempted to free 3,000 slaves if they fought for the Continental Army, beginning with the 40 slaves he stood to inherit from his father Henry Laurens, President of the Continental Congress. But while Laurens won approval for the plan in the Continental Congress, when he arrived in South Carolina to emancipate the said 3,000 slaves, he faced extreme opposition. Even as a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives, Laurens failed three times by overwhelming margins between 1779 and 1782 to emancipate 3,000 Black lives from chains.

Hamilton supported his friend Laurens’ cause, but he was personally busier with his responsibilities as George Washington’s aides-de-camp (a secretary). He was also working his way into intentionally marrying into a wealthy family like the Schuylers… a family that’s wealth was partially predicated on owning slaves.

In a fact completely ignored in Hamilton, New York was very much a slave colony and then state during the 18th century. While the smaller northern farms never reached the economic needs for chained Black bodies on an industrial scale, it still was a common, even fashionable practice to own a slave. Before becoming a late-in-life abolitionist, Benjamin Franklin owned several house slaves in his youth. And in New York City during the 1790s, one in five white homes owned at least one domestic slave for household chores. It was a status symbol.

For the Schuylers it was more than just one slave too. At his height of wealth, Philip Schuyler—the father of Angelica, Peggy, and Eliza—owned 27 slaves, tending to his mansion in Albany and his mills in Saratoga. And while Eliza herself became a staunch abolitionist in her old age after Alexander died, in her youth, she told her grandson, she was her mother’s chief assistant in running the domestic affairs and slaves of the house.

All of this is expunged in the Hamilton musical that depicts two of the Schuyler sisters as free thinkers. In reality, Angelica long maintained the practice of slaveholding after leaving her parents’ home… as might have Eliza.

Read more

Movies

Hamilton: The Real History of the Burr-Hamilton Duel

By David Crow

Movies

Hamilton: Ranking Every Song from the Soundtrack

By Alec Bojalad

There are several ambiguous documents that would seem to suggest early in their marriage, Alexander and Eliza either bought, rented, or at least provided financial support in others’ purchase of slaves. After his wedding to Eliza, Alexander wrote Gov. George Clinton that “I expect by Col. Hay’s return to receive a sufficient sum to pay the value of the woman Mrs. H had of Mrs. Clinton.” Biographer Forrest McDonald argued that this was too small a sum of money to buy a slave and rather it was the salary for a domestic servant, however others have speculated it was essentially for the renting of a slave.

Later in 1795, Philip Schuyler wrote to his son-in-law that “the Negro boy & woman are engaged for you” at the sum of $250. Hamilton even noted the transaction in his cashbook as “for 2 Negro servants purchased by him for me.” Biographer Ron Chernow argues that this purchase was possibly a reluctant service Hamilton did for his brother and sister-in-law, John and Angelica Church. But the best thing to hang on that is Angelica writing, regretfully, to Eliza that she and Alexander have no slaves to help host a large party. Yet to say there is an uncomfortable ambiguity there is an understatement.

To Hamilton’s credit, he was an early member of the New York Manumission Society, which fought against slaveholders kidnapping fugitive slaves and Freed Black people off the streets of Manhattan and selling them into bondage. The group petitioned the state’s General Assembly to pass a law that would phase out slavery in New York—a policy championed by Burr (before he reversed his abolitionist tendencies when he became a political ally of Democratic-Republicans and remained a slaveholder his entire life). And as the leader of the Society’s Ways and Means Committee, Hamilton drafted proposals that members of the group who owned slaves, including chairman John Jay, free all slaves over the age of 45 immediately; those younger than 28 by the time they’re 35; and those between 28 and 38 within seven years of the proposal’s writing. But even these potentially decade-spanning deadlines were considered too radical by the slaveholders of this anti-slavery society… they were roundly rejected and Hamilton’s committee was disbanded.

Still, Hamilton remained part of the group’s standing committee and even petitioned the state legislature of New York to ban trading slaves from anywhere else in the world, saying exporting Black people “like cattle and other commerce to the West Indies and the southern states” was a monstrous affair.

Nevertheless, all of these stands were made before Hamilton had actual political power inside of the government, as opposed to writing to it. So what did he do when he actually was in the room where it happens? Largely nothing other than treating it as a bargaining chip. During the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton spoke passionately about the need for allowing easy immigration and U.S. citizenry to anyone who wanted it—and argued that senators should have lifetime appointments—but on the issue of slavery, and the infamous “Three-Fifths Compromise” that occurred there, Hamilton gloomily surmised, “No union could possibly be formed” without it.

And what of his visceral admonishment of Jefferson’s hypocrisies in 1796? It was vividly fair. Jefferson, ever the proud renaissance man, was aware that slavery was evil. He attempted to blame the institution on King George III in the Declaration of Independence before Southern states forced him to take it out, and in the early 1780s he published Notes on the State of Virginia, which among other things argued that slavery could be ended in the state by 1784 with emancipated slaves moving into the interior North American continent. Of course none of that happened, and between his many impressive positions in government, from ambassador to France to Secretary of State, to vice president, and finally President of the United States, he never actually acted on these goals… or freed the hundreds of Black men and women he kept toiling at Monticello.

In fact, Hamilton used the hypocrisy and blatant racism within Notes on the State of Virginia against Jefferson, noting the document’s paternal bigotry where Jefferson offered pseudoscientific explanations to suggest in the natural hierarchy, whites were above Blacks, in the way Blacks were above orangutans. “[He’d have them] exported to some less friendly region where they might all be murdered or reduced to a more wretched state of slavery,” Hamilton wrote as Phocoin about Jefferson’s unrealized emancipation plan. But his most damning indictment was insinuating that the well-noticed light skinned slaves called Black in Monticello might have a complicated heritage.

“At one moment he is anxious to emancipate the blacks to vindicate the liberty of the human race. At another he discovers that the blacks are of a different race from the human race and therefore, when emancipated, they must be instantly removed beyond the reach of mixture lest he (or she) should stain the blood of his (or her) master, not recollecting what from his situation and other circumstances he ought to have recollected—that this mixture may take place while the negro remains in slavery. He must have seen all around him sufficient marks of this staining of blood to have been convinced that retaining them in slavery would not prevent it.”

– Alexander Hamilton

Biographer Chernow even believes this hints at Hamilton having knowledge about Jefferson’s affair with the light-skinned Sally Hemings, as Angelica Schuyler Church was a friend of Jefferson’s during his time in Paris when he possibly began that, um, relationship. Hemings was 14 at the time.

Sadly, lest you think Hamilton was simply using the cloak of anonymity to call out the blatant hypocrisy of Southern planters, the uglier truth is that Hamilton was using this potential knowledge as a cudgel against Jefferson in the South. Writing in support of his Federalist compatriot John Adams, Hamilton rather cynically ends the essay by saying, “For my own part, were I a Southern planter, owning negroes, I should be ten thousand times more alarmed at Mr. Jefferson’s ardent wish for emancipation than at Mr. Adams’ system of checks and balances.”

So even in his most full-throated denunciation of slavery, the racism it’s founded on, and the hypocrisy of slave owners, Hamilton was still posturing it for political gain… among slave plantation owners.

For this reason, some historians, and even more activists, hold a wary cynicism toward Hamilton. Author and playwright Ishmael Reed even wrote a full-length lecture of a play called The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, in which he depicts Miranda as a hapless dupe manipulated by Chernow into spreading manipulative lies about America’s founders, whom Reed compares to Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.

This kind of broad portrait of these historic figures—or Miranda and Chernow for that matter—may be just as sweeping as the centuries of deification the founders and other “great white men” received before recent decades’ attempts by historians and universities to be more inclusive and objective about the historical record.

The truth about Hamilton, like most men, is a lot more complicated, including how Miranda’s impressive work of art presents him. Hamilton was a forward-thinker ahead of his time who understood slavery, and the basic tenets of racism that white society used to rationalize it, was insidious. “Odious” and “immoral” (complete with italicizations) were his favorite words to describe it. He made some nominal effort to fight it, but like a lot of white men throughout history, and even today, he ultimately placed it low among his priorities and often on the backburner… allowing it to linger to the next generation and the next century, and to the point where it nearly tore his beloved Union asunder in a civil war that claimed more than half a million lives.

Perhaps it’s best to remember, beyond musical stage glory, Hamilton was a man who did good and bad, and maybe cruelty by simply not doing enough when he had the power to do more. But instead of glorifying or vilifying those shortcomings, it’s best to learn from them and see how much (or little) we are doing today to overcome the legacy of slavery. It’s wishful thinking on the part of Miranda and Phillipa Soo’s Eliza at the end of the musical to say if Hamilton hadn’t died in 1804 “you could have done so much more” about slavery. When Burr shot him, his time in power had honestly passed. Ours has not.

The post What Hamilton Doesn’t Say About His Real History with Slavery appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[neptunecreek]

The Foilies 2020

Recognizing the year’s worst in government transparency

“The Ringer,” the first track on Eminem’s 2018 album, Kamikaze, includes a line that piqued Buzzfeed reporter Jason Leopold’s curiosity: the rapper claimed the Secret Service visited him due to some controversial lyrics about Ivanka Trump. To find out if it was true, Leopold filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the federal law that allows anyone to demand access to government records. 

After a year of delays, the Secret Service provided Leopold 40 pages about the interview with the real Slim Shady, including a note that he was “exhibiting inappropriate behavior.”

This wasn’t the first time government transparency has intersected with hip-hop. Type “Freedom of Information” into Genius.com (the site formerly known as Rap Genius) and you’ll turn up tracks by Sage Francis and Scroobius Pip using FOIA as lyrical inspiration. The hip-hop duo Emanon sampled Joanna Newsom for “Shine Your Light,” in which they declare that due to redactions of FOIA documents, we’re “never gonna see the true history of this nation.” Even George Clinton, whom many rappers cite as inspiration, chanted about “getting funky” with the freedom of information on the track “Maximumisness.” 

There’s nothing quite like an envelope of freshly photocopied documents to make a journalist or open-government advocate break into song. But there’s also nothing that brings the melody to a record-scratching halt than the government withholding information without due cause. 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an international nonprofit based in San Francisco that fights to uphold civil liberties in the digital age —work that includes filing hundreds of public records requests each year with a variety of government agencies. In collaboration with the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, we also compile “The Foilies,” a list of anti-awards that name-and-shame government officials and corporations that stymie the public’s right to know. 

Now in its sixth year, The Foilies are part of the annual Sunshine Week festivities, when news and advocacy organizations celebrate and bring attention to state and federal open-records laws that allow us to hold the powerful to account. 

And the winners are…. 

The Twitter-Assist Award: President Donald Trump

The Space Opera Award: New Mexico Spaceport Authority

The Catalog Is Out of the Bag Award: Special Services Group

The Smokescreen Award: Texas Elementary Schools

The Uncontrolled Burn Award: Federal Aviation Administration

The Queen of all FOIA Denials: Egyptian Museum of Berlin

The Busiest Government Office Award: U.S. Department of Justice

The Pointless Redaction Award: Mueller Report

The Repeat Winner Award: Atlanta Mayor’s Office

The Unnecessary Fee Award: Horry County, South Carolina

The Surveillance for You, Privacy for Us Award: Ring Inc.

The About Face on Face Recognition Award: Immigration and Customs Enforcement

The Hardest Department to FOIA Award: Chicago Police Department

The Choose-Your-Own Exemption Award: Immigration and Customs Enforcement

The Anything Can Be Confidential Award: U.S. Supreme Court

The Resigned to Secrecy Award: Oregon Gov. Kate Brown

The Enemy of the Press Award: California Attorney General Xavier Becerra

The Stupid, Dumb, F**king Idiot Award for Political Interference: U.S. Department of the Interior

The Twitter-Assist Award: President Donald Trump

It’s not often that prying documents out of the CIA comes with a little bit of help from the commander in chief. But Buzzfeed reporter Jason Leopold (yeah, he turns up a lot in The Foilies) stumbled into just that kind of luck when Trump tweeted an acknowledgement that he had ended “massive, dangerous, and wasteful payments to Syrian rebels fighting Assad.”

Leopold requested information on the payments from the CIA. Despite the president’s confirmation that these payments existed, the CIA still refused to confirm or deny the records existed, a move known in the legal world as a “Glomar response.” Leopold went to court and a judge found that because Trump had acknowledged the payments publicly, the CIA had to stop playing secrecy games and hand over the documents. 

The Space Opera Award: New Mexico Spaceport Authority

In space, no one can hear you scream about thwarted public records requests, but down on Earth, you can take the government to court and make them listen. 

That’s what Heath Haussamen, editor and publisher of NMPolitics.net, did after the New Mexico Spaceport Authority in 2017 refused to hand over basic public records related to the private companies that lease real estate at Spaceport America, the much-publicized commercial launchpad just outside Truth or Consequences, N.M. 

With a New Mexico Attorney General’s Office opinion in hand that determined the Spaceport Authority had violated the state’s open records law, Haussamen filed a lawsuit. After following the wormhole of the justice system, Haussamen finally received the records in 2019, along with a $60,000 settlement for his trouble—but not before the New Mexico Legislature stepped in and passed a new law granting the Spaceport even more secrecy over its operations.

The Catalog Is Out of the Bag Award: Special Services Group

In response to a California Public Records Act request for information about surveillance technology, the Irvine Police Department in California provided researchers at MuckRock and Open the Government with a catalog called the “Black Book” from a secretive company called Special Services Group. The catalog advertised a range of spy devices that would make Q drool, including cameras that can be concealed in gravestones, vacuum cleaners and baby car seats. 

But, as Vice’s Motherboard prepared to publish a story on the documents, Special Services Group stepped out of the shadows to issue sweeping legal threats, arguing that by publishing the documents, researchers were violating everything from federal copyright law to arms control regulations. Vice, MuckRock and Open the Government rightfully resisted the censorship threat, since that’s not how it works. Special Services should have taken its beef to the city's law firm, which reviewed and then released the documents.

The Smokescreen Award: Texas Elementary Schools 

Across the country, parents, educators and lawmakers are fuming about nicotine “vaping” among underage students. Considering that this is branded as a public health crisis, one would assume schools would be forthcoming with data about vaping incidents on campuses to help inform policymakers. 

That’s not what Sarah Rafique, a reporter with ABC 13 Investigates in Houston, found when she filed records requests with more than 1,000 schools across Texas. About 10% of agencies missed the 10-day deadline to respond. One school demanded an (illegal) flat fee of $150 for all requests, while another agency demanded to know the reason for the request before they’d hand over the documents. “It was weird, too, that some districts said they didn't have any data/information but when I explained I was reaching out to 1,000 districts (and they wouldn't be singled out, per se) all of a sudden they had numbers to share,” Rafique said in a Twitter thread outlining the most troubling responses to her requests.

The Uncontrolled Burn Award: Federal Aviation Administration 

Courtesy of Mike Katz-Lacabe

Someone at the Federal Aviation Administration has an unhealthy relationship with their CD burner. 

Last year, Mike Katz-Lacabe of the Center for Human Rights and Privacy filed a FOIA request with the FAA to get records about helicopters and airplanes operated by 19 different police agencies in California. The FAA turned up 120 MB of files. They could have put them on a single CD-ROM, which can hold about 700 MB of information. Instead, the FOIA officer burned the records to 19 separate discs and sent them to Katz-Lacabe in the mail. 

The Queen of all FOIA Denials: Egyptian Museum of Berlin

For three years, Cosmo Wenman battled with the German-government-funded Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection (aka, the Egyption Museum of Berlin) over a freedom of information campaign to release the 3D scan of a bust of Queen Nefertiti. The museum denied the request for the high-quality scan of the over 3,000-year-old statue, arguing that it would threaten its commercial interests—namely by creating competition in the sale of images or reproductions.

“The organization was treating its scan of Nefertiti like a state secret,” Wenman wrote in Reason.

After a prolonged battle, and temporary access to a very slow computer containing the scan, Wenman was finally given a USB drive with the full 3D image. No word on whether museum visits have declined precipitously.

The Busiest Government Office Award: U.S. Department of Justice 

In response to yet another FOIA request from Buzzfeed reporter Jason Leopold, this time for documents relating to the Mueller investigation, the Justice Department claimed it has as many as 19-billion responsive documents. This would mean the investigation had generated or collected more than 28-million documents each day, weekends included. 

Although Mueller’s investigation lasted 22 months, the DOJ told Leopold it would take 2,300 years for it to review and produce the requested records for public disclosure. Leopold tweeted that he is exploring cryogenics as a way to review the records in the 4320s. 

The Pointless Redaction Award: Mueller Report 

Courtesy of the National Security Archive

Among the many blacked-out sections of the Mueller Report, a few redactions particularly stood out. The National Security Archive reported that the Justice Department redacted sections of public news stories that the Mueller Report quotes or cites. For example, the report cites a CNN headline as: “[Redacted] Says He Won’t Agree to Plea Deal”—but the CNN story is freely available online, and a quick Google search shows that the redacted words are “Roger Stone Associate.” 

The Repeat Winner Award: Atlanta Mayor’s Office

Back in 2018, then-Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed earned a Foilie when he responded to a corruption probe by releasing 1.476 million documents, which he displayed in a six-foot wall of boxes at a press conference, even though it turned out that many of the documents were entirely blank or fully redacted.

Mayor Reed is no longer in office, but his legacy lives on in Atlanta, where his former press secretary, Jenna Garland, was convicted this year for violating Georgia’s Open Records Act. The New York Times reported that she sought to frustrate journalists’ requests for records by directing city spokespeople to be “as unhelpful as possible,” “drag this out as long as possible” and “provide information in the most confusing format available.” 

This is the first time that a public official has been charged or convicted under Georgia’s open records laws—and if recent history is a guide, it may not be the last. 

The Unnecessary Fee Award: Horry County, South Carolina

Horry County, South Carolina, is the home of Myrtle Beach and its many dedicated beach-goers—and home to this year’s most unnecessary FOIA fee. The Myrtle Beach Sun News sent out requests to a number of local towns and public entities inquiring about payments made on behalf of public agencies to settle lawsuits in the last five years. Many of the towns in Horry County emailed the responsive documents back for free; some charged less than $50, but the county itself asked for $75,500. 

When asked why the records cost so much, the county was unable to provide an exact accounting. Although its $75,500 demand is not the most outrageous total to grace the Foilies, Horry County’s response is award-worthy in light of how disproportionate it was compared to other agencies.  

The Surveillance for You, Privacy for Us Award: Ring Inc. 

EFF has written a lot about Amazon Ring surveillance doorbells, mostly aided by a torrent of great investigative reporting done by journalists using public records requests. The doorbells may be capturing the movements and conversations of neighbors and pedestrians in neighborhoods all across the United States, but Ring employees really value their privacy. 

One researcher, Shreyas Gandlur, turned up an email from Ring to the Joliet City Police Department, asking them to redact the names and email addresses of any Ring employees that may show up in emails released through FOIA. “Ring employees have strong personal privacy interests,” wrote one Ring employee (whose name was redacted).

The About Face on Face Recognition Award: Immigration and Customs Enforcement

How hard is it to unmask records on face recognition? The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) discovered the many faces of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) when it filed a request for information on the agency’s acquisition and use of face recognition technology. 

ICE initially said it had only three redacted records—while failing to search one of its largest directorates, Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO). After POGO successfully appealed, ICE responded that a query of ERO had been conducted and was being reviewed. Two months later, ICE said the request had been closed. After POGO reached out to the agency, ICE then contradicted itself, stating that the appeal was assigned and ERO would be queried. A follow-up request seeking updated information was met with silence. Accordingly, POGO has decided to face off with ICE in a different venue—the courtroom—after filing a lawsuit for the records. 

The Hardest Department to FOIA Award: Chicago Police Department 

In 2019, the Chicago Police Department was in the news multiple times for its inability to respond to even the most straightforward public records requests.

After members of CPD raided the wrong home and traumatized a family, the family sought to get the body camera footage of the raid. The family believed that, in addition to showing the mistaken raid, it would also show police misconduct. Unfortunately, the CPD refused to turn over the footage. 

In July, the CPD was forced to turn over documents after 14 months of stalling over a FOIA request for files on officers. After a legal opinion from the Illinois Attorney General, the CPD turned over a spreadsheet with more than 33,000 names dating back to the 1940s.

Does the Chicago Police Department use search warrants? Of course it does, but you wouldn’t know it by its FOIA responses. Also in July, the CPD told Lucy Parsons Labs that it did not have any responsive documents for a request for all executed search warrants. After several months of fighting, the department finally released records about 11,000 search warrants issued over a five-year period.

The Choose-Your-Own Exemption Award: Immigration and Customs Enforcement

What’s an agency to do when it can’t identify a FOIA exemption to justify withholding records? In ICE’s case, it created its own.

As is common practice in immigration court, where there is no discovery process, attorney Jennifer Smith sought the immigration file of a client by filing a FOIA request with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). USCIS told Smith that it had identified 18 records, but instead of producing those records, it mysteriously instructed Smith to request them from ICE. 

Two years later, ICE finally responded that it was withholding the records to “deny fugitive alien FOIA requesters access to the FOIA process when the records could assist the alien in continuing to evade immigration enforcement efforts.” While admittedly creative, there is no “fugitive disentitlement” exemption under FOIA. Moreover, this fake exemption countered exactly what immigration attorneys are trying to do: ensure that their clients won’t be considered fugitives.

The ACLU of Colorado sued on Smith’s behalf, and in 2019, won the case. 

The Anything Can Be Confidential Award: U.S. Supreme Court

With the rise of outsourcing, no-bid contracts and elected officials seeking to reduce government spending, private businesses and government have never been more intertwined. Whether it be facial recognition technology or algorithms used to determine whether people receive public-assistance benefits, private companies and the technology they build are embedded in government’s daily work.

Yet in June, the U.S. Supreme Court made it much harder for the public to access records that involve private companies. In the case Food Marketing Institute v. Argus Leader, the court interpreted a FOIA exemption broadly to allow the government to withhold records that a company considers confidential. Prior to the Supreme Court’s decision, private information could not be withheld from a FOIA requester unless the government or the business could show that making the information public would harm the business. But under the court’s June decision, the government can withhold any information a business deems private.

Confidential business information under FOIA is thus in the eye of the beholder, a result that will frustrate the public’s ability to understand how the government uses private companies’ products and technologies as part of its duties. 

The Resigned to Secrecy Award: Oregon Gov. Kate Brown

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown came into office with a stated goal of restoring trust after public records showed that her predecessor had ordered officials to delete thousands of his emails from state servers. One concrete step Brown took to improve transparency: creating a state public records advocate to push for more openness. 

The abrupt resignation of Oregon’s newly minted public records advocate, Ginger McCall, in September significantly undercut Brown’s stated commitment to transparency. In her resignation letter to Brown, McCall said that she received “meaningful pressure” from Brown’s office to advocate for the governor’s interest, rather than the public’s interest in having a transparent state government. Brown’s office at first denied McCall’s characterization and later chalked it up to a difference in views on McCall’s position.

McCall released notes of her meetings with Brown’s staffers that reflected an effort to make McCall’s position report directly to the governor’s staff, rather than being an independent advocate for the public. If there is any doubt, we believe McCall. She has long been a conscientious and honest advocate for the public’s right to know. 

The Enemy of the Press Award: California Attorney General Xavier Becerra 

Obtaining data about police misconduct under California’s public records law can be a crime, according to California Attorney General Xavier Becerra. That was the upshot of legal threats Becerra’s office made to two investigative reporters in March after they received data on police officer arrests and convictions in the past 10 years in response to a public records request filed with the Commission on Peace Officers Standards and Training.

According to a letter from Becerra’s office, the spreadsheet, which detailed officers’ criminal histories, was off-limits to the public and its mere possession by the reporters was a misdemeanor. The reporters didn’t back down and instead “formed an unprecedented collaboration to investigate the list, involving three dozen news outlets across the state.”

Becerra’s legal threats backfired spectacularly, leading to statewide comprehensive reporting about criminal investigations into police officers, including a searchable database. But Becerra should never have threatened the journalists in the first place, an authoritarian move that conflicts with his efforts these past years to position himself as the counterweight to President Donald Trump.

The Stupid, Dumb, F**king Idiot Award for Political Interference: U.S. Department of the Interior

In 2019, reporters at Roll Call broke the news that the Interior Department had been allowing political officials to intervene in the processing of FOIA requests, either by stalling or potentially blocking the agency from fulfilling the request. 

The reporting on this so-called “awareness review process” was based on FOIA documents obtained by Aaron Weiss of the Center for Western Priorities, an environmental organization based in Colorado. Among the scores of examples Weiss obtained was a stalled FOIA request from Buzzfeed’s Jason Leopold for all emails in which Interior press secretary Heather Swift used the terms “fucking," "idiot," "stupid" and "dumb.” (Swift had already been caught calling CNN’s René Marsh a “fucking idiot” in an email.) 

“If political appointees get to decide what the public gets to see, it completely undermines the letter and spirit of FOIA,” Weiss says.

Want to read more FOIA horror stories? Check out The Foilies archives. 

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[thepermanentrainpress]

THE PERMANENT RAIN PRESS INTERVIEW WITH MILCK

“I’ve trained myself to look out for the positive edge to all my challenges, and am using what makes me different into what makes me stand out.”

You may have heard her hit song “Quiet,” which rose to prominence as the unofficial anthem of last year’s Women’s March, or uplifting cover of the Five Stairsteps’ “Ohh Child,” used in P&G’s #LoveOverBias commercial (which you may have heard while watching Olympics coverage). We had the pleasure of chatting with the emerging artist about her journey as an Asian American musician, songwriting process, building the #ICantKeepQuiet Global Community, and touring with Amy Shark.

Congratulations on the release of This Is Not the End! What were the major themes across the record?

Thank you! To me, the EP is about reclaiming freedom, and shedding the blame that I put on myself for the mistakes or adversities I had experienced in the past. It’s the emotions I need to come face to face with before I can learn to truly love myself or others around me.

You’ve been pursuing music for close to ten years. Tell us about your growth as an artist since your earlier a cappella days, to being an Atlantic Records artist today. What challenges did you face and overcome in your journey?

It’s definitely been a journey. I was singing and writing all my life, but didn’t give myself permission to believe I was an artist, as I was raised in a traditional household that highly discouraged art as a profession.

When I was studying pre-med, then pre business, then pre law at Berkeley, I realized that I couldn’t focus or care enough about anything I was studying in school. I was trying so hard to find my place in academia, but couldn’t find the thing that I could do for hours on end without tiring of it. The only place where time would fly and my mind would crave more was when I was making music. I could stay in the studio for 13 hours and not tire of the process. Once I noticed that, I knew that I had to take a leap and try to pursue music as my focus.

Because I started pursuing music after college, I felt like a fish out of water in Los Angeles, as a lot of people had gone to music school, or had been pursuing the arts for a long time. As some people were experienced with the industry, I had zero connections or ideas as to what the industry was. I had to feel my way through the dark, and follow my instincts however much I could. As an Asian American, there are not many of us in the industry, so it does feel a bit like trailblazing, and swimming upstream sometimes. However, in order for me to survive, I’ve trained myself to look out for the positive edge to all my challenges, and am using what makes me different into what makes me stand out.

Pursuing art in a commercial space is not just about the art- it’s about the human interactions with the industry. Being the shy girl that I can be, it’s been really intense training myself to communicate and build relationships with people within the industry. I’ve also had to let go of my younger habits of trying to please others by becoming what they wanted, as that was really holding me back from finding out who I truly was. I also had to learn to confront people and speak my mind, as it’s never been easy to speak out. However, I’ve been chipping away at my own fears and have been trying my best to be who I need to be in order to create the best art.  Art doesn’t thrive in fear, so that’s why I do my best to fight the fear. I do it for my art. Georgia O’Keefe has a quote that perfectly describes my experience of navigating the music industry: “I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life- and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”

Your music is so honest, and listeners connect with each word. You have stories to share, and messages to relay. As a songwriter, take us through your writing process. How do you express your thoughts?

Thank you so much for saying that… it means a lot, as I put so much love and care into my lyrics. I usually keep my songwriter mind open and ready for any inspiration at any time. I have a journal that I keep by my side constantly, and I’ll jot down inspirational moments. These things can range from quotes in movies to things my friends say in passing over lunch… They can also be realizations that pop into my mind as I’m daydreaming. Sometimes it can just be a word that has some edge to it that pleases me. I collect all of the findings, and then come back to them when I’m in writing mode.

Sometimes melodies and lyrics come rushing into my mind all at once, so I pull out my voice memo recorder and capture those ideas. “Quiet” chorus lyrics came to me in a dream. I have a song that will be out on my next body of work, that rushed into my mind during a dream. I woke up and recorded the chorus melody.

Because my life has gotten much busier, I schedule out blocks of time to be with all those moments and words that I’ve collected. Then I start watering those seeds, to see if any sprouts form. I give myself a focused and creative space to start uncoiling. I love co-writing, so I’ll usually schedule for a writer to be there with me. Specific writers have specific gifts, and I’ll invite them according to what I think I’ll need for that day.

I have learned to get in tune with my intuition via meditation and merely just honoring it, and by doing so, I can now detect a very specific feeling in my body that tells me when an idea is right. I follow that instinct, and don’t let myself settle (EVER!), until I get that very specific feeling.

Your latest record can be described as soulful, cinematic pop. Is your sound still evolving, or is this the direction of your future music as well?

My sound is definitely evolving, as I am evolving as a human. My life has changed and blossomed so dramatically this past year, that I find myself writing about new types of feelings, like unabashed joy. I still write about joy from my perspective, which is from the same spot that I wrote “Quiet.” However, I am now mostly on the other side of the darkness, finding community and realizing dreams. I am also becoming less interested in metaphors, and more interested in simply saying things as they are. Metaphors have been my obsession as they can be so beautiful, deep, and intellectual, but right now I am really interested in stripping away every possible barrier to the raw feeling. It can actually be more challenging to write without metaphor or cinematics. I’m interested in that challenge now, and I can hear it have a strong impact on my style.

“Quiet” is a beautiful and powerful anthem. The response has been astounding, and has since formed the #ICantKeepQuiet Global Community. How have these stories inspired and given strength to you?

I get so many messages of survival from fans, women and men, who come from all different walks of life. They are a constant reminder that I am not alone, and that even though I’ve felt like such a black sheep for so much of my life, I have truly found a new, and fitting family of my own, and it’s a global family. A global black sheep crew! Haha!

The knowledge that I am not alone has healed me in the deepest ways possible, and I think people will be able to hear the change within me in my new album. The confidence that I’ve been building over the course of the past few years has deepened, and my ability to think big has soared through the roof. I used to struggle with thinking big for myself, or believing in myself. Of course, I still wrestle with my demons, but I feel way more capable of winning the battles, as I know I have a community growing around me, that what I have to say is connecting with like-minded folk, and that I can always turn to songwriting.

How can one get involved and show our support?

Anyone who is interested in activating their inner voices can go to icantkeepquiet.org to share their stories of survival, buy merch to support the fund, simply donate to the fund, or spread the awareness by sharing with friends what the #icantkeepquiet community is doing. I also love when people message me! I cherish reading through people’s messages, and responding. I do this because I want to connect. I think we all, as humans, want to connect, eh?

Both bandanas on this store page are specially designed by Anna Tatsuno. 100% of profits will go to the #icantkeepquiet fund, so consider supporting while also getting some badass gentle rebel swag (https://shopmilck.myshopify.com/).

FYI, the #icantkeepquiet fund helps to funnel awareness and money towards 3 organizations that I so dearly love and admire, because they create tangible change, and build COMMUNITY:

1.     Step Up, a mentoring program for at risk teen girls, ages 13-18, to help them get the confidence and tools needed for the path of college and professional careers.

2.     Tuesday Night Project, a safespace open mic series for the LGBTQ community and people of color. It’s where I was able to publicly share for the first time that I’m a survivor of abuse.

3.     Joyful Heart Foundation, an organization that helps to empower and heal sexual assault survivors.

There are so many women who have influenced and inspired you. As a woman of colour creating music that is driving social and political change, what do you hope listeners (many of whom are young females) take away from your songs and work as an activist?

I think self care, and healing through community are the most important first steps towards a more humane existence, so I hope my music can heal people, and empower them. I think my job is to help people confront emotions that could be bottled up, and then to release, so that they can hear their own inner voices more clearly. What people decide to speak up about after that, I feel like is only for them to decide. I think that the universe tries to express itself through our dreams and inner voices, so I want to help encourage everyone, no matter what particular stories they have, to start healing so that they can fully practice being kind to those around them.

You’re currently on tour with Amy Shark. You’ve described Amy as being a woman who “is braving the world with her voice.” First off, we have to mention girl power! Additionally, how has tour been going, and have you been spending much time together while on the road?

Tour has been going amazingly! I love that it’s not easy, with the traveling and long hours, because it makes the reward of putting on a good show for people very fulfilling. This process is like getting pressed into a diamond. The sheer act of doing the same thing over and over again is magical to me, because the repetition allows me to feel the nuances and intimate moments with each different crowd. Different cities definitely bring different energies to the table, and I love playing around with that. I feel both very clearheaded as an artist, and sometimes lonely as a human being. Overall, I think it’s an incredible way to push myself to the next level.

Spending time with Amy and her band has been really nice. I’ve enjoyed my conversations with Amy about life as an artist, and balancing self care while giving so much of ourselves to our audiences every night. We talk about how we both were close to giving up on our music careers right before our big breaks. I like that we both know what it feels like to really fight for something we love, despite so much uncertainty. I think there’s a lot of respect between us, and I am grateful for that type of loving energy on this tour.  

You’re based in Los Angeles. What are your favourite activities to do and/or recommended eats in California?

Above all, I’m a huge home body. I love inviting friends over to have some good one on one chats, and sitting on my back patio, gazing at the mountains that grace the Pasadena skyline. I love hiking, as nature reminds me of how I am a part of something greater. There are a lot of hiking areas on the east side of LA County. I love going to take time away from the hustle and bustle. I also love to visit the contemporary art museums, like LACMA and The Broad. I love abstract art, as it gives me space to step into another artist’s emotions. It feels great to get out of my head and into other people’s hearts. I also love laughing, so I try to go out to comedy shows as much as possible.  

There is this amazing vegan spot in the South Bay of Los Angeles, called Green Temple. Some of the best comfort vegan food ever. I also love this vegan sushi place called Shojin. It’s my boyfriend and my special spot. Another great spot is Little Sister in downtown. I like getting early dinners there with my girlfriends, to beat the heavy traffic. We call em our grandma dinners. ;)

What are your plans for the rest of 2018?

I am pretty much touring and traveling until the end of April, and May is my month to really uncoil, process, and create the next record. I want to spend some time isolated and in nature to go deeper with my writing, and to explore new sounds and textures. I need some space to do that, as the past year has been literally nonstop.

I’ll be releasing new music this year-just not sure when exactly. I already have songs lined up for the next body of work, so it’s coming along. I have a concept that has been really inspiring me, so I am going to dive deep into that in May, and I am sooo excited.

I hope to be touring as much as possible, because nothing beats the magic of a live show, and I think I’m the type of artist where the live show is the truest manifestation of what I do.

I’ll be continuing to partner up with the #icantkeepquiet fund beneficiaries through fundraising concerts and harmony workshops. I absolutely LOVE doing the pop up harmony singalongs once in a while to really interact with my community.

What is your favourite quote to live by?

Keep Zen and Try Again.

Our signature question – if you could be any ice cream flavour, which would you be and why?

Mint chip all the way! It’s a timeless ice cream that has a simple yet impactful vibe to it! And its minty taste has a refreshing quality to it! The chocolate chips within the ice cream are classic and a solid way to express its sweetness without trying too hard.

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Thank you to Connie for taking the time to give us insight into her work as an artist, the #ICantKeepQuiet project, and being an LA native! Visit  www.milckmusic.com to stay connected with MILCK, her upcoming tour dates, and new music. 

[blackkudos]

Mary Lou Williams

Mary Lou Williams (born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs; May 8, 1910 – May 28, 1981) was an American jazz pianist, arranger, and composer. She wrote hundreds of compositions and arrangements and recorded more than one hundred records (in 78, 45, and LP versions). Williams wrote and arranged for Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, and she was friend, mentor, and teacher to Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Tadd Dameron, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie.

Early years

The second of eleven children, Williams was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and grew up in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A young musical prodigy, at the age of three, she taught herself to play the piano. Mary Lou Williams played piano out of necessity at a very young age; her white neighbors were throwing bricks into her house until Williams began playing the piano in their homes. At the age of six, she supported her ten half-brothers and sisters by playing at parties. She began performing publicly at the age of seven when she became known admiringly in Pittsburgh as "The Little Piano Girl." She became a professional musician at the age of 15, citing Lovie Austin as her greatest influence. She married jazz saxophonist John Williams in November 1926.

Career

In 1922, at the age of 12, she went on the Orpheum Circuit. During the following year she played with Duke Ellington and his early small band, the Washingtonians. One morning at three o'clock, she was playing with McKinney's Cotton Pickers at Harlem's Rhythm Club. Louis Armstrong entered the room and paused to listen to her. Williams shyly told what happened: "Louis picked me up and kissed me."

In 1927, Williams married saxophonist John Overton Williams. She met him at a performance in Cleveland where he was leading his group, the Syncopators, and moved with him to Memphis, Tennessee. He assembled a band in Memphis, which included Williams on piano. In 1929, 19-year-old Williams assumed leadership of the Memphis band when her husband accepted an invitation to join Andy Kirk's band in Oklahoma City. Williams joined her husband in Oklahoma City but did not play with the band. The group, Andy Kirk's Twelve Clouds of Joy, moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Williams, when she wasn't working as a musician, was employed transporting bodies for an undertaker. When the Clouds of Joy accepted a longstanding engagement in Kansas City, Missouri, Williams joined her husband and began sitting in with the band, as well as serving as its arranger and composer. She provided Kirk with such songs as "Walkin' and Swingin'", "Twinklin'", "Cloudy'", and "Little Joe from Chicago".

Williams was the arranger and pianist for recordings in Kansas City (1929) Chicago (1930), and New York City (1930). During a trip to Chicago, she recorded "Drag 'Em" and "Night Life" as piano solos. She used the name "Mary Lou" at the suggestion of Jack Kapp at Brunswick Records. The records sold briskly, raising Williams to national prominence. Soon after the recording session she became Kirk's permanent second pianist, playing solo gigs and working as a freelance arranger for Earl Hines, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey. In 1937, she produced In the Groove (Brunswick), a collaboration with Dick Wilson, and Benny Goodman asked her to write a blues song for his band. The result was "Roll 'Em", a boogie-woogie piece based on the blues, which followed her successful "Camel Hop", named for Goodman's radio show sponsor, Camel cigarettes. Goodman tried to put Williams under contract to write for him exclusively, but she refused, preferring to freelance instead.

In 1942, Williams, who had divorced her husband, left the Twelve Clouds of Joy, returning again to Pittsburgh. She was joined there by bandmate Harold "Shorty" Baker, with whom she formed a six-piece ensemble that included Art Blakey on drums. After an engagement in Cleveland, Baker left to join Duke Ellington's orchestra. Williams joined the band in New York City, then traveled to Baltimore, where she and Baker were married. She traveled with Ellington and arranged several tunes for him, including "Trumpet No End" (1946), her version of "Blue Skies" by Irving Berlin. She also sold Ellington on performing "Walkin' and Swingin'". Within a year she had left Baker and the group and returned to New York.

Williams accepted a job at the Café Society Downtown, started a weekly radio show called Mary Lou Williams's Piano Workshop on WNEW and began mentoring and collaborating with younger bebop musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk. In 1945, she composed the bebop hit "In the Land of Oo-Bla-Dee" for Gillespie. "During this period Monk and the kids would come to my apartment every morning around four or pick me up at the Café after I'd finished my last show, and we'd play and swap ideas until noon or later", Williams recalled in Melody Maker.

In 1945, she composed the classically-influenced Zodiac Suite, in which each of the twelve parts corresponded to a sign of the zodiac, and were accordingly dedicated to several of her musical colleagues, including Billie Holiday, and Art Tatum. She recorded the suite with Jack Parker and Al Lucas and performed it December 31, 1945 at Town Hall in New York City with an orchestra and tenor saxophonist Ben Webster.

In 1952, Williams accepted an offer to perform in England and ended up staying in Europe for two years. By this time, music had taken over her life, and not in a good way; Williams was mentally and physically drained. When she returned to the United States she took a hiatus from performing, converting in 1956 to Catholicism. This three-year hiatus began when she suddenly backed away from the piano during a performance in Paris in 1954. Her energies were devoted mainly to the Bel Canto Foundation, an effort she initiated to help addicted musicians return to performing. In addition to spending several hours in mass, Williams used her savings as well as help from friends to turn her apartment in Hamilton Heights into a halfway house for the poor as well as musicians who were grappling with addiction; she also made money over a longer period of time for the halfway house by way of a thrift store in Harlem. Her hiatus may have been triggered by the death of her long-time friend and student Charlie Parker in 1955 who also struggled with addiction for the majority of his life. Father John Crowley and Father Anthony aided in persuading Williams to go back to playing music. They told her that she could continue to serve God and the Catholic Church by utilizing her exceptional gift of creating music. Moreover, Dizzy Gillespie convinced her to return to playing, which she did at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival with Dizzy's band. One can notice a significant difference in her works after her hiatus through her willingness to take more risks with her music as well as her renewed outlook as a proponent of jazz and its legacy.

Father Peter O'Brien, a Catholic priest, became her close friend and manager in the 1960s. They found new venues for jazz performance at a time when no more than two clubs in Manhattan offered jazz full-time. In addition to club work, she played colleges, formed her own record label and publishing companies, founded the Pittsburgh Jazz Festival, and made television appearances. Throughout the 1960s, her composing concentrated on sacred music, hymns, and masses. One of the masses, Music for Peace, was choreographed by the Alvin Ailey and performed by the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater as Mary Lou's Mass in 1971. About the work, Ailey commented, "If there can be a Bernstein Mass, a Mozart Mass, a Bach Mass, why can't there be Mary Lou's Mass?" Williams performed the revision of Mary Lou's Mass, her most acclaimed work, on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971.

Following her hiatus, her first piece was a mass that she wrote and performed was named Black Christ of the Andes (1963), a hymn in honor of the Peruvian saint St. Martin de Porres; two short works, Anima Christi and Praise the Lord. Williams put much effort into working with youth choirs to perform her works, including "Mary Lou's Mass" at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City in April 1975 before a gathering of over three thousand. It marked the first time a jazz musician had played at the church. She set up a charitable organization and opened thrift stores in Harlem, directing the proceeds, along with ten percent of her own earnings, to musicians in need. As a 1964 Time article explained, "Mary Lou thinks of herself as a 'soul' player — a way of saying that she never strays far from melody and the blues, but deals sparingly in gospel harmony and rhythm. 'I am praying through my fingers when I play,' she says.'I get that good "soul sound", and I try to touch people's spirits.'" She performed at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1965, with a jazz festival group.

Throughout the 1970s, her career flourished, including numerous albums, including as solo pianist and commentator on the recorded The History of Jazz. She returned to the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1971. She could also be seen playing nightly in Greenwich Village at The Cookery, a new club run by her old boss from her Café Society days, Barney Josephson. That engagement too, was recorded.

She had a two-piano performance with avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor at Carnegie Hall on April 17, 1977. Despite onstage tensions between Williams and Taylor, their performance was released on an live album titled Embraced.

Williams instructed school children on jazz. She then accepted an appointment at Duke University as artist-in-residence (from 1977 to 1981), teaching the History of Jazz with Father O'Brien and directing the Duke Jazz Ensemble. With a light teaching schedule, she also did many concert and festival appearances, conducted clinics with youth, and in 1978 performed at the White House for President Jimmy Carter and his guests. She participated in Benny Goodman's 40th-anniversary Carnegie Hall concert in 1978.

Later years

Her final recording, Solo Recital (Montreux Jazz Festival, 1978), three years before her death, had a medley encompassing spirituals, ragtime, blues and swing. Other highlights include Williams's reworkings of "Tea for Two", "Honeysuckle Rose", and her two compositions "Little Joe from Chicago", and "What's Your Story Morning Glory". Other tracks include "Medley: The Lord Is Heavy", "Old Fashion Blues", "Over the Rainbow", "Offertory Meditation", "Concerto Alone at Montreux", and "The Man I Love".

In 1981, Mary Lou Williams died of bladder cancer in Durham, North Carolina at the age of 71. Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, and Andy Kirk attended her funeral at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola. She was buried in the Calvary Catholic Cemetery in Pittsburgh. Looking back at the end of her life, Mary Lou Williams said, "I did it, didn't I? Through muck and mud." She was known as "the first lady of the jazz keyboard". Williams was one of the first women to be successful in jazz.

Awards and honors

Guggenheim Fellowships, 1972 and 1977.

Nominee 1971 Grammy Awards, Best Jazz Performance – Group, for the album Giants, Dizzy Gillespie, Bobby Hackett, Mary Lou Williams

Honorary degree from Fordham University in New York in 1973

In 1980 Williams founded the Mary Lou Williams Foundation

Honorary degree from Rockhurst College in Kansas City in 1980.

Received the 1981 Duke University's Trinity Award for service to the university, an award voted on by Duke University students.

Legacy

In 1983, Duke University established the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture

Since 1996, The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. has an annual Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival.

Since 2000, her archives are preserved at Rutgers University's Institute of Jazz Studies in Newark.

A Pennsylvania State Historic Marker is placed at 328 Lincoln Avenue, Lincoln Elementary School, Pittsburgh, PA, noting her accomplishments and the location of the school she attended.

In 2000, trumpeter Dave Douglas released the album Soul on Soul as a tribute to her, featuring original arrangements of her music and new pieces inspired by her work.

The 2000 album Impressions of Mary Lou by pianist John Hicks featured eight of her compositions.

The Dutch Jazz Orchestra researched and played rediscovered works of Williams on their 2005 album Lady Who Swings the Band.

In 2006, Geri Allen's Mary Lou Williams Collective released their album Zodiac Suite: Revisited.

A YA historical novel based on Mary Lou Williams and her early life, entitled Jazz Girl, by Sarah Bruce Kelly, was published in 2010.

A children's book based on Mary Lou Williams, entitled The Little Piano Girl, by Ann Ingalls and Maryann MacDonald with illustrations by Giselle Potter, was published in 2010.

A poetry book by Yona Harvey entitled Hemming the Water was published in 2013, inspired by Williams and featuring the poem "Communion with Mary Lou Williams".

In 2013, the American Musicological Society published Mary Lou Williams' Selected Works for Big Band, a compilation of 11 of her big band scores.

In 2015, an award-winning documentary film entitled, Mary Lou Williams: The Lady Who Swings the Band, produced and directed by Carol Bash, premiered on American Public Television and was screened at various domestic and international film festivals.

In 2018 What'sHerName women's history podcast aired the episode "THE MUSICIAN Mary Lou Williams," with guest expert 'Mary Lou Williams: The Lady Who Swings the Band,' producer and director Carol Bash.

Mary Lou Williams Lane, a street near 10th and Paseo in Kansas City, Missouri, was named after the renowned jazz artist.

She is one of three women who appear in the famous photograph of jazz greats, A Great Day in Harlem.