Soulful singer shares her musical heritage
By Jesse Hamlin
Linda Tillery is rehearsing her Cultural Heritage Choir, slapping out a loping groove on the percussion box called the cajón and singing “Rosie, Darling Rosie,” an old children’s play song from Alabama. She heard it on a Smithsonian Folkways field recording about 25 years ago when she became enthralled with African Amer- ican roots music and set out to study and share it.
“Ro-zay darling Ro-zaaay,” Tillery sings with the sassy, soulful authority that has made her one of the Bay Area’s most revered vocalists since the late ’60s, when she made her name at 19 with the San Francisco psychedelic soul band the Loading Zone.
“Ha-ha, Ro-zay,” respond the
“A lot of people don’t know that folk music they listen to is from the African diaspora.” Linda Tillery, founder of Cultural Heritage Choir
“We try to get as authentic a sound as we can. Most of us have been to college and have studied music, so I don’t think we’re ever going to sound like a black field worker. But we do our best.”
Linda Tillery
five singers seated in a circle at the Montclair’s Women’s Club, where the rousing a cappella choir rehearses its repertoire of work songs, spirituals, Afro-Cuban chants and other songs rooted in the oral tradition that links this seminal music to gospel, blues, R&B and even contemporary hip-hop.
“Just grab your partner and follow me, and let’s go down by Galilee,” Tillery continues in falsetto-inflected phrases that swoop and stomp.
An original member of Bobby McFerrin’s prized a cappella group Voicestra, Tillery is a performer, producer and activist educator who played a major role at Olivia Records, the pioneering label run by the lesbian-feminist collective that made a place for female musicians, engineers and producers.
Since 1992 she’s poured her energies into Cultural Heritage Choir, whose records have featured singular artists like Taj Mahal and Wilson Pickett, and whose performances bring forth music that’s “the foundation for a lot of Western popular music, black and white,” says the 66-year-old Tillery.
‘Very American’ music
“This music is very American and ingrained in our consciousness. A lot of people don’t know that folk music they listen to is from the African diaspora. ‘Michael Row Your Boat Ashore’ — that’s a West Indian spiritual.” Likewise, she notes, the song “Little Walter” by the Oakland soul group Tony! Toni! Toné! is based on the spiritual “Wade in the Water.”
Tillery calls the songs the choir sings “survival music. It helped African Americans endure Jim Crow, lynchings, rapes. The music carried them forward.”
She learned a lot about vocal layering and dynamics from McFerrin, who still sings her praises.
“If I was the heart of Voicestra, Linda was the soul,” he says.
McFerrin’s manager, Linda Goldstein, a singer who shared a place with Tillery in Oakland in the ’70s, adds: “Everyone worshiped Linda for her musical integrity, her sense of history and her badass chops.”
Those qualities will be on display when Tillery appears on the final two programs of the SFJazz educational series she curated, “Sounds of Resistance: Tracing the African American Experience,” at the African American Art & Culture Complex this week and next.
Tillery has also participated in the SFJazz program “Discover Jazz” for the past two years, under SFJazz Education Director Rebeca Mauleon, who calls her a “treasure” and values her ability to take “her audiences on a journey through African American history in a way no ordinary academic can.”
Try for authenticity
“We try to get as authentic a sound as we can,” Tillery says one afternoon in the cozy Montclair club owned by her friend Barbara Price. “Most of us have been to college and have studied music, so I don’t think we’re ever going to sound like a black field worker. But we do our best.”
She was inspired to explore this music after coming across Kathleen Battle and Jessye Norman singing spirituals on TV. “It hit me like a ton of bricks. I hadn’t heard that music since I was child,” she says.
She put together a concert of spirituals with the Oakland Youth Chorus, and soon after director Benny Sato Ambush tapped her to sing music for the play “Letter From a New England Negro” (her first gig with Cultural Heritage’s Nicolas Bearde).
Stirred by the visceral power “of those old craggy voices” on field recordings Ambush provided, she envisioned a group re-creating spirituals and works songs “in the folk tradition, not the European concert tradition.” She formed the choir as a way to honor her ancestors and keep alive the memory of her parents, who’d recently died. Her research has taken her to the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina, the Smithsonian and other cultural repositories.
Tillery’s family moved here from east Texas during World War II. Her father, a boilermaker, worked at the Hunters Point Shipyard, and her mother later pressed garments in a Chinatown sweatshop. She was born on the Fell Street block where the SFJazz Center now stands. Her parents danced to the modern blues of T-Bone Walker and Howlin’ Wolf and also exposed her to Count Basie and Dinah Washington. She eventually found her way to Streisand, Bach, Etta James, Jefferson Airplane and later, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane.
“I always sang,” says Tillery, a funny and forthright woman who identified with the “big women with big voices” she saw on TV (and does an Ethel Merman imitation to prove it). She sang for a spell in a Baptist church, but found it surprisingly terrifying.
“It scared the hell out of me. I’d have to sit between two men, because they usually didn’t jump up shouting and getting outside of themselves. I had to develop an understanding of what abandonment was all about.”
Played percussion
At Lowell High, she played bass and percussion. At the time, “it was confusing to be interested in instruments that were only played by men. I never saw a woman playing congas or djembe (the West African drum). I just knew I wanted to do it.” Years later she insisted everyone in Cultural Heritage learn percussion. “We’re calling ourselves African Americans, so we have to put some Africa in this music.”
Tillery, who lives with her partner, Ann Jefferson, director of Community Life and Spiritual Care at Pacific School of Religion, loved jazz singer Nancy Wilson but couldn’t imagine herself looking like her, “in a fishtail dress with an open bodice.” She took the rock route instead, answering a Chronicle ad that read: “Wanted: One Soul Singer,” the title of a Johnnie Taylor album she dug. Tillery still laughs about Loading Zone guitarist Steve Dowler coming over to pick her up for the audition. Her mother saw a hippie at the door and refused to let him in.
Tillery recorded and toured with Loading Zone, opening for Cream at Winterland and at the Fillmore for Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin. “To be honest,” she says of Big Brother, “we kicked their asses.”
After her 1970 solo album on Columbia flopped, she played casuals and sang background vocals on records by Carlos Santana, Boz Scaggs and many others before joining Olivia Records for a long, fruitful run. In addition to her pleasing eponymous 1978 pop album, she performed on and sometimes produced records by artists like Holly Near and Teresa Trull.
“Because of Olivia Records, and Pleiades Records and Cris Williamson, myself, Mary Watkins, Diane Lindsay and all these women who put their blood and guts into those records, younger women today are having an easier time,” Tillery says. “I’m very proud of that.”
Leadership Award
Tillery received a Community Leadership Award from the San Francisco Foundation in October, given by Belva Davis, and the Women’s Cancer Resource Center is also honoring her Feb. 23. She ought to be used to receiving honors by now, but they still mean a lot.
Tillery, who performs in the Hills to Hollers trio with equally well-known Bay Area musicians Barbara Higbie and Laurie Lewis, bounced back from various ailments over the years, including a stroke and a malignant abdominal tumor. She had both knees replaced, has spinal stenosis and now gets around on crutches. That’s how she came onstage at last month’s Martin Luther King Jr. birthday celebration at Oakland’s Scottish Rite Temple, where she typically sang her heart out.
“If I didn’t have a sense of humor, I would’ve fallen through the cracks a long time ago,” says Tillery, who figures if Itzhak Perlman can “drag himself onstage on his crutches, sit down and play his ass off,” she can deal with her challenges.
“I have a real strong desire to continue. I’m a 66-year-old African American woman, and I get to do this. What’s not to like?”