He produced her debut, 1979’s Wild & Peaceful, a set of silky R&B punctuated with James’ signature horns and percussive guitars.
Marie wasn’t Motown’s only white artist, but she was the first at the label to write music that was undeniably made for Black listeners, especially once James stepped in. “And instead I found this short, tiny white body sitting at the piano, singing like the gods had come into her spirit.” “I expected to see a writer-producer," James told People years later. The funk-rock svengali took an instant shine to Marie. studio one day, Marie finally got the right person’s attention: Rick James, fresh off 1978’s Come Get It!, his debut Top-10 R&B album that would launch his outrageous, sequin-studded “Super Freak” era. Despite earning Berry Gordy's approval, she worked with an assortment of songwriters over nearly three years with no luck.
Marie attended Santa Monica College and wrote music on the side with friends, eventually landing her first break with Motown, which had expanded from Detroit to Hollywood. You can hear the seeds of Marie’s swooning music in Green’s vocals especially, the way he holds his breath for a beat before letting loose a maelstrom of emotion. Marie knew even then that she wanted to write love songs modeled after her favorites from Smokey, the Dells, and Al Green, whose lush, heartbroken “Tired of Being Alone” stopped her in her tracks as a sophomore in high school. She would haul her battery-powered turntable and Smokey Robinson 45s outside to play and sing along while she and her friends ran track, earning her the nickname Lil’ Smokey for how closely she could mimic the timbre of his voice. They encouraged her hobby early on, and as a youth in Venice her love for soul and R&B ran deep. At 8, she began singing in church and at local functions, growing up with parents who played jazz staples like Frank Sinatra and Sarah Vaughan at home. “I’m a Black entertainer, and I always have been.”īefore all of the success that led to Soul Train, however, Teena Marie was simply Mary Christine Brockert.
TEENA MARIE I M STILL IN LOVE SKIN
“My skin is white, but I’m not looked at like that,” she said in a posthumous 2012 documentary on her life.
TEENA MARIE I M STILL IN LOVE FULL
By the time she made the album, her third, and the first over which she had full creative control, the singer had secured a rarified place that no white entertainer in R&B had ever reached, before or since. It was a street cred she carried through her entire life, even name-checking the locale by name on the title track to Irons in the Fire. Marie’s music was steeped in the gospel, R&B, and soul traditions she heard growing up in “Venice Harlem,” a melting-pot, working-class neighborhood in west Los Angeles. That performance-plus the next “nine, ten, eleven” times she appeared on Soul Train over the course of her career, as she remembered it-is testament to many facts about Teena Marie: her tireless brio onstage her robust and layered vocal talents her infectious, easygoing personality.
0 kommentar(er)
