Belief, ritual, music, craft, tradition. What gets passed down, and what’s at risk of not being.
Martha Wash’s voice is on some of the biggest dance records of the 1990s. It just wasn’t her face. Wash sang the actual vocals on Black Box’s “Everybody Everybody” and C+C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now),” two of the era’s biggest hits. Record labels hired other women, thinner, conventionally marketed women,…
Clyde Stubblefield was the drummer you heard without knowing his name. His work with James Brown helped define the sound of funk. But one performance would carry his playing far beyond the records on which his name appeared. On “Funky Drummer,” Stubblefield laid down a brief drum break that became one of the most influential…
This photograph captures dignity in a world that offered these boys very little of it. Five boys, dressed in their Easter best, gathered around an automobile, looking directly at the camera. They aren’t posing as victims. They look confident, curious, serious—even proud. And yet the photograph quietly tells us that they understood the world around…