Grandma Is On My Playlist
Music and Remembrance
One of my favorite songs is a raucous rhythm and blues number recorded live in Atlanta in 1956. The lead performer on this track titled “I Ain't Nobody’s Fool” is a pop chart pioneering albino African American musician named Piano Red. The song is an uptempo juke joint butt shaking duet featuring a teenage female singer named Bertha Colbert, who happens to be my late maternal grandmother. It's been well over a decade since my Grandma Bertha passed away but she remains the most fascinating woman I’ve ever known.
She was a charismatic fierce personality who had a laugh you could hear across county lines. As a young woman raised in the segregated south she had dreams bigger than color lines and Jim Crow. Her appearance on “I Ain’t Nobody” Fool” was a career breakthrough and less than a decade later while having a regular singing gig at a famed Greenwich Village nightclub known as Trude Heller’s, where the likes of Salvador Dali danced the night away, where silver screen legend Robert Mitchum once flirted with her, she was signed to Columbia Records, home to Aretha Franklin, Barbara Streisand and Bob Dylan. She recorded and released music with the label but her time there was short and she eventually moved on for a brief period to Roulette Records whose roster over the years featured such stars as Sarah Vaughn,and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. In 1967, her music is briefly featured and she receives opening screen credit in the cult classic film Chappaqua; a movie focused on a young man’s odyssey through drug addiction and treatment and contains appearances from Beat Generation luminaries Allen Ginsburg and William Burroughs, and music icons Ravi Shankar and Ornette Coleman.
Like many others who have pursued the bright lights of success and celebrity and even got to stand in it for just a moment, my grandma did not receive fame and fortune, but to her family and loved ones she was the biggest star in the world. Growing up I and my sister and cousins were often entertained by the stories my grandmother shared about her days and nights in the world of entertainment. Some stories so wild I dare not repeat them because some of the subjects are famous and still alive and I don’t want to be sued. As I write this, we are just days away from what would have been her 82nd birthday.
My grandmother passed away in 2007 after a weary battle with cancer, a fight that I’m pretty sure took something out of cancer because of how tough she was, this was a woman who in the late 1980s and early 90s when the streets of New York were a 24-7 felony fight club was not afraid to walk at night in the streets of the South Bronx where we lived wearing a fur coat and diamonds. She was a fervent praying, bible quoting, sweet potato pie baking, Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion perfume wearing badass, her passing left us grieving but the ability to listen to her music gave us great comfort. When I listen to “I Ain’t Nobody’s Fool” I hear a vibrant sassy take no nonsense young lady who would eventually grow up to be my Grandma Bertha, but she’s no stranger because my grandmother remained a vibrant sassy take no nonsense young lady all of her life despite age. She will always be on my playlist.