In the main room of Horizon Recording Studio on a recent afternoon, Phil E. Brown laid down a hard, swinging groove on the drums. Elijah White, Morris Trent, and Teddy Boyd — a.k.a. Dr. Bottom — filled out a smoky sound on keys, guitar, and bass. Fred Nobles, Jr., on saxophone, danced over the top.
But the star of the hour, approaching the microphone in an isolated booth, was Yvonne Monk Adams, of the Monk Family Singers.
In the course of her life she has sung gospel, funk, blues, and jazz, but that day she was there to turn the jazz standard “Summertime” into a cry from the heart about being Black in America that felt as old as the song itself and right up to the present moment.
Brian Slattery Photos
Yvonne Monk Adams.
Adams sang through the verse as the Gershwins wrote it, then made the song her own. “Summertime, and the living ain’t easy,” she sang, her voice gathering strength, fervor, power. “These streets are jumping, and the tension’s up high.” Moving away from the melody altogether, she kept going. “Late night / street lights / police lights in my rear-view mirror / I don’t know if my man will make it home tonight.”
“The reason I’m here today,” Adams said, was because of Brown and the other musicians in the room backing her up. “They’re the best of the best,” she said. But she was also there to deliver a message that had been brewing for a year.
Adams has been singing since “birth,” she said. “It’s a family requirement. With my family, we’ve been singing gospel together for 59 years. We’re currently four generations living.” Her family, the Monk Singers, sing at Thomas Chapel Church of Christ on White Street.
One of the things you learn growing up singing gospel in church, Adams said, is “recognition of what’s on the inside — and that is spirit,” Adams said. “It’s allowing cultivation of that gift, so you can share it spirit to spirit.” Singing is, after all, about delivering a message, “no matter the genre. Music is a part of that umbrella of love.”
Adams was in her teens when she began singing secular music. She sang with Second Shift, a band led by Duane Edwards that played “all that ‘70s and ‘80s stuff — it was a lot of funk.” Her brother was in the band with her; he was killed in 1983 after being hit by a transit bus, and the band dismantled after that. Her brother’s death, Adams said, “is always with me.” She learned to sing jazz at Unity, a club that used to be on the corner of Goffe Street and Sherman Avenue. Her mentors included Dickey Myers and the Buster Brothers, “these great jazz musicians,” she said. “They were the ones who really taught me.”
So Adams has sung for her entire life, but never felt the need to record. “For me, it never was about going beyond whoever could hear me where I was.” In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, she also knew that she couldn’t have the kind of life she wanted — singing in church and raising a family — if she also tried to pursue a full-time career in music. She occasionally appeared on someone else’s recording but “never pushed it,” she said. “I just felt richer being able to bless folk as I went along.”
That changed just before the pandemic, when she found herself changing the words to “Summertime,” the Gershwin-penned standard. “While I was singing it, it turned from ‘the living is easy’ to ‘the living ain’t easy.’” she said. “The words change according to how I feel.”
And, “since George Floyd’s death, the song began to encompass my thoughts to the point where I wasn’t sleeping, and I had to call Phil Brown,” Adams said. In one sense, Adam’s interpretation of the song isn’t a departure; it’s unearthing what’s already there. The power of the standard, even in its original form, is that the words aren’t sincere.
“The music camouflages the words of the song, so you’ll sway to the song without necessarily hearing the message,” Adams said. Or listening to them more closely, to understand that the singer isn’t singing about what she has, but what she doesn’t have and wishes she did. Adams’s take on the song tapped into its keening desperation, and its quiet anger. “In my mind, that mammy” — the person singing the song — “was sitting on her porch with Massa’s baby suckling on her breast,” Adams said.
But she didn’t want the song to become simply an expression of grief and rage; hence her desire to record a driving, up-tempo version that would rouse listeners to action. “I want them to think about it and not be sad, but think, ‘what can we do?’” Adams said. “I always tell my kids, ‘find a solution.’”
The dramatic interpretation of the song will be reflected in the cover art as well, which won’t read “Summertime,” she said, but rather “Ain’t a Damn Thing Changed,” with photographs from the civil rights era and today placed next to each other to drive home the comparisons.
“We have never overcome — we just stopped singing the song,” Adams said. “When you have brown-skinned boys always looking over their shoulder” when they go out, “that says a lot.”
Adams and the band did two full takes of the song, the second even more powerful than the first. Standing in the control booth with producer Vic Steffens to listen to the playback, Adams closed her eyes, her head moving side to side to the music. They had what they needed — just about — to meet Adams’s expectations for what the song needed, and what she could do with it to tell the story. They made plans to finish. It was well within reach.
As for a release date, “when they tell me it’s working, then that’s when I want to put it out,” Adams said. “Right now I’m under Phil Brown’s tutelage.” But recording her scorching version of “Summertime” may have opened a gate. She plans to record another song, “Missing Pieces,” written by a cousin, and a song sent to her by musician Trey Oliver that she calls “Slow Ride.”
“When the spirit tells you it’s time to share it, you do,” she said.