So you still have family [in Charleston]?
Yeah, and I’ve got cousins you wouldn’t believe.
From the quantity of cousins?
Yeah, yeah…and very nice. I love them.
A lot still live in Charleston?
Yeah.
Do you have family events?
Well we see them at Thanksgiving, Christmas—funerals these days—and also a lot of them, one main group are members of a very peculiar and politically not very correct—actually, it’s getting more correct all the time—organization called the Society for the Preservation of Negro Spirituals , which is gaining considerably more attention as a very legitimate preservation society of a very important folk song ethic, and I love to sing the things.
Oh really?
Yeah, and there are now what are called rehearsals, and they used to have a once-a-year concert which was so peculiar. People dressed up like Miss Ann and Mr. Charlie, you know, in ball dresses, and we’d sit on the stage pretending to sing like African Americans, but not blackface—I don’t mean that—but doing a thing called “shouting and lining”, which is a traditional way of singing, and the whole point of the one concert was to raise money to buy the booze and the potato chips for the rehearsals throughout the year, which were once-a-month sing-alongs at people’s houses, and when I was a little girl I’d hear these voices coming up the staircase. I loved the music from then on.
So music was always a part of your life?
In that way—singing.
And do you still sing?
Only in the back of the Spiritual Society. I sing in church on Sunday. It’s not anything people would ever really, really want to listen to, but I love to do it.
I grew up in a very…my parents were singers, so I grew up around…
Oh, so they were good ?
(laughs) They were very good. Well I mean, you can imagine…we had those kinds of moments where everyone…you’d hear that. I mean, you’d hear singing all the time, and they wanted us to sing; singing was very much a part of my upbringing.
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