In 1978, a group of Native Americans protested the innumerable injustices faced by ingifenious groups at the hands of the American government. Called “the Longest Walk,” protesters walked 3,000 miles from CA to DC and held a rally at the Capitol. https://t.co/FAUPB7KeJ4 In 1…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 17, 2022
Back in a time when mainstream America glorified the “vanishing west,” Dumbarton Bridge over Rock Creek Park was adorned with buffalos and a Native American. The indigenous person was modeled after Kicking Bear, who greatly opposed westward expansion. https://t.co/qATEXWa5zj …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 17, 2022
Did you know Alexandria was once a part of DC? Due to laws that didn’t allow government buildings on the VA side of the Potomac, Alexandria remained rural farm land. This along with the booming slave trade at Old Town’s port got Alexandria returned to VA. …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 16, 2022
After George Washington decided where the nation’s Capital was to be, he had MD and VA cede the land. Most private land owners willingly sold their property to GW’s land agents for the sake of the country, but not one “Obstinate Mr. Burns.” https://t.co/a8MxB02Rdm After Geor…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 16, 2022
Today in History - July 16 https://t.co/ygoI1Uw1yg On July 16, 1790, the Residence Act, which stipulated that the president select a site on the Potomac River as the permanent capital of the United States following a ten-year temporary residence in Philadelphia, was signed i…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 16, 2022
July News from the Library of Congress https://t.co/gwx0RS9fYw News from the Library of Congress National Book Festival Author Lineup, U.S. Poet Laureate, Library’s Packard Campus Theater and More. Library of Congress National Book Festival Announces Full Author Lineup Th…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 15, 2022
Legend has it that the word “lobbies” originated in DC. The term supposedly has its roots in President Grant's interactions with favor-seekers in the lobby of Willard Hotel, which he frequented after long days in the Oval Office. https://t.co/KONCqLFKTO Legend has it that th…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 15, 2022
SpaceX Dragon Heads to Station on 25th Resupply Mission via NASA https://t.co/cPYDhqwx02 https://t.co/7j3GWHIi1n
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 15, 2022
This fascinating 1967 map shows main linguistic zones and dialects across Nigeria. Take a closer look here: https://t.co/5Etp0jFKwB https://t.co/RdfDacsGMz This fascinating 1967 map shows main linguistic zones and dialects across Nigeria. Take a closer look here: …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 15, 2022
Swann Street Could Be Re-Dedicated For First Known Drag Queen https://t.co/AOmYAd6Ui7 Swann Street Could Be Re-Dedicated For First Known Drag Queen https://t.co/AOmYAd6Ui7 — Streets of Washington (@StreetsOfDC) Jul 15, 2022
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 15, 2022
In 1959, a would-be art thief tried to cut out a Rembrandt painting out of its frame hanging at the Corcoran. Fortunately, the piece was painted on a panel and not canvas as the thief suspected. Art heist fail! https://t.co/JJ5tYguiaY In 1959, a would-be art thief tried to c…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 15, 2022
Today in History - July 15 https://t.co/6DVS8Wmn6f John J. Pershing, a military commander whose brilliant career earned him the title General of the Armies of the United States, died on July 15, 1948. Continue reading. Click here to search Today in History for other histori…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 15, 2022
Here are this week’s standout stories from across the web, and if would like to find more you can always visit our editors’ picks or our Twitter feed.
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Jason Fagone and Alexandria Bordas | The San Francisco Chronicle | July 10th, 2022 | 6,195 words
Before Roe vs. Wade, there was “the List”: a secret document that helped 12,000 people get safe abortions in the 1960s and ’70s. Created by Patricia Maginnis, a former U.S. Army nurse, the List began as an activist project and evolved into a clandestine yet well-organized health care system that spanned multiple countries, notably Mexico, which was viewed as the best, most affordable option at the time. Fagone and Bordas sift through a trove of Maginnis’ documents, including letters from desperate women seeking access to competent providers, and describe what some of these women had to go through to get the vital care they needed. “If you don’t know about the past, you cannot learn from the past,” said Karen L., one of the women who got an abortion in 1968 with the help of this underground network. The List, a “road map for breaking the law” when abortion was illegal, now provides a blueprint for the present. —CLR
Jennifer Senior | The Atlantic | June 6th, 2022 | 10,500 words
It’s hard to write about liars and megalomaniacs who are also raging bigots — which is to say that profiling the people angling to shove America fully over the fascist brink requires being able to recognize, endure, analyze, and contextualize hateful bullshit. Jennifer Senior was up to the task — no surprise for the most recent Pulitzer Prize winner in feature-writing — in her profile of Steve Bannon, who just this week agreed to testify before the Jan. 6 committee. Senior paints a picture of a dumpster fire and implores readers not to look away: Bannon, she explains, is a powerful agent of chaos, keen to leave “a smoldering crater where our institutions once were.” Senior’s use of first-person perspective and text messages in her storytelling is expert. So too is her depiction of Bannon’s slippery relationship with facts and ethics. (OK, in the latter case there’s no relationship at all.) It’s hard to come away thinking Bannon will tell the truth in his congressional testimony, unless it serves his goal of “attempting to insert a lit bomb into the mouth of American democracy.” —SD
Lachlan Summers | Noema | July 14th, 2022 | 3,699 words
Mexico City’s two most significant earthquakes happened exactly 32 years apart, in 1985 and 2017. Both further destabilized what is already a miracle of geology: As Lachlan Summers puts it, CDMX is, seismically speaking, a “floating city.” For many residents who lived through one (or both) of these quakes, such disruptions were neither beginning nor end. These tocado — touched as they are by a combination of PTSD and vertigo — find themselves assaulted by sensory reminders of the entropy around them. “Cracks in a wall, shifts in the Earth’s surface, the angles at which buildings lean,” Summers writes, “people who are tocado have geological sensors that foreground the indicators of the city’s ongoing collapse.” A PhD student in anthropology, Summers has spent years speaking with the tocado, and posits their difficulties as the result of temporal collision: the epochal irrupting into the timeframe of lived human experience. This is a piece that delivers poetry and terror in equal measure, a quiet awe at the enormity and fragility of our physical world. And in a week we all spent marveling at the images from the James Webb Space Telescope, it serves as a crucial reminder that the infinite doesn’t lurk solely overhead — but all around us, in every fissure and foundation. —PR
Lupita Limón Corrales | Protean | June 24th, 2021 | 2,887 words
“Why struggle to stay?” asks Lupita Limón Corrales in this essay on pandemic life, reimagining both public and private space, and living in California — which, for many, has become impossible. I’d realized after reading the piece that it was published last year, but these observations still feel so fresh, as I continue to ask myself questions in the face of constant devastating news: Should we leave? Is everything pointless? What are we even doing? I’m most drawn to the musings on our changing relationship to space, such as the movements the privileged among us have been able to make, and how those shifts have affected other people and the ecosystems around us. (Who wins and who loses in this remote work revolution?) Corrales reflects on an uncertain present, but considers a future — one where communities mobilize and people come together — with much-needed optimism. “Maybe rather than asking ‘Should I leave or should I stay?’ we should ask, ‘In which versions of the future can everyone have a choice?’” I share this one in the hope that you, too, may benefit from its beautiful insights. —CLR
Anna Wiener | The New Yorker | June 27th, 2022 | 6,185 words
There is something lovely about an essay that includes the phrase, “I need more ka-chunkers,” and Anna Wiener’s dive into the bizarre world of Foley sound effects is endlessly delightful. I love learning about things that I never even knew were a thing. I assumed that sound effects were always added post-production in some soulless studio. I was wrong: The sound of E.T.’s movements — just one example — is raw liver sliding around in a packet and “jello wrapped in a damp T-shirt.” Wiener finds that although “technology has changed the process of recording, editing, and engineering sounds … the techniques of Foley have remained stubbornly analog.” Wiener spends time with the Foley artists at Skywalker Sound, and their passion is infectious. As I read, I found myself starting to listen differently: Could slurping this cup of tea be an alien slug sliding off his chair in his intergalactic spaceship? Could munching this packet of crisps be centaurs rustling through the forest? Our soundscape is truly amazing, and this vivid, information-rich article will truly make you hear. —CW
Quote of the Day: "He who is brave is free." - Lucius Annaeus Seneca
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 15, 2022
Today is Bastille Day! To remember this important French holiday, we look back on an important Frenchman to the DMV: Pierre L’Enfant, the designer of DC. He had some plans for the city which never came to fruition. https://t.co/ouaFIKh6bU Today is Bastille Day! To remember t…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 15, 2022
S. Nagakubo created this wood-block print of the world around 1785—based on the 1602 ed. of Ricci’s Great Universal Geographic Map in Chinese. Though less accurate than hemisphere maps, these remained popular in Japan in the 18th c. https://t.co/NxtxkeyJ4O …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 14, 2022
For 10 days in August 1974, the address of President of the United States was not 1600 Pennsylvania Ave... It was 514 Crown View Dr in #AlexandriaVA. Following Nixon's resignation, it took a few days for the White House to be ready for the Ford family. https://t.co/pCVUGvix7E …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 14, 2022
Before the #NSO had their residency at the Kennedy Center, the orchestra took to the water during the summer months, performing from a barge in the Potomac as audiences listened on land. https://t.co/OHB6jaSFHX Before the #NSO had their residency at the Kennedy Center, the o…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 14, 2022
Long before we were human, we were microbes, and from a common ancestor we evolved into the many creatures that led to us being who we are today. But our relationship to the microbial world is not in the past, and while the COVID-19 pandemic has brought one aspect of that interconnection into sharp relief, it is not the whole picture. Beneficial microbes make up our microbiome, which serves as one foundation to our physical health, but they also make our world more delicious, more fizzy, and more fun.
We eat and drink fermented foods every day, shaped by what fermentation expert Sandor Katz calls “the transformative actions of microbes” that give us cheese, coffee, black tea, tempeh, cured meats, soy sauce, alcohol, miso, vinegar, fish sauce, and a host of other foods. Ferments are found, to varying extents, in every culture and cuisine on earth, and the history of their production is deeply interwoven with our own.
I began my own fermentation journey over a decade ago, as an answer to the question of how to put up the bumper crop of cabbages in my garden. Over the years, my practice has blossomed to include koji (the mold used for miso, shoyu, and sake, among other things), cheesemaking, yogurt, alcohol, vinegar, and an assortment of pickled fruits and veggies. I begin each and every day with fermentation, incorporating it into a mindfulness practice as a key moment of my morning routine: one that’s just for me, and lets me practice curiosity and play with abandon.
Fermentation has given me the gift of a beautiful community, too, and I’ve been lucky to spend time learning and teaching alongside some of the people whose writing inspired this list.
My hope is, in reading it, you find a way to plug into that community yourself, or to dive deeper into your fermentation explorations. There are many resources out there that investigate the what of fermentation, including the process and how to make certain dishes. But here, we’re focusing on the why: These pieces all highlight the wondrous, almost magical process of fermentation, and perhaps will inspire you to make some fermentation magic of your own.
Sandor Katz self-describes as a fermentation revivalist, and his work has been central to stoking the fires of our fermentation fascination in recent decades. He is a prolific author on fermentation, whose work is engaging and accessible while also tapping into his deep expertise on the subject. Wild Fermentation, his first book, is a classic, while Art of Fermentation offers a deeper dive into the contexts and histories surrounding fermented foods. At his mountain home in Tennessee, Katz hosts fermentation residencies, where students learn and create alongside him. These residencies have been life-changing for many people, myself included: Without this opportunity to engage with the fermentation community, I would not have given myself permission to pursue fermentation as an author, or to have space to find a Queer culinary community.
Katz’s Fermentation as Metaphor touches on the magic and mystery of fermentation, using it as a lens to better understand ourselves and our world. The book is mind-blowing in the best way, exploring transformations on a microscopic level to understand and perhaps even reimagine the world we can see.
In this interview with Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, Katz talks about the book and his approach to his work, and I like that it touches on so many of the things that make Katz special: his view, for example, of fermentation as subversive and radical in an era so heavily reliant on monocultures and convenience foods. For Katz, fermentation helps us move from these large-scale structures to human-scale ones, and nourishes and excites us in the process. The interview also weaves in history, culture, and a bit of magic, showing how wide-ranging our connection to fermented foods really is.
“Cultivation,” “culture,” these words—our sense of what we can cultivate maybe has changed over time but this word that sort of originates with cultivating the land in order to grow crops has so many more broader applications. We cultivate certain values in our children that we want to manifest in the next generation. Culture is any information that we pass down from generation to generation, so whether that is the language and the meaning of the words that we’re using or our values or belief systems.
Or very practical information: how do you grow carrots? How do you grow squash? What is the season? When do you plant those seeds? When do you harvest those? How do you cook those? How do you ferment them? All of this is cultural information and it’s not that any of it is, in terms of cultivation, none of it is metaphorical. I mean it’s all important things that we’re seeking to pass down from generation to generation that are outside of our genes.
And of course we talk about yogurt cultures and introducing a culture in the ferment. So in the cultivation of microorganisms on our food—which is what we’re doing in fermentation—we use the same word, “culture,” to describe the community of bacteria that turn milk into yogurt that we use to describe language, belief systems and the totality of what we’re trying to pass down generation to generation.
Fermentation engages all our senses, and the act of making ferments is anything but passive. When we massage salt into cabbage, for instance, we smell, watch, and taste to check our ferments’ progress — connecting with our food as it transforms. Fermentation also piques our auditory sense, as Grace Ebert explains in this piece, and a shelf of active ferments is a sonic landscape unto itself: Burps and bubbles and hisses and pops all speak to the unseen world, bringing life to our food. Ebert’s article examines the different ways that fermentation appears in art, using Lauren Fournier’s Fermenting Feminism as a starting point, and explores how the sounds of ferments — and the metaphors Katz explores in his book — can all weave together to make something strikingly beautiful and deeply thought-provoking.
Fermentation, in essence, both embodies and is a catalyst for further change, and it’s when we hear the fizzing and gurgling of a pressurized substance that we perceive transformation is underway. Speaking metaphorically, when centuries-long, structural issues bubble up into mainstream discourse, it’s apparent that change, albeit sometimes slow and incremental, is in motion.
We are (in part, at least) product of and partners with fermentation, and so too is the world around us. While we harness fermentation for food and drink, it is a living, natural force: a collaboration, not a one-sided creation. When we ferment food, we’re participating in a partnership that stretches back before recorded history; I often say that fermentation is ecological, because it is intrinsically tied to the natural world, and microbial communication takes place well beyond our kitchens.
Microbes are at the root of healthy soil, the root of animal digestion and the root of, well, roots. In forests we have a couple of interesting things happening: Microbes in the soil break down organic matter, producing the nutrients needed for plants to thrive. And then other microbes, forming dense mycelial networks, move these nutrients to where they need to go. Definitely a moment of microbial magic!
Mycelial networks, first described by forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, connect all major terrestrial ecosystems, making fungi the literal lifeblood of the world we see above ground. I have been enamored with Simard’s work for years, and with her willingness to take a risk to study what she knew to be important: When she started her research, few of her colleagues understood what she was doing or why. But Simard, who saw monoculture forests failing on the same land where diverse old-growth forests had thrived, knew there was an answer in the soil, and her team explores it through scholarly articles like Mapping the Wood-Wide Web, and through her new book, Finding The Mother Tree.
This interview with Ferris Jabr takes a closer look at her work and into her as a person. I stepped away feeling like I knew the person behind the work a bit better, and had a more intimate understanding of how the unseen world influences what we see.
An old-growth forest is neither an assemblage of stoic organisms tolerating one another’s presence nor a merciless battle royale: It’s a vast, ancient and intricate society. There is conflict in a forest, but there is also negotiation, reciprocity and perhaps even selflessness.
The trees, understory plants, fungi and microbes in a forest are so thoroughly connected, communicative and codependent that some scientists have described them as superorganisms. Recent research suggests that mycorrhizal networks also perfuse prairies, grasslands, chaparral and Arctic tundra — essentially everywhere there is life on land. Together, these symbiotic partners knit Earth’s soils into nearly contiguous living networks of unfathomable scale and complexity. “I was taught that you have a tree, and it’s out there to find its own way,” Simard told me. “It’s not how a forest works, though.”
One of my favorite parts of studying fermentation is how many surprising small moments it contains. These little gems come up often in my research on fermentation (did you know, for example, that ketchup comes from fish sauce?), but I also encounter them in conversations with fellow fermenters. Perhaps your own history contains a fermented food that’s tied to a strong family memory (for me, it’s Amish friendship bread, among other things), or one that sparked a moment of exploration or discovery.
Related Read: Benjamin DuBow on the ritual of making challah bread with his own hands.
The fermented foods we make do not just nourish us — we use fermentation to add nutrition to the grains we feed animals or to the amendments we add to our soil, and in these acts we find surprising historical gems, too.
William Rubel, an expert on the history of bread, wrote this piece in 2006, and I first encountered it when doing research on 17th-century author Gervase Markham. I revisited it recently, and fell in love again with Rubel’s writing — particularly his ability to make an unwieldy subject compelling to the reader. Horse bread, which as you might guess is bread made for horses, was an important part of English horse care in the early modern period. More nutritionally dense than hay or grains, it was considered such an important part of English transportation infrastructure (remember, transportation back then ran on the backs of horses!) that it had its own laws. English law recognized two classes of bread — bread for people and bread for horses — and the latter were heavily regulated, being a critical source of nutrition for the country’s horses. Leavened breads were, as Rubel writes, “elite breads for elite animals,” and were widely in use for centuries. His opening paragraph sets the stage:
In the summer of 1415, the Aragonese ambassadors on their way to the court of Henry v purchased horse-bread every day, spending more on horse-bread than on practically anything else. Don Quixote bragged to an innkeeper that his horse was the finest that ever ate bread. Thomas Nugent, writing about pumpernickel in 1768,relied upon his readers’ association of horse-bread with travel to introduce the still- repeated absurdity that the name was coined by a Frenchman at an inn who complained that Westphalian black bread was unsuitable for himself, though “qu’il étoit bon pour Nicole,” his horse; and the writers of the Oxford English Dictionary, when they published the letter h in the closing years of the nineteenth century, appended to their definition of “horse-bread” the factual statement, “Horse-bread is still in use in many parts of Europe.
The fermentation industry is always moving and changing, and its transformations can serve as metaphors not only for our world as it is, but for the world it might become. Miin Chan’s writing brings to light an issue in the world of fermented food production, and in our conversations around fermentation: lack of diversity, cultural appropriation, and the role of fermentation companies in gentrification. This manifests in a variety of ways, from the language we use to describe our food (for example, calling tibicos “water kefir”) to the fact that white producers and authors are often given greater access to funding and media attention, particularly if products are rebranded and divorced from their cultural roots. In this piece, Chan asks us to consider the world of fermentation as it is so that we can build something stronger: one connects our foods to the traditions, people, and place in which they’re rooted.
Wherever you look, you’ll see that the fermentation industry in the West (meaning North America, the U.K., Europe, and Australasia) is dominated by mostly white fermenters, who often sell whitewashed BIPOC ferments and associated white-gaze narratives about these foods to mainly white consumers. This dearth of diversity is problematic in and of itself, but it’s worsened by the fact that white fermenters are commoditizing ferments that are ingrained in the cultural identities of BIPOC, whose centuries-long labor developed and refined the microbial relationships required to produce them.
The art of fermentation gives us a wealth of metaphors, inspiration, and transformations as we try to understand the world around us, but it also functionally provides us with food that’s delicious. In other words, while the process of fermentation as a whole is magic, the taste of ferments is magical, too: savory and sour in a way non-fermented foods could only dream of being. In the hands of a skilled writer like Jenny Dorsey, that magic translates onto the page. I love this piece because it combines the how-to of fermentation with the pure pleasure of reading beautiful words about a beloved dish.
Five days, the color of the ribs have deepened considerably and the once-thick paste has unwound. I cut open the bags and take a whiff of its contents. The pungency of the garlic is gone, replaced by mellow sour notes accentuated with a pleasant, sake-like scent. I grill up each rib with great relish, every window in my apartment flung open, the char of meat and rice filling my nostrils and eyes. It takes another hour to finish the cooking process, but it’s all worth the work for that first bite: sour and salty, with an umami-rich fragrance that keeps me salivating and craving more.
Further reading:
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Julia Skinner, PhD is a fermentation enthusiast, food historian, and author of Our Fermented Lives: A History of How Fermented Foods have Shaped Cultures and Communities. She teaches classes and offers consulting through her business, Root, and writes about history, food traditions, and fermentation in her newsletter. You can find her on social media @rootkitchens and @bookishjulia.
What was it like to feed a family in Washington, D.C. during the days of World War II rationing? Put yourself in the shoes of a 30-year-old mother of two and find out. https://t.co/7lWKJ5zv8B What was it like to feed a family in Washington, D.C. during the days of World War …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 13, 2022
Check out this free app that gets you cash back on gas and other errands! Click this link or use promo code KENNETH973 to get an extra 20¢/gal bonus the first time you make a purchase. https://t.co/8oftEs14K8
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 13, 2022
James Webb Space Telescope Senior Project Scientist John Mather via NASA https://t.co/ajfmkerC6q https://t.co/919sLUgQX2
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 13, 2022
This kaleidoscopic 1873 map of Ohio is rich in information, including railroad distances, county and city populations, and more! Take a closer look here: https://t.co/s6FmvTqR64 https://t.co/JdT3ZenHsV This kaleidoscopic 1873 map of Ohio is rich in information, including rail…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 13, 2022
In 1798, President Adams pleaded for George Washington to come out of retirement to serve as Lieutenant General and Commander-in-Chief as war with the French was brewing. While he agreed, it was with great reluctance. https://t.co/lpY8cMSxw9 In 1798, President Adams pleaded …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 13, 2022
Today in History - July 13 https://t.co/I13hacixuE Frank Sinatra made his recording debut with the Harry James band on July 13, 1939, singing “Melancholy Mood” and “From The Bottom of My Heart.” Continue reading. John Parker was born in Lexington, Massachusetts, on July 13,…
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During the Civil War, one key part of #DC's defenses was Fort Ward, located in occupied Alexandria on 86 acres owned by Phillip Hooff -- a slave owner, who was also a Union supporter. https://t.co/tm5Z6jz4wK During the Civil War, one key part of #DC's defenses was Fort Ward,…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 12, 2022
President Biden and the World Preview Webb Telescope's First Image via NASA https://t.co/90paReGMSM https://t.co/GbAjzhn1uG
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 12, 2022
With a population of just over 8,000, Montpelier, Vermont, illustrated here in this beautiful 1884 panoramic map, is the least populous state capital in the US! Take a closer look here: https://t.co/KOBQ1c3ZbL https://t.co/dAGgjkccOC With a population of just over 8,000, Mont…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 12, 2022
Circa 1908 view facing south from Columbia Rd and Connecticut Ave NW. The Mt. Pleasant trolley tracks can be seen veering off on Columbia Rd to the left. The statue of Civil War General George B. McClellan had just been erected the previous year. https://t.co/SG94ZGGsgv Circa …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 12, 2022
Believe it or not, during much of the first half of the 19th century, Dolly Madison often threw dinner parties that eclipsed any function put on by the White House. Madison was so beloved by the city, she was dubbed “the Queen of Washington.” https://t.co/lNC4UJrBJr Believe …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 12, 2022
Today in History - July 12 https://t.co/kbL1jWYZ3f Writer, philosopher, and naturalist Henry David Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts. Continue reading. Click here to search Today in History for other historic moments.
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Jul 12, 2022
David Gambacorta | Longreads | June 2022 | 16 minutes (4,445 words)
The girl was no more than 12. Night had fallen, and the caravan of gospel singers that she’d traveled with from Nashville had steered their sedans and station wagons to a quiet space under an oak tree in Mississippi. Booking a hotel room wasn’t an option, not for this group of Black performers in the early ’50s. Instead, they shifted and turned in their seats, in search of a comfortable position and a few hours of sleep.
Their peace was interrupted by the rumble of approaching engines. Candi Staton heard doors clunk open, and several pairs of footsteps approach. Flashlight beams invaded the cars, stirring awake the other occupants. A voice cut through the air. “What are you n—s doing here?” asked a white police officer.
“We’re singers,” said one member of the caravan. “We travel. We just stopped to take a nap.” Staton had experienced the terror of the Ku Klux Klan years earlier, back home in Alabama, where her mother used to tuck her under a bed when Klan members rumbled by in pickup trucks, armed with smoldering torches. Now Staton — who would befriend and tour with Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, and The Staple Singers — was in Mississippi, where 581 lynchings were reported between 1882 and 1968. “In those days,” she’d recall years later, “you didn’t know what to expect. That song — ‘strange fruit, hanging from the poplar trees’ — came to mind whenever a police officer stopped you. Especially more than one.”
The officer turned his attention to five men, who sat terrified in another car, and ordered them to get out. He told them to sing and dance. One meekly protested that they only sang. “You gon’ dance tonight, n—,” Staton would remember the officer responding. “You gon’ dance tonight.” He aimed a gun at the men’s feet, and opened fire. “The police fell out laughing. They kept shooting at the ground,” Staton says. “I cried. I honestly cried for the men.”
The encounter, a microcosm of the bigotry and violence that Black Americans routinely faced, could have compelled Staton and her older sister, Maggie, to quit their group — The Jewell Gospel Trio — and return home. But Staton pressed on. As a small child, she’d discovered that when she sang, her sound was unlike anything the adults in her life had ever heard. Her voice could crackle with campfire warmth, or summon freight train strength; she instinctively understood how to make a listener actually feel the joy or sorrow that a sheet of lyrics hinted at. Staton wanted only a chance to share that gift. What she often found though, were obstacles — people and circumstances that threatened to silence her voice.
Photos courtesy of Candi Staton.
There was a missed opportunity — an invitation, at 18, to move to California with her friends Cooke and Lou Rawls and pursue a recording contract. A jealous husband who beat her and wanted her nowhere near any stage, leaving her a single mother of four at age 24. To support her children, Staton worked at a nursing home, while some of the musicians she’d traveled with as an adolescent found stardom. It was a practical, understandable choice. But a thought nagged at her: What if she could somehow find her way back to performing?
Toward the end of the ’60s — without the benefit of a modern DIY star-making vehicle like TikTok — Staton built a new musical career from scratch. She played smoke-filled nightclubs, toured the unpredictable Chitlin’ Circuit, and recorded some of the most arresting soul music to come out of FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, visceral songs about heartache, and the torture of doomed relationships: “Too Hurt to Cry,” “I’m Just a Prisoner (Of Your Good Lovin’),” “I’d Rather Be An Old Man’s Sweetheart (Than A Young Man’s Fool),” “Mr. and Mrs. Untrue.”
Staton reinvented herself in the mid-’70s, becoming a disco star and an early ally of LGBTQ+ communities — and then reinvented herself again in the ’80s, this time as a Grammy-nominated gospel artist who doubled as the host of shows on Christian television. Another rebirth, in the ’90s, saw her become a house music sensation in the U.K.; in the aughts, she returned to Southern soul, just as a younger generation of musicians, like Florence + the Machine and Jason Isbell, were drawing new attention to Staton’s past work.
Her story is almost too big to fathom, a life that weaved through multiple chapters of American musical history, and weathered dizzying amounts of public success and private anguish. Staton’s admirers believe she possessed one of the defining voices of her generation, yet has sometimes been overlooked in conversations about soul music greats of the last 50 years. Her talent and tenacity, they argue, deserve wider appreciation. At 82, Staton has outlived many of the musicians she called friends. “She’s a legend to us,” says John Paul White, the singer, songwriter, and former member of the Civil Wars, who was born in Muscle Shoals. “But I quickly realized that outside our circle, she’s less known. And I always felt like that was grossly unfair — the talent of Candi Staton, in relation to the celebrity of Candi Staton.”
***
It was on a 40-acre farm in rural Alabama that Canzetta Maria Staton first learned that music could represent hope, a channel of light in life’s darkest valleys. Her family lived in Hanceville, surrounded by dirt roads; just 12 miles to the south sat Colony, a town originally settled by previously enslaved people following the Civil War. “We were dirt, dirt poor,” Staton says. “Our family was so poor, we didn’t even have shoes to wear for school, until my mother got enough money. We had some of the ugliest shoes you ever wanted to see. They cost but $1.98. They were boy shoes, not girl shoes.”
Throughout Staton’s childhood in the ’40s, Jim Crow laws reigned. Schools were still segregated — the U.S. Supreme Court wouldn’t rule that practice unconstitutional until 1954 — and it was impossible to avoid the menace baked into everyday life. Staton remembers reading a sign affixed to a nearby bridge: “Run n— run. If you can’t read, run anyway.” When Klan members stalked past their farm in search of a target, Staton’s mother dropped to her knees, and prayed, “Oh Lord, please don’t let them come to our house.” Those past aggressions no longer seem so far away. Republican lawmakers have advanced hundreds of bills across the U.S. to restrict voting access, while activists have launched coordinated campaigns to ban books about, or by, people of color and LGBTQ individuals. “I’ve lived all these years. [Black women] fought hard to even get the right to vote,” Staton says. “Now they’re trying to pull that backwards. Gradually. Day by day, incident by incident.”
As a child, Staton and her five siblings fixated on a new family possession to help them process the cruelty of the world: a radio. The children stretched out on the floor, and listened as a melange of booming voices — Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, The Five Blind Boys of Alabama — unspooled stories of love, struggle, and spiritual reassurance in song.
When Staton was 5, her mother answered a knock at their door. Members of a traveling church group asked if they could use the family farm for an impromptu performance. She agreed, and Staton was drawn to the sound the group conjured. “They set up their drums and tambourines. It was nothing like the boring churches I was used to. They sung fast songs, and they were dancing,” Staton explains. “I thought that was the most joyful thing I’d ever seen in my entire life.” Soon after, Staton and her 7-year-old sister, Maggie, started to sing together, and learned how to harmonize. “Do you know how I got a voice? God gave me a talent,” she says, “because of my mother’s generosity to strangers.”
Staton was drawn to the sound the group conjured. “They set up their drums and tambourines. It was nothing like the boring churches I was used to. They sung fast songs, and they were dancing,”
A few years later, Staton found new possibilities in Cleveland, where her mother had relocated her children to escape her husband. “Papa was a rolling stone,” Staton says. “Drinking and gambling and chasing women.” There, Staton and her sister participated in a singing contest at a local church, and caught the ear of a towering woman, Bishop Mattie Lou Jewell, who oversaw dozens of churches, and a Tennessee-based school called the Jewell Academy. Jewell offered to let Staton and her sister attend the academy for free — as long as they’d sing at revivals that she staged across the country. The Staton girls formed their gospel trio with Jewell’s granddaughter, Naomi Harrison. A teenaged Staton can be heard on some of the group’s surviving recordings; on a track like 1957’s “Praying Time,” she sings with the poise and power of someone twice her age.
On the road, they met kindred spirits, other young performers who possessed stunning voices and a hunger to connect with strangers through song. In between performances at churches and auditoriums, they’d play softball and muse about their futures. During one conversation, Sam Cooke confided to Staton that he’d decided to leave his group, The Soul Stirrers, and transition from gospel music to the blues. Staton was startled; crossing over to secular music had long been considered too risky, personally and professionally, to even attempt. She’d once watched a gospel audience boo and shout “Traitor!” at one of her idols, the pioneering guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who began playing secular venues in the late 1930s.
“When we think about a person who’s performed in and who grew up in the world of sacred music, it really is a cultural phenomenon that absorbs every aspect of your life,” says Katie Rainge-Briggs, the exhibition and collections manager at the National Museum of African American Music, in Tennessee. “When that happens, intrinsically moving to the space of the world seems to have so many pitfalls.”
In 1957, Cooke released a dreamy new song that he’d written: “You Send Me.” The track shot to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and Rhythm and Blues charts, an encouraging sign for other gospel singers, like Lou Rawls, who wanted to follow in Cooke’s footsteps. A year later, when Staton was 18, the two men suggested that she join them in Los Angeles. “Sam and Lou said they’d get me with Capitol Records,” Staton says. “I was so excited. I told my mother, ‘They said they’d take me to California!’ But my mother said, ‘No way. You’re never singing the blues, little girl.’”
But my mother said, ‘No way. You’re never singing the blues, little girl.’”
It’s easy to imagine this what-if moment having gone differently — a young Staton landing a record deal, her star rising steadily as the doo-wop wave of the ’50s gave way to the Motown sound of the early ’60s. But Staton isn’t so sure. “You know, I was 18. Full of energy and excitement,” she tells me, letting go of a small sigh. “And wide open and ignorant. I don’t have a clue what would have happened to me.”
Rawls, who would duet with Cooke on their 1962 hit, “Bring It On Home to Me,” briefly dated Staton, and assured her they would be married. Rawls’ mother intervened, and told Staton she should instead return home and finish high school. Staton reluctantly agreed. It was another pivotal choice — one that nearly cost her life. Back in Alabama, she met a man who drove an eye-catching ’57 Chevrolet and doted on her. Soon, she became pregnant. Staton hoped to continue her singing career, but instead found herself married, the mother of four children. The stage never seemed so far away.
Staton discovered that the man she married had a dark side, one that would prove dangerous. He became verbally and physically abusive, she says, and grew jealous if he thought other men looked at her. “When I got married to him, he owned me,” she says. “I was no longer free.” On Valentine’s Day 1964, Staton laid in bed with her 18-month-old daughter and watched TV, while a chilly rain fell outside their Birmingham home. Her husband barged in, accused her of cheating — and began attacking her. Staton says he dragged her toward his car. She believed he intended to take her to a nearby portion of Interstate 65, which was under construction. “He planned to take me up there, jump out of the car, and let the car go off the road with me in it,” she says. A relative who lived next door heard Staton’s screams and intervened.
Staton filed for divorce, and — like her mother, years earlier — moved with her children to Cleveland, where one of her sisters lived. Staton had been a little girl during her first visit to the city, one whose singing voice pointed to a bright future. Now, her circumstances were far more bleak. She landed a job at a nursing home, which barely paid enough to cover her bills. She had two arms, and four children; trying to meet all of their needs could sometimes feel impossible. “This is why I could sing the blues,” Staton says. “I had to face the blues everyday.”
She had two arms, and four children; trying to meet all of their needs could sometimes feel impossible. “This is why I could sing the blues,” Staton says. “I had to face the blues everyday.”
On one rare evening, Staton had some time for herself. She ventured to a nightclub where her old friends, The Staple Singers, were appearing, along with The Temptations. Backstage, she caught up with Pervis Staples, Mavis’s brother. Their conversation was interrupted by David Ruffin, the lanky, mercurial Temptations singer. Ruffin glanced through his dark-rimmed glasses at Staton, who wore a pink dress and no makeup. “Whoa, where’d you get that little country girl from?” he blurted. “That your girlfriend, Pervis?” Staples tried to explain that Staton had once been a singer, but Ruffin continued needling. “If that’s your girlfriend,” he laughed, “Lord have mercy!”
A fire sparked inside Staton. She had once dazzled audiences across the country with ease — and now she was being treated like a punchline. She turned to Ruffin. “I knew what I could deliver, if only I had a chance,” she says. “I looked him in the face, because I’ve never been shy. I said, ‘You’re gonna regret these words. You gonna be paying to see me one day.’”
***
Staton wasted little time trying to make good on her backstage vow to David Ruffin. She would quickly find success and validation — and new challenges that threatened to derail her career. Her first step was to find a stage. In Cleveland, her brother approached a band at a small club, and persuaded them to let his sister have a turn at the mic. “I didn’t know them. They didn’t know me,” Staton says. “But everybody knows ‘Stormy Monday.’” She tore through the decades-old blues number, which traces a week’s worth of misery, a sentiment Staton understood all too well. “I can’t sing a song if I don’t know the meaning of that feeling,” she says. “I have actually lived that moment.”
“I didn’t know them. They didn’t know me,” Staton says. “But everybody knows ‘Stormy Monday.’”
In 1968, she moved to Tennessee, and ran into an artist she’d played with years earlier, the blues singer and songwriter Clarence Carter. Fate was about to bend in Staton’s favor. Carter insisted that Staton travel with him to Muscle Shoals, a city in Alabama situated about 20 miles east of the Mississippi River. There, a producer named Rick Hall had turned a small, unheard-of recording studio into a hit-making phenomenon. Wilson Pickett recorded some of his most popular songs — “Land of 1000 Dances,” “Mustang Sally” — at Hall’s FAME Studios in 1966, with a band composed of local musicians who possessed an almost preternatural ability to find a groove. A year later, Aretha Franklin recorded what was then the biggest hit of her career, “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You” with Hall’s crew. The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and Paul Simon were among other artists who would make a pilgrimage to Muscle Shoals, hoping to tap into the local sound.
Photos courtesy of Candi Staton.
But now it was 1969, and Staton was auditioning for Hall in an Alabama hotel. He listened for a few minutes, and delivered a verdict: She needed to get over to FAME Studios. Hall hastily assembled some musicians, and they recorded several tracks. The first — “I’d Rather Be An Old Man’s Sweetheart” — begins with some keyboard vamping and a punch of horns. At the 13-second mark, Staton’s voice explodes into the track, and the song takes off like a rollercoaster. “Her voice jumps right off the record,” says Clayton Ivey, who played keyboard on some of Staton’s early recordings with FAME. “I’ll tell you what’s amazing, to be sitting in the studio … you get caught up in her vocals for a second. It’s like, damn! She can really do this!”
Staton began to perform on the Chitlin’ Circuit, a network of clubs and theaters for Black audiences and performers that traced its roots to the ’30s, when big band music was the chief draw, and was later a critical incubator of early rock ‘n’ roll. Her experience on the Circuit, she says, “was good and bad at the same time.” She learned how to shut down hecklers and won devoted fans. But the clubs could sometimes be claustrophobic, and she also contended with male promoters who tried to cheat her out of money, or coerce her into sleeping with them — deterrents that proved exhausting.
“I had to be a gangster and get me a .32,” she says. “I learned how to cuss. I’d go to promoters, and say, ‘You better have my money, motherfucker.’ I’d take my little gun, and lay it out.” Singer Gloria Gaynor, a friend of Staton’s, confirms this was too often a reality for many female performers. Gaynor recalls once having to search through a club for a promoter who tried to stiff her after a show: “He was in the kitchen, crouched between a refrigerator and a freezer, hiding from us.”
In 1971, Hall encouraged Staton to record a cover of the Tammy Wynette country hit “Stand By Your Man.” In Staton’s hands, Wynette’s cloying message of wifely devotion took on an edge of knowing irony. Staton’s performance was nominated for a Grammy Award; another nomination followed in 1973, for her affecting cover of the Elvis Presley song “In the Ghetto.” Just a few years removed from feeling stranded in Cleveland, she was now playing concerts amid the neon of Las Vegas. Still, some of her supporters felt Staton had been deserving of more commercial success.
“I think Candi’s one of the greatest soul singers of all time,” says Rodney Hall, Rick’s son. “But I think she’s been a little bit overlooked. To be honest with you — my dad used to say this and I’ll say it, too — part of the reason for that is that she wasn’t on Atlantic Records. She was on our label, which was distributed through Capitol. If she’d been signed directly to Capitol, she would have gotten more promotional muscle.”
Broader music tastes began to change — and Staton’s did, too. She continued to record with Hall, but grew tired of singing about cheating men and women who pined for them. In 1976, she signed to Warner Bros. Records, and a new producer, David Crawford, sketched out a song based on comments Staton made about a relationship that was wreaking havoc on her life. “Young Hearts Run Free” embraced the surging sound of disco — the four-on-the-floor beat, swirling strings, sunny vibes — and spoke the language of female empowerment. “Never be hung up, hung up like my man and me,” she warns in the song’s chorus, before later declaring, “Self preservation is what’s really going on today.”
Staton had been on the sidelines when songs recorded by Cooke and The Staple Singers became part of the fabric of the civil rights movement; now, her music spoke directly to women’s liberation efforts, much like Gaynor’s 1978 song “I Will Survive” later would. “Young Hearts” became the biggest hit of Staton’s career, climbing to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Soul Singles chart, and No. 20 on the Hot 100.
To soul music historian David Nathan, Staton’s ability to successfully transition from gospel to Southern soul and then disco made her a peerless figure in 20th-century music. “She is just completely unique,” he tells me from his London home. “I can’t think of any artist who I can say is like Candi Staton.” Staton’s disco records were embraced by the LGBTQ community, and she, in turn, embraced it. Some musicians, Nathan says, were still wary in that era of acknowledging such a connection. “But she played LGBTQ-oriented events, specifically for the community. She’s a true LGBTQ musical icon.” Staton paid little attention to critics who didn’t approve of this bond. “I don’t want anybody telling me how to live,” she says, “or who to love.”
Some musicians, Nathan says, were still wary in that era of acknowledging such a connection. “But she played LGBTQ-oriented events, specifically for the community. She’s a true LGBTQ musical icon.” Staton paid little attention to critics who didn’t approve of this bond. “I don’t want anybody telling me how to live,”she says, “or who to love.”
By the late ’70s, Staton was living hard. She’d married blues musician Clarence Carter and had a child, but their relationship unraveled when Carter became unfaithful, and allegedly assaulted her. Now she was on the road constantly, trying to parent from afar, and responsible for house and car payments. The occasional glass of Johnnie Walker Black to unwind became a daily necessity. “I became overwhelmed. I felt like I couldn’t even function without it,” she says. Staton began drinking before she took the stage, and her performances suffered. Then she developed kidney problems. “I had an antibiotic in one hand,” she says, “and a Scotch in the other.”
She could feel everything she’d built start to slip through her fingers. During a visit to a club in Atlanta, Staton drank so heavily that she fell off a bar stool. She staggered into a bathroom, and glimpsed herself in a full-length mirror. “For the first time, David, I saw myself,” she tells me. “I saw who I had really become. And I started to weep.”
Candi Staton needed to break away. To go back to her roots.
***
“Oh my God. Oh, oh my goodness,” David Letterman huffed appreciatively, as he strode across the New York City set of the Late Show with David Letterman on an early October evening in 2013. His destination was Staton, who stood in a shimmering black jacket and dark pants, flanked by Jason Isbell and John Paul White. Led by Isbell’s sinewy slide guitar, the trio blended their voices for “I Ain’t Easy to Love,” a song that appeared on Staton’s then-new album, the appropriately titled Life Happens. At 73, Staton had lost none of her ability to sway an audience. Letterman bowed his head, and pecked her hand.
Staton had spent much of the aughts establishing herself once again in the realm of secular music — and firming up her legacy. In the ’80s, having given up alcohol, she embarked on what she calls “a 25-year sabbatical.” She started a record label and publishing company, and focused entirely on gospel music, earning two more Grammy nominations. “I was burned out,” she says. “I went back to the church, and got refreshed.” Gaynor cites a song Staton recorded during that period, “Sin Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” as her favorite. “It’s a prayer,” Gaynor says, “to make me a better person.”
Yet the ’80s and ’90s had, in one sense, been another lost opportunity. Recording artists from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s enjoyed some renewed visibility — and replenished bank accounts — when their catalogs were made available on CD. But the essential music that Staton recorded with FAME was nowhere to be found; the company was embroiled in a lawsuit with Capitol Records over the rights to her recordings that wouldn’t be resolved until 2000. “So, pretty much for the whole CD era, her music wasn’t available,” Rodney Hall says.
Staton still loomed particularly large in the imaginations of aspiring musicians in the South. White grew up in Tennessee, and often heard bar bands chugging through covers of Staton’s soul classics. “The main thing I took from Candi, and the trajectory of her career, is to make sure you’re always doing it for the right reason,” he says. “She sings things that she’s felt, that she’s been through. She was not chasing hits, or chasing trends. She was always herself.”
“She sings things that she’s felt, that she’s been through. She was not chasing hits, or chasing trends. She was always herself.”
In the early ’90s, the British group The Source released a remix of a song that Staton had recorded, years earlier, for a documentary. “You Got the Love” climbed U.K. dance charts, and introduced Staton to a new audience: electronic dance music fans. Younger artists, like Florence + the Machine and Joss Stone, later recorded popular covers of the song, and Staton became a sought-after touring attraction in the U.K., playing the Glastonbury Festival — which draws upwards of 200,000 spectators — in 2008 and 2010.
Thoughts of mortality intruded in 2018, when a breast cancer diagnosis forced Staton to cancel a planned tour. Within a year, she’d added cancer to the long list of obstacles that she’d overcome, and spoke openly of feeling grateful to still be among the living. “Every time I look around,” she says, “another one of my friends is gone.” She has continued to write and record — new Americana gospel album, Roots, is planned for a fall release — and squeezed a handful of live appearances in between several waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, she’s mulling a U.K. farewell tour.
Rainge-Briggs, of the National Museum of African American Music, argues that Staton’s career has added up to something more significant than album sales or hits. “Her music is a perfect example of someone saying, ‘Guess what? I’m not perfect. I’m not pretending to be perfect,’” she says. “Her career is a demonstration of redemption. Her imperfections are an example of her growth.”
When pressed, Staton acknowledges that it might be nice to have a little more recognition for all that she — a country girl from Alabama — managed to accomplish through sheer determination. Perhaps a lifetime achievement award from the Grammys, an honor they’ve bestowed on many of the performers she once considered peers. Maybe a movie, given all of the cinematic drama that punctuates her story.
But if none of those things happen — well, that would be fine, too. Because Candi Staton still has her voice. Sometimes, in conversation, the mention of an old song will trigger an almost involuntary reaction. A melody will rise up from somewhere deep inside, and she’ll start to sing, all of her pain and joy circling around the words like growth rings on an oak tree. “It is what it is,” she says. “We’re all born for a reason. A purpose. Some of us meet that purpose, and some of us never find it. And I found it.”
***
***
David Gambacorta is a writer at large at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He’s also written for Esquire, The Ringer and Politico Magazine.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact checker: Lisa Whittington-Hill
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