Always the Queen

The Denise LaSalle Story

Denise LaSalle, David Whiteis

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780252051937
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

Denise LaSalle's journey took her from rural Mississippi to an unquestioned reign as the queen of soul-blues. From her early R&B classics to bold and bawdy demands for satisfaction, LaSalle updated the classic blueswoman's stance of powerful independence while her earthy lyrics about relationships connected with generations of female fans. Off-stage, she enjoyed ongoing success as a record label owner, entrepreneur, and genre-crossing songwriter.

As honest and no-nonsense as the artist herself, Always the Queen is LaSalle's in-her-own-words story of a lifetime in music. Moving to Chicago as a teen, LaSalle launched a career in gospel and blues that eventually led to the chart-topping 1971 smash "Trapped by a Thing Called Love" and a string of R&B hits. She reinvented herself as a soul-blues artist as tastes changed and became a headliner on the revitalized southern soul circuit and at festivals nationwide and overseas. Revered for a tireless dedication to her music and fans, LaSalle continued to tour and record until shortly before her death.

Chapter One

Mississippi Girl

“A House with a Hole in It”

That’s my earliest memory.

Years ago, out in the country, they used to make duplexes, houses for two families to live in. The house had a hallway straight down the middle with rooms on one side and rooms on another side. You could stand in front, look down the front porch, and look straight through the house. And that’s the first memory I had; the first thing I remember was a house with a hole in it. That’s what I called it.

It didn’t come to me until we had moved out of that house. My mama and them, in our new house, now we had both sides; just walk across the hall and go in this room or that room, from one bedroom to another. One day I asked her, “Mama, didn’t we used to live in a house with a hole in it?” And she couldn’t imagine what I was talking about. But I kept telling her, “There was a hole in the house! You could look straight through it.”

I guess I had grown up a little bit, maybe three or four years old by then, and I described it to her. She said, “You don’t remember that! We lived in that house when you was a baby. You couldn’t possibly remember.”

I said, “Well, I remember seeing a house with a hole in it.”

And she finally had to admit I must remember it, because nobody talked about it when we moved from there, and I could just see it in my head. I remember crawling around, going on the floor, looking at that hole in the house. And that’s the first thing I can remember. So my mother finally said, “Well yes, we used to live in a house like that in The Island.”

They called it The Island because from every direction you had to cross water to get there. On one side was the Yazoo River, then on the other side was Catfish Lake. It was over near Sidon, Mississippi, just west of town. The plantation we lived on then was called Phillipston’s. That was the name of the white man who had bought the land.

My parents were farmers—dirt farmers. Cotton, corn, and everything. Hogs and cows. They always worked on somebody else’s farm, working as sharecroppers, what they called the “third and fourth.” For every four bales of cotton they picked, three went to “Mister Ludlow.” That’s what we called all white folk that used to own farms, “Mister Ludlow.” The fourth bale would be my mom and dad’s money. Corn, the same way; one out of every three wagon loads went to us.

When we moved from The Island, we moved onto Mister Yaeger’s plantation. I don’t remember much about Mister Yaeger; we really didn’t see him that often. On the plantations in those days, the white man who owned the land would pick him somebody to oversee the property. That overseer was always a black man. I don’t know if it was because black folk related better to other black folk or what the reason was, but it was always a black man, and nine times out of ten, it would be someone who was lighter-skinned. He was the one who got on his horse and rode around to all the black folks’ farms and see that everything was okay. And then he went back and told Mister Yaeger how things were. Anything my mama or daddy wanted, they had to go tell the black man; the black man take it to the white man, and he ended up getting what they wanted.

The overseer on our plantation was Mister Hunter Southworth. We didn’t know who his daddy was; Mister Hunter looked white, but he wasn’t white. I think maybe his father or his grandfather was Ol’ Massa during slavery times. Because, you know, that happened a lot then. They could do whatever they wanted with us, and a lot of them had children by us. And a lot of times those children were still favored, even later, after all those years, when my siblings and I were coming up.

When my family was working there and we children were coming along, the overseer had this big barn where everybody living on the plantation would come and get mules or whatever they needed, plows and things like that. That’s what my daddy was doing at first. But then they made an arrangement where he could purchase his own mules and things. It was pretty much like buying something on credit. They’d give him a price, and then he owed the money, whatever it was, and they’d take it out of his earnings when they paid off at the end of the year. Of course, that meant he never really owned any of it; he just kept paying, little by little, but none of it was ever really his. But he could use it like it was his, and it was probably better than having to go up to the overseer’s barn and fetch everything every time he had to go out in the field and work. My daddy got his own mules, and they let him have his own little area that he could farm for himself.

I remember we had a pear tree in the front yard, and we had an apple tree, and there was a little peach orchard down the side, with maybe about eight peach trees out there. And we had a black walnut tree. My daddy had it all fenced in, and that little area was called a truck patch. We didn’t actually own it, of course. All the property belonged to the bossman. But he’d let us fence it off and use it if we did the work to keep it up and take care of it. And later on we had—I can’t call it a garage because it wasn’t a garage; it was a car shed. Four posts sticking up with some tin built over it. That’s where the car was. And I think my daddy had a T-Model Ford, or A-Model Ford, something like that.

Our kitchen was attached to the house. It was a four-room house, and it looked like somebody had said, “Well, I need these rooms here, but I want a kitchen, too.” And so they went and got a cotton shed, and they brought it up to the back of the house. Then they built a little walkway and put a roof over it. In the wintertime you’d like to freeze to death going out through there, but walk about three steps and you were in the kitchen.

That little walkway to the kitchen came right out of the dining room. My daddy built a big old wooden table to seat all of us, eight children and two adults. We’d walk right out of that dining room up this little walkway, into the kitchen. Didn’t have kitchen cabinets; they had what you call a safe. You put your dishes in it, and lard. Grease for cooking was bought in a five-gallon lard can, a big old tall lard can, about five gallons. Those are some of the first things I remember details about.

A lot of people today have no idea how folk lived in Mississippi when I was growing up. But these are my roots, and if you want to know who I am, you need to know who I was and where I came from. I’m going to share some of those memories first.

My Family

My parents were Nathaniel and Nancy Allen. Cooper was my mother’s maiden name. There were eight children. My mama had four boys in succession before she had any girls. Albert James was my oldest brother; we called him A.J. The second brother’s name was John Quincy. I think John Quincy Adams is what made them name him that; he became John Quincy Allen, instead of John Quincy Adams. His nickname was Buddy, but when they were growing up, the boys all named themselves after cowboys, so he became Hoppy, for Hopalong Cassidy. The next brother, who died in 2017, his name was Frank; we called him Shine. He smiled all the time, so we called him Sunshine. And then my fourth older brother was named John Preston; we called him Pres. He was named after my grandfather, my mother’s daddy, who was named John Preston Cooper. The cowboy name for him was Gabby Hayes.

A.J. and Frank had cowboy names, too, but they didn’t stick. A.J. was Tucson for a while. That’s because my Uncle Bo, Daddy’s baby brother, used to go to the movies with A.J. when they went to town. They saw this movie called The Three Mesquiteers, and the two lead characters were named Tucson Smith and Stony Brooke. A.J. became Tucson, and Uncle Bo was Stony. And then Frank was Don “Red” Berry for a while, for the actor who played Red Ryder in the movies. But Shine was the name he kept.

In 1930, my mother got pregnant again, and out come my oldest sister. Her name is Naomi, but we call her Sutter because Preston was so young, and he talked with kind of a lisp at that time; he couldn’t say “Sister” when she was born. He’d say “Tuh-Tuh” or “Thutta” or something, which turned into “Sutter,” and that name stuck. She’s Sutter to this day. Even her nieces and nephews call her Aunt Sutter.

Then about two years later came my sister Luberta; we called her Doll, Baby Doll. I guess they thought she was pretty like a doll. And about two years after that, here I come! They named me Ora Dee. There was a lady who lived around us named Miss Ora Dee Nellum, went to our church, and they named me after her.

My nickname, by the way, was O.D. I never did like that “Ora.” Hated that name! But you know the way brothers and sisters kid each other? All through my life, my brother Frank, when he’d call me, the minute I pick up the phone:

“Ohh-Deeee!”

“Hey, Shine!”

And J.Q. stayed “Hoppy” until the end of his life. I have a picture of him giving me away at my wedding in 1977, and he was still Hoppy, even then.

My baby brother, Nathaniel Jr., was born a little over two years after me. I was too young to remember this, but later they told me the circus had come to town, Ringling Brothers, and my brothers and my Grandpapa were at the circus when Nate was born. Come home, here’s your new baby brother! He didn’t have a cowboy nickname. We called him Mike. We had a radio by then, and on one of the programs Mama used to listen to, one of the performers was named Mike. She’d be listening, and sometimes then she’d turn to Nate and say, “Okay, Mike!” So that became his nickname; before that, we called him Junior. Finally, though, he just became Nate.

My first real recollection of him is when my granddaddy, my mother’s daddy, was dying. He was crazy about Nate. And I remember Grandpapa was so good to Nate; even when he was laying in the bed dying, he had his hand out of the bed, trying to play with him. Nate was crawling under the bed around Grandpapa’s hand. That’s my first memory of him, a little baby boy crawling around that bed when Grandpapa died.

In those days, you understand, black people usually died at home because they didn’t have any hospitals they felt welcome to go to, and they didn’t have any money. Nobody had a birth certificate either. Women gave birth at home, and the family kept the birth records in the back of a Bible. When my brother made the army, that’s the first time we ever heard of a birth certificate; they went through some changes to get my brother a birth certificate so he could go into the army. That’s when I knew it was important. Before that, going to school or whatever we did, whenever Mama said we were born, that’s what they accepted. Four older brothers, two sisters, me, and the baby brother. That was the family. And all my mama’s children were born at home.

Toys, Love, Chicken, and Clabber Milk

We were a fun family. We loved each other, and we had a lot of fun. What did we do for fun? Oooh, lordy, it was more fun then than now! We played with each other! My daddy could make toys that we played with. He would take hay wire and bend it into a little small wheel, and we could throw it on the ground and run behind it with a stick. Run all up and down the road with it, make it flip, turn, do anything you want with it. And then my daddy would take a board and he’d fix wheels on it, like from wagons and things like that, for my brothers to play with. And we’d run out and find berries and different things, go out and pick some berries—“He caught a frog!”—run away from snakes, scare us, stuff like that. Oh, we had some fun, now!

Eight children. That’s a lot of milk to be had, a lot of hogs to kill. They always killed the hogs and kept the fresh meat. My mom would put salt on the pork and bury it down. Daddy made big wooden boxes. They’d put salt in the bottom of the box, put a slab of meat on top of the salt, then pour some more salt on top of that, put another slab in there, salt that down, and fill that box up with salted meat. When they get ready to fry it, they would boil the salt out of it first. And that’s what we had for breakfast almost every day. Salt meat, syrup, and biscuits.

On weekends, we’d have chicken. Every Sunday morning we could count on my mom: She’d send my brothers out to pick the chickens up and wring their necks and pop ’em and pull the head off. I remember seeing one of my brothers pop a chicken, and before he pulled the head off, he threw it. Chicken got up and started running! “Cluck! Cluck! Cluck! Cluck! Cluck!” Like he’s laughing at him. The ones who were too little to do that, they’d put the head up on a piece of wood and chop it off with an axe. And that was Sunday morning breakfast. Fried chicken with gravy, country biscuits, syrup, milk. We drank buttermilk or sweet milk, didn’t matter which one. Or clabber milk. You know what clabber milk is? That’s when milk has to set up and spoil, and when it spoils, all the cream comes to the top. You skim the cream off, and you churn it up in a churn, and it makes clabber milk. Looks like cottage cheese.

For Christmas, they would always buy a gallon or a half gallon of homemade whiskey, what they call “moonshine.” They would bring it to the house, and every child in the house could have a little shot-glass of liquor. We thought that was something! Neighbors would come by, “Mama! Want a little something! Got a little nip?” Everybody go in back, give all the neighbors a little nip.

That’s the only time we ever had alcohol in our house. The only one in the family I knew who really drank was Uncle Bubba, my mother’s brother. Oh, Uncle Bubba! Now that’s a story in itself. I mean, I’m talking about a drunk! And he lived that way until he died. He died laughing at God; that’s how crazy he was.

Someone tell him, “Uncle Bubba, say your prayers.”

“I hanged them dang things on the head of the bed! He can get ’em if He want ’em!” That’s his answer!

But we were a Christian family. Church, always. Always! Mount Carmel Missionary Baptist Church, Rev. J. H. Thompson, that was our church. And Uncle Bubba, he’d clown right there in church. That’s right! They had a bench they called a moaners’ bench. You go to church, you get down and pray, and they’d be praying for you. And we’d see Uncle Bubba, he’d be down on his knees with his face in his hands, like he’s praying. But he’s got his fingers spread a little bit and he’s looking through his fingers at us. See his teeth, his eyes, shining in the dark behind his hands. Uncle Bubba was something else!

Like I told you, Sundays were special at our house, not only because we went to church, but because that was the day we had our best breakfast of the week. But one Sunday morning, something had happened to our chickens. The chickens were dying of a disease they called the “limberneck”; they’d have a hard time standing, almost like they were dizzy, they wouldn’t be able to eat, and their heads would flop around on their necks like they were looking backwards or staring up at the sky. We call it “botulism” today; you can’t eat chickens when they have that. So our chickens had gotten infected somehow, and we were sitting down to a syrup and biscuit breakfast on a Sunday morning, and my brother Preston—Gabby Hayes!—he was sitting there at the table and saw this great big flock of birds, flew over, swarmed and lit out in the field. He said, “Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Hold breakfast, Mama! Hold breakfast!”

He got the shotgun with the bird-shots in it, ran out there, threw him a rock, and when the birds flew up, he let down about thirteen, fourteen birds. Change the menu! Mama put on the hot water, scald ’em in there and pull the feathers out, just split ’em down the back, open ’em and get the intestines out and all that stuff, and fry them, just like that. Get ’em open, fry ’em fat, make gravy. Succulent breakfast!

You know how to churn milk? They’d milk the cows, and my daddy had the wooden churn he made by hand, and that’s how you made your butter. See the yellow butter floating to the top, take a spoon, go down in there and take it out. When you get it out, squeeze all the milk out of it and put it in little bowls, however you might want it to look. You might want it to look square, you might want it to look like a star. Anything you want to do. Then you just let it sit up there. If it was hot, in the summertime, it wouldn’t make hard butter. If it’s wintertime, you set it out there in the window. Take it out, you got butter.

We made our own syrup, too. We raised sugar cane and sorghum. My daddy’d take it to the mill and grind all the juice out of it, put it in a big old iron vat and cook it. It would sit there and cook to syrup. It’d keep sitting there, just cooking, and you’d go out there and feed it wood all day long. Didn’t ever let the fire go out. Cook it, get a wooden paddle, climb up on the ladder and stir it. It would start getting thicker and thicker. After a while it would get real sticky and they’d know when to pour it out. They had a little spigot thing at the bottom of the vat; they’d open that up and pour it into big gallon buckets. Put tops on those buckets, and all of a sudden you got syrup.

So we never knew what a hungry day was. We were really poor, I mean, poor as you can get, but we didn’t know it. We children didn’t know how poor we were. Only after I got grown, I realized: We were destitute! We didn’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prelude: “Far Away Places”
• 1 Mississippi Girl
• 2 Music and Life Lessons
• 3 “There’s Got to Be a Better World Somewhere”
• 4 “That Was God Talking to You!”
• 5 “Mama Says It’s in My Blood!”
• 6 The Road to “Trapped”—and Stardom
• 7 Dreams Come True
• 8 Going through Changes
• 9 “One Life to Live . . . Let’s Live It Together”
• 10 A New Label and a New Era
• 11 Steppin’ In on Some Down Home Blues
• 12 Cry of the Black Soul
• 13 Still the Queen
• 14 God Don’t Make Mistakes
• Coda: “Speak to God on My Behalf”
• A Note on the Text
• Index
• Back Cover