Take Five - In Memory of Dave Brubeck

The Dave Brubeck
Anthology - Music Book

On summer evenings in the 1950s and 1960s when the air inside the kitchen was too stifling to turn on the stove and cook a meal, my mother made cold-cut suppers outdoors with the music of her favorite jazz artists lilting out of the house into the fading light of day and blending into her candlelit table setting.

This is how my mother made my life seem like a luxury, instead of the drudgery most people simply accepted. 

Outdoor Entertainment at Littie's was necessary because there was no indoor air conditioning. These were my family's evenings out and sometimes we had overnight company, traveling relatives or friends passing through town. At that time, there were no restaurant or hotel accommodations for black people, except ill-equipped, insect-infested flop-house rooms above nightclubs. My mother would never expose guests to rooms where sheets had never been laundered.or restaurants with rear Jim Crow entrances or walk-up windows to order food to be eaten while standing on the street. That was just not acceptable to her. 

To complete evenings out, my mother brought out music to play on a record changer she had bought at a yard sale. She connected her new electronic music device to a power source in the kitchen, set the box on a chair just inside the back door and put on her favorite music--Dave Brubeck--while she decorated the backyard for supper. 

"You can make your life better with a little effort," she said. "I already have the world out there screaming at me what I can and cannot do for a living; where I can and cannot sit in a restaurant; where I can and cannot live! Why would I want to come home from the job they do let me have and listen to a guy whining how bad life is to the sound of an out-of-tune guitar," she would say. I guess that music was too sad, reminding her of the Jim Crow realities under which we lived, at that time, and making her feel worse than the world already made her feel. 

"I do not need someone crying loud and yelling about a broken heart or a life gone wrong," my mother would say about Blues and Country Music, she wrote songs herself that were very much country. "I can look up the street and find real examples of failed love lives! I want to hear music that gives me hope and lightens my spirit." Dave Brubeck's song, Take Five, from his album, Time Out,  really lifted my mother's spirits after she went right out and bought it as soon as the studio released the music in 1959.

 Time Out

Essential Dave Brubeck

My mother's motto was, take five-- take time to enjoy yourself. Taking five always included the Dave Brubeck Quartet or some other of her favorite jazz artists who played "sweet and soft."

Listening to Brubeck's music allowed my mother and me to exchange feelings of sadness with feelings of joy. 

Dave Brubeck Quartet Take Five

Paul Desmond, Saxophone

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Just like my mother tried to make life better by creating her own fine restaurant in the backyard and playing her favorite music, all of America was yearning for hope during the 1950s and 1960s. Life under Jim Crow laws could make one feel pretty oppressed and I imagine the oppressor's burden was getting heavy, too. Although we all saw the changes over the horizon, the changes were yet to be fully realized.

All Deliberate Speed: 
Reflections on the 
First Half-Century 
of Brown v. Board 
of Education

When the Supreme Court decided Brown v the Board of Education in 1954, my mother thought the schools would be integrated and, finally, I would be issued new school books. 

When this was not the case, we all waited, patiently and some impatiently. And nothing changed. Long after the Court ordered school desegregation with aIl deliberate speed, I continued my education in a segregated school system using hand-me-down books from the white school until I graduated from high school ten years later. And ten years later and even today, we are all still the Offspring of Jim Crow. When their books were replaced, the black schools got them, marked up, pages missing and bindings loose. Then some of our teachers used books to play favorites, giving their pets the best of them. 

Best of Kenny Burrell
 (Guitar Recorded 
Versions)

Best of Paul Desmond

I could not use tattered books as an excuse. My mother never accepted that. "You have books," she said. "That's more than your ancestors had on the plantation! Now, go to your room and do your homework." 

My mother expected me to graduate from college one day and those books were all my school had to prepare me.

There was never any use arguing with my mother. She had all the answers, it seemed. So, I dragged those old beat-up books home from school every day and studied under her watchful eye while listening to the music of Dave Brubeck or Kenny Burrell or some other favorite jazz or classical artist of hers in the background.

My mother's mother, Bigmama who lived with us, had a brother, a school teacher in Houston. His wife was a traveling book and music seller, on the road sometimes seven days a week with a statewide route that included our town. Our great aunt stopped often at our house for a meal when she was in town and sometimes slept overnight 

Due to the lack of restaurants and hotels available to this black traveling sales executive, we became part of her accommodations network, providing evenings outdoors with delicious food and conversation about books, music, politics and current events; and listening to the latest jazz and classical music albums that she also sold from the back of her car to supplement her income. This was possible because, like most small towns in the 1950s, ours had The Record Shop downtown, a dark, dusty, dingy little hole in the wall that did not carry jazz or classical music and did not sell sheet  music, which I needed for my piano lessons. 

My mother also ordered my sheet music and her jazz and classical music recordings from our great aunt. She also bought lots of other product from our great aunt on installment plans, such as a set of reference books, because my school's encyclopedia were outdated and the public library was segregated. My mother bought subscriptions to national magazines, newspapers, journals and other periodicals like National Geographic. 

My father always wanted to know where my mother got all the money to make those purchases. She replied, "I manage."

After breakfast the next morning, before our great aunt left to continue her sales route to the next county, she gave my mother discontinued music recordings and book samples she no longer needed for display and demonstrations, which my mother eagerly added to our shelves. 

Our aunt made quite a good living for a number of years until record clubs and book-of-the-month deals in the backs of magazine ruined her business. It was just as well, she said. It had been a hard job for a woman. In fact, she was the only woman I knew who was a traveling salesman. Although she had a college education, professional jobs outside of the classroom for black women in her generation were scarce. When she and our uncle retired, I spent weekends with them in Houston. Over the years, the childless couple had amassed a small fortune and lived very well in a black upscale Houston neighborhood.

Books, newspapers, photo essays and television helped change U.S. race relations. 

Rosa Parks
by Rosa Parks
& James Haskins

Rosa Parks had started the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott and Dr. Martin Luther King soared to national prominence one year after Brown v the Board of Education failed to change the Jim Crow American educational system. And, again, I have to admit, there was little immediate change.

The Supreme Court said one thing and the American people said and did another. Some black Americans waited for others like Martin Luther King to test the new laws regarding U.S. race relations that had replaced Jim Crow and other black families sued districts, cities and states in efforts to receive equal access to better schools. People of all races were afraid of what was about to happen to their ways of life. 

School districts hired attorneys to guide them through the postponement game to avoid court rulings on a slew of Landmark Cases Affecting Jim Crow Laws in American Education. In the meanwhile, things stayed the same. For another decade, there were people in the United States of America who were not allowed to vote and there were still colored and white only signs at the movies, in waiting rooms and other places around the nation.

Their Last Time Out
BY DAVE BRUBECK

When I was growing up, my mother exposed me to a world far different from the Jim Crow world in which we lived. She created a library in our house, took me on trips, sent me to ballet and piano lessons and took me to galleries and museums 100 miles away on a Greyhound Bus. 

In her planning for my education, the music of Dave Brubeck and other similar music figured in prominently. She believed this music along with classical selections would improve my mind by calming my thoughts while I studied my lessons in those hand-me-down books. And it worked. I became one of the first black women to graduate from Texas A&M University and I made the Dean's List several semesters while listening to the music that became the ambiance of my life. 

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Bigmama Didn’t Shop 

At Woolworth’s 

Sunny Nash

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Bigmama Didn't Shop 

at Woolworth's

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Bigmama Didn't Shop 

at Woolworth's

Sunny Nash

Sunny Nash is an author, producer, photographer and leading writer on U.S. race relations. She writes books, blogs, articles and reviews, and produces media and images on U.S. history and contemporary American topics, ranging from Jim Crow laws to social media networking. Sunny Nash is the author of Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's (Texas A&M University Press), about life with her part-Comanche grandmother during the Civil Rights Movement.

Sunny Nash’s book is recognized by the Association of American University Presses as essential for understanding U.S. race relations. Nash's book is also listed in the Bibliographic Guide for black studies at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York; and recommended for Native American collections by the Miami-Dade Public Library System in Florida. Nash uses her book to write articles and blogs on race relations in America through topics relating to her life--from music, film, early radio and television, entertainment, social media, Internet technology, publishing, journalism, sports, education, employment, the military, fashion, performing arts, literature, women's issues, adolescence and childhood, equal rights, social and political movements--past and present—to today's post-racism.

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© 2014 Sunny Nash. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
 www.sunnynash.blogspot.com 

~Thank You~

My Birthday in Denver

I traveled, saw movies, read books and went to galleries and museums when I was growing up because my mother wanted me to have more education than school could provide.

During the summer of 1964, I traveled to Denver to vacation with Aunt Clara and Uncle Fred in Denver. I spent many summers and other out-of-school time with those two. They had no children of their own, and seemed to really enjoy having me as a substitute.

Aunt Clara and Uncle Fred mailed me money wrapped in letters and cards, which I answered promptly. When I was young, they mailed me dolls, games and gadgets. Later, more expensive gifts came. They paid for my insurance, watches, jewelry, fancy winter caps, Cashmere sweaters, quilted poodle skirts, pink petticoats, books, a typewriter, tiny radio with earphone, a Baby Ben alarm clock for my bedside table and other "unnecessary stuff you don't need and we have no place to store," my mother said. I loved to listen to music on the transistor radio they sent. I placed the little gadget under my pillow and fell asleep listening to Randy Record Shop out of Nashville, Tennessee.

Aunt Clara liked stylish clothes and bought expensive dresses, and leather and woolen coats, which I relieved her of when I became a teenager, along with most of her makeup and beauty products.

The subject even came up that I could live with them during my high school years and get a better education in a Denver school than I could back home. It was all about civil rights, the subject of Martin Luther King's speeches, Brown v the Board of Education and Rosa Parks in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. 

Aunt Clara and Uncle Fred kept my school in mind when they bought a nice little home with a second bedroom that could be mine in a quiet, racially mixed neighborhood. The next door neighbors on both sides were white and there were lots of children my age of all races riding their bicycles together up and down the tree-lined paved streets with green lawns, flower gardens and sidewalks. I could even have a bicycle, they said. No bicycle for me back home. There were green lawns and vegetable gardens where I lived, but no flower gardens, paved streets or sidewalks and nowhere to ride a bicycle on the bumpy red-dirt and gravel trails that connected the blocks of my Candy Hill neighborhood.

East High School - Denver, Colorado

Aunt Clara and Uncle Fred said I could attend East High School, the oldest high school in Denver and one of America's top high schools in the 1960s. Uncle Fred drove me past the school one winter day in his new car when I had traveled to Denver during the Christmas holidays.

"East High School is a great school!" Aunt Clara told my mother on the telephone. "Fred will drive her to school every day."

The following summer, 1964, they arranged a tour of East High School with a friend attending the school that Fall. There were long discussions on the telephone about East High School that summer. I liked the elegant school building and imagined walking into the tiled hallway and up the grand staircases. But I knew my mother well enough not to get into a discussion with her about it. My mother's was always the last word over mine, my father's, Bigmama's and certainly Aunt Clara's.

East High School, Main Hallway

"I know the school in Denver is better than schools here," my mother said. "I know you and Fred have more money to spend on her than we do." 

Uncle Fred had an office. He took me to the research laboratory where he worked. Aunt Clara was an assistant administrator at a large Catholic hospital. Not many black people in our town had jobs to equal those in the 1950s and '60s. Wages in most southern towns were very low and promotion was still next to impossible.

"I appreciate everything you do for her, Clara," my mother said. "I know you mean well offering to send her to high school out there."

"If it's about money, we'll buy all of her school clothes and pay for anything else she needs," Aunt Clara said.

"It's not about money, Clara."

"Then why won't you let us give her this white education?" Aunt Clara asked.

"Because I'm her mother."

To my mother it wouldn't have mattered whether I went to a great school, a white school or any other school. It had nothing to do with integrated schools or liberal Colorado politics. 

My mother wanted to give me an education herself, not that she doubted Aunt Clara's sincerity about school. My mother had a plan and her plan would work better with her in control. She wanted me to go to college and she felt that the road to a college education would be best paved by her, regardless of where I graduated high school. And the discussion was closed forever, although I resented not having input into the decision.

College was my mother's insurance for my success.

For my birthday that summer, Uncle Fred went out and bought a croquet lawn set and read all the rules to learn how to play, so he could teach me and my friends how to play. Uncle Fred sacrificed his impeccably landscaped rear garden with flowerbeds along the fence that separated their backyard from the neighbor's very large Great Dane. After carefully placing the wire wickets and hardwood stakes into the soil, Uncle Fred tried out a wooden mallet for himself to strike an Easter-egg-colored wooden ball. He did not let me try the game or teach me the rules, saying it wouldn't be fair to the others if I knew how to play the game already.

Croquet, a one-thousand-year-old outdoor game invented around 1066 for the English Royal Court, took its name from the French word, meaning conqueror. 

Croquet Set - 4 Player

A game that had stirred the imaginations of a great number of Americans by the 1960s, croquet had also seemed to have ignited Uncle Fred's attention, too. Why he thought genteel competition would be appropriate for me and my little heathen friends, I will never know, but I am sure it had something to do with my mother. 

When I returned home on the train at the end of the summer, the croquet set was shipped along with all my other birthday and vacation gifts. I found out later that the croquet set was quite expensive and my mother had shared in that expense. "You can teach your friends here to play the game," my mother said, unwrapping Uncle Fred's sturdy package.

Birthday Cake Book 

On my birthday, in addition to spending a lot of money on games, Aunt Clara purchased my birthday cake and made all the snacks. Then Aunt Clara brought her phonograph from the living room out into the backyard to play the latest music she had bought, to which we were to teach her the latest new dance steps. On three card tables, Uncle Fred set up his chess set to try to teach us to play, a set of dominoes, set of checkers and other board games I had never seen. 


It was a fine birthday with my friends nibbling on healthy snacks and other goodies at my mother's insistence, "Don't come

Aunt Clara danced with my friends and Uncle Fred played Chinese checkers, regular checkers, dominoes and other table games with them. But mostly comparing notes about politics, race relations and civil rights that we had all been hearing so much about on television lately. Everyone had an opinion. I thought the new civil rights law meant more to me than it did to my Denver friends until we got into some pretty heated discussions. The school they attended, East High School, where Aunt Clara tried to convince my mother I should go, was integrated. They could sit at the lunch counter at Woolworth's. They could watch movies from any seat in the theater. What is their complaint, I wanted to know. Certainly Martin Luther King wasn't talking about them in his speeches. 

Estes Park Rocky Mountain National Park

At home, I couldn't do the things I could in Denver. When Aunt Clara took me shopping or to lunch, we tried on clothes and sat where we wanted in the restaurant. That could not happen a back home. Black people were not allowed to try on clothes before buying them, could not return the clothes if they did not fit and could not sit down and eat in most restaurants, except in a segregated section. 

Aunt Clara and I rode at the front of the bus not the back like Rosa Parks had been forced to ride before the Montgomery Bus Boycott. When Aunt Clara took me to Red Rock, Cherry Creek, Colorado Springs, Estes Park or other places in the mountains to see the sites, clerks behind the souvenir counters were polite when they took our money for postcards, trinkets and gifts. That was all I expected from civil rights, except that I may have to go to a different school one day.

"What's it like to go to a white school?" I wanted to know. "Do you have any black teachers? Do you have any white friends?" 

"A few," they said.

As I listened, I realized that these people experienced racism of a different kind, "the sneaky kind," as my mother would say. They had been made to stand in lines waiting for services because of their race. They were taunted at school and treated badly by some white teachers and students. This whole subject of race and civil rights in Colorado and the rest of the nation was a lot more complicated that I had thought. Maybe living in Denver and going to East High School wouldn't be that great after all.

Want to know more about Colorado, U.S. race relations or anything else?

Aunt Clara and Uncle Fred, with no children and no contact with other nieces and nephews growing up, were baffled by the adult-like conversation about civil rights, Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Act at the party. My aunt and uncle were vexed by my seeming indifference to all their efforts to prepare my birthday party. When Aunt Clara talked to my mother on the telephone that night, she said she didn't think I enjoyed my birthday. 

"Put her on the phone!" My mother shouted. When I placed the phone to my ear, I could hear my mother yelling. "You have no right to treat them that way! I have to give you a birthday party. You're mine. They don't owe you anything! No one owes you anything in this world. And you'd better be grateful when someone gives you something and they don't ask for something back. I'm asking--no demanding--something back for all that I do for you," she said. "I want exemplary behavior! How dare you act uncivilized!" My mother shouted into the telephone.

It was useless trying to tell Littie I was not ungrateful but was more interested in trying to find out how these kids felt about civil rights. "It does not matter what kids in Denver think about civil rights!" My mother shouted."You are not going to school in Denver! You are coming home to go to school! If it didn't cost so much to change your train ticket, I'd say start packing right now!" I listened, realizing I should have made more of a fuss about the party to make Aunt Clara and Uncle Fred feel good about doing something special for me. But it was too late for that and all I could do was say, "I'm sorry."

I was made to apologize, period, no explanation, right then with Littie listening. "I'm sorry," I said to Aunt Clara and Uncle Fred, who were not trying to get me into trouble or even to complain. Their concern was about their failure to entertain me and my friends. Afterwards, they seemed to regret saying anything to my mother about my reaction. At dinner, we talked about it. 

After I explained, Aunt Clara and Uncle Fred understood why we were doing more talking than dancing and playing games on my birthday. 

"I'm sorry," was not enough for Littie. As long ago as I could remember, she had given me birthday parties in the backyard with my friends. I always had two cakes, a large white sheet cake that she made for the party and a second, a devil's food cake, that Aunt Lucille  made for me every year. To teach me a lesson in gratitude, my mother stopped the birthday parties altogether. Aunt Clara's was the last birthday party I had. The only cake I got from then on was the devil's food from Aunt Lucille, which she made for me sporadically over the years until I was 40-something and had moved out of state.

My mother taught me many lessons during her lifetime and continues to teach me as I think and write about her. As important as my college education and ultimate success was to her, the life lessons she taught me, like the one about gratitude, using her withdrawal of birthday parties as a tool, prove to be the most important. Many years later, she confessed that she didn't miss the birthday parties. She had grown tired of birthday parties after I got older.

© 2012 Sunny Nash. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

www.sunnynash.blogspot.com

~Thank You~

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Jim Crow Laws & the Stage Mother

School, music and movies prepare for success.



Sunny Nash
8 Years Old, from
Bigmama Didn't Shop
At Woolworth's

After my singing debut, my mother became my music director, companion, confidant, partner and co-conspirator when we were pursuing a dream of mine or hers, mostly hers.

There was no You Tube when I was eight years old in third grade at Booker T. Washington Elementary School. My music teacher, Eloise King, discovered that I could sing the old-fashioned way. I knew I could sing along with the radio but I never thought I was good enough to impress my music teacher. And I had no idea singing would be part of my education.

I saw her walking up and down the aisle during music class listening as the we sang lines from an arrangement she had chosen. On one of her strolls down the aisle, she stopped close to me and stood there for a few moments and then asked me to sing the song without the group. 

Back then, in addition to there being no You Tube, there were no American Idol, The Voice or America's Got Talent. 

I was afraid, thinking I was singing the song out of tune or something, which I didn't have to worry about singing with my radio. Then she asked if I would come to the auditorium at recess. I did. She told me she wanted me to sing a solo at the Spring Festival. That was the last recess for me throughout most of my remaining elementary school days. When other teachers saw me on that stage, they started making plans for me as well. If it wasn't Mrs. King rehearsing a new musical selection with me, it was Mr. Pruitt's gymnastics team or Mrs. Jackson preparing a dance routine that required new steps, elaborate makeup, which I was otherwise not allowed to wear, and vintage jewelry, which I was.

The next day, Mrs. King began teaching me the music to the Academy Award-winning song, Over the Rainbow, from the 1939 film, Wizard of Oz, instructing me to sing it exactly like the Judy Garland recording, which she sent home with me to practice before returning to school. I was already familiar with the music because I had seen the film numerous times when my mother took me to the movies whenever it encored at our Jim Crow movie theater in the 1950s or was rebroadcast on local television. Singing along with the music on the recording was different from my singing along with the radio. With the radio, I was just having fun. Singing with the recording was serious business. It would have been so much easier if You Tube had been around.

Sometimes, for television broadcasts of movies like Wizard of Oz and other shows, my mother made large bowls of popcorn to pass around our living room for the crowd of neighborhood kids and adults, who did not have television and, some of whom, had never been to the movies, a weekly trek for my mother and me. We saw all the latest movies that came to the Palace Theater downtown. My mother was as enthusiastic about movies as she was about school, books, radio, television and music, and we had plenty of books, and jazz and classical music in the house, and a revolving series of modern electronic technology on which to listen.

My mother insisted that I read books, see movies, hear music and travel for exposure to a larger world than the Jim Crow world where I lived. 

My mother insisted that I dress a certain way and she strained our budget to make sure I had the appropriate wardrobe and shoes for a teenage girl in the 1960s. My cousins looked at me with envy. They thought I was pretentious, but it wasn't me. My mother dressed me. "Everything you do reveals who you are and who you want to be," she said. All of this my mother did to produce the person she wanted me to become. What she counted on was my cooperation in her plan. Doing well in school was the most important part of her plan. It all paid off when I won a beauty and talent competition and became a statewide celebrity.

We traveled on buses, trains and, when I was older, airplanes to our destinations. 

My mother took me to museums, galleries, beaches, mountain resorts, amusement parks, tourist sites, restaurants and sporting events. This was all part of my education. We left the state to visit these attractions. Jim Crow kept us out of them at home. She encouraged me to learn new games and keep up with current events that I was required to read about in our tiny home library.

I practiced the music to Over the Rainbow with the recording Mrs. King loaned me. Again and again, I tried my best to sing the song like Judy Garland. After studying the lyrics and melody and trying to stay true to the Judy Garland version, I gained a lot of confidence in my abilities. This confidence would extent to more places than on stage and my mother seemed to see something in me that she had not seen before the performance. I caught her watching as I sang along with the music and hoped she would not get the idea to find a Dorothy costume for my performance. The original Dorothy dress is now up for auction and estimated to bring between $400,000 and $600,000. Even so, back then, as much as I loved the song, I did not want to wear Dorothy's homely dress. I might as well show up at the school festival to perform the music wearing a Cowardly Lion mask to complete the outfit.I cannot imagine how many hits I would have gotten on You Tube wearing that mask.

For the night of my performance, fortunately, my mother and Mrs. King agreed that I should wear a dainty pink dress that I already owned. I stepped upon a stack of soda pop crates in front of the microphone. I was very small for my age and needed a boost. I had practiced with the microphone and amplifier several times before the performance and felt very comfortable with the electronic equipment, as if I were a real entertainer in the music business, a recording artist in a recording studio or on the radio.

Standing up there on the stage in front of the audience, I was not nervous as a full house stared at me. Mrs. King played the introductory music to the song on piano and gave me the nod. I took a deep breath silently through my nose as she had instructed and sang the song the way we had rehearsed, paying close attention to microphone technique. When I hit my high strong notes, I held my face away from the microphone to control the amount of sound going into the microphone. 

Mrs. King had told me at rehearsal, "Back off! You're going to blow out their ears!" My own ears rang with feedback, produced by a voice untrained in mic performing. By the time that rehearsal was finished, I knew how to handle my voice using a mic. Of course, stage electronics back then were nothing compared to the ear buds and mini mics modern entertainers strut around with on stage today, to mention sophisticated HD video instantly available for instant upload to YouTube. 

I sang Over the Rainbow as if the song belonged to me, instead of Judy Garland. And I knew I had nailed it as I hung onto the last note of the song before I got a standing ovation from my neighborhood friends, classmates and teachers at school. That night prepared me for many things to come in my life, including hearing my own song on the radio one day.

Mrs. King was so pleased with my performance, she gave me the Judy Garland recording as a gift. My mother, more pleased and surprised than Mrs. King, had no idea I could sing until she heard me practicing, but she was quiet about it until the performance was over. I have Mrs. King and the Judy Garland recording of the song, Over the Rainbow, in the film, Wizard of Oz, to thank for giving me the confidence that helped to shape my life.

All of my singing and seeming joy with it stunned and pleased my mother because she couldn't get me to sing a Christmas song around the tree with her. She didn't realize I had been embarrassed to sing in front of her. She had such a wonderful voice and I felt my voice was inferior to hers. Feeling that her own time for singing professionally had past, I believe it was on the night of my song, Over the Rainbow, that my mother got ideas about entering me in The Ted Mack Amateur Hour and other competitions.

Nearly a quarter century ago, Judy Garland sang the song originally. More than a half century ago, Mrs. King picked the classic for my first song on our little school stage. In 2000, the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts voted Over the Rainbow as the #1 song of the 20th Century. When I read the announcement, memories flooded back to me of my childhood. 

Popularized by the film, Wizard of Oz, produced before I was born, Over the Rainbow had been part of my life throughout my life and had a great deal to do with my education, confidence and career choices. The song Mrs. King taught me helped to bring me to the place my mother worked so hard to get me, in spit of Jim Crow Laws. 

Bigmama Didn't Shop
At Woolworth's
by Sunny Nash

In the 1990s, I began writing a newspaper column based on my life during the era of Jim Crow laws.

My mother encouraged me to change the focus to family topics, involving the experiences her mother, my part-Comanche grandmother, Bigmama. These topics still involved Jim Crow laws, but did not center on the subject of discrimination. "People have heard enough about segregation and they're tired of it," she said. "Aren't You? I know I am. Write about your family and let their lives tell the story of civil rights. That way people won't blame you for preaching to them."

My mother's tactic worked. People loved hearing stories of our lives, even when mixed with a little non-preachy racial politics of the day. Then she advised me to use the local column to build my reputation as a writer. She was right again. The local column led to a regional column, then a syndicated column and eventually gave birth to my first book, Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's (Texas A&M University Press).

My mother was delighted when this book came out. The idea that I had written about her mother and other ancestors pleased her. After one book signing, we were sitting at the kitchen table in the house where I grew up. "You're doing better than the drug dealers in the neighborhood," she said. Although, she was just guessing how much money the neighborhood drug dealers made. There were no drug dealers in the neighborhood when I was growing up and my mother was teaching me how to have good posture at the same time that she was teaching me to use power tools. Time passes. Things change.

Thank you, Littie Nash, for being my mother and taking the job so seriously. I wouldn't be who I am without you.



Sunny Nash
Bigmama Didn't
Shop At
Woolworth's

Sunny Nash has also co-authored, edited or compiled several books, written three newspaper columns, created a major photographic study and exhibition, produced and written for television, and conducted public speaking tours. “Fortunately, writing comes easy to me and I am able to produce all kinds of copy and media—movie treatments, television scripts, book manuscripts, proposals, commercial jingles, whatever a client needs,” Nash said. “I also produce video for broadcast and Internet marketing and distribution. My client list includes corporations, cities, chambers of commerce, nonprofit organizations, real estate companies and all kinds of groups and individuals, The balance for any artist is making sure their own work does not suffer, while giving the client the best work possible.”

Bigmama Didn't Shop at Woolworth's by Sunny Nash

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© 2012  Sunny Nash

All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

~ Thank You~