Her death, however, provides an occasion to revisit all the early albums and catch up on what happened after.īorn in 1953 in Miami as Bessie Norris, she was singing in her family's gospel group by the time she was a toddler, transitioning to soul by 12. She should’ve been getting the Aretha or at least Mavis Staples treatment as a beloved and iconic American master, but instead she seemingly sank into the background hum, though she never stopped working. Soon she was recording an album with the Roots, getting sampled by Beyoncé, appearing on tracks with Lil Wayne. By the time the neo-soul revival arrived in the early 2000s, she was producing records and arranging vocals for various artists. B Records, one of the few such enterprises created by a black woman in the era. Like many of the singers in the classic era of soul, she sang gospel as a child. Her records of the early 1970s moved from classic soul toward disco, a very early version of that development. Dissatisfied with record companies that tried to control her material and eventually stopped promoting her records, she founded Ms. Were I trying to tell the story of soul music, or even black popular music as a whole, in the late 20th century, I might focus on the emblematic career of Betty Wright, who died on May 10 (of cancer, not COVID-19, apparently).
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