The Cover Song: On Being “Folk” in the Academy

This summer I worked on a cover of Oleta Adams’ rendition of the song “Get Here,” originally written and performed by Brenda Russell.(1) I don’t think I’ve heard a version of this song that I don’t love. I wanted to hold it in my chest, and in my hands. Something that I’ve known forever. Something that I will always be learning.  

Around this time I was reading Ross Gay’s book Inciting Joy. In chapter ten (titled, “How Big the Boat”)  Gay writes about the collaborative nature of the cover song. He expresses that when an artist covers a song, while they may have very different approaches, somehow they co-create.(2) As a folk musician and early scholar, I remain attentive for genuine opportunities to collaborate in the highly individualistic and competitive environment of the academy. More than once, I have been asked what a folk musician has to offer to scholarship. Pretty sure this question was rhetorical, but I think it reveals the very limited and exclusionary ways we think about knowledge: who it comes from, and who it is for. My presence as a working-class Black woman and self-taught musician is disruptive to hierarchies that reinforce elitism. Drawing the circle wider and wider still, I remain unconvinced that there will ever be enough “seats at the table,” because the table was designed for exclusion. As Black and Native American activist Amber Starks encourages, I hope to meet you “on the land.”(3)

By asking “how big the boat,” Ross Gay is inching us toward collaboration and generosity and away from scarcity and competition. He  writes, “...the cover [song] as a witness or prayer to abundance.” A prayer to the “enough, already.”(4) Which is to say, there is already enough. Enough space for difference, disagreement, dismantling, challenging, genuine kindness, creativity, change, growth. Healing, healing, healing what/who/how/when and wherever we can. We will only continue to perpetuate the violence of these institutions if we don’t extend belonging and practice space-making. This is a truth that both anchors and buoys me. I hope that in my own work I am coming behind and alongside a host of people who have cared about Black women’s lives. A sort of chorus. There is an archive of words, sound and feeling that is from a people and for a people, and that’s Folk. 

As a genre of music Folk has African, Indigenous, and immigrant origins. It has been shaped by the Appalachian mountains, delta wetlands, winding hills in Ireland and California alike. Like Folk music, much of what we know and desire to know is connected to people and place. Folk is the lineage of my ancestors. I think songwriting can be characterized by what my friend, songwriter Alex Blue describes as a “wisdom of presence.”(5) It is about being attentive to the world around you before a lyric, note, or melody ever comes; forever trying to be in the way of beauty.(6) In this way, songwriting is a kind of translation, and I think that scholarship can be as well. In the best case scenario, scholars can thoroughly and thoughtfully translate knowledge, and return it to people, hopefully without perpetuating violence the people have already endured.

My friend and colleague Christina Taïna Désert writes, “Seeking to undo the harm of anti-blackness globally and in academia, [Christina] Sharpe notes that Black people are ‘disciplined into thinking through and along the lines that reinscribe our annihilation’. In response, she asserts, ‘we must become undisciplined’ (Sharpe 2016, 13).”(7) A major aim and outcome of colonialism is to empty people of what they know (in their bodies, minds, spirits) and—through violence—fill them back in with what the colonizer says is “worthy” of knowing. What “counts” as knowledge is often determined through metrics of brutality. It stands to reason that for many of us, “disciplining” ourselves into disembodiment would come at too high a cost. This is vitally important in the face of fascism and tyranny.(8) Collaboration and space-making are at the very heart of our folklore as well as our flourishing: the stories and practices that sustain a people.  

My curiosities about Black women’s relational wounding and commitments to our healing are the result of witnessing, trying, failing, and even succeeding at loving Black people well, myself included. The university thought it needed to crush the songs in my spirit (thought that it could), not knowing that  Oleta Adams’ cover of Brenda Russell’s “Get Here” (every line, every note of longing) is a profound source of wisdom. The kind we need to hold in our chest and hands, our bones, as well as our minds. The kind that might change us. The kind we can always be learning, together. 

Thank you, thank you, thank you:

1. "Get Here,” performed by Oleta Adams. Written by Brenda Russell, produced by Roland Orzabal and David Bascombe, released on the album Circle of One on December 31, 1990. 

2. Gay, Ross. Inciting Joy: Essays. New York: Algonquin Books, 2022. 123-136 (“How Big the Boat (The Cover Song: The Tenth Incitement)”.

3. Quote from a talk given by Amber Starks (presented at Womanist Wisdom Live, hosted by Faith Matters Network in Nashville, TN in August, 2024).

4. Gay, Ross. Inciting Joy: Essays. New York: Algonquin Books, 2022. 135.

5. Quote from a conversation with Alex Blue. October, 2023.

6. From a conversation with Poet Hawkins. 2014.

7.  Désert, Christina Taïna. “Undisciplined! A womanist ethnography for an Africana practical theology.” Practical Theology (2023): DOI: 10.1080/1756073X.2023.2179001. Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press,  2016. 13.

8. I am thinking along the lines of poet Dionne Brand when she talks about “resistance to tyranny.” Video shared with me by t.r.h. blue. Barnard Center for Research on Women. Dionne Brand: Writing Against Tyranny and Toward Liberation. Posted  August 20, 2017. YouTube.

Photo credit: Kelley Raye Photography.