Miss Celie's Blues (Sister)

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Miss Celie's Blues (Sister) is a song from the Spielberg film The Color Purple (1985), the melody of which was composed by Quincy Jones and Rod Temperton ; Lionel Richie supported them both in writing the text. The song was nominated for an Oscar in 1986 for best movie song (which Say You, Say Me received).

background

The song is written in the form of a traditional blues song and is performed (according to the lecture title) "slowly, bluesy and in a down-to-earth style". In the text the singer explains to her "sister" that she will remember her because she is of the same kind. She has good news that she is finally "someone" after being lonely on the street for a long time. She hopes that her sister is "someone" too. With this text, the original message of the filmed book is changed, where Celie sings a song without words that reminds us that she has mistreated a man again.

In the film, Miss Celie's Blues (Sister) is used to denote the sexual relationship between Shug and Cellie. The song is sung by Shug, portrayed by Margaret Avery . Avery's singing was dubbed by Tata Vega as Spielberg wanted Avery to focus on acting. The harmonica at the beginning played Sonny Terry .

reception

Alice Walker , the author of the novel, liked the song immediately, as did everyone on the set: For her, the hummed intro had a lot to do with women's experiences and had the potential to become a kind of national anthem for women. In fact, the song functioned in individual concerts as the "anthem of the community spirit of Afro-American lesbians."

Cover versions of the song were made by Ute Lemper (1987), by Elba Ramalho (1989), by Nikka Costa (1996), by Carol O'Shaughnessy (1997), by Jeff Bradshaw (2003), by L'art de passage (2004) , published by Vanessa Petruo (2005) and by Eden Atwood (2010). In the field of jazz there are 33 interpretations of Miss Celie's Blues (Sister) , for example by the Tin Roof Jazz Band , Pat Thompson , Kirsten Gustafson , Molly Johnson , Debbie Duncan , Lyambiko and Chaka Khan .

literature

  • Susan Sackett: Hollywood Sings! An Inside Look at Sixty Years of Academy Award-Nominated Songs . Billboard Books, New York 1995; ISBN 0-8230-7623-7

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Miss Celie's Blues (Sister) from the Warner Bros. Motion Picture "The Color Lilac" , Alfred Music, Cologne undated
  2. ↑ Carla Kaplan: The Erotics of Talk: Women's Writing and Feminist Paradigms: Women's Writing and Feminist Paradigms . Oxford 1996, p. 139
  3. ↑ a b Tom Lord : The Jazz Discography (online, February 23, 2014)
  4. ↑ Alice Walker: The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult , Scribner 1986
  5. ^ Eileen M. Hayes, Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women's Music , University of Illinois Press 2010, p. 112
  6. ↑ Quincy Jones & Friends: 50 Years in Music: Live at Montreux 1996