This International Women’s Day singer-songwriter Sarah Jane Morris is celebrating the likes of Billie Holiday, Annie Lennox, Kate Bush and Sinéad O’Connor
BY SARAH JANE MORRIS, IMAGE BY RICCARDO PICCIRILLO
My name is Sarah Jane Morris. I am a singer-songwriter and have a back-catalogue of 15 solo albums since establishing myself as a lead-vocalist in the 1980s with bands such as The Republic, Happy End and The Communards. Don’t Leave Me This Way was a worldwide hit in 1986, in which I duetted with Jimmy Somerville.
I admire activist artists, and try to be one myself. I identify strongly with the pioneering women who combined artistic brilliance with a sense of moral duty to sing songs for justice and human rights. Billie Holiday who sang Strange Fruit, her haunting, politically charged lament about lynching; Joni Mitchell singing the story of the Irish Magdalen Laundries; Nina Simone with Mississippi Goddamn: these women spoke straight to me.
This is how The Sisterhood started – I compiled a list, eventually of 12 women, whose stories I would write and each of whose musical idioms I would acknowledge, telling a story of women asserting themselves as artists and choosing to use their voice to champion justice. Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Miriam Makeba, Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, Ricky Lee Jones, Annie Lennox, Kate Bush and Sinéad O’Connor comprise the company. I have written a song to tell each singer’s story, using words and music to build sound-pictures. A whole world is reflected in the art of these 12 women, and this wide cultural richness informs the entire project, a selective history of women in popular music.
When current musical trends are considered, most of the individual mega-stars are women. Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Adele, Lady Gaga – the girls have taken the citadel. The Sisterhood describes the struggle of the pioneering women who fought for artistic parity, and whose efforts were vital to the success of those that followed.
Just over a hundred years ago the age of recorded music began. The first great singing star to emerge was Bessie Smith. Originally a vaudevillian blues singer, in the roaring 20s she recorded with many of the most influential jazz musicians of her day, including Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins and Sidney Bechet. The world celebrates Bessie for her amazing artistic accomplishments – singing the blues with such passion and truth, re-inventing the blues, helping to change jazz from the music of marching bands and street-dancing to the sophisticated artform which dominated mid-twentieth century music. We also marvel at the scale of the obstacles she had to overcome – an orphaned black child in the segregated South in the early years of the Twentieth Century, working for her and her siblings’ survival from the age of nine, achieving such cultural significance despite everything; Bessie is our universal hero, defiantly bisexual, the conquering Queen of the Blues.
Every one of the 12 is dear to me.
Nina Simone taught me how to ramp up the power of lyrics till they make the audience shudder with their truth. And she knew how to make every song she sang her own. She was a great mentor to me. As was Janis. Jerry Ragovoy, who wrote Piece Of My Heart, once told me that I was the nearest thing to Janis Joplin that he had ever heard – which remains one of the compliments I treasure the most.
Of my near-contemporaries, backing vocals were traded for studio time for the Eurythmics’ first album (Into the Garden,1981) and, decades later, I shared my guitarist with Annie Lennox. That guitar-player, the incomparable Tony Remy, is my co-writer and co-producer of The Sisterhood. Annie founded The Circle (Women Empowering Women) a charity with outreach to women and girls worldwide.
Sinéad O’Connor was a friend, and one of the bravest people I ever knew.
I loved Rickie Lee Jones’s story (her autobiography Last Chance Texaco is brilliant). Imagine my delight when Rickie Lee herself sent me a private message to say we’d got her right, she dug her song. That made it all worthwhile.
Here are the rest of my sisterhood: Miriam Makeba, Mama Africa, tribune of the oppressed – Tony and I went to South Africa to record vocals for Miriam’s song with the Soweto Gospel Choir; Kate Bush, enchantress, child genius, inspiration to generations of young women; Aretha, who had the greatest voice of all; Patti Smith, the “beat poet who invented punk”, who brought performance poetry to Rock & Roll in a blaze of cool, and whose creative life continues to excite us.
The Sisterhood is the most complex, ambitious project of my life in music. The very first live performance was in London last October. The next, on International Women’s Day, 8 March 2024 will be at the Tung Auditorium, University of Liverpool. Then, on Saturday 9 March at one of London’s great live music venues, Alexandra Palace Theatre. Book now. Be sure to support The Sisterhood.
The Sisterhood is out 8 March 2024. See it performed live: sarahjanemorris.co.uk
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