Ruth Brown: "A Very Special Lady"

Why does it often happen that we learn about the contributions and sacrifices people have made only after their deaths? I found myself asking that question yet again at a memorial service for the late Ruth Brown, the woman once credited with putting Atlantic Records on the map. That company, which will soon celebrate its 60th anniversary, was known in the 1950s as “The House That Ruth Built.”

At her memorial service at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church on Jan. 22d were performers ranging from Little Jimmy Scott to Bonnie Raitt to Chuck Jackson to Paul Shaffer – and Ruth Brown’s band. The Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts 3d described her as "a very special lady" and "one of the greatest entertainers of the last century."

John Sayles, the director, was there to show a preliminary recording session for a movie he’s making called Honeydripper, starring Danny Glover and Charles Dutton. She died shortly before scheduled to star as a kind of Ma Rainey character down on her luck in Alabama in the 1950s.

“She lived the songs that she sung,” her longtime musical director, Rodney Jones, said. That meant lots of blues amid the joy. For a time she worked as a domestic, too ashamed to tell her employers that some of the music they were listening to was her performing. She drove a school bus for a while. But after a fallow period as a singer, she made a comeback in the 1970s. She won a Tony for her performance in Black and Blue on Broadway. Find out more about her at this website: http://www.ruthbrown.net

What she was best appreciated for among her friends in the music industry was her fight for royalty reform so that all those pioneers of R & B and Rock & Roll stood a chance to be paid the money they were due. She eventually received money from Atlantic after a valiant fight. She was a founder of the Rhythm and Blues Foundation (www.rhythmblues.org) that continues as an advocate for not just the music but also the musicians. Sadly, she died within days of two others involved with the foundation, Ed Bradley of CBS News and the singer Gerald Levert.

Thanks Voza Rivers and thanks Chuck Jackson for putting together a great show – that memorial service – that did justice to the pioneer that Ruth Brown was. In the summer, Harlem will pay tribute to her and to James Brown during the Harlem Week festivities.

And more of us will learn more about what they went through to make their records, to gain airtime -- and to be reasonably compensated by the record companies that exploited them. May the current generation of entertainers not have to go through what they did because of WHAT they did.