Sista Monica

by Alex Teitz

Sister Monica is a blues singer-songwriter of world renown. She came into the music world in 1992 after being a Sergeant in the US. Marine Corps, and as an engineering consultant. She was a 1998 nominee for “Best Contemporary Blues Female” at the W.C. Handy Awards.

Sista Monica sings with an overpowering voice. She has toured the world over. Her newest release is People Love The Blues.

For more information on Sista Monica visit http://www.sistamonica.com

FEMMUSIC: You came to music late. What made you decide to pursue music professionally?

SM: I started professional pretty late, but I’ve been singing all my life. I started out as a little girl around seven years old singing in Gary, Indiana gospel music. And I was brought up around an entire family enjoyed music of all genres primarily R&B and soul music back in Gary. And then I moved to Chicago and stayed there for about ten years and sang in some gospel choirs there at different churches and also became acquainted with blues and soul music there and then I moved out to the Bay Area in ’87. During that time I pretty much started listening to the music and the music scene here and decided that my day job was really preoccupying me and I really didn’t have a lot of quality in my life and I thought, “Well. What the heck. I’m gonna start singing.” And little did I know that my first gig was going to put me on the spiral of many, many, many gigs until I got to the festival level of which I’m performing now.

FEMMUSIC: Describe your songwriting technique.

SM: I pretty much write songs about things that are going on in my life at the time that I’m writing them. I usually write them on Highway 17 which a winding highway between Santa Cruz and the Silicon Valley. It’s a big mountain in-between those two areas. I tend to live in the Santa Cruz mountain area. As I travel back and forth to the Silicon Valley I’m in my car and I think about things that have happened and the first thing I do is develop a “hook.” On my last CD, the Sister Monica  CD I won a California Music Awards, a BAMMIE Award here, during that time I was going through some different changes and I wrote a song called “I’ve Been Bamboozled!”

Once I got the “hook” together I start thinking about things that have happened to me and then I say, “Oh okay all right. So I’m going to make that one verse and then we’ll make a change, and then we’ll keep going.” I wrote “What Difference Does It Make?” and “Never Say Never” and “I Don’t Want to Hurt You Baby” and all those came from experiences that actually happened in my life. This last CD, which is People Love The Blues, that has just been released about a week ago, I wrote a lot of those songs after coming out of “block” because we had lost my tenor saxophone player Ken “Big Papa” Baker and out of that last I decided that I needed to take a break for a minute in terms of putting out an album last year. So I wrote People Love The Blues ‘ songs as they came to me. And that’s how I do it. When they come to me I’m usually in my car thinking, riding down the road, and sometimes I take the time to write it down and sometimes it just sticks with me with entire arrangement like the beginning of the song, when the change comes…I mean the whole chorus, the refrain (laugh) everything. I thank god for that because I never wrote before 1995. So it’s a new thing for me but I guess I might as well take advantage of it and continue to do it.

FEMMUSIC: That’s terrific! You’re one of the few people I’ve spoken to who say they begin with the “hook.”

SM: I wrote a song on this new CD called “The Walking Wounded” and it came to me as a result, we were in Pierre, Belgium and my band was playing, and I said, “I need you guys to stop playing so much funk and give me a soul wrenching slow blues song which you can do instrumental.” And Sammy my guitar player said, “Ok. I can do that.” and he took the beginning of it and people actually thought I was coming out to sing and I didn’t think of anything that I could sing and so as time progressed and life went on I started thinking of personal situations or societal situations and that particular song is one that hopefully one day will hit a soundtrack or something. It’s more societal than it is personal.

FEMMUSIC: What was the biggest challenge making People Love The Blues?

SM: I think my biggest challenge…Actually there were two challenges. One, as I said before,  was the death of our tenor sax player who also played for John Lee Hooker for about fifteen years and he knew how to get us in and out of airports because he’d been around the world with Hook and he also knew where all the best food was and all that kind of thing. So after losing him I took a break and actually wrote, performed and produced an entire gospel album that will come out in September called Give Me That Old Time Religion. That was one challenge, to get over that period of time.

And the other one was just figuring out when to release it. We finished it in November but I didn’t want to get caught up in the Christmas hub-bub you know. It felt like the new millennium would be the best time in which to release it. And now that it’s summertime I’m really glad that I released it now because really seem to be getting into it.

FEMMUSIC: What was your best experience making People Love The Blues?

SM: Oooh the best experience was meeting Larry McCray in Norway at The Notowden Blues Festival. I met him in the lobby of the hotel that we were in. That festival was a great festival for me because I had a chance to have breakfast with Buddy Guy, and Jimmy Vaughn and a lot of other great musicians, Bobby Rush, and Larry McCray and we would go and do our gigs and come back and stay up all night and wait for the dining hall to open up in the morning. (laugh)

And Larry, one day, was trying to make sure that his bass player knew all the material for his event. It turned out that he started playing guitar and I couldn’t wait for his bass player to come back because I was tired just from jet lag and I was laying in my room and I heard this guitar playing permeating throughout the valley, ’cause we were in a mountainous type area, and it was just loud and clear and just soulful and rockin’ and I was like, “Whoa! Man who is that!?” So I asked my band, “Was that Larry McCray?” and they said, “Yeah. That was Larry McCray.” So he had a three hour rehearsal and during that rehearsal I slept some of it, and listened to some it but it stayed in my head.

So I went down to him, after our gig, and said, “I know you don’t know me and I really don’t know you but do you think you’d be open to doing a recording session with me?” And he said, “Yes.” and I said, “Where do you live?”, and he said, “Detroit.”

And I said, “Great. When we get back in town (the States) I’d like to fly you out. I’m producing a CD with my piano player, Danny B., and we’d like to get you on the record.” Well I think he thought I was kidding. You know, here I was this woman walks up to you and says she wants you to be on a record, you know, “How many times has that happened?” Quite a bit actually for guitar players. So I called him up and he said, “You did call!” I said, “Yeah. I’d like for you to come on.” I didn’t rehearse with him. I did not have all the songs written out completely. I had the arrangements and Larry came in and he played phenomenally well on “You Got To Pay” which is the first song.  On the third song, “A Chance To Breathe.” He was, he was (sigh) just wonderful on that. On “Honey It’s Your Fault (I’ll Take The Blame)” (laugh) my storytelling song, and the beauty of it is he played so many different styles that I didn’t have to hire too many more guitar players on this. And also meeting Jimmy Thackery but I’ll tell you between Jimmy Thackery and Larry McCray that was probably the most exciting of the CD production.  

FEMMUSIC: As a woman in the music industry, have you been discriminated against?

SM: Well I think that I would be lying if I said I haven’t been discriminated against but I also reconcile by saying that the blues industry is a male dominated industry primarily with guitar players being the primary instrument. To that extent I would say that it certainly has its place. However being a woman, particularly a black woman, in this industry, I’ve been able to overcome some of the obstacles I think a lot of women have experienced in the industry because I’ve been able to take my military background (laugh) and my business background, for twenty-two years I’ve been an engineering and management consultant to corporate America throughout the United States. So I’m quite accustomed to talking to CEO’s and Vice-President’s and people in the high tech arena and when you start talking to people like that you don’t have any boundaries. You don’t meet strangers. Everyone is pretty much human. So when I talk to festival promoters and agents and management people they don’t see me as a big, black, (pause) unintelligent, not able to manage a situation person. They see me as a businesswoman probably first. Or maybe they see me as that first, or as a singer first, and then, “Oh! She’s got a brain!” (laugh)

So I would say that the blues industry in the United States has not been as welcoming as it has been in Europe. Although I think that there’s a shift going on and the United States environment is realizing that we are losing a lot of great blues musicians to the European market every year with respect to festivals. Now people in the festival market in the United States are calling people earlier and they’re making sure that they can get their people on certain blues rosters or blues festivals. It has been difficult. It is an uphill climb, but I’m a new person in the business. I admire women like Etta James and Koko Taylor and the late Katie Webster and Ruth Brown and just the women who are legends in my mind. Who’ve sort of have paved the way for me? I would like to say that as we move forward in the next three decades I would like to be able to continue to carry the baton for them as we proceed forward because they have really done an excellent job of continuing the tradition, the rich tradition of women in blues.

FEMMUSIC: What would you like to see changed most about the music industry?

SM: I’d like to see blues music be a much more prominent genre. That is it tracked more heavily with Billboard, and all Gavin and all of the other major charting experiences and that we start to get royalties for our music that is out there and that we don’t have to move over to be commercial in order to be able to do that. I would like see people not just use blues music for commercials. That they use blues music in all other idioms in mediums in the world because it is such a truthful music. It is one that if people really take time and listen to the lyrics, when people write their songs they’re writing their truth. Since blues is truth it is the closest thing that I could say is to gospel music and that’s where most of my background and foundation resonates. I’d like to see a lot more done for blues artists in terms of medical insurance, in terms of touring. I like to see the dollars, obviously I’d like to see the dollars for blues artists go up, and I’d love to see the blues community expand itself to younger ages. That’s why I like to do festivals because it allows for children to hear music that they would not ordinarily hear on the radio. Those are the changes I would like to see happen in the blues world and if I have ANYTHING to do with it, which I’m sure I will (laugh), I would like to see those changes happen.

The reason I named this album, People Love The Blues, was because I wanted to say, “Young ones and old ones too, Everybody loves the blues.” but unfortunately not all of us get a chance to hear it if we go mainstream. We have dig out and find the stations, and the TV’s and the other areas that are playing it and featuring this kind of music. I’d just like to see it a lot more expanded. And if it means MP3 as an avenue, or being on the Internet as an avenue then well be it. Let’s do it! because we need to expand it as much as possible.