First Song

On the first song that mattered to me , Stevie Wonder's "Ribbon in the Sky"

The hapless tone in the voices of bureaucrats whose grasp on power is contingent on diminishing yours, comes to be a familiar mercy. You have to call with an air of sweetness and servility in your timbre, as if making a bid on something that isn’t yours, though it is. You cannot sound too entitled or desperate, but you must exhibit a little of both entitlement and urgency or you’ll be dismissed. The chain-of-command of the hush money to be is invisible and ricochets off your ability to maintain composure and gravitas. The art of getting an advance on royalties. What does that really mean? A bit of Adam’s rib or Stevie Wonder’s “Ribbon in the Sky” (for our love). A pittance of the corporate earnings from record companies and music publishing agencies belongs to us each quarter.

My dead father, my mother’s dead husband, left us this contraband, a troubled bounty. Sort of. In a sordid, semi-silent way, divided between several entities and calculated per play and sale and placement. When a song of his was in the movie Scrooged, were we rich?! Were we? In our Culver City adjacent apartment, then our mid-city rental, then our Melrose-adjacent home where life began, near Canter’s Deli and The Mint. With each move, my mother had been demoted at her job, from teaching at a private school, to public, to L.A.U.S.D. From a famous man’s wife to his widow to a single mom of two, then three, and an inconnu’s baby mama.

When she divorced my father and they stayed together in spite of it, she tells me he begged her to remarry him before, or in case, or before (did he have a premonition)—in case he died. He’d been married once years earlier, in California, a community property state, and if she didn’t heed his advice, fifty percent of the future earnings from the songs he’d written would go to his first wife somehow, and the remaining fifty would be divided up between the three daughters, in perpetuity, the territory shall be the universe, the contracts sing in blunt agreement like a sad ancient chorus, their course on customary exploitation. She hadn’t listened to his entreaty, suspecting it was manipulation or that he might live for decades beside her out of wedlock, and so it was, three heirs and one first wife inherited the Jimmy Holiday estate. She would receive nothing in her own name, but remain custodian of the money going to her daughters until they turned twenty-one.

Anyhow, we needed advances, the teacher’s salary wasn’t enough, nothing was enough to make up for being left alone. And the calls to EMI, ASCAP, BMI, and Valerie, Ray Charles’s assistant at Tangerine, were household rituals I pretended not to hear so I could listen closer. EMI handled the most money, could they send us some around Christmas so we could join the family in Big Bear with ease, or in June so we could join them in Lake Tahoe; we needed structure from the extended family with no living father present. Plus, the children had dance lessons, camp, daycare so the mother could work extra hours and hire a babysitter so she could take a second job waiting tables at a local restaurant. Usually, the advance was granted, sometimes, my mother’s voice would crack with rage that became tears during or after the ask, but we made it to the lake or could afford the new pointe shoes and costumes for a competition in Las Vegas, and we cast ribbons into the sky like spells on dad’s birth dates and death dates to show our appreciation, to choke the blackbirds, to coax some sparrows home for winter.

For so long/ for this night I prayed/that a star/could guide you my way, Stevie Wonder rejoices. The first time I heard “Ribbon in the Sky” I was watching an adult member of the dance company where I studied perform a solo in all white, rehearsal for an upcoming casting. Lisa, was her name, she was Japanese American in a sea of black dancers, and her somatic grammar was reserved and modest but sure of itself as she glided across the cork in ivory spandex, twirling a transient streamer into spirals and leaping into subtle grande-jétés then recoiling in pantomimed anguish. The for so long, as opening line, a forced goodbye anchored in the welcome position, makes the song feel like it’s cornered and angular, neurotic with yearning. We know it’s going to be fulfilled, or at least we’re teased into expecting wish fulfillment and not instructed to be crestfallen or petty about how long it’s taken, how we begin with a tally and have to ascend it to reach the billowing cloth of spun up union. For so long, but the wait is almost over, and no one is weary or bitter. You start to wonder if he’s singing about a dream or hallucination, then you realize he probably is, conflating desire with fate. You can’t choreograph a solo that lasts the whole six minutes of the song, the dancer disappears into the wings in the middle-verse, to the lines from now on/ it will be you and I, and Stevie celebrates alone for a few isolated bars, silly with relief as the lights dim. This is mostly a lighthearted lyric but it became my private purgatory anthem, the soothing sway I’d hear backwards whenever my mom made one of those humiliation ritual calls and then went to the store for more foiled helium to release into the sky with notes tied to the beveled string. Thank you, ASCAP, EMI, BMI, dad, Ray Charles, Valerie, Los Angeles. With your help mom’s a little less high strung or hysterical , Sara’s tantrums can be obliged with small bribes of food or Malibu barbies, and I— for so long, for so long, so long.

Earlier this week, emboldened by an assignment turned mandate, I called what was listed online as the Ray Charles Museum. I’d made up a scandal in my imagination when I read that they were no longer accepting visitors from the general public. Strange radar goes off in my heart when archives are withheld or gate-kept. Why hadn’t I tried this sooner, I should have made an unannounced junior mafia style visit there when they tried to buy all our song shares for a hundred dollars in 2001, as if we were stupid or oblivious. For so long, what I’ve prayed for is justice. I heard myself leaving an assertive message: I’m Jimmy Holiday’s daughter, I write for the L.A. Times, I’m writing in-depth about my father’s collaboration with Ray Charles and need whatever archival material might be on hand from their years of working together. I couldn’t conceal the accusatory undertone.

I was called back a few days later, double and triple dialed by a 310 number like it was 1995, having already forgotten who it might be in a bout of mild traumatic amnesia. When I returned the call, that hapless, domineering bureaucrat’s tone I’d recognize anywhere greeted me cheerfully, this is—— of the Ray Charles Foundation. For so long… stay in my corner by The Dells wells up a little as accent, as subconscious worry— servile, sweet, entitled, gracious, remember it’s yours, but they don’t know that. Hopefully I pulled it off and they let me through the gates with my helium scoffing ribbons with notes attached, that a star/that a star/that a star, the record scratches. It was never for so long, it was Oh, so long. It was longing for the unknown, hunting for it in the familiar, and feeling terrified and violated (interrupted) when you catch it.