René Marie talks Grammys, Earth Kitt and more.
The reviews for René Marie’s Eartha Kitt tribute album couldn’t have read better if the critically acclaimed jazz singer had written them herself: “The voice is as stunning as always, her phrasing immaculate.” (JazzTimes); “It is René Marie who pulls off the best tribute disc of this or any other year.” (All About Jazz); “It’s easily one of the best albums of the year and perhaps the best of René Marie’s relatively short but consistently impressive career.” (Jazz Inside Magazine).
In early February, jazz vocalist René Marie traveled to Los Angeles to attend the 57th Grammy Awards. Her tribute album, “I Wanna Be Evil: With Love to Eartha Kitt,” was rated among the top five jazz albums and universally lauded by critics, a rare gush of plaudits from the oft-demanding jazz community.
“I could tell there was something afoot because there were rave reviews of the CD. There wasn’t even one review that was sent to me, or that I looked up, that was even modest,” says René Marie, who grew up in Warrenton and Roanoke and now lives in Fredericksburg. “I was shocked. Fellow musicians would come up to me and say, ‘You’re going to get nominated.’” And she did.
Kitt, a legendary activist, actress, comedian, singer and writer of a singularly cosmopolitan pedigree, seemed to be the perfect musical foil for René Marie, a provocative risk-taker. The album, the first-ever full-length tribute to Kitt, covers some of her more popular works including the title track, “I Wanna Be Evil,” and classics “C’est Si Bon,” “Come On to My House,” and “Santa Baby” as well as some more obscure tracks.
Though René Marie ultimately did not win the Grammy (losing to Diane Reeves’ “Beautiful Life”), the experience seemed to offer definitive proof that she had made the right choices in life. For many years, she had to cage her own talents under the thumb of her religion and a difficult marriage. And when she finally broke free, not singing professionally until age 42, her journey became the exceedingly rare later-in-life musical success story. And yet the refreshingly candid chanteuse has mixed emotions about the Grammy experience. The mainstream critical validation was nice but not necessary.
“It was a lot like the first time I’d ever eaten cotton candy when I was at the fair. You know how they make the candy; they swirl it around the stick and make it really big and [add] these bright colors. It looks like a lot until you taste it. You put your mouth on the cotton candy, and it just disappears and you swallow,” says one of few jazz artists who writes most of her material. “And it’s just kinda gone, and that’s what it was like being there—like a big thing blown up, and you get there and you’re in it, and you go, ‘Huh. This is it?’ So it’s much ado about nothing, in my opinion. And that sounds so terrible to say, I know; it’s almost sacrilegious. It’s the Grammys, after all … but I was like, ‘Let me get back home to the real stuff, the meat and potatoes instead of the cotton candy.’”
Back home is Fredericksburg. But her story starts much earlier, when she was a young African-American girl in Jim Crow-era Warrenton, and continues as she became a young woman, wife and mother in Roanoke. A devoted Jehovah’s Witness with her musical dreams deferred. An apostate and divorcee in Richmond. A jazz musician and recording artist later in life. And finally, seemingly an overnight success a quarter-century in the making at age 42.
Virginia Roots
René Marie Stevens was born in Warrenton in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains on Nov. 7, 1955. The Stevens family, seven children and two parents, lived in a small two-bedroom clapboard house. Her parents, both school teachers in the still-segregated South, slept in the living room on a fold-out sofa. René Marie, her sister and her baby brother were in one bedroom, with her four brothers sharing two twin beds in the other room. There was no hot running water or indoor bathroom, just an outhouse near the modest home. “We were poor but content,” she remembers.
René Marie describes her father as an alcoholic. He lost his teaching job after protesting lunch-counter segregation and turned to carpentry work, and as that income became less frequent, his drinking became worse. But with his darkness, there was also a light. Her father offered a portal to a world outside of her spartan conditions.
“We feared our father, and we adored him at the same time. He was the source of so much culture. Through him, we learned about opera, poetry and Dante’s ‘Inferno.’ He played all kinds of music in the house. All kinds, except for jazz,” she chuckles.
From an early age, music stirred something on a visceral level inside of René Marie. She would often sing with her siblings, playfully competing to harmonize a note or write an impromptu song. Even a bouncy doo-wop song on the radio could be a heartrending experience for the young girl.
“When I’d hear a song on the radio, I would just be so lost in [it]. I didn’t even know what the songs meant, but I just felt them,” she says. “And I would often cry because I was so moved by the lyrics.”
In 1965, at the age of 10, her parents divorced, and she moved to Roanoke where she lived with her mom and two of her siblings. Four of the brothers stayed with their father. Her mother worked three jobs. They struggled, but they survived.
At 15, René Marie won the title of Miss Black Teenage Roanoke Valley, showing a budding talent for performance and soaring vocals. Her talent caught the eye of The Randolph Brothers, a local rhythm and blues band, and when an opening became available, she leapt at the opportunity. Little did she know, in her three years with the band, her life would change.
“After [the contest] was over, the guys in the band congratulated me, and the keyboard player [Brion Croan] eventually introduced himself to me, and we got married three years later,” she laughs.
A Note on Hold
Married at 18, she adopted her husband’s religion and became a Jehovah’s Witness. A few years later, she was a mother of two boys. The religion’s strict tenets—and her then-commitment to them—seemed to end a budding musical career as quickly as it began.
“At some point we decided that once we were married, we’d no longer be playing our music out in public, that we would be no part of the world, that we would not go to venues where this music would be played, and that we would only play in the context of a song the Jehovah’s Witness would sing,” she recalls.
A faithful Witness, she raised two sons and worked a variety of jobs—janitorial work, cleaning houses, waiting tables, delivering newspapers, working at a bank—to provide for her family. But during that time, her love of music did not wane. It merely stayed private.
She continued to write and compose songs, pen a love song to her husband, teach herself a song on the radio or play for friends when they’d visit her home.
“And it was like that for 20-something years. [My husband] never did play in a band after that, and I didn’t either for at least 24 years,” she says. “That was the whole thing with [my religion]: Work only as much as you need to provide your food, shelter and clothing because this world is going to be destroyed any day now, and the thought of pursuing a career is misplaced enthusiasm. There was never a thought of a career or singing again. Ever.”
Finding Her Voice Again
But circumstances would eventually change. Her children grew up, her marriage faded, and René Marie found that spark once again in music. Her son Michael, home from college on holiday break, happened to be listening to a perfunctory singer at Montano’s, a jazz club in Roanoke, and thought his mom could do better.
“He called me from there and said: ‘Mom, you have got to come right now and listen to this woman singing all of these jazz tunes that you sing at home. And she’s terrible,’” says René Marie, who was working in the commercial division for First Union at the time. “So I did. I don’t remember what I was doing. I just [went] up there, sat at the table across from my son and said, ‘Wow, she’s actually getting paid,’ and nobody was listening to her.’”
Her son knew what he was doing. After 20 years in the performing wilderness, perhaps they both sensed René Marie was ready to find her voice again.
“I [knew] I could do a better job, and my son kept telling me, ‘Do it, Mom!’ to the point that by the time that I got home, we had a little meeting as a family to talk about me singing again,” she says.
Very quickly, René Marie had steady gigs and a growing local following. She was in a band again, making tips until the wee hours of the morning while still working at First Union.
“It seemed like the more I sang, the more I started remembering who I was,” she says. “I don’t think I thought of it in terms of being free, yet. It was just a growing awareness that, ‘Oh, I’m my own person.’”
Her husband could not seem to adjust to the new, or perhaps old, René Marie.
“The more I enjoyed it, the less my husband enjoyed me enjoying it, until it got to the point that he demanded that I quit.”
She obliged and quit singing for three months, but soon she begged him to let her play again. He wrote up a list of conditions that she had to meet in order to sing again.
“I met them, and then I started looking around. The more I sang, the more bold I got in proclaiming who I was.”
The relationship kept getting worse, however, and she found more comfort on stage than in her marriage. The gigs continued, and she continued to cultivate a critical following. Eventually the writing started to appear on the wall.
“My husband ended up giving me an ultimatum: ‘Either you stop singing and cancel all your gigs tonight, or you get out. If you want to keep living here, you’ll not go to that rehearsal the next day,’” she recalls. “And so I decided that I didn’t want to live with a man who thought it was OK to issue ultimatums to me, no matter what they were about.”
That was it. After 20 years of marriage, raising a family and being a devoted Jehovah’s Witness, it was time to make a change.
“When he finished, I just picked up my stuff and got in my car. And I never ever came back,” she says. “Some women come back, and the husband apologizes and all that. No, not me.”
New Beginnings
She divorced her husband, disavowed her religious commitments and started living with her mother. A job opportunity soon became available, and she moved to Richmond.
“I didn’t know anybody there. But it was time for me to enter a new phase of my life, so I did,” says René Marie.
While in Richmond, she got involved with the Richmond Jazz Society and found like-minded musicians. She started performing with a band and played several gigs a week at local clubs. In 1999, she self-released her debut album, “Renaissance,” (under her married name, René Croan) and it quickly gained traction on public radio and within the national jazz community. A bus of her fans and followers made the journey from Richmond to see her perform at D.C.’s Blues Alley. That night, a writer’s promising review from the Washington City Paper had put in her in the same room as the president of MaxJazz, a boutique label based out of St. Louis, Missouri. He wanted to sign René Marie as an artist, and just like that, she had found a home on the MaxJazz record label.
“In that same year, I had quit my job, filed for divorce, left my religion, moved to Richmond and signed on to a record label,” she says. “So I was lucky, but I was also ready; that was the thing. You’ve got to be ready.”
Her first MaxJazz album, “How Can I Keep From Singing,” became an industry favorite, nationally and internationally, winning awards and surging to No. 1 on the jazz radio charts within three months of its release. Her second album with the label, “Vertigo,” was selected by the Academie Du Jazz as the Best International Jazz Vocal CD of 2001 (topping Cassandra Wilson and Joni Mitchell) and was given the prestigious “Coronet” ranking by The Penguin Guide to Jazz, an accolade bestowed to only 85 artists in jazz history. René Marie recorded four albums with MaxJazz and started headlining jazz festivals across the world.
“Everything just came together,” she says. “And it was a big lesson about how important it was to follow through and live with intent.”
René Marie left MaxJazz in 2006 and released two albums on her own, one of which (“Slut Energy Theory U’Dean,” which explores sexual abuse and self-esteem through the lens of a young woman) she turned into a one-woman play. She also found herself a lightning rod for criticism in 2008, when she was invited to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at a mayor’s event in Denver. When it came time for her to perform, she substituted the anthem’s lyrics with those from “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the unofficial African-American national anthem. Local and state officials denounced her performance, and she received hate mail and death threats. Yet she remained stoic and undeterred.
“As artists, we have to be our own advocates. We certainly shouldn’t apologize for our creativity, in whatever form it comes out,” she says. “I do believe there are times when we have something creative to say, and it crosses the line—I think we should cross that line and realize that not everybody is going to like what you do all the time.” Over the years, she has released several singles dealing with homelessness, racism and other social issues.
In 2011, she signed with Motema Music and found a place where she could be herself musically with the unqualified support of a record label.
“It was very important, not only for them to allow it but to be very enthusiastic about it. I don’t want to go through a whole bunch of effort, time and money to record a CD that the record label can’t get behind,” she says. “And I don’t like asking permission to share my vision.”
The Next Song
In between a touring schedule that will take her from international jazz festivals in Italy to single gigs in Easton, Maryland, René Marie has found time to work on an original album of new material, including a long-steeping song called “Lost.”
“I’ve been writing this song for years,” says René Marie, who will be playing at both the Jefferson Center for the Performing Arts in Richmond and at The Kennedy Center in late January. “I’ve always known the title and the beginning, and then as the years went by, I’d compose a little something else, or write something down, and think ‘Yeah, that needs to go into ‘Lost.’’”
Now the veteran of 10 albums since 1999, she allows her voice to trail off for a moment to reflect.
“Until finally, finally, finally after many years, the song was complete.
(November 2015)
