The Funk Queen. Dawn Silva. An Autobiography: A review

 

The Funk Queen: Dawn Silva. An Autobiography

New Rising Publishing. 2023. $99.00. 532 pages.

In this massive 500-plus page-turner, singer, songwriter, producer, turned author, Dawn Silva, best known for her time as a singer, and performer with Sly and the Family Stone, Parliament-Funkadelic, the Brides of Funkenstein, and the Gap Band, tells her story of survival, overcoming and outshining at every stop on the underground railroad to the funk. While the book documents how she has earned the title of the Funk Queen, it also contains a “Forrest Gump” trope where themes of prejudice, violence, and inequality over decades emerge as Silva engages historical figures of sports, politics, film, and music.

We learn about her life through hundreds of photos and wonderfully detailed anecdotes. Silva, the Sacramento, California-born artist, who was known for her charismatic performances onstage reveals herself as a skilled vocalist, vocal arranger, producer, and leader, who behind the scenes battled to receive equitable pay, recognition, and royalties.  She had to fight (at times physically) her group members, band members, staff, record label executives, booking agents, and concert promoters, which some P-Funk fans will empathize with, others will find unbelievable, and many will pretend to ignore as their allegiance is not towards Ms. Silva or any of the females whose unheralded vocals helped elevate Parliament-Funkadelic from underground to mainstream.  

According to memoirist and feminist, Vivian Gornick, in nonfiction writing, “the writer has only the singular self to work with.  So, it is the other in oneself that the writer must seek.” The writing works in this autobiography when the narrator engages in a type of self-investigation of “one’s own frightened, or cowardly or self-deceived part— (which helps) creates the dynamic.” In other words, there is the situation but the emotional investment the writer and the reader are looking for is found in the stories recorded in thorough detail over these 51 chapters.

Full disclosure. Ms. Silva is someone that I have known for decades. However, after reading this book, I realized how little I knew about her family, their Indigenous roots, and the amount of violence she experienced at an early age, and throughout her life. I learned about the favor God graced her with—she lived to tell. She must have known that she would live a life worth writing about because she prepared to write this book by keeping a diary or journal and meticulously compiling clippings and photos.

If you believe in destiny and purpose, it is easy to conclude that she was born to travel worldwide as we read how her family moved to Germany when Silva was three. In several places in the book, we see how she quickly adapts and picks up the language, whether German as a child or Portuguese as an adult. This ability to adapt will be important to note as you read. These stories take us across North and South America and Europe.

The first part of the book reveals the singer’s family story--both the Taylor and Weber sides. The introduction to Dawn Carla Weber comes in the form of a beautiful black and white photo of Willy and Leora Taylor, her maternal grandparents. Like photos from the past, this one is ghostly and beautiful. The closing features a photo of the triumphant Silva, onstage as the show-stealing special guest act at the 2009 Long Beach Funk Festival.

 

This notion of an underground railroad to the funk is not what this book is about; instead, it is about the battle to bring to light the real-life story of one of Funk music’s pioneers and the truth about how the unsung workers–those women whose names were not included at P-Funk’s 1997 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction–were treated. This is accomplished through Forrest Gump-type anecdotes which place Ms. Silva in the company of who’s who during the 1970s and beyond.

 As a coffee table book, it is an oversized, hard-covered volume complete with glossy stock worth the high price tag, that you can display on a table. You can use it to entertain guests, inspire conversation, or pass the time. You must sit down to read it. It is rich in its storytelling—the description of the characters is wonderful.

Aside from the treasure trove of photos, the majority of which photographer, Steven LaBelle provides, the writer here questions her choices and does not make excuses for them, she offers reasons. Today’s young people know nothing about the past. The Funk Queen could allow college students to analyze the African American experience in the United States from the 1970s to 2000s in Popular Culture, Composition, and Rhetoric, as well as Feminist and Womanist (the focus on black women) Theory courses.

Serious musicologists should include this volume in their collections. This is also a must-have for music aficionados who either grew up in the glory days of vinyl recordings and the black self-contained group or are curious about what happened to them. But is also for any woman interested in the music industry as it is a cautionary tale which you must read.

Photos courtesy of dawnsilva.com.

Charlotte Morgan is a journalist, writer, and educator based in Cleveland, Ohio. She worked during the late 1970s as a music journalist for Northeast Ohio Scene Magazine and nationally for Rock and Soul Songs.

 

 

The Mower Lady of The Ville

 

The ‘mower lady’ of Greenlawn Avenue keeps her street clean and safe — one cut at a time

BY CHARLOTTE MORGAN 

Neighbors on Greenlawn Avenue in Cleveland’s Glenville neighborhood hear the “mower lady” early some summer mornings or afternoons. Twenty-year resident Bridget Daniel is a mother of two and a caretaker for numerous family members. She is known on the street for helping those in need.

Daniel’s home is surrounded by abandoned homes and vacant lots, so she’s motivated to help take care of them. When they’re not kept up, she steps in with her lawnmower and other gardening tools.

Vacant lots are a perennial problem in the city of Cleveland. They’re a breeding ground for rodents like groundhogs, a problem which is so out of control that it was recently highlighted for discussion at a Ward 9 neighborhood meeting. They’re also a safety problem; a 2016 study showed that fixing up vacant lots reduced nearby gun violence by five percent.

Each year, crews are responsible for cutting more than 16,000 land bank lots throughout the city. They also tend to more than 3,000 properties where buildings have been condemned and another 8,000 vacant properties that have been abandoned. That’s a heavy load, but the city employs workers who typically mow these properties four times per season.

Yet Bridget Daniel is not waiting. She has made it her mission to keep her street clean and safe. She says the city does not always do a good job cutting the vacant lots, so she steps in to help.

It is her love for the Glenville community that drives Daniel. “I want it to look nice where I live,” she says. “That’s how my parents raised me.”

A bad start

This year, keeping workers safe from the Covid-19 pandemic, coupled with heavy rains in May, meant that cutting crews were very behind, Public Works director Michael Cox said at a recent meeting of Cleveland City Council’s Development, Planning and Sustainability Committee.

The result was that yards grew out of control.

“We had a bad start to this year,” Cox said. “We lost the first round.”

Cox, who deploys about 180 full-time workers to cut grass and handle lot maintenance and about 30 more seasonal workers who are hired for the cutting season, expect to be caught up by mid-summer.

Yet Daniel says the city could do a better job. “First of all, the city people that come out to clean, if they don’t have the right supervisor, they will skip past and won’t cut the grass right,” she says. “And they won’t edge it right and do a half job.” Daniel reached out to Ward 9 Councilman Kevin Conwell about these problems but says she never heard back.

Conwell says the city has been behind in cleaning the vacant lots because of Covid-19 and the damage from the George Floyd protests in downtown Cleveland. “There were staffing problems and they were a month behind,” he says, adding that he spends $54,000 of his own ward allocation to clean up high grass and weeds in Glenville and encouraging residents to call him if they have problems. “I ride the ward constantly, but I cannot be everywhere.”

Photo: Karin McKenna

Photo: Karin McKenna

Photo: Karin McKenna

Photo: Karin McKenna

Photo: Karin McKenna

Photo: Karin McKenna

Photo: Karin McKenna

Photo: Karin McKenna

Keeping Greenlawn clean

Daniel remembers when the city first started tearing down houses on the street during the foreclosure crisis. The city lacked the resources to maintain them and she was worried criminals could hide in the shrubs and small trees growing there.

“I wanted the kids going to school to be safe,” she says. “I saw little girls were walking to school by themselves because sometimes mothers don’t get up with their kids. I just took it upon myself to do something. I got my handsaw and I drove down there with my water, parked my truck, and the whole neighborhood was looking at me. I remember people said, “Wow, you’re really doing a good thing.’”

It took her two days, but she cleared the property.

That’s when her neighbors began calling her “the mower lady.” Daniel battles the overgrown vegetation on Greenlawn which is a typical street in the city of Cleveland. Today, there are at least a dozen vacant lots and a half dozen abandoned homes on the street.

While the city comes out and cuts the vacant lots that sit on the east corners of the street and on the west corner which faces East 105th Street, it does not always mow the lawns of abandoned homes, says Daniel. Even when they do, the empty lots grow back quickly.

Although vacant lots are not as much of a concern in other parts of the city, they remain a big issue in Glenville.

Daniel says there has often been a lack of response from the city to overgrown vacant lots, which is why she continues to mow. “I have called Mayor Jackson’s hotline about the high grass and vegetation and even about these abandoned houses that needed to be boarded up,” she says. “They know me.”

Part of her chores

Daniel once lived in East Cleveland, then moved to Wickliffe where she graduated from high school in 1981. “I got to see how a suburban community is, how they lookout and take care of their own,” she says. “They make sure that their parks and their community are clean. Everybody helps each other out.”

She says that she started mowing grass when she was young. “Part of my house chores or if I got into trouble was to cut the grass. My sister’s backyard was like four yards.”

Daniel also picks up litter and trash to beautify the community. “That look of trash all over the place, it’s just a disgusting look,” she says. “When you see that, it doesn’t make the community look good. It doesn’t make your property look good.”

Now, when the city does not come out to mow the vacant lots and abandoned properties, the residents of Greenlawn have the “mower lady” of Greenlawn turn to.

“Bridget cuts all those lawns and she won’t let anyone give her any money,” says longtime resident Jean Coleman, one of several senior citizens who have benefited from Daniel’s services. “They should recognize her for doing all that work to make our street look good.”

Daniel refuses to take credit and says she simply takes pride in where she lives. “I do not take money from anybody because I do it for my health, to keep my body moving,” she says. “But mostly because I love where I live, and I want it to look nice for me and my family.”

Charlotte Morgan is a journalist and college professor who lives in Cleveland.

Reprinted from the Land.