He was there when Erica Wright became Erykah Badu by her own will and invention. King was there when that girl, Erica Wright, starred as Dorothy in a local production of The Wiz.

King told the little girl’s godmother, Gwen, and mother, Kolleen, “This young girl is going to be a great artist, and she’s gonna do re- mark-able things around the world.”

She seemed always “above the fray.” Most of all, she had talent. In 1975, he spotted a 4-year-old girl from South Dallas at the local rec center. He is the founder and president of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters in Dallas. It was one of the most incredible things that I have witnessed or experienced in American theater - in entertainment, period.” “And when she finished that last note,” Curtis King told me of Badu’s performance of the song in D.C. The moon returned, bigger and oranger, and the crickets and keys brushed up against each other in pace with Badu’s aching voice, musing howgoooditisss, so many different ways and wonderings, until she landed, softly, finally, on a solitary syllable, ooooooooo. One sister held her hand high in praise, in “yes,” as she swayed, and soon Badu’s eyes were back up on the megascreen in double. Their tale went on, and soon it was Badu realizing “how good it is,” sweetly singing “how good he is,” wailing “how God is.” Nearby, a few entranced listeners were on their feet, just some of the thousands she played to during her 25-city Unfollow Me tour this summer. It’s a tale of a man who’d spent so many, many, many nights all alone because his light was too bright. Then Badu’s voice - which some compare to Billie Holiday’s, though she compares it to a clarinet - pulled us through the song, from her album Mama’s Gun. Everything was very still, everything was the memory of your first great summer lover - then she nosedived into the first lines: Time had come for Erykah Badu to sing “Orange Moon.”įrom the keyboard trickled pools of ascending notes, and under those keys crickets chirped softly. It was late July in Dallas, in the blunt-filled dark of the American Airlines Center, during one of the hottest summers we’ll ever experience until next summer. Just her and me, just thousands of Mes watching their own private Her. She stood alone atop a black staircase before a megascreen that had all night projected many curious symbols - digital mitochondria, ancestral totems, a beetle - but would soon show a giant moon.

Erykah badu dom hill