By Larry Katz
A rap song pleading for the preservation of the home of an opera company?
Unexpected.
But no more unexpected than the collaboration between a 29-year-old Houston rapper, Michael Berry, and a 60-year-old Boston songwriter, Dawn Carroll. The two partnered on a pair of tracks that bookend ‘Songs for Mary,’ a collection of songs inspired by the life and work of Mary Cardwell Dawson, the founder of the National Negro Opera Company in Pittsburgh.
Did Berry think it weird when Carroll asked him to write and perform a rap about a nearly-forgotten classical musician and educator who died back in 1962? “Actually I found it fascinating,” said Berry, who performs his own rap music under the name Money Makin Micch.
“Because this home, the actual house that Miss Mary used in Pittsburgh, is a piece of our own history. At a time back when no one really gave us the chance to perform in public.”
“You have to think about all these different artists that used this house, Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington and all the others.“
“I felt a connection with Miss Mary because she gave us a platform.”
Her own career as a singer thwarted by racial discrimination, Dawson was determined to bring opera to African American audiences. She founded the National Negro Opera Company in 1941 and soon its headquarters, a grand Victorian home known as Mystery Manor, became a gathering place and refuge for Black celebrities.
Work to restore the house, empty and neglected for decades, finally began this year. At the same time, Carroll launched a project to restore the memory of Mary Cardwell Dawson herself by celebrating her activism with ‘Songs for Mary’, a soundtrack to a projected musical.
‘Songs for Mary’ kicks off with “If the Walls Could Talk,” as a young rapper voiced by Berry contemplates the abandoned Mystery Manor and channels the spirit and energy—and pain—of Dawson and its prominent Black visitors.
“‘If the Walls Could Talk’ is if you could imagine what these same people would think and feel if they were alive today,” Berry said from Houston.
“If the Walls Could Talk” asks what are we able to learn from them through their experiences?”
Berry and Carroll—Miss Dawn, as he calls her—met when Berry was a high school student in Houston. Carroll, a designer by trade, had come to his school as part of her work as co-founder of the Over My Shoulder foundation, an organization that encourages mentoring.
“I was a kid that was interested in graphic design and stuff,” Berry recalled. “One day we had this little special convention at school. We were trying out some of our graphic design art that we did in class and messing with this interactive media. Miss Dawn came and talked to the class about the importance of mentoring. And so pretty much with me having a disability and
everything—I was born with cerebral palsy—we kind of hit it off right there. And it’s been a long lasting friendship ever since then.
“I always had a passion for words and for music,” Berry said. “I think I wrote my first song when I was nine years old, a little simple beat with me beating on the table.”
“My parents was like, ‘The song is nice, but why don’t you eat your food?’ I kept putting my energy into it. And like I remember my 13th birthday, my mom actually booked studio time for me, about three hours. I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m ready. I can do this.’ And I went in there and I layed an egg! My mom was like, ‘I paid all this money and…’ She was like, ‘You want to do this but I don’t see you taking it seriously.
“I left the studio and was kind of upset. But I stayed up all night and rolled out like four songs. I always had a gift when it came to putting words together. I’m like, ‘Mom, I know you wasted $150 yesterday, but take me back today. And she took me back after I convinced her. I didn’t expect that.”
Now Berry is applying his verbal gifts by adding raps to two of the songs written by Carroll with longtime Boston rock veteran Jon Butcher, whose production, arranging, guitar and vocal skills are prominently displayed on ‘Songs for Mary’, which embraces rock, pop, jazz and even classical music as well as rap. Its final track is “Rise,” whose lyrics were inspired early one morning as Carroll watched Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton in a live race broadcast from Abu Dhabi. Before the race was even over, she had adapted Hamilton’s Tupac Shakur-derived motto, “still I rise,” into the lyrics of a song set to an insistently propulsive rock riff from Butcher.
Next she called on Berry. He would add a fierce denunciation of racial discrimination from the perspective of one of Mystery Manor’s distinguished guests, heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, as towering a Black sports star in his time as Hamilton is today. Berry had no idea that Hamilton’s “still I rise” catchphrase was inspired by another person coping with cerebral palsy like himself: Hamilton’s race car-driving brother Nicholas.
Did Berry even know who old time boxing legend Louis was when Carroll called?
“I always knew that Joe Louis was the first AfricanAmerican world heavyweight champ.” Berry said, “that’s all I knew about him. But I researched and learned about him. Everyone knows about Muhammed Ali, but Joe Louis laid the foundation for Ali. “Rise” was a pretty cool way to show that, hey, Muhammad wasn’t the only one. Joe Louis paved the way.
And now we’re asking, what if Joe Louis lived today? What if Miss Mary Dawson lived today? Do you think they would approve of the way things are?”
‘Songs for Mary’ uses these figures from the past to show that the prejudice they faced in the 1940s persists today and that the struggle to overcome it is far from over. But will listeners in the age of the Internet and iPhones pay heed to these voices from decades ago?
“I think my job,” Berry said, “was helping to take Miss Dawn’s vision and modernize it to where people from my generation would understand it. It’s like you have a big corporation that may not know how to get their product out to the world, so they find an influencer, someone who can use their platform, use social media to get people to accept the product.”
“Well, I feel like Miss Dawn is the corporation and I am the influencer who can get people to open up to this experience. This project uses different angles. It’s not just music, it’s art. It’s about freedom of expression. We use different ways to raise awareness about being a minority, about having opportunity.
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