Amber Weekes: A Lady With a Song

Irving Berlin wrote "Suppertime" (aka "Supper Time") for As Thousands Cheer (1933), a topical revue with several stars and many musical numbers. Ethel Waters introduced it, making history as the first African American woman to star on Broadway. Berlin wrote it specifically for Waters, who also sang his lighthearted "Heat Wave" in the show.

"Suppertime" has a more serious story, told in the voice of a woman who—while making dinner—must find a way to tell her children that their father has been lynched. Hard to imagine a tougher talk. Berlin wanted Waters to "show the agony of the family that's left behind" (Waters interview, Online Exhibitions, Yale University Library). The 1933 staging had her by the kitchen table, near a paper with this headline: "Unknown Negro Lynched By Frenzied Mob." Readers can watch her sing it many years later on The Hollywood Palace (1969, available on YouTube).

Amber Weekes, in researching A Lady With a Song: Amber Weekes Celebrates Nancy Wilson, was reminded that Wilson had recorded "Suppertime" on But Beautiful (Capitol, 1969). "I used the fact that she had recorded it—though it had a much earlier history—to bring the song into present time and highlight the history of the tragedy of lynchings." Weekes had been reflecting on the importance of lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson's work with the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. "He gave me the inspiration and courage to remind people that this is something we should never forget, unlike so many stories that have been bulldozed over, tilled back into the soil."

Weekes visited Stevenson's National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and could not shake the image of the heavy hanging columns, six feet tall, 800 of them, arranged by county, names of people from each county etched into the steel, men (and women and children) who had been lynched for spurious crimes ("thinking too much of himself") or no crime at all. Preparing to record, she envisioned them and felt their terror, with that of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and others more contemporary. "I just felt like I needed to bring the history of the song back into the song," she said, "and so that was the way that I did it, by creating the monologue." As Maya Angelou wrote in On the Pulse of Morning (1993)—and as Stevenson has quoted—"History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again." Truth is a prerequisite for peace and justice.

Barbra Streisand (People, Columbia, 1964), Judy Garland (Great Day: Rare Recordings from the Judy Garland Show, Savoy Jazz, rec. 1964) and others have recorded stirring renditions of "Suppertime," but mainly without explanation, leaving it up to their audiences to fill in the blanks. Against the advice of some, Weekes chose to bring her listeners into the story more fully, in a way that reflects what is in her heart and mind as she sings. Her performance is more powerful for it.

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