Dr. Brittnay L. Proctor – Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Race and Media in the School of Media Studies at The New School, USA – has recently released her study on Minnie Riperton’s debut album Come to my Garden. Her study forms part of Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series, which provides forensic deep-dives into seminal albums. Read our interview with Dr. Proctor below!
THTSB: Tell me a bit about the inspiration behind this project. Why this album?
BP: This is an album I just kept coming back to after I completed my PhD programme. And it’s an album that my father introduced me to.
I was in this transitional phase and thinking about what my next research project would be… and what my dissertation would look like as a book (my dissertation was about 1970s funk music). I took some time to think about the work of Minnie Riperton. It just so happened that Bloomsbury Press had their call and I just decided to submit!
THTSB: How do you situate this album in the wider context of soul and/or Black music? You talk about the opulence and luxuriousness of Come to my Garden’s sound; prior to this album, was there anything similar or anything which harked to the sound this album would embody?
BP: In parts of the book, I talk about the album’s relationship to a sound like Dionne Warwick’s earlier work with Burt Bacharach and Hal David and that made me think about using pop-adjacent sounds in more full and elaborate ways. Some of that work is imperative but I do think that the album is fairly singular in the way that it moves in and out of so many different sounds.
THTSB: You talk in the book about genre, and genre as a limiting and reductive framework. Can you classify this album into any particular genre?
BP: I would say the album is uncategorisable in that it does not buy into the logics of genre or adhere to a particular set of sounds that are affiliated with any single genre.
Even though genre is the framework you have when you are researching music – as a way to locate and understand music – it was really important for me to resist those urges when describing what the album sounded like. [I wanted to] think more capaciously about the album and the ways that it’s traversing in and out of all different types of sounds and using different types of sound technologies.
THTSB: The average person on the street, if they are aware of Minnie Riperton, will probably associate her with the whistle tone as heard on ‘Lovin’ You’. Can you tell me a bit about Minnie Riperton’s voice?
BP: Minnie Riperton was trained vocally as a young woman in Chicago in an operatic style. But at that time there weren’t many opportunities for Black women in opera. She also, as a young person, was coming across all these new sounds coming out of Chicago. Her affinity for rhythm and blues met with her exclusion from opportunity to build upon her capacity as a classically trained vocalist. Minnie’s training never left; she found a different vehicle for it. Her mother was also trained as a vocalist in the same style and ended up working as a domestic as there were no opportunities [in opera]. The socio-political context really shaped [Minnie’s] inability to build upon a career as a classically-trained vocalist.
THTSB: Tell me a bit about the lasting influence of this album and what happened subsequently.
BP: This album is very much on the precipice of some of the sounds that come out of progressive rock maybe a couple of years later. Even contemporarily, you see so many young Black artists and musicians citing this album and the work of Minnie Riperton. For example, Solange listed Riperton as inspiration for her 2016 album A Seat at the Table.
I think because of the insistence on moving away from genre – or moving in and through so many different sounds – it really made a blueprint for contemporary Black artists. A lot of contemporary Black artists are suspicious of genres and guiding logics to making music and feel deeply insulted by the way their work gets reduced to genre, in particularly genres like ‘R&B’.
It was important for me consider the work in its totality and think about sound rather than use genre as the only point of entry to think about Black music. And I think that is the lasting legacy of this album. I think that, because of how daring and audacious it was, the resonances are felt so deeply.
THTSB: And how did Minnie Riperton’s sound evolve after this album?
BP: She’s always tapped into the natural world. When I spoke to Richard Rudolph he told me that they would often record lullabies and use a tape deck to record demos. You can hear on the demo for ‘Lovin’ You’ – which was a lullaby for [Minnie’s daughter] Maya Rudolph – birds chirping and basically singing to and with Minnie.
This evocation of the natural world is carried throughout the remainder of her career. I do think that, towards the end of her career, she was very ambitious around reimagining what Black popular music could be. She definitely embraced more dance-adjacent sounds. As much as her work stayed true to this evocation of the natural world, she was able to tap into certain pop sensibilities and reimagine them.
THTSB: Were there any assumptions or misunderstandings about Minnie Riperton you wanted to clear up?
BP: I think more than ‘clear up’ anything, I just wanted in my own way to honour her life’s work. She passed in a very tragic way and that’s a very interpersonal thing that I really struggled with trying to write about. There’s so much more to her life than her diagnosis, even though that work was so important to her – [advocating] on behalf of [cancer survivors] and being open about having a mastectomy and talking so very openly about living with cancer. But I also wanted to take the time to really honour her life’s work and honour her genius, and the genius of all those involved in making this very singular album a possibility. I really wanted to try and do this work justice.
THTSB: You have absolutely done that! And finally, do you have a favourite song?
BP: ‘Rainy Day in Centerville’ is my favourite song; it’s so heart-wrenching and so dramatic and beautifully written. I just love the album so much!
