by DuEwa Frazier
With a career in the performing arts that has spanned a lifetime, the acclaimed singer, actress, poet, activist, television producer, and author Camille Yarbrough is an influential figure.
Recently, Yarbrough re-released on compact disc The Iron Pot Cooker for a new generation of fans anxious to hear some of her music, and get some wisdom in their souls. Along with the release came the title “foremother of hip hop” from Spin magazine. And rightfully so, for she’s inspired a generation of poets and musicians through her lyrics and passion.
Looking at Ms. Yarbrough it’s hard to see on her face the span of her history or feel it in her presence. Time doesn’t show – she is smooth skin, graceful walk, deliberate speech, and feminine grace. You know that she is a legend.
At first glance her regal stature brings to mind a dean in academia–she did serve as a professor of African dance at New York’s City College for twelve years. You might also think she was one of the characters on an episode of The Cosby Show, you know, one of Claire Huxtable’s friends––she’s that well coiffed and classy. Looking at Camille Yarbrough you see your mother, your grandmother, the auntie you never had, you see a teacher and leader, all in one woman. A lover and practitioner of dance, poetry, dramatic theater, the written word as well as song and protest for progress in the African-American community, you wonder, how did this woman get to be so many things and so good at so many things? And thus, the answer, is her journey, from past to present.
Camille Yarbrough was born in 1938, the seventh child of a family of four girls and four boys, on the Southside of Chicago, and has fond memories of the people and community that surrounded her.
“When you walked down the street, the men selling their vegetables, fruits, and wares would be singing. They sung to you about what they were selling. It was blues music. All around us was blues music.”
The Dancer
Her initial inspiration came at fifteen when she heard the sounds of drumming coming from a local community center and knew she wanted to be a part of that music. By seventeen, she started studying primitive dance, a modified Katherine Dunham technique, taught by the legendary dance master Jimmy Payne, as well as Martha Graham technique.
While a teenager, Yarbrough frequented the famed Tivoli in Chicago. It was there she got her first chance to see such renown entertainers as Moms Mabley, Butter Beans and Susie, Coles and Atkins, Billy Eckstein, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, and Lena Horne. When Camille saw singer, dancer Josephine Baker for the first time, in the 1950s during one of Baker’s U.S. performances, she was stunned. “I had never seen a performer who performed like her. Baker talked about how she witnessed a race riot in East St. Louis when she was a little girl. I was admiring of her and other artists who spoke out. Baker stood up to the racism, she was outspoken.”
The blues of Chicago wouldn’t hold Yarbrough for long. After high school Yarbrough started working at a local calypso club. It was there she met members from Katherine Dunham Dance Company who gave her leads on dancing jobs in Canada and New York. At the age of twenty, Yarbrough left Chicago, first landing in New York. There she stayed with the family of a Puerto Rican dancer she knew. It was a humbling beginning. Yarbrough was looking for work, striving to pay rent and make sense of the new world she found herself a part of.
After a short time in New York, she returned to Chicago where she auditioned for John Pratt, husband of Katherine Dunham. Yarbrough was accepted into Dunham’s dance company in 1955, which was then based in Los Angeles. “It was with Dunham that I had a high level of dance training. We were constantly rehearsing.
When we didn’t get work in theaters, we danced in clubs. Dunham had thirty-five dancers and all the performances involved showcasing African culture from the diaspora. Katherine Dunham’s study, her research as an anthropologist in African culture in America, the Caribbean, Cuba, South American, and Central America fueled much of the dances.
KDDC performed in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Yarbrough admits, “It was a cultural lesson to perform these dances.” She strived to understand the various lifestyles and personalities she would encounter as a dancer traveling the world. Her close family upbringing from Chicago did not completely prepare her for the worldly lifestyle of the artists she worked and socialized with.
In 1960, shortly before the dance company disbanded, the company traveled to Paris for a brief tour. Yarbrough reveals, “I learned so much about myself being in the company and about the frailty of human nature and also the strength.” After dancing with Dunham for five years, Yarbrough headed to New York in 1961.
The Actress
Camille Yarbrough hadn’t been in New York six months before she received her first Broadway show Kwamina, which made use of her dancing skills once again.
She later performed in plays such as: God’s Trombone/Trumpets (1969); Lorraine Hansberry’s To Be Young, Gifted and Black (1970), and The Beast Story and Sambo staged at The Public Theater.
The tour of To Be Young, Gifted and Black, started at the Cherry Lane Theater, which preceded a 56-city tour, showcasing the critically acclaimed play on college campuses around the country. “It was an amazing tour,” says Yarbrough. In addition to her theater work, Camille was also acting on television soap operas such as Search for Tomorrow and Where the Heart Is. When asked why she didn’t pursue acting in Hollywood as a means to further her career, Yarbrough replies, “I was reading about Black people, about Paul Robeson, and slave rebellions. I listened to Black activists on the radio, my work changed. I found that in this society, you get paid for not having values, you get paid to keep this system going.”
Camille, not desiring to keep the system of racism and degradation towards Black people going, on or off the stage and screen, set her goals on acting parts that would tell the stories of Black people without the added destructive Black images and perpetual stereotypes.
Yarbrough asserts, “Black folk, Black artists used to be concerned with freedom, but now, [acting] seems to be solely about money.” As a working actress, Yarbrough looked up to writers such as Lorraine Hansberry and Alice Childress for their “thinking in terms of the truth of what Black people were going through.” Sharing what it was like to be a Black actress in the sixties and seventies, and a conscious Black actress at that, Yarbrough adds, “If you’re going to be an artist, it is a difficult life. I was running from racism, where the people were oppressed, where the police oppressed us. We were discriminated against as actors and performers. Not only did she learn the ins and outs of her craft as a performer, she also learned some ugly truths about the business in terms of the people who hired you and could fire you. “Even the shows you did, some directors would direct you gearing towards racial stereotypes. I was always in trouble for resenting those behaviors, so I would be out of work for a little while.”
“I knew of plagiarism and how people were exploited. During an open-call audition this woman director took myself and three other dancers aside, we had all been with Dunham, she had intentions on stealing our Dunham moves, Dunham choreography. She told us that we would get solo dances or an understudy with Ethel Ayler, a known actress here in New York City, if we showed her some Dunham moves. I began to see that these people were stealing everything,” says Yarbrough. She did as she was told, but only to the extent that she would always have her dignity and integrity as an artist and as a Black artist who cared to preserve the culture of her people, not exploit it.
The Singer
A sudden illness reconnected Yarbrough to her ancestors through prayer and a changed diet. This also served as impedance for her first album, The Iron Pot Cooker. The album was a culmination of her performance show, Tales and Tunes of an African American Griot, which she performed for two years. When asked why she named her album, The Iron Poet Cooker, Yarbrough replies, “Doing research and thinking in terms of using the art for the people, I found there were Nigerian female doctors who would travel, they would have their iron pots, they cooked herbs, healing mixtures in their iron pot. I consider myself a healer, and thus, I too am the iron pot cooker.” The songs on The Iron Pot Cooker, “But It Comes Out Mad”, “Dream/Panic/Sonny Boy the Rip-Off Man/Little Sally the Super Sex Star” were all original spoken-word poems, before being set to music.
The album dropped in 1975. Yarbrough made her singing performances a full and fantastic production. Coming from a background with Katherine Dunham and theater, Yarbrough fit her song-storytelling performances into Black history monologues. “When you start your performance, if it’s spiritual, you use a high pitch, I would ululate, a traditional healing way of using the voice, for the listeners. Ululation is also to clear the air, to set the tone for spirituality. I’m reaching back into our culture and bringing it back to us now. When I did the shows, I had a projection of a Nigerian door. The stage was black, the music started in darkness and then came my spotlight. I would come on stage with long African earrings and a huge kente cloth gown. I would sing to them in Hausa, an African language. I also had African stools on the stage,” says Yarbrough.
When asked about the value of today’s music Yarbrough comments, “The music now, the vibrations are very destructive, not healing.” Camille Yarbrough is a griot within her songs. She tells a story of her people, she has always told a story that her audiences can relate to and take value from. Camille gives you life experiences and praise and storytelling for African ancestors, in her songs.
In recent years, Camille has performed to packed houses ranging from school age children to senior citizens as well as noted activists and entertainers. Her concerts are called, “thought provoking,” “soul stirring,” “culturally uplifting,” and “African-centered.” Recently, Yarbrough hosted and sang for the annual African Voices Rhymes, Rhythms and Rituals Music and Poetry Concert in Marcus Garvey Park, in Harlem, singing songs of reverence to African spirits and ancestors, for the hundreds in attendance. Under the early evening sky and tall, sloping trees Ms. Yarbrough, dressed in one of her trademark flowing African wrap gowns sang with a holy deliverance and uplifted all in earshot.
Yarbrough’s performance was a sheer uplift. She set a standard for all the other artists to hope they could follow, in their own special way.
The Poet and Writer
Spin magazine named Yarbrough “the foremother of rap.” Journalist Kevin Powell stated in her CD liner notes, “There is no question that Camille Yarbrough ‘raps’ on this album, be it the tender ode to Black men ‘But It Comes Out Mad’, or the panic sequence on ‘Dream.’“
Asked to reflect upon her foremother of rap title, Yarbrough answers, “When you go to the old, you see where the new comes from. Everything I did on stage, without music, was spoken word, it was rap.”
Over the years, Camille Yarbrough has worked with Jazz Mobile, a program that utilized poets in the public schools, and taught drama and poetry to young students. During a brief stint as a student at Hunter College, Yarbrough began to write stories for Black children.
The experience led Yarbrough to write her acclaimed book, The Shimmershine Queens (Putnam, 1989). Others followed: Cornrows (Putnam, 1997); Tamika and the Wisdom Ring (Putnam, 1994), and The Little Tree Growing in the Shade (Putnam, 1996).
The Shimmershine Queens gives a message to African-American youth to respect themselves and others, achieve success and confidence through knowing and connecting with their culture and heritage, and reversing negative self images through artistic performance. The Shimmershine Queens is a Parent’s Choice Award in Story Winner. In Cornrows, A Coretta Scott King Award Winner, Yarbrough reinforces the beauty of Black culture and African beauty for young readers and families. The Little Tree Growin’ in the Shade is a story that reveals an African family and it’s three generations in the midst of a history telling, by Yarbrough, weaving African proverbs and spirituality with song, music and relation to the Diaspora experience. Tamika and the Wisdom Ring tells the story of a young girl striving to realize her cultural heritage in the midst of such destructive community ills as drugs and violence.
Yarbrough finds ways to mix her love of African heritage with her messages of hope, beauty, self-esteem, triumph, and discovery for Black youth in all of her books. For years Yarbrough has conducted workshops that entail her singing, dancing, and storytelling in conjunction with introducing her storybooks to the youth. It is with Yarbrough’s African American Traditions Workshop that she has conducted such diverse performance storytelling for young audiences.
The Activist
During the 60s and 70s, there were marches, riots, and protests. Black Panthers were being jailed and killed. Black people were outraged and fighting back. Camille Yarbrough was always right there to support her brothers and sisters. Yarbrough took her outspoken perspective of the civil rights movement and intertwined it with her performances. “I would always lend my support. Every march there was, every protest there was I was there as a poet.”
Yarbrough also served as occasional host of Bob Law’s Night Talk, a conscious Black radio show format, airing from midnight to 5 am on WWRL-AM in New York City. The goal of the show was to give factual and inspirational information about Black people, for Black people. “I’d say ’Good Morning, Africans’ at the beginning of the show. People would call in and talk and debate with our guests and we loved it.” During the show Yarbrough talked with some of the most intriguing, motivated, and conscious Black activists and scholars of the time. Dr. Leonard Jeffries, Dr. Manning Marable, Dr. Betty Shabazz, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Abiola Sinclair, and Dr. Adelaide Sanford were all guests.
Yarbrough continues to lend her voice and passion to progressive action for the Black community. Most recently working with a panel of educators and activists to form a new leadership summit.
Today, she continues to write, record music, perform, and host a public access television show Ancestor House. The show, produced by Yarbrough, showcases the art, culture, and perspective of people of the African Diaspora, and features Black performers, musicians, poets and book authors.
Although it may not have always been pretty, easy, or glamorous, Camille Yarbrough has journeyed on a particular path, a spiritual and cultural path, leading her into the positions of: griot woman, songsters, poet, author, actress, teacher, dancer, lecturer, actress, and broadcaster. She continues to take her positions seriously, with grace and humility.
Camille Yarbrough, renaissance woman in her lifetime. For all these things, are the reasons why we love and appreciate her and appreciate her.