An Evening With Valerie Simpson
Hi, folks! For this week, my assignment was to watch the video, “An Evening With Valerie Simpson In Honor of Nick Ashford.” Simpson formed half of the musical duo “Ashford and Simpson” with her husband Nick Ashford, who had unfortunately passed away not too long before this interview was filmed in November 2011. The video is below.
Well, without further ado, let’s get into it!
What did you learn?
Honestly, a simpler question would ask, “What didn’t you learn?” I just have to be honest—I hadn’t heard of this duo at all before! So, virtually all of the information in the video and in the course of this research was new to me. It was interesting to hear the story of how they got started in music and the influence they had on the rhythm and blues genre.
What surprised you?
First of all, I was surprised that Ashford and Simpson wrote so many great songs that I’d heard of before, including “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” I don’t know why it never occurred to me to think about who wrote the song.
Second, I was surprised about how the group got their start. Ashford and Simpson started off in gospel music in the early 60s. They met while Valerie was singing in Whiterun Baptist Church. Ashford was homeless at the time and someone told him that he could get a free meal at the church. Despite his material conditions, Nickolas was a talented gospel song writer. After he met Valerie at the church, that’s when their collaboration began.
What research rabbit-holes did you go down in the database?
Without a doubt, the main rabbit-hole I went down this week involved the history of the Caribbean island of Barbados. You see, the interviewer in the “Evening With” video, Gwen Ifill, had parents who came to the United States from Barbados. (Well, her father was himself from Panama, but his parents had come to Panama from Barbados.) Ifill, notable herself for her journalistic work, has her own interview posted to the HistoryMakers Digital Archive. In the clip, “Gwen Ifill describes her mother's family background in Barbados,” Ifill explains that she would sometimes have conversations with ADOS (a neologistic acronym that Ifill herself didn’t use that stands for American Descendants of Slavery—i.e. Black people whose families didn’t willingly immigrate to the US from somewhere else) about slavery in the US versus Barbados. According to Ifill, “Well, the only difference was cotton. It wasn't cotton. It was sugarcane. We were definitely working as indentured servants and as slaves in the same way in the West Indies as people were here.”
That got me wondering about the history of slavery in Barbados. Ifill was correct that sugarcane was indeed a huge part of the slave economy of Barbados—and slavery was very brutal on the island. The conditions the enslaved people led to the rebellion led in part by an enslaved man named Bussa in April 1816. With nearly 5,500 enslaved people and 800 British soldiers involved in the revolt, Bussa’s rebellion was much larger in terms of numbers than any that took place in the United States before the American Civil War. Although the rebellion was unsuccessful, Bussa is still remembered to this day for the valiant stand he took for freedom.
A statue in honor of Bussa in Bridgetown, the capital of Barbados.
There’s another interesting development in Barbadian history that interested me. Since Barbados formally gained its independence from the United Kingdom in 1966, it has been a unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy with Britain’s Elizabeth II as its queen. (It’s mostly a ceremonial title, much like in the UK.) But, in about a month, Barbados is set to remove Elizabeth as its queen and put a president elected by the people in her place. The current president-elect is a native-born Bajan named Sandra Mason. I don’t want to speak too much on another country’s politics when I don’t know that much about it—but Mason seems much more qualified than Elizabeth. She’s set to take office on November 30, 2021.
In other news, I’m still chugging along with my other work as a Student Brand Ambassador. I have a presentation scheduled for this coming Tuesday, so hopefully that goes well! Wish me luck!