Gothic Theatre

Erykah Badu

THE year 1997 couldn’t have possibly been any bigger for Erykah Badu. The sleepy-eyed twenty-something singer released two albums that wowed critics and fans alike; appeared on a soap opera and in her first feature film; directed two of her own music videos; headlined one of the summer’s biggest tours; and somehow managed to find time to have a child. In the process, Badu, who has a voice like Billie Holiday and a musical sensibility that melds seventies soul with jazz and hip-hop, assumed the throne as the reigning queen of soul and R&B.

Born Erica Wright in Dallas, Texas, Badu was raised, along with her brother and sister, by their mother, Kolleen Wright. Since her husband had abandoned the family early on, Kolleen turned to her own mother for support in raising the children, while she made her living as an actress in local stage productions. By the age of four, Erica had performed professionally alongside her mother at the Dallas Theater Center. Immersed in the arts by Kolleen, young Erica painted, sang, and danced, and grew up to the seventies strains of the likes of Stevie Wonder and Chaka Khan. Erica’s adolescent years coincided with the rise in popularity of hip-hop (her first concert experience was Run D.M.C., with the Beastie Boys), and at the age of fourteen, she landed a gig freestyle-rapping for local radio station KNON. (She was backed by a beat-boxing Roy Hargrove, who would one day achieve fame in his own right as a jazz trumpeter.) She successfully auditioned for admittance to Dallas’s arts magnet school, Booker T. Washington High. At Booker T., Erica, a.k.a. “MC Apples,” performed as one half of a female rap squad. The nom de rap would not be the last name change she would undergo during her high school years. Declaring Erica Wright to be “a slave name,” she changed the spelling of her first name to Erykah, because, as she explains, “‘Kah’ is the inner self, which can do no wrong.” A new last name, Badu, resulted from a simple phrase that she would repeat over and over in a bit of scat-singing. She later made the discovery that the invented surname actually means “to manifest truth and light” in Arabic.