Joy AKA violet performing "I Sing The Blues For You Today" with Demetrius Daniel, Charles Worrel, & Dubblex.

Joy AKA Violet performing, "I Sing The Blues For You Today" with Demetrius Daniel, Charles Worrell, & Dubblex. JoyandDubblex Poets

I Sing The Blues For You Today

I want to do poetry like Billy Holiday singing the blues

I want to do poetry like Ella Fitzgerald

I want to be me singing my holiday blues

Billie’s songs are poetry so fine it makes me think I’m her doing rhyme

Thoughts about Billie make me go off line, hook line & sinker; she puts me back in time

I sing to my lover, I want to make your poetry mine because you spout rhymes

Observing my life become an unending grocery list of things to get done

Your life or mine, yours is on my mind - the list of to dos keeps growing exponentially

Number 1, try out a mattress, 2, buy it, 3, buy new locks to keep someone out number 4, find someone to install it, make 10 million calls. Keep writing lists. What did you say? How many sessions, any lessons in storage? Will the Divine power of intervention help?

I don’t want to bore you with the details and derail you from my song.

Damn, wonder if I’ll ever see Willa Dean again– oh man, you know the women I mean

Kept her head wrapped up like an African Queen with her creamy coffee looking self.

Willa said the secret to good potato salad is to go heavy on the mayo

Willa Dean days, they’re all in a haze now. I was so high back then.

The memory lingers, listening & watching while she told stories. She’d whisper, her voice barely a breeze, tell me about her lovers, say, “I’m gonna get me some.” … I’d get confused & asked, did she mean her husband or lover.

She’d show me wilted lettuce and bring it back to life telling me about her lovers, drugs, & children while making potato salad.

I thought - she’s a woman of many talents, a stoned cold junkie and a working mom combined

The nose that knows, her preference was coke, good moist coke at a good right price too on the upper - upper west side in Washington Heights, 162nd street to be exact

Willa had class & style combined; she took me to dress models at the Ritz one time. Got paid for it too. It was such a pleasure to do. I even got a pair of designer gloves out of it.

People accepted Willa everywhere we went –

Willa was friends with a famous New York jazzman and his wife, a New York City teacher. We were at jazzman’s apartment, small tight crowded living room, upper west side 90’s.

Willa’s friend sat across from me staring at my big breasts. I can see how tight your muscles are.

Let me massage you she said aggressively hurting me so bad physically

we had an argument instead.

Passing through hundreds of lives so many colors

Let me take you back to what we share - strivings for love – wanting to go somewhere –

Wanting to discover who we really are ~

see ourselves through the eyes of others and – finally see who we really are.

Extend this power to the umpteenth degree. We still wonder who they think we are ~

Uncover recover to return to who we want to be

Dreams are reality - stop thinking, dreams are the color of my true love’s hair

Black is the color of my true love’s hair, his dreads caress my bare hands

A whole-years grocery list pressed into a foggy mist of autumn red

turns bright chartreuse before bleakly the list dissolves before my eyes

True colors make my heart sneeze amidst a perpetual mist of violet-blues
A dream more real than a memory                                     

Joy’s repertoire is expanding

Since late 2008 when I began working on my bluetry series, beginning with I Sing The Blues For You, which to date, has been published 5 times, I have been incorporating music into my performance poetry. More recently I decided to expand my repertoire by adding song to my performance and also to give listeners a break from my rants and raves which are very sad and sometimes overwhelming.

My neighbor, Wren Harrington, has been kind enough to take me on as a student. Ms. Harrington is a very accomplished singer and teacher. The first lesson consisted of breath exercises along with scales. I then begged her to help me with my first song that I had been miming alone and with Dubblex. Wren proclaimed that I improved greatly just in my first lesson.

I am so excited! I can't wait for lesson two.

In the meantime, here I am playing sing song all by my lonesome, plodding along.

Here below is the first song, Turning Point, that I know from listening to Nina Simone. If you click on the link you can watch at youtube.

Turning Point

The second song below can also be watched at youtube.

I Wish You Love


Gloria Lynne made the song I Wish You Love famous. According to what I read, Ms. Lynne, who recently passed on a few weeks ago, recorded this song thinking it was no big deal. It wasn't even one of her favorite numbers to perform, but audiences fell for the way she performed this number and it hit the top ten list quickly and became a hit.

For a while, Ms. Lynne was homeless, as she never received any monies from the records of most of her recordings. When asked why she continued to sing when she couldn't make a living, she replied, that singing was what she lived for. I am certain all of you artists can relate to that. It's certainly welcome to earn income for our art, but whether we earn or not, we continue to be artists. It's just so sad that so many artists during her time period were taken advantage of in this manner, and not given proceeds for the albums they made that sold.

The day after Ms. Lynne passed, I happened to be at a music jam on the lower east side, at University Of The Streets, and a woman sang this song in memory of Gloria Lynne, and did it justice too. This inspired me to move myself to the next level to add to my performance. It was also a sad moment for me because Mohammad, the guy who originally founded the University Of The Streets, was someone I'd met back in 1977. During that time Mohammad had many type programs at the University for the community. I happened to be walking by, looked up and saw the name of the organization and walked in. After that, I met with him frequently. My discussions with Mohammad was a focusing impetus in my decision to enter Columbia University, where I was a student in the Higher Education Opportunity Program, made eligible through poverty status and being disadvantaged educationally. I was the only white one in the program the entire 5 years I spent undergrad there.

I went to the music jam at University of the Streets with Demetrius Daniel and his friend Mark. Mohammad's photo sat large on a wall. Only the lady singing knew what I was talking about when I said the University used to be around the corner from where it currently was. She informed me that Mohammad had died a few year ago. This made me sad because I had always intended to stop by and see and thank him for our talks and now I can only thank him in my heart.