The Rev. Osagyefo Sekou’s debut record, “The Revolution Has Come,” got its start at a protest in Oakland, in a jail cell in St. Louis, in the choir room at Soldan High School and at a gambling house in the Arkansas Delta.
“After a year in streets, I had the blues, so I needed to sing,” Sekou told The American.
Sekou spent a year in the streets – of Ferguson, Baltimore, Oakland, Cleveland – following the police killing of Michael Brown Jr. in August 2014. After the one-year anniversary of Brown’s death, Sekou was “stressed out, not thinking right,” so he flew to the San Francisco Bay area to see a friend.
It was supposed to be a vacation, but almost immediately Ashley Yates, a Ferguson protestor who relocated to Oakland, took him to a demonstration. In the car was a woman, Jay-Marie Hill, who remembered him from a protest in Cleveland. He had helped wash pepper spray out of her eyes.
Sekou needed a momentary break from protests, police and pepper spray, so when Hill said she played in a band, he went to her place and hung out. They wrote 11 songs in six days.
The songs were new, but they came from the past year on the streets. The hook to one song, “We Comin’,” he wrote with Tef Poe, the St. Louis rapper and Ferguson protestor, while sitting together for eight hours in a St. Louis jail cell.
Struggling against police and prosecutors may have given him some blues he needed to sing, but he was a singer long before he was a protestor. In 1989, when he graduated from Soldan, he had a vocal performance scholarship to Knoxville College. “I thought I was going to be a professional singer,” Sekou said. “Broadway shows, opera, that’s what I thought I would be doing.”
At Soldan, he sang under the direction of the legendary choir teacher Charles Gladney Jr. But that’s not where he got his start with music. Houston Cannon, the woman who raised him as his grandmother in Zent, Arkansas, provided him with a piano at an early age and saw that he was classically trained. “When I was six or seven, I sang in five foreign languages,” he said.
From that same early age, he learned the language of the blues. His blood grandfather, Richard Braselman, played blues in the Arkansas Delta with the likes of B.B. King, Albert King and Louis Jordan. But they never met.
As a small boy, Sekou was taken around by an uncle, McKinley Watson, who ran a gambling house. He would ride with his uncle to work and watch him count the money. He would ride with his uncle to his moonshine whiskey connection. Needless to say, gambling houses and moonshine stills are blues country.
And now, this classically trained, ordained minister has made a hard blues record. In his Delta youth, raised in a Pentecostal household, blues was the devil’s music. But in the 21st century of street protests, he intends for his blues to drive demons away.
“All I want this music to do is to help somebody to fight another day,” Sekou said. “That’s all I want to do – if it can get some of these demons off them.”
Sekou had a lot of help making these blues. The Fellowship of Reconciliation, which appointed him Bayard Rustin Fellow, previously released a record of Rustin performing spirituals and work songs, so it stepped up to fund a musical project by its Rustin fellow. Sekou’s friend Anasa Troutman, who manages India Arie, also helped to produce. The record is being released by FarFetched, a St. Louis label co-led by Damon Davis, a St. Louis artist and Ferguson protestor.
Sekou found his supporting musicians everywhere, as happens in St. Louis. Ferguson protestor Alexis Coleman sings vocals, and protestor Dhoruba Shakur drums on one track. Tom Ray, owner of Vintage Vinyl, blows harp under his “Papa Ray” handle. Sekou ran into his horn players, the St. Boogie Brass Band, literally walking down his street.
He recorded the record in Nelly’s studio EI, Anthony Thompson’s studio TBeats and at Suburban Pro, Matt Sawiciki’s home studio in Sekou’s South City neighborhood.
Sekou understands that he is known as a liberation pastor, not a blues singer. At 44 – he will turn 45 on January 22 – he is at an awkward age to start a career in music. These factors gave him doubts. “I kept asking, ‘Is this something I need to be doing?’” he said. “But doors keep opening. It became a labor of love for a community that believes in music and in this work. I received so much grace.”
But did he succeed in singing away the blues?
“Yeah,” Sekou said. “Of course, then I found new things to get sad about.”
Rev. Sekou and the Holy Ghost will celebrate the release of “The Revolution Has Come” at 7 p.m. Sunday, January 31 at 2720 Cherokee St. Tickets are $10. For more information, visit http://wearefarfetched.net/ or look for FarFetched on Bandcamp or Soundcloud.
