Ravinia 2019, Issue 1, Week 2

Bless the Child Shemekia Copeland has Got Her Bold By DonalD lieBenson T hese days , “Your Mama’s Talkin’,” a song from Chicago-based blues scion Shemekia Copeland’s 1998 debut album, Turnin’ Up the Heat , has taken on a whole new mean- ing. Copeland became a parent in 2016, and when she isn’t wrangling her “little man,” she says she’s thinking about “the type of world I brought him into, and my concerns for him and what he will have to face.” Those concerns are at the heart and soul of Copeland’s most recent album, America’s Child , which contains such pointed songs as “Ain’t Got Time for Hate” and “Would You Take My Blood?” “I’ve always been conscious of what I put out into the universe,” Copeland tells Ravinia . “I’ve always thought that one day I may have children, and they would hear this. You always want to make your kids proud. After having my son, it’s become even more important to me to be bold in the statements I want to make.” In “Would You Take My Blood?” Copeland poses this question to a bigot: “If your life was fading fast, your next breath was your last / Would you take my blood? / Or would you rather die than share your life with mine?” “This is the first time I’ve ever touched on racism,” Copeland says. “My child is mixed-race, so it was important for me to make that statement.” Her “sweet baby child” is also much on her mind in “Ain’t Got Time for Hate,” the album’s righteous opener, which has been nominated as Song of the Year at the 40th Blues Foundation Blues Music Awards [ the winner has not yet been announced at time of press ], and a song Copeland has used to open recent concerts. “That song needed to be done when it was done. It needed to happen,” she says. Copeland, who has lived in Chicago for more than a decade, participated in a panel discussion at the recent three- day Summit on Race in America at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, TX, where she spoke of how she has been increasingly moved to address social issues such as intolerance, homelessness, social injustice, and date rape in her mu- sic. These are, she states, “scary times.” Copeland writes songs, but she does not consider herself a songwriter. Nor does she direct her collaborators to de- liver a song about a specific subject. “It happens organically from conversations we’re having,” she says of the process. A song she intends to record for her next record is based on a conversation she had with her manager John Hahn, who co-wrote “Ain’t Got Time for Hate” and who has known Copeland since she was 8 years old, “about something that Donald Trump Jr. said that really pissed me off.” PHOTOGRAPHY BY MIKE WHITE 18 RAVINIA MAGAZINE | MAY 31, 2019 – JUNE 16, 2019