Cole Williams - How We Care For Humanity (2024)

What does it mean to be a Soul Queen of New Orleans? Irma Thomas knows, and Betty Harris probably does too. Maybe Tami Lynn and Merry Clayton as well. But this album leaves no doubt that there is another name joining this list – Cole Williams.

She spent her childhood in Brooklyn with her Jamaican mother and grandmother, and all these years later she still thinks, prays, and dreams in that Caribbean patois. But it was her father who laid the foundation for the woman she is now. Her singing first drew attention in church when she was a little girl, but not long afterwards she was living in Paris, performing her own music, modeling, and electrifying stages in other cities around Europe. She soon became a background singer for the Grammy-winning, African superstar, Somi, and also for the American pop phenomenon, Aloe Blacc, among numerous others. In 2015, she fell in love with New Orleans and began to make her home in this storied city, for she found that its blend of Africa and Europe, along with ways it filtered the urban energy of her native Brooklyn through her Caribbean perspective made it a natural match for her. In the decade she has been in New Orleans, she has performed on stage and formed rich creative alliances with some of the city’s most beloved musical heroes, from Walter “Wolfman” Washington and Bill Summers to Al “Carnival Time” Johnson and Cyril Neville. The list could go on – Corey Henry, Trumpet Black, the extended musical family that listens to her weekly radio program at WWOZ 90.7 FM – but it is her connection to the late Civil Rights leader, Curtis Muhammad, that most directly shapes this album.

She learned a lot from this founding member of the historic Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who mentored her in the strategies of the 1960s Freedom Movement until the very week he died. She used these tools and trainings to awaken to her full humanity, expressed, among other ways, in her dedication to honoring the humanity of those most often overlooked and stepped around. The upshot: today she is widely known around New Orleans for her leadership in advocating for the houseless population. And, in this new album, she showcases the wisdom bequeathed to her by Curtis Muhammad, and in turn, the woman who charted that man’s own path, Ella Baker. This album is a tribute to this legacy, a suite of anthems for growing that movement among the next generation and beyond.

She played all the instruments on the recording, wrote all the tunes, and engineered it herself in her home studio in the Central City section of New Orleans.

The lead-off track “Let’s Live Together” features elaborately layered vocal harmonies over a deep groove to arrive at an understated call for social unity that sets the tone for all that follows. The track begins with a sample of Curtis Muhammad himself speaking about Ms. Williams’s life. The next track, “How We Care for Humanity” opens with a nod to the same street dialogue that starts Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” and continues to channel her roots in the classic soul music of that era through soaring background choruses and driving hand-clap beats and ethereal chimes. The song can be heard as an extended nod to one of her greatest musical inspirations in New Orleans, the 9th Ward mystic, activist, painter, street singer and recording artist, Sister Gertrude Morgan. The third track, “Love Our People,” is a love-song, entirely acapella, about the freedom train. Her roots in the church radiate through this piece. Next comes the stunning “Inherit the Earth” with a big thumping parade beat. She chants the refrain as if leading marchers on the path to justice and redemption. What follows is “I Do,” driven by a bass line of hypnotic intensity and shimmering waves of vocal rhapsody. After that, “Divine Mother” is an apotheosis of spiritual love for the entire human collective that brings us to the bedrock of what she learned on her pathway to activism.

What comes next is her greatest triumph as a pop composer, “A Better Woman.” Ms. Williams has delivered several pop gems before – “Bowl in a Pot” and “He’s My Man” and “Little Me” and “Single Black Femelle” and “Get High”, among others -- but this one has already begun to climb the charts in the UK and, as the album is readied for official release, has already garnered nearly a half million hits on Spotify. On this tune, she celebrates the karmic rewards for her service to humanity in the streets of New Orleans, for it stands among the greatest pop singles of this era. Go listen for yourself, right now. You’ll agree.

The gorgeous horns in this tune return in a different mode in the final call to action – “Organize Humanity Mix” -- that concludes the album with a renewal of the primary messages of The Black Panthers. All of this is surely making her ancestors who have traveled this pathway before her very proud. In fact, given the way her Jamaican roots first blossomed in New York City, she calls to mind the legendary Marcus Garvey and would seem a worthy spiritual descendant of that man. He only passed through New Orleans once, when the FBI was deporting him back to Jamaica, ending his career; but Cole Williams, now fully established as a soul queen of New Orleans, is here to stay. Long may she reign, no matter how far word of her extraordinary work as an artist and activist travels, as it surely will, around the world.

T. R. Johnson, WWOZ 90.7 FM New Orleans,
Author of New Orleans: A Writer’s City