The Music That Raised Me

My mother never changed the station. She just changed the direction.

People hear “Jakes household” and assume we grew up on nothing but gospel: Mahalia Jackson on repeat, Beverly Crawford before breakfast, hymns piped through the walls like air conditioning. We didn’t. I was the only one playing Mahalia Jackson, and I found her on my own.

What we actually grew up on was Ronald Isley pulling a note so far it should’ve snapped, Lenny Williams making a grown man’s plea sound like prayer, and Roberta Flack singing like she was trying to explain something language couldn’t hold. The way some homes smell like cedar or lavender, ours sounded like longing.

And then, with no pause, no transition, no clearing of the throat, my mother would start humming “Draw Me Nearer.”

I didn’t understand it then. I know now she was teaching me something harder than preference: how to tell the difference between technique and conviction. Between a song that was beautifully performed and a song that meant itself.

In my mother’s kitchen, the dividing line was never between secular and sacred. It was whether the song meant what it said. Whether the ache in it was real or performed.

She played Phoebe Snow like phrasing could tell the truth better than testimony. She played Mariah as if virtuosity only mattered when the run cracked open feeling instead of hiding it. She played Blackstreet without apology — not to be provocative, but because embarrassment was never her standard for discernment. Then she’d sing “The Spirit of God Gives Life” and “How Excellent” with the same closed eyes, the same surrender, the same fullness.

That was the first theology I ever absorbed: God was not threatened by longing. Not if it was honest. Desire did not become holy by changing categories; it became holy when it stopped lying.

My mother didn’t teach that to me in doctrine first. She taught it in sequencing. In what she let sit beside what. In the fact that a song could ache for a man and a hymn could ache for God, and both could be reaching with the same human instrument.

That standard didn’t stay in the kitchen. It became how I evaluate everything — a pitch, a person, a prayer. I don’t ask whether it’s polished. I ask whether it means itself.

My mother taught me what music was reaching for. My father taught me what it meant to shape that reaching.

His collection was different. Joe. Kem. Ledisi. Keiko Matsui. Smooth jazz filled the room like cologne: controlled, intentional, never asking for attention twice.

I’ll be honest: I never loved smooth jazz. The slap bass alone made my skin crawl. I always preferred the rawness of my mother’s collection. The exposed nerve. The note that wasn’t polished before it left the mouth.

But my father’s music taught me something whether I chose it or not. Every artist he played had something in common: control. The note was always placed, never thrown. The groove was polished. Nothing jagged, nothing wasted. His collection was curated the way a man builds a room: each piece earning its place.

Even though I leaned toward my mother’s frequency, I absorbed his.

That’s the tension I still carry: my mother’s permission to feel at full volume, and my father’s insistence that the feeling be shaped. I hear it in myself when I’m building a campaign and strip a deck down to five slides instead of fifteen. I hear it when I cut a word from a sentence because the space says more. Restraint is not the enemy of feeling. It’s its steward.

Maybe that started in the hallway between their two speakers.

At some point, I stopped just absorbing what the house played. I started choosing.

As a kid, I’d go to Barnes & Noble with my father to find music. I’d walk out with Sheryl Crow in one bag and Get Rich or Die Trying slipped into the cart while he looked the other way. Both purchases were honest. Only one of them could happen in the open.

That was the beginning of the unsanctioned collection — the private one, built in earbuds, in the car with the windows up, in bedrooms with the door closed. Lil Wayne. Jeezy. Boosie. Lil Keke. Monica. Ye. Music that didn’t ask permission. The kind you turned down at red lights and turned back up once the windows were sealed. The kind that felt less like rebellion than private recognition.

But that wasn’t the whole playlist. There was also Radiohead, Coldplay, Jamiroquai, D’Angelo, N.E.R.D. — music that didn’t fit the image but fit the interior.

Boosie in the car. Radiohead in the headphones. That was the split I lived inside — the music you use to announce yourself and the music you use to admit yourself. One was for volume. The other was for recognition.

I didn’t have language for that then. I just knew some songs helped me perform a self, and others helped me encounter one. I think a lot of us grew up using music to manage the distance between a performed self and a private one — one for the room, one for the mirror.

Jamar — my brother — didn’t live with us growing up. But he drove me to school, and in the back of his Nissan Altima was a CD book that expanded my world faster than any lesson plan ever did.

Thick. Zippered. Plastic sleeves. That was the curriculum. A Tribe Called Quest. Slum Village. Busta Rhymes. Then Robert Glasper. Chick Corea. Tower of Power. Then Jim Jones. Then back to Tribe.

No sorting. No separation. Just everything next to everything.

Jamar was the first person who showed me that hip-hop and jazz weren’t separate rooms. They were branches off the same argument — rhythm, improvisation, swagger, restraint, the discipline of knowing where the pocket is and what to do with it once you find it. Tribe and Chick Corea were having the same conversation in different languages.

He never explained any of it. He just pressed play. And in that CD book — Tribe next to Chick Corea, Busta next to Glasper, Jim Jones next to jazz fusion, all filed in a case that smelled like the inside of an Altima in Texas heat — he taught me something I still believe: taste doesn’t have borders, only depth.

If my mother gave me permission and my father gave me standards, Jamar gave me range. He taught me to look for kinship beneath categories — in music, but also in people, in ideas, in rooms where everyone assumes they have nothing in common.

Between the three of them, I learned that taste is not just preference. It is discernment, discipline, and depth working together. And it is moral before it is aesthetic — because what you trust your ear to recognize eventually becomes what you trust your life to follow.

Sometimes I hear a song in a grocery store and it stops me in an aisle I wasn’t even shopping in.

But the truth is I was already living it before I had language for it. At sixteen, I was pulling out of The Potter’s House parking lot with “Jesus Can Work It Out” still loud enough to keep the sanctuary on me. By the time I merged onto the highway, it was “Otis.” I wasn’t rejecting one world for the other; I was trying to figure out why both felt true — why the human and the divine could ride in the same car without one canceling the other.

No streaming platform taught me that kind of sequencing. My mother did, standing over a stove.

I’m still making the crossing she made. Love song to hymn to rap verse to choir record. No rupture, just one honest hunger wearing different clothes. My father taught me to refine it. Jamar taught me to widen it.

And the hymns — “Draw Me Nearer,” “How Excellent,” and “The Spirit of God Gives Life” — those didn’t outlast the other records. None of it faded. It all stayed. The Isley Brothers stayed. The slap bass I hated stayed. Boosie stayed. Tribe stayed. “Jesus Can Work It Out” in the parking lot and “Otis” on the highway — both stayed.

Because the point was never which songs survived. The point is that the sum of all of it — every record, every hymn, every CD sleeve, every Barnes & Noble run, every song turned down at a red light — didn’t just shape my taste. It shaped my philosophy. How I judge what’s honest. How I decide what deserves space. How I hear for conviction instead of performance in a room, a song, a person, a pitch, a prayer.

A record collection isn’t taste. It’s a formation. And the deepest thing mine formed in me was this: your humanity and your divinity don’t need separate rooms.