Jazz and R&B Legend Sarah Jane Morris: ‘We Were Homeless’
Jazz and R&B legend, singer and songwriter Sarah Jane Morris, now age 62, spoke to me from her home in St Leonards-on-Sea in Sussex, England, on the 18th of August, 2021, just back from Italy, where she is so feted that she was presented with the key to the City of Verona.
She chose not to talk about her glamorous life, but instead, her humble origins in Southhampton, and how she and her mother and her six brothers struggled to survive.
The story of her early years is a far cry from the carefree song she is most famous for, her duet with Jimmy Somerville, The Communards’s ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’, her rich contralto contrasting with Jimmy Somerville’s falsetto.
(44) The Communards — Don’t Leave Me This Way (Official Video) — YouTube
As the ‘only girl’, Sarah Jane, at just fourteen years of age, helped her mother look after her six brothers while her family were constantly on the move, her father evading debt collectors and the police. At the age of seventeen, her Dad was arrested and sentenced to prison, locked inside his cell ’23 hours out of 24.’
She describes this period as ‘not easy’ and ‘stressful’, but her stoical nature prevailed as she found her inner strength and her ‘soothing voice’, as she describes how she sang a lullaby to her baby brother, coaxing the newborn to sleep as her mother worked nights as a Tee-side (shorthand) teacher, and studied by day, leaving her one capable daughter to look after her six siblings.
To this day, Sarah Jane marvels at how her mother managed to feed all her children.
She muses how her deep voice commanded authority in a chaotic, ‘shouty’ household.
The lullaby she chose to sing, at the age of seventeen, was ‘Me and Mrs Jones.’ This was to become her torch song.
This is how Sarah Jane Morris tells her story:
‘I come from a big family. Okay, I’ve got six brothers — my poor Mum had a child a year for four years and when I was 14 years old, one of my brothers was born, so I’m fourteen years older — he’s kind of the baby and I became a second Mum to him.
And part of that was singing him to sleep.
And one of the songs that I would sing to him to sleep […] ended up being a very pivotal song in my career, ‘Me and Mr Jones.’
Sarah Jane Morris describes a nomadic, tumultuous childhood:
‘I went to 13 different schools because I had a Dad that was forever evading the official receivers — you know we were several times a year moving in the middle of the night to somewhere else, to avoid paying the debt.’
On reflection, she suggests this lack of financial stability and peripatetic childhood prepared her for a musician’s life on the road:
‘So that was my childhood, which in a way, when you think about it, is a good way to prepare you for life as a musician, as you never know where you will be next, you never know when you are going to be paid — all of these things.
Let’s face it, it was stressful, but nevertheless, was probably a good lesson for me to learn.’
Remarkably, she never had any formal training as a singer or even learning how to read sheet music.
‘I never got to study music,’ Sarah Jane Morris said. ‘So I never learned to sing.’
She remembers how the music all around her influenced her deeply.
‘The musical backdrop was just fantastic,’ she said. Her eyes light up as she lists some of her favourites from the Seventies — Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Philly Sound, Northern Soul.
‘I was a Northern Soul girl,’ she said. She describes sneaking off to parties and clubs on the rare free night, pretending to her Mum she was going to her girlfriend’s house, and her girlfriend telling the same story — only to meet up at a local club and dancing her heart out to Northern Soul, turning ‘back-flips’ in her ‘Oxford bags’, a 1970s style of wide, cropped flares winstthat recently have come back into style.
‘At the age of seventeen,’ she said, no longer smiling, ‘my Dad — eventually it all caught up with him — he went to prison, and actually he went to prison at Winson Green, which is your Birmingham prison.’
Her eyes sparkle with recognition, seeking a connection, as she knows I am to start my MA in Radio Production at Birmingham City University, and hopes I might share her interview with my fellow students.
On stage, she is the same — looking out to the audience, seeking a connection with each and every one: ‘And you, and you, and you, and you’, she sang, pointing to each one of us in the audience.
Her glamourous image — her mane of softly flowing, flame-red hair and scarlet lips, her long robes and windswept, sensual demeanour, her ready smile and squinty, laughing eyes — conceal any sadness within, and yet it is clear she can never have that sense of entitlement or security that children born into wealth can have.
Recently, on Instagram (15 September, 2021) she pictured herself with her two Afro-Carribean band-mates, Tony Remy and Tim Cansfield, asking her followers to donate money (‘I wonder if you have any idea how hard we musicians are finding life at the moment with Brexit and Covid…’). In her long post she describes how musicians like herself were struggling to survive, getting paid less for live gigs since Covid, with no income at all during lockdown.
On the eve of her recent appearance at Ronnie Scott’s, London, in September, 2021, she said on Instagram to share the details of the gig with friends who might buy tickets, because if she and her band fail to fill all the seats, she might not be asked back.
That sense of economic precariousness appears never to have left her. Nor has her sense of responsibility for her ‘brothers’ — at a recent live outdoor performance, she introduced her bandmate, master guitarist Tony Remy as her ‘spiritual brother’ and hugged him close.
It is her sense of suffering and compassion for others which gives such depth to her music, and her latest album ‘Love and Pain’ is no exception.
The full interview with Sarah Jane Morris accompanied by her music and the Northern Soul music that influenced her can be heard here on Night Train, Radio Winchcombe, first broadcast live on the 19th of August 2021.
You can purchase music by Sarah Jane Morris direct from her website for maximum proceeds to the artist.
For updates on Sarah Jane Morris live gigs, see the latest and upcoming listings here.
The charity Help for Musicians has been very effective on social media during Covid, raising awareness of the financial and mental well-being of musicians in the UK.
The following is a critique of my own story, above, based on my interview with Sarah Jane Morris.
- My recorded interview was on Zoom and subject to, well, life. It was interrupted by a phone call to Sarah Jane Morris by the Home Office as she had just returned from Italy and was in quarantine. When she resumed the interview I failed to press record! So I lost the second part of the interview where she describes her early jazz influences. So my report is biased towards the first half-hour in which she describes her childhood and teenage years.
- Her story of her itinerant childhood strikes a chord because my mother was a foundling and had a similarly unsettled childhood in working-class Montreal. So I think our conversation flowed partly because the story was not unfamiliar.
- An interview is ‘a mimetic representation of a conversation’ (Broersma, 2008). I have edited the interview and there is so much more. I wanted to elucidate in particular how her singing sprang from a sense of caring for another, and not from vanity or self-promotion. I am hoping this comes through by mimesis, whatever the inevitable distortion in the relating of our partial conversation (see 1), and not by diagesis, or some form of clumsy telling, and let the reader decide.
- In some ways, this account of an interview follows the Cortazzi model: Abstract — an artist’s early life; Where — England, Southampton; Complication — father in prison, seven children, single mother; Evaluation — the ability to cope with the musician’s nomadic life; Result: a great album and a great career; Coda: buy her album, listen to the full interview.
- Alternatively, this interview could have been presented as a sadder tale. But Sarah Jane Morris takes the lead here, and puts a spin on her own story which is realistic but hopeful and lacking in any self-pity or bitterness, so I simply followed her lead.
- This tale might slot into a general interest in homelessness, single motherhood, and musicians struggling under Covid pressures. It might also be slotted into the massive social media campaign, HelpforMusicians.
- Please comment below. This self-critique and interview-based story are part of an ongoing learning process as an MA student at Birmingham City University, Media Production (Radio), 2021–22.
