Yahoo Finance 'Elvis' Star Yola Is Reclaiming Black Women's Power In Music
You might have seen Grammy-nominated singer Yola performing to a sea of festival-goers at Glastonbury last weekend, but throwing shapes under the strobe lights at Worthy Farm’s Shangri-La, she most certainly was not. ‘My schedule has been a bit brutal, so raving isn’t really in the "Vocal Care 101 Handbook",’ she tells ELLE UK, days after her festival appearance. It’s not exactly surprising that Yola is prioritising her Zzs right now. The British performer is weeks away from kicking off her European tour – her first in over two and a half years – and hot off the promotional tour for her debut film, Elvis.
Directed by Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge), the Elvis biopic (played by Austin Butler) explores the musician’s gradual rise to fame and complex relationship with his manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks). ‘I grew up with Baz Luhrmann and his movies,’ says Yola. ‘I was massively converted to Shakespeare via his Romeo & Juliet. His approach to cuts, angles, the high energy… it did a really big number on me. When I heard he was doing Elvis, I thought it was going to be perfect. It needs that high energy to live up to the story.’
Before filming, Luhrmann told Yola that he had a mission to put Elvis’ life into the right context, touch on his humanity and tell the true story of rock 'n' roll. ‘For a musician that draws on rock 'n' roll quite a lot, that was massive for me,’ Yola continues. In the film, the singer plays Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and an American singer, songwriter and guitarist who was catapulted onto the music scene in the 1930s and discovered artists like Little Richard (who is played in the film by Alton Mason). Tharpe, along with the likes of American R&B singer Big Mama Thorton, was one of the most influential, but largely overlooked, creators of rock 'n' roll. ‘It became a mission of mine to get their names back out in the world to a whole new generation,’ says Yola.
Born Yolanda Quartey in Bristol, England, Yola believes she grew up somewhat of a ‘musical pariah’. ‘I had people, both Black and white, trying to tell me what they thought a Black person should do in music. For example they could rap, sing R&B, do reggae or narrowly be accepted as an MC, but they couldn’t pick up a guitar. But there was no limit to what a white guy could do,’ she says.
‘One record company executive told me that no-one wanted to hear a Black woman singing rock 'n' roll, which I thought would be a challenge given a Black woman invented it,’ she laughs. ‘That was the kind of ignorance I had to deal with, from punter and peer to executive level. The ignorance of not only how much we owe women in music, but how much we owe people of colour, and those in Black America specifically, is everywhere.’
Yola, who spent hours learning how to portray Tharpe’s unique lead guitar style, credits her character for being a pioneer of the rock 'n' roll movement, creating the music scene, showcasing new talent by hosting one of the most popular nights on the circuit at the time. ‘She was a matriarch to people like Little Richard, Elvis and B.B. King,’ she notes. ‘When you think of the evolution of rock 'n' roll, unfortunately, the credit is given to straight white men as opposed to a queer Black woman. If there's a young Black girl who wants to pick up a guitar, and she feels like she's got the most profound right to it at the hands of a woman like Tharpe, who invented the genre, then I've done something right.’
Yola started the early days of her career working with dance-music collective Bugz in the Attic, as well as the electronica stalwart Massive Attack, before her 2018 performance on Jools Holland’s Annual Hootenanny sparked widespread acclaim for her debut album Walk Through Fire, and earned her four Grammy award nominations, including for Best New Artist. In 2021 she released her latest album, Stand For Myself, which is the perfect blend rock, symphonic soul and classic pop, was dubbed an ‘album made on her own terms’ by The New York Times. Its opening track, ‘Barely Alive’ explores the idea of feeling like an ‘other’ and making yourself smaller in order to fit in, but losing yourself as a result.
‘It came from being a Black woman in England,’ she says of the inspiration behind the track. ‘I often ask my friends when we're traveling around the UK to count the number of times they see a Black woman in an advert not raising a child on her own, or even just smiling, dancing around or being doted on (not because of some magical white saviour complex) for no reason or without an agenda. A Black woman’s narrative is so often excluded from society that they try to fit into the nearest norm, which doesn’t honour who they are. I see the footprints of brilliant people having their aptitude dulled by a lack of acceptance.
‘Society has lowered the bar for what’s expected of Black women,' she continues. 'As if we should be grateful for just being included or thought of. Those norms don't apply to everybody else... I'm consistently in environments where people, who don’t realise they’re doing it, expect me to accept a lower level of life experience because of who I am.’
A celebration of diversity and artists’ skills is one of the many reasons why Yola made the move to Nashville, Tennessee in 2020, and now splits her time between the US and UK. Contrary to widespread opinion, she insists that there’s much more to Nashville than the archetype of country music. After years working as a performer in the UK, Yola says: ‘I needed to be somewhere that had musicians and a scene that was more than a single genre. Nashville doesn't get credit for its great jazz scene and soul scene.
‘When I moved to Nashville I quickly realised I was having conversations about how to broaden music and how to club together to change it I wasn’t having in London. What I didn't expect to see in Tennessee, compared to places like London, or Bristol which are ostensibly known for being hyper liberal, was the number of incarnations of women writing their own script for their lives and succeeding. I was meeting so many women who were instrumentalists with intimidating talent. Before I moved to the US, I didn't know that many female instrumentalists and I was left thinking, that doesn't feel right. I chose to spent more time in Nashville because it was going to let me do me.’
Soon after its screening at the 75th annual Cannes Film Festival in May, where it received a 12-minute standing ovation, Elvis was predictably tipped for award success. And if Oscar-winning actor Rami Malek’s 2018 win for his portrayal of Freddie Mercury in the Bohemian Rhapsody biopic is anything to go by, Butler is a shoo-in for Best Actor nominations during award season next year. Award-triumph aside, for Yola, the thing she most cherishes was the was the ‘family-like energy’ among her cast.
While she didn’t meet some of her co-stars, like Hanks, until the film’s promotional tour (‘it’s shot in the time of segregation so, by logic, the Black actors wouldn't have had interaction with the white actors, apart from Austin because Elvis grew up in the Black community), she says the rest of her co-stars would regularly go out on town once they’d finish a day of filming. ‘Me, Olivia (DeJonge), Kelvin (Harrison Jr.), Alton, Austin and everyone from like the gospel team would go out for dinner all the time,’ she shares. ‘One time we got a boat together and got drunk… That was one thing Tom [Hanks] said: “The most fun thing about doing movies is that you make really like profound connections that last.”’
Elvis is out now in UK cinemas.
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