Before Anyone Was Watching

Black Music Month, a goodbye, and the kid on the floor with a pen.

There is a song from when you were small. Not the hit. The one buried at the end of side two, the track the radio never touched. You loved the song without being told to. You did not know why. You only knew you wanted to hear the song again.

Mine was “I’ll Miss You.” Last track on side two of Foster Sylvers, his 1978 record. The world knows him for “Misdemeanor,” the hit he cut as a child years before. I loved the quiet one at the end of a later album, the song nobody played for me.

I was fourteen, on the dining room floor, next to the stereo we kept on the bar. I stopped the record every few seconds to write the words down by hand. Then I gave myself a private concert. My mother was the audience, one seat, attendance depending on her mood. I performed as if the room were full.

Foster Sylvers died yesterday at 64. The boy on the cover, open smile, red shirt, sang a song a fourteen-year-old loved so much she copied every line onto notebook paper and kept the pages for almost fifty years. I still have them.

Here is what I see now in the girl on the floor with the pen. She was not performing for approval. There was no one to approve her. She sang because the song lived in her. She welcomed her mother’s attention and sang the same with or without an audience.

Amy Sherald carries a line she was given. Do not listen to criticism. Do not listen to praise. Do what you do. I was doing this before I could spell the word. The first practice of becoming my own best friend happened on a dining room floor, pen in hand, performing for the love of the thing.

This is how June opens for me. Black Music Month. The artists who scored the early version of me, the one who already knew how to love something fully and out loud.

So here is your invitation. Find your side two song. The deep cut nobody else remembers, the one you loved before anyone was watching. Play the whole side this week. Let the kid who loved the song first say hello.

Foster, thank you. Rest easy. The true fans never left side two.