One of VIBE’s most adept OG journalists—and super duper Teena Marie stan—Keith Murphy reflects on his personal history with the lost luminary.
It was inconceivable really.
Just how did a bantam white girl from Santa Monica, California go on to become one of the most respected R&B voices of her era? Teena Marie, who passed away in her sleep Sunday (Dec. 26) at the age of 54, was indeed an anomaly: a free-spirited, blue-eyed soul act who never traded in her ethnicity to garner praise or record sales. For the multi-skilled vocalist, songwriter, musician and producer, the well-worn cliché of she-sounds-pretty-good-for-a-white-girl simply did not apply. To be real about it, Teena Marie was black.
True story. At the age of 10, I remember watching an episode of Soul Train over my grandmother’s house on the Southside of Chicago in 1980. We were in the kitchen and on the TV was Lady T herself performing her saucy-yet-elegant come-on “I Need Your Lovin’.” Of course, being an obsessed, opinionated, and obnoxious music head even at that young and impressionable age (an affliction I’m still trying to shake) I was up on Teena Marie.
My older cousin Aaron—the coolest dude on the planet at least in my eyes—played bass and introduced me to her music. I knew that Teena’s mentor funk superhero Rick James co-signed her, which was good enough for me. She was signed to Motown (another plus!!!!) and I loved the cartoon like hook that drove her early 1979 workout “I’m a Sucker For Your Love.” I recall my cuz wearing out Teena’s first album Wild and Peaceful and later re-playing the stank-face bass line to her 1980 floor-burner “Behind The Groove.”
Teena sung (scratch that…she SANG) like a sister who just got kicked out of a Baptist church because she outshined the choir director. She played rhythm-guitar as nasty as a dirty-minded kid from Minneapolis named Prince. So I was more than aware of her. However, to grandma Teena Marie was a revelation; an alien. “Who is that little white girl lip-syncing to that black voice,” she asked? “That’s Teena Marie,” I said confidently.
“That’s her real voice.”