‘We crafted it from our hearts’: the Womack Sisters on continuing a great soul music dynasty
Backstage at a London festival, on a Sunday afternoon, the Womack Sisters are assembling themselves on a sofa, still clad in the clothes they were wearing on stage a few minutes ago. They look very stylish in their black dresses, tights and high heels, but they are not, it has to be said, dressed appropriately for the weather, which is sweltering. “You don’t feel anything on stage,” says Zeimani with a shrug. “You just feel amazing, like you’re floating.”
“And we’re committed,” nods her sister BG. “You know, we were taught by professionals.”
Indeed they were. BG, Zeimani and Kucha Womack’s father was Cecil Womack: he wrote Teddy Pendergrass’s oft-sampled classic Love TKO, as well as hits for the O’Jays, the Four Tops and Patti LaBelle, and was one half of Womack and Womack, of Love Wars and Teardrops fame. The other half was their mother, Linda Womack, the daughter of “king of soul” Sam Cooke. Their uncle was Bobby Womack, who initially performed with Cecil in early-60s band the Valentinos – their most famous song was It’s All Over Now, later covered by the Rolling Stones – before going on to record a string of classics that earned him the unofficial soubriquet The Greatest Soul Singer in the World: from Across 110th Street to If You Think You’re Lonely Now to the triumphant final album he made before his death in 2014, The Bravest Man in the Universe. Their half-brother’s mum, meanwhile, was Mary “My Guy” Wells.
Given their heritage, Zeimani says her father thought a career in anything other than music was a waste of time: when she approached him with the idea that she might go to medical school, he reacted with something approaching horror. “He said, ‘Just go in the studio and make music.’ I told him I needed to have a Plan B. He was like, ‘Plan B? Do Plan A, go hard, get on it.’”
In fairness, the Womack Sisters had long been apprenticed in the family business. They had spent their childhood travelling the world with their parents: Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas or Bob Marley’s studio in Jamaica; homes in Bangkok, Phuket, Johannesburg, London and, slightly less glamorously, Southend-on-Sea. “We were raised between London, Thailand, Paris and Amsterdam, but mostly here in London,” recalls Kucha. Their mum and dad didn’t just take the kids along with them, they got them involved “in everything they did, in the studio, on stage, in meetings. They wanted to make sure that we knew what they were doing with their time, so they communicated with us a lot.”
BG says that if I had interviewed her parents back then, “We would have been in the interview. If they went on a television show, we were on the couch with them.”
Zeimani made her first public appearance as a baby, in her mother’s arms on the cover of Womack and Womack’s Conscience, the 1988 album featuring Teardrops. The sisters made their recording debut, alongside their four other siblings, on the 1993 album Transformation to the House of Zekkariyas. “We opened their shows,” remembers Zeimani. “And it was the start of us realising that we could be a group, because before, we were just sisters. ‘Yo, actually this is a good feeling, I could do this for the rest of my life.’”
But still, she says, “we didn’t take our dad’s advice”. They decided they did need a Plan B. “We were a little hard-headed. We wanted to go out and explore.”
The three sisters moved to Los Angeles and attempted to balance regular jobs with getting a musical career off the ground. There was a cleaning company, and a brief stint, as Zeimani puts it, of “selling drugs”, which turns out to mean they ran a marijuana dispensary. But it wasn’t as easy as they had hoped. “We kept getting fired,” says BG. “I got fired from Zara for trying to take a couple of trips out of town for shows.” The sisters also drove Uber taxis. “Uber was a lifesaver! I swear, without it I would have been turning tricks,” BG laughs.
To compound their problems, there was the music industry’s attitude towards them. The group “always had soul in mind,” says Zeimani – they were huge fans of Amy Winehouse – but the labels they met with kept pushing them towards pop. “We would go to them with our demos and tell them what we would like to accomplish, with a live band, an orchestra, everything. They were just like, ‘Soul’s not what’s happening right now, here in the States, particularly for brown artists.’ So for years we were trying other things. We dabbled in R&B. They even had us rapping a couple of times.”
Hang on – are you saying you were told that Black artists shouldn’t make soul music?
“Yeah, I know,” nods BG, rolling her eyes. “They told our manager that, and he didn’t want to tell us, he was so embarrassed. Eventually, we just put our foot down and said, ‘We’re not doing anything else.’ Couldn’t get anyone to invest in what we were doing, so we funded our own thing.”
Happily, their own thing caught the attention of Daptone Records, home to Jalen Ngonda, Thee Sacred Souls and the late Sharon Jones, whose house band the Dap-Kings are best known for backing Winehouse on her Back to Black album. “An instant connection!” enthuses BG of their meeting with the label’s co-founder, Bosco Mann, who now plays bass in their backing band. “We just hung out and listened to music for a year before we actually recorded anything. So when we finally came down to it, it just rolled, it flowed, the music was just pouring out.”
The result was a string of acclaimed singles, among them Chauffeur – which details the downsides of the sisters’ period as Uber drivers, including realising that you’re invisible to the “fine-looking” man you just picked up – and If I Let You, which last month enjoyed a burst of social media virality after support from a startling array of luminaries: SZA, Timbaland, Ghostface Killah, Pharrell Williams, Erykah Badu and Questlove. One suspects the stars were drawn by the Womack Sisters’ fusion of traditional and modern: the music on their upcoming debut album is as deeply rooted in soul’s past as you’d expect (“We are,” as Kucha puts it, “so familiar with these streets”), but it never feels self-consciously retro.
But it does feel strikingly raw, racked with very real emotion. “We crafted it from our hearts,” says Zeimani. “I wouldn’t say that we had a lot of sorrow to get off our chests, but there is a lot of relationship drama in our family, you know? Our father passed away, our Uncle Bob passed away shortly afterwards. Our aunt, our Uncle Jude’s wife, there was a car accident and she didn’t make it. I lost my husband in Atlanta in 2020 – he was robbed, he got shot, he didn’t survive. You find love, there’s nothing that impacts you more, and to lose it before you can fully experience it – like, we were married but we were about to start a family … I had a really hard time moving through that.
“You know how when we were in the pandemic, we couldn’t do anything? That’s really what you need to do to reset from loss – stop doing everything, just love on yourself, go to the beach, find a reason to smile again.”
Their live shows, meanwhile, are proving triumphant. At the London festival, their set featured a roaring take on Teardrops, their parents’ most enduring hit. No, they say, they aren’t intimidated by their family’s legacy. “We’re proud of them, but they exist in their own right. The time they came up in and the things they faced – segregation, things we can’t even imagine – they saw that,” says Zeimani.
“If you can imagine, our mother came up behind Sam Cooke – and we saw her win Grammys,” nods Kucha. “So I’m just like, well, she did it.”
“She focused on herself – that was her advice to us,” says Zeimani. “And Uncle Bob’s career was piping hot at the same time as my dad’s career was piping hot, so we saw that we could coexist without competing, because they were very different from one another. They always told us: you’re not us and you don’t have to be. You’re you, and there’ll never be anyone like you. We took that seriously.”
Reporting from The Guardian contributed to this story.
