FOR years, Gregory Porter struggled to come to terms with his absent father.
Raised with seven siblings by his valiant mother in Bakersfield, California, he could count the times he saw his dad on the fingers of his hands.
Gregory was just 20 when Rufus Porter died and he still admits to “crying over father/son stuff”. Now 48, the much-loved singer breathing life and soul into jazz can cast his problematic parent in a slightly more favourable light.
There’s a track on his new album, the stirring All Rise, called Dad Gone Thing, inspired by qualities he hadn’t always appreciated.
“It’s both sweet and heartbreaking to learn that the daddy I didn’t know was a great singer, a veteran, a great cook . . . all these charismatic things,” he says. “ ‘Oh, by the way,’ I’m being told. ‘The very thing you do, the thing that is central to your life, he gave it to you.’ My voice.”
Hence Porter’s horn-fuelled, gospel-infused song with its line: “He didn’t teach me a dad gone thing… but how to sing.” I’m meeting the irrepressible jazzer in SFTW’s London Bridge HQ as darkness falls over the Thames and he proves a mesmerising companion.
He’s dressed smartly in a black velvet jacket, amazing shoes with a colourful floral design and his trademark peaked cap, complete with fabric covering his ears and chin. Porter fills the room with his big personality, never far from a wide, toothy grin, an emphatic hand gesture. He even breaks into that lovely velvety croon to make a point.
He picks up the story of his challenging upbringing. “My mother was pregnant with me when Father left,” he explains. “We were visiting him one summer when I was about ten, and these visits were few and far between, when he says something which really got to me.
“It was a bit of rhetoric that any older man would put out . . . he said, ‘Boy, I will forget more than you’ll ever know’. And I’m thinking, ‘Dude, you haven’t taught me how to fish, how to iron my shirts, how to cook bread and that’s the line you come with!’ My father didn’t invest in me. He didn’t leave me nothing, not a tie, not a watch, nothing.”
Later, when his dad passed away, it was as if Porter was hearing about an entirely different man. “I’d never heard him sing but person after person got up at his funeral to say, ‘Oh, when your daddy would sing in church’. I was like, ‘I’ll be damned’.”
Later still, during an interview in London, Porter was asked where his singing voice came from. “Nobody had ever asked me that,” he says. “I’d never considered anybody giving me anything except my mother but I knew the answer was my father.”
Dad Gone Thing has extra resonance because Porter is determined not to make the same mistakes with his own son. “I’m trying to pave some way for my seven-year-old,” he says. “That makes me think about this stuff and feel it.”
Does he think there’s a danger of him over-compensating? “I do and I have to watch myself,” he replies. His son is “the little star” of the video for Concorde, the rousing opening song on All Rise, named after the defunct supersonic airliner.
“I’m just finding a way to plug him in as much as possible because I’m on the road a lot,” says Porter. “After a three-month tour, the sweetest trip is going home at twice the speed of sound, 60,000ft up in the air. The idea of Concorde taking you is pretty awesome.”
But, when Gregory was a little boy, the same age as his child, his minister mother Ruth was his only rock. He pays tribute to her in his song Movin’ from 2014’s Grammy-winning Liquid Spirit.
“I wish my momma was here/ A strong, strong steady rose/She would know what to do, what to say, how to pray/To make things better.”
Even on her death bed, way before her Gregory became famous, she encouraged him to, “Sing, baby, sing!”
Today, Porter says: “Oh man, her optimism, without question, is in me. For her, nothing was impossible, no one was beyond revival.” He uses the word “revival” in connection with his euphoric new song of the same name, which, he says, summons the vibe of his youth, when he sang in church.
Despite his mother’s sizeable brood, her mission was to spread Christian values and to help the destitute. Porter describes how she would approach homeless people and say something like, “Oh, you’re on the street? Dried vomit on you? On your dress? In the worst conditions you could possibly be? Watch. I can clean you up, I can help you.”
As a kid, Gregory became his mother’s travelling companion when she preached in churches. “Myself, my brother Lloyd and my sister Luanda had a little singing group together, but I was ‘the voice’,” he says.
“Sometimes, we were in little store front churches as small as this room and we were her congregation. She filled them with her kids and street people. One called Skull Cat Frenchie would get up and sing a secular song but my mother would say, ‘So long as he’s engaged, let him sing the blues’.”
That said, Porter remembers his early singing being mostly about God and Jesus. “I thought I’d be spitting up blood if I didn’t sing for God,” he says. “But then I said, ‘Mom, I don’t know if I want to be a gospel singer.’
“I was little. I could barely see over the dash of the car and I said, ‘I want to sing about love’. So she said, ‘God made love and you can sing about it’. I can still see the house we were in front of, driving down the street, when she said it.”
Without a dad at home, the young Gregory found solace in the “fatherly” tones of Nat King Cole. It explains why, decades later in 2017, he recorded an album called Nat King Cole & Me including the evergreen Mona Lisa, Smile and Miss Otis Regrets.
“That felt like a reset for me,” he says. “I felt I had established my name as a writer and performer and I wanted to say something about my idol, the music of my childhood, my foundation.”
This brings us back to All Rise, an album of passionate original songs that reflect America’s political, racial and social divides while providing a positive, uplifting and forward-facing attitude drawing on the inner strength of Porter’s mother.
“Recording the songs Revival, Phoenix and Concorde, I kept feeling ascension. A judge will come and we all rise for this respected person but I’m thinking we all are lifted by the power of music.
“If I’m a vessel for music, I get lifted and I lift y’all. That’s what I’m thinking.”
He says Revival “is front row gospel, the lyric a reworking from a scripture in Isaiah. Real Truth is inspired by Herbie Hancock’s electronic period and Long List Of Troubles comes straight out of the blues experience and thinking about my relatives.”
By saying “relatives”, he’s taking about black Americans who came from the South to places like Bakersfield, a city in Kern County, one of California’s most fertile farming areas.
“They were poor people looking for opportunities, farming work, and they brought gospel with them. So I grew up singing this country gospel blues. We went to a white school but I would get up in front of the class and sing a gospel song.”
Porter says racism frequently reared its ugly head. “We grew up in the Seventies and and Eighties in Bakersfield, which was very, very racist, very divided. We were catching hell from a racist organisation, the KKK. This included cross burnings and urinating in bottles and throwing them through our windows.”
He fears that Donald Trump’s America is moving back to the bad old days. “It makes me think I have to tell my son things that I hoped I wouldn’t have to tell him.”
He’s saddened by his belief that people with racist tendencies have been given “comfort to fearlessly say really awful things which they might have hidden in the past.” On Mister Holland, he borrows the names of his friend and fellow roots musician Jools Holland and his daughter Rosie Mae to imagine being warmly welcomed rather than turned away by prejudice.
“I can see Jools opening the door to me, saying, ‘Hey, hey mate!’ as opposed to the experience I had when I was a young man of 16. I was just trying to do a typical teenage thing, take this girl out for a Coke, right? I came to the door and her daddy was like, ‘Get away from my door’ and then he called me the N-word. It was so shocking.”
The mention of Jools leads us to Porter’s huge popularity in the UK, where coronavirus permitting, he will play four nights at the Royal Albert Hall in May. He says it’s funny the way local news in Bakersfield, where he still lives, shows clips from his performance at Glastonbury.
“So now my neighbour goes, ‘You’re kind of famous!’ She’s taking pictures of me in my front yard and I’m like, ‘Noooo!’”
Porter adds: “I think the UK music listener loves a soulful voice and soulful sound. If I reference a Four Tops song or a Temptations song, everybody in the audience is singing. When I did Papa Was A Rolling Stone, it was louder here than in Detroit. That’s quite amazing.”
He says he “loves the big yet intimate space” inside the Albert Hall. “It’s the shape. It kind of fits my arms and I hope I can reduce the size. I have in the past.”
With that, Porter is whisked off to an awards ceremony in those fancy shoes. And I’m left thinking I’ve witnessed a force of nature and a force for good in a troubled world. All rise for Gregory Porter!
★★★★☆
