Singer Lalah Hathaway’s first recording was in 1969. It was recorded when she couldn’t talk yet. She wasn’t even a year old. How does that happen? Well, you can hear her wailing on her father, Donny Hathaway’s single “The Ghetto.”
Best known for soulful songs like “Where is the Love?” and “The Closer I Get To You” and of course, the unforgettable classic played around Christmas time, “This Christmas.” One of the most promising talents of his generation, Hathaway suffered from major depression for much of his life and committed suicide in 1979, at age 33. Lalah was 10.
Like other offspring of famous singers, such as Natalie Cole (daughter of Nat “King” Cole) or Ziggy Marley (son of Bob), Hathaway inherited the advantage of having a famous last name along with the burden of being constantly compared to her father and the pressure to live up to his legacy.
Since, then Lalah grew up and has made a name for herself with her own career in contemporary R&B and soul music. But she’s still coming to terms with her father’s legacy. She remembers covering one of her father’s songs during a performance in Japan in the early 90s, “and this man came, he was probably 50 years old … And he sat really stoically in the middle of the room and cried the whole show … It’s really a testament of how much my dad really, really meant to people — even people who could not understand the words.”
“It would be hard to be a singer, musician or have ears and not be an admirer of my dad,” said Hathaway, who performs some of her father’s songs during her shows. “I can only say that now that I’m older, because growing up, I thought I was biased. I thought it was just me. Now I see that he left his mark on the world.”
Hathaway was around music constantly when she was growing up. She and her younger sister, Kenya Hathaway (a singer, guitarist and percussionist who tours with George Benson)…
…, studied piano and attended performing-arts high schools. Their mother, Eulaulah Hathaway (she never re-married after her husband’s death), is a classically trained vocalist.
Hathaway, who lives in Los Angeles now, still has sentimental ties to her hometown, Chicago, which, she says, is full of culture, great food and music. Members of her father’s family live there and she tries to visit and perform in Chicago as often as possible.
“I do a lot of inward thoughts and meditation,” said Hathaway. “I listen to a lot of music. I’m not an extremely religious person. I am an extremely spiritual person. It’s more of a feeling than something I can talk about.”
“The way I view things is so the way I hear them. It’s really from my own experience. I can hear things in a lot of different ways and I really feel that most people hear and see art through their own lens. So it does me no service to limit how you see things by telling you how I see things. I’m already interested in how people perceive my art and how they perceive what I do. I hear everything: “Oh, you’re a gospel artist; you’re a jazz artist; you’re a neo-soul artist; you’re a pop artist; you’re a blues artist; your sound is low and sultry.” I hear so many different things, and people really are set where they hear things because they’re filtering things through their own lenses, and I really prefer that. It’s limiting for me to tell you what I think it is.”
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