Everyday Singing

whatever comes next, plus an upcoming event at McIntyre's

Our dear brilliant friend Tift Merritt has a new album, Sugar, coming out this month.

Tift, as you may know, is an amazing person. Mom to 10-year-old Jean, Practitioner-In-Residence at Duke University’s Franklin Humanities Institute, writer, songwriter, scholar, organizer, teacher-of-songwriting and artist-who-tours (sometimes). Authentic beauty who makes everything around her more beautiful and authentic. Restorer of The Gables, a 1928 motel and boarding house that will soon reopen as a boutique hotel in Raleigh.

The Gables is gonna be gorgeous, but it took a special person like Tift to see its promise—this old brick building was seriously decaying and had been broken into many times over the years. The road sign was rusting and its lot was overgrown with weeds.

In early January, Tift invited a group of us to record the final chorus on “Everyday Singing,” a song inspired by the friendship between Rosetta Reitz, a feminist music scholar and record label owner, and Dachine Rainer, a writer and anarchist. In the 1960s, Rosetta lived in New York City, and Dachine lived in London. They exchanged letters about their lives—struggling, organizing, succeeding, raising daughters, getting divorced. Tift found their letters, and she thought about all the women she knew in her life, doing the same kind of hard work in this extraordinary time. She wrote about it in her Substack, Nightcap (subscribe to get early access to songs!):

When I found their words, I found myself in them. I found my friends. I found our present inside their past.

That’s what this song is about. Everyday resilience. Lasting friendship. The work that women do that so rarely gets named out loud, the scientific research, the creative labor, the caregiving, the mothering, the long quiet endurance of just keeping things going. The mark of women’s hands on everything around us that we somehow still forget to celebrate.

I wanted to make something that held all of that. And for the last chorus, I asked women I love and who have lost their research funding under the current administration to come sing it with me, loudly, together. I hope you’ll feel that when you hear it.

That was a hard time, early January. So many more months and years of Trumpism to struggle through. Hundreds of jobs lost at Duke, and the thousands of UNC system faculty told that our syllabi were now all public record, which in this environment put our classes and careers (maybe our lives) at risk. Thousands of important research grants, many of them led by women scientists and scholars, cancelled by 20-something DOGE boys using AI.

But Tift said “Let’s get together and sing.” Some of us said, “We can’t sing.” Tift said, “Of course you can sing.”

She invited us into the under-construction lobby of The Gables and taught us the words:

Whatever comes next there always will be

Poets and revolutionaries

People who risk their own for another

The everyday singing of mothers and daughters

I hear the everyday singing

I hear the everyday singing

I hear the everyday singing

It goes

May Love write the story between us

May Love fill the space that remains

May Love enter here on my signing

May Love leave no blank page

Here we are after recording (photo from Tift’s Substack):

Here is the song and video:

May love leave no blank page, friends. Whatever comes next.

P.S. The Office of Management and Budget has published proposed new rules that will put all federal grants under review and potential cancellation by political appointees of the president, endangering the work of nearly every scientist and researcher in the country. The journal Science calls it a “red alert.” To oppose rule changes that politicize your research (or scientific research more broadly), please submit a comment at this link. Substantial comments are allowed until July 13th. The administration MUST reply to every substantial comment.

And, if you want to know more about how the targeted termination of scientific grants has affected minoritised researchers and the communities they study, please read this devastating Lancet article coauthored my friend and fellow AAUP organizer Abbey Hatcher.

And friends in the Triangle—Sylvester and I will be at McIntyre’s Books on June 27 at 2pm to talk about The Legend of Wyatt Outlaw. Please join us and spread the word!