Play Jay

One evening in the fall of 1974 , the nineteen-year-old grandson of Red Cornish, Herman Hayes, drove downtown to see his infant nephew, James.

Herm parked his car near Grand Circus Park and walked to the nearby Madison-Lenox Hotel, where his big sister Maureen now lived with her new husband—Beverly Yancey, a musician whom everyone called by his middle name, Dewitt. When Maureen let him into their apartment, Herm hollered. There was little James, a fat baby perched upright on the knee of his father. Dewitt was holding the wobbly infant vertical with his left hand curled gently around the back of James’s neck. With his right, Dewitt’s fingers thumped a rhythm on James’s belly, just as Dewitt would pluck his upright bass, singing along …

Booom-badu-bup-boooom. Badooom-bup-boooom.

“Dewitt,” Herman said. “You’re playing your son ?!”

“It’s the only way I can get him to shut up and stop crying,” Dewitt replied. Maureen shook her head. That wasn’t even the half of it. James wouldn’t sleep at night without some kind of music, either on the stereo, or Dewitt playing his bass, or—as it was tonight—Dewitt playing James.

As Dewitt tapped his foot, James bounced, his round eyes and tiny ears wide open. Herm sat down and watched the father put the bass lines into him.

Born February 7, 1974, James Dewitt Yancey represented a second chance at building a family for both of his parents.

Maureen Hayes came from Black Bottom. Her family lived in the upstairs flat of an old house on Antietam Street, oil-burning stove in the middle of the dining room. With four younger siblings—Terone, Reta, Clarice, and Herman—Maureen was saddled with their care while her mother, Maybeline, worked a succession of jobs: switchboard operator, bookbinder; and her father, Thomas “Suge” Hayes, made deliveries of bootlegged corn liquor. Sometimes he’d pile the children into his black 1949 Mercury to fetch his ingredients, sending each of them into different markets to buy five-pound bags of Domino sugar, and he always left a pad and pen near the house phone so they could take orders whenever someone called for

“the milkman.” Maureen felt as much apart from this world as she was a part of it: she had fallen in love with opera after studying classical voice at Miller Junior High. Her aunt, a music teacher, occasionally gave her tickets to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra; Maureen and her friend from glee club donned their freshly pressed school uniforms, taking the bus to join the white-gloved ladies and besuited gentlemen at the Ford Auditorium. Back in Black Bottom, no one shared her passion. Girls at school teased her about her singing. Her mother, Maybeline, listened to country music. Maureen brought her sister Reta to a concert, thinking it might give her some culture. Reta fell asleep. Her brothers got their hands on her two favorite records—a 45-rpm single of Nina Simone’s “I Loves You, Porgy,” and an album by her idol Leontyne Price, the first Black prima donna at the Metropolitan Opera— and threw them around until they cracked. Her alienation began to make more sense to her when she turned fifteen and needed her birth certificate to apply for a summer job. According to the City of Detroit’s records, there was no Maureen Hayes. Her legal name was Maureen Renee Shearod, the daughter of Maybeline Cornish and George Robert Shearod, to whom her mother was still technically married. A number of disconnected memories came rushing back to Maureen in a thunderclap, moments that now made sense when joined together—being left behind when her younger siblings went off to spend their summers in Alabama with Suge’s family; the Christmas card from Suge’s sister that she found open on her mother’s bed: I’m putting $400 in this envelope and I want you to spend $100 on each one of my babies . Maureen, who’d never received any money, did the math and told her mother: Aunt Mag can’t count. There’s five of us. Maybeline told Maureen not to read her letters and to mind her business. Suge and his children never wavered in their embrace of Maureen; she felt some distance nonetheless.

By the time Maureen came of age, the neighborhood had been upended, and so had her family. Suge had grown his hustle into a large drug operation, shacking up with a girlfriend while running cocaine out of the City Airport Inn on Gratiot; Maybeline, with help from her father, Red Cornish, bought a new home on Garland, pregnant with Suge’s fifth child, Albert, while Maureen was expecting her first, Kenya, fathered by a young man from the neighborhood. The next few years were a traumatic blur. She moved in with a new boyfriend, a drug dealer and user who grew increasingly abusive. While Maureen was pregnant with his son, Kenya died under his care— a bad fall , he claimed. Maureen fled to her family’s home and had her second child, Andre, while mourning her first. She cared for Andre for the first few years of his life, but eventually gave him to his paternal grandmother as a way to keep Andre and herself safe, and perhaps a way to survive that chapter of her life by shutting it out.

Maureen started over. She promised God she’d go to church. She created a workaday life for herself with a clerical job at the IRS. Her dreams of a performing career had long since faded when she was introduced to Dewitt Yancey, who had never stopped chasing his.

The Yancey family’s music history ran decades deep. Dewitt’s parents, William and Beverly, had both migrated from the South and played piano accompaniment for silent films in movie halls. They had twelve children: James, Blanche, Webster, McCoy, Clemmer Geno, Robert Lee, Alberta, Annabelle, Thelma, Martha, Cecelia, and, born in 1932, Beverly Dewitt, a boy named for his mother. Dewitt saw combat in the army during the Korean War, and carried with him thereafter what later generations would call posttraumatic stress. When he was discharged, he came home and went to work on the Ford line, but music was his preoccupation even when it wasn’t his occupation. In the late 1950s, his brother Geno worked with a singing group, the Ambassadors, for whom Dewitt wrote and produced records. Later, Dewitt and his songwriting partner Johnny Thornton coaxed a young gospel singer to record a couple of their songs. Kim Weston was uncomfortable with secular music at first, and it took a few years until Thornton and his cousin Eddie Holland convinced her to sign with the record company Holland worked for, Motown. Weston went on to record a handful of hits for the label, including “Take Me in Your Arms (Rock Me a Little While)” and “It Takes Two” with Marvin Gaye.

But Dewitt had moved on by the time Kim Weston’s career took off. He joined another singing group, the Ivies, who recorded songs for Roulette and Brunswick Records, and whose leader, Aaron McCray, turned down an offer from Motown because the money wasn’t right. Sometimes billed as the “Sensation Ivies,” they also recorded sides for singer- entrepreneur Johnnie Mae Matthews, one of the first Black women to found and operate her own independent label, Northern Records, and sang backup on her 1961 single “My Little Angel.” In the years to come, Matthews became a friend and mentor to Dewitt Yancey, who wrote, recorded vocals, and arranged for Matthews’s groups like the Eldees.

Dewitt would tell his family and friends that, in the late sixties, he had another brush with Motown, ghostwriting a song called “It’s a Shame” and selling it to the label—which, according to Dewitt, gave him a Ford Cortina; gave the song to the Detroit Spinners; and gave the writing credit to Stevie Wonder, Syreeta Wright, and Lee Garrett. “It’s a Shame” became the Spinners’ first hit in 1970.1 But Dewitt Yancey had little to show for all his work, neither in credits nor cash. He’d married a woman named Alice Scarbough and they’d had three children—two girls, Beverly and Tracey, and a boy, Mark, whom everyone called Dewayne. Dewitt’s work at the plant was the thing that kept the family afloat. By 1973, Dewitt’s first marriage was over and he was living in a room at the Madison-Lenox Hotel.

Maureen met Dewitt when a mutual friend heard her sing and convinced Dewitt to invite her to one of his rehearsals. Dewitt liked Maureen’s voice enough to bring her to an audition at a nightclub, the Hideaway, where the owner offered her a regular gig on the spot. It was all too much for Maureen, who worked full-time and took accounting classes at night. But Dewitt kept inviting her to rehearsals and Maureen, for some reason, kept finding the time. She liked this generous, gregarious man who seemed to think nothing of giving his time and effort to all these musicians and singers. She was twenty-two, he was thirty-eight. They had both just been through separate, significant splits. But she knew Dewitt was a good provider, working every shift he could at Ford, doing his music thing when he couldn’t; and a good father, taking his kids every weekend. She made a silent vow: I’m gon’ get him .

Moving into Dewitt’s home, Maureen tried to be respectful of his children, who reacted to their father’s new wife in different ways: The eldest daughter, Beverly, fourteen, was polite. The boy, Dewayne, thirteen, brooded. Tracey, eight, was resentful and possessive of her father. At first, the weekends were not comfortable.

James changed things. Since Maureen had brought her son home from Zieger Hospital, Dewitt’s girls doted on him. James had a healthy appetite, and Maureen was tiny, so she carried the heavy boy in a sling around her belly. Maureen and the girls laughed at James’s little feet rotating like propellers whenever he would eat his favorite food—Gerber Hawaiian Delight. By the time James was six months old, the doctors told Maureen that she needed to restrict his diet. But it soon became clear to them that James took the world in through his ears more than his mouth.

When he wasn’t using his son as a musical instrument, Dewitt played his upright bass; James startled both his parents by singing along and matching Dewitt’s pitch. When Dewitt put James Brown on the stereo system, little James Yancey would pull himself up by the netting of his playpen and dance. When James got big enough to move around on his own, records became his thing: crawl to the turntable and watch the label spin. When James was old enough to walk, Dewitt took him record shopping as a treat, and James soon got his own portable, battery- powered record player. Dewitt would return from his shift at the plant to bring James to nearby Harmonie Park for some fresh air, and James would insist on bringing that record player with him. He’d load a stack of 45-rpm singles onto his chubby arms, pushing his hands through the spindle holes and letting them dangle; then James would sit and play records for his fellow Detroiters. Passersby were amused at the sight of this toddler playing grown-up music. They’d make requests— You got any James Brown? —and little James knew exactly what records they meant. He couldn’t yet read, but he could find the right records using the color of the labels as a guide.

At that very moment, six hundred miles to the east, a new scene of park-and-street DJs was emerging in New York City; a culture that didn’t yet have a name. James, at the age of two, was with them in spirit, spinning 45s in the streets of the city on the strait.

Through Dewitt’s drive, Maureen found her singing voice again, but she discovered that their home had room only for Dewitt’s dreams. When James was a baby, she’d enrolled in a correspondence course to finish her accounting degree; Dewitt didn’t like her studying and taking time away from the family, and Maureen never finished the course. On their first Christmas together, Dewitt began making a gift list for their children, and on it, four names. Dewitt can’t count , Maureen thought. There are five children: Beverly, Tracey, Dewayne, James … and Andre. Maureen had already noticed Dewitt’s lack of interest when Andre came for the rare visit. She had hoped Dewitt’s heart might warm to him as hers had for his children. But in that moment, she decided to stop trying.

Maureen buried her wants because she wanted, most of all, to be married. So she sang when Dewitt wanted to sing, rehearsing until she lost her voice. She bowled when Dewitt wanted to go bowling, his favorite family pastime. And when the owner of a nearby hotel restaurant, the Milner Grill, wanted to turn his business over to Dewitt, Maureen found herself running it: cooking, waiting on the counter, operating the register, serving cube steaks and salads, up before dawn and closing after dark, while James kept himself occupied with a crayon and paper, sitting at a table in the back. Things got harder: Maureen gave birth to a girl, Martha, born in late spring 1977. When an ectopic pregnancy sent Maureen to the hospital, her recovery spelled the end of the Yanceys’ adventure in food service. By then, Maureen had taken responsibility for another child who wasn’t hers, Earl Hurst. A year younger than James, Earl was the son of an unmarried couple who lived in the Milner Hotel, where the Yanceys had moved to run the restaurant—the father, Earl Sr., worked long hours; the mother was a white woman who seemed disinterested in parenting altogether. Maureen grew fond of the boy and, with financial support from Earl Sr., she and Dewitt took him in. After a couple of moves, Maureen found a bigger place for their expanding family, a three-bedroom wood-frame house in Conant Gardens, on Wexford Street, where her sister Clarice already lived.

A tiny pocket of blocks on the East Side between 6 and 7 Mile Roads, Conant Gardens was the kind of place where Maureen knew the children could have more space and enjoy, for the first time, a backyard. But her apartment-dwelling downtown kids were terrified of bugs, flying insects, and dirt. They preferred to stay inside: Earl drawing, Martha writing, James playing records. Still, their house was a short walk to good schools and a great African Methodist Episcopal church, Vernon Chapel. Dewitt and Maureen joined the choir, but the music was—even for Maureen’s refined tastes—a tad too proper. So the Yanceys also hosted Positive Force, an afterservice Sunday singing group for more raucous praise sessions. Dewitt often grilled in the backyard; for a goof, Dewitt had Maureen modify an apron so that when he raised it to wipe his face, out popped a long, brown tube shaped like a penis, complete with black wool around the base to simulate pubic hair. The apron was such a popular gag that he and Maureen started selling them to church friends, the fabric customized for skin tone. It was one of several family side hustles: lawn care, a reupholstery business. With half of Dewitt’s check going to support his older children, Maureen had to keep her hands moving.

The Hayes siblings were frequent visitors. Herman had become a professional chef and now had a job making donuts, and would often stop by after work at Dewitt’s behest to bring a dozen. Herm’s own kids were sick of them, and of the smell of fryer oil on their father’s work clothes. One day, Dewitt discovered that Herm’s regular box had gone missing from the kitchen. He found it empty, under James’s bed. After the bust, James began needling Herm regularly. Herm shook his head— the kid barely said two words to anyone but had plenty to give his uncle the third degree about some damn donuts.

As the kids grew, Dewitt wrestled with the machines at Ford’s Rouge and Saline plants, then at Livonia Transmission; driving by way of surface streets because he was rattled by the freeways, and because his car would occasionally break down. He’d relax at home by recording himself singing, assembling three-part harmony on a chunky tape deck. And he continued to moonlight for Johnnie Mae Matthews’s Northern Records, running rehearsals out of her West Side basement and recording at United Sound. Maureen endured these interminable sessions even though she had grown to hate them. Because these engagements often ran late into the night, the children had to attend them as well: James, Earl, and Martha in their street clothes or in their pajamas, roaming the same studio halls that George Clinton walked, or curled up with a blanket in a corner, trying to get some sleep before school. James stayed up and watched the action, class in session.

James was quiet, in part, because he stuttered. His father was a stutterer, too; when Dewitt was a child, sometimes he would have to lie down and cross his arms against his chest, holding opposite shoulders, just to get the words out.

But mostly James didn’t talk because he was listening. Where others’ energies went into their output, James used his own to process input. When the Yanceys arrived at Grandmother Maybeline’s house on Garland for family functions, they entered to the cheers and hollers of the Hayes clan. But while the adults carried on and the rest of the kids ran around outside, James drifted over toward the dining room and the wooden cabinet containing Maybeline’s stereo. He’d slide down on his knees on the plush red carpet and examine each record, one by one. Then he’d walk to the staircase that led down to the basement, where Herman had tacked up two dozen record album covers at Maybeline’s request—Nancy Wilson, Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, Dinah Washington, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Mary Wells. James—carefully, carefully—removed the four pins from the corners of one of them. He flipped the cover to the back and read all the text he could; and, if there was an inner sleeve that had liner notes on it, he read that, too. For Maybeline, her wall of album covers was decoration. James saw them as code, and looked behind the mosaic to see the information that most intrigued him: the names of the musicians who played on each of the songs and of the people who wrote them; the places where those songs were recorded and the producers who brought those sessions into being. After studying these details, saving them, he would flip the album back, hold it against the wall, and—carefully, carefully—place the tacks back in the tiny pinholes so no one would be the wiser. Then James would move on to the next record and repeat the process.

At first, James’s relationship to music was about absorbing rather than creating. It was Maureen—remembering how hostile her childhood environment was to her own musical aspirations—who took the initiative to enroll five-year-old James in Saturday morning piano lessons at the Krainz Woods Music School. The classical rigor of the place delighted Maureen, but she soon noticed how James would drag behind her as they walked to his lessons. The musical director at Vernon Chapel AME proposed a solution: Kenneth Minor ran his own music school, much less formal, more inclusive of popular styles. James liked these lessons a bit more. After a time, James declared that he wanted to play the drums. Maureen told him that she couldn’t afford a whole set for him, but she had saved enough by the Christmas of James’s eighth year to buy him a good snare from the JC Penney catalog and some brushes. Within a few weeks, she remarked that James was making that single snare drum sound like a full kit. Dewitt and Maureen soon drafted him to be the regular drummer for their jazz-andgospel singing group, the Larks, who emulated the tight harmonies and vocalese techniques of the Manhattan Transfer.

At Farwell Junior High School, the music teacher Peggy McConnell paired James with the cello; and though the instrument was taller than he was, James was equal to its challenges, putting some of Dewitt’s low-end legacy to work. James applied himself with similar dedication to the baritone sax. McConnell began to rely on James—always game, always prepared—as a model for her other students. He played in the Detroit Public Schools

“Area E” orchestra at events around the city; in the audience at Kettering High School, Maureen cried. Dewitt enrolled James and Earl in a program run by the woman whose career he helped launch: Kim Weston—at the behest of Mayor Coleman Young—had created an expansive summer cultural curriculum for the city’s school-age children. Launched in 1977, the annual Kim Weston Festival of the Performing Arts offered training in a variety of disciplines from music and dance to culinary and clerical work. Dewitt put James in instrumental instruction and Earl in visual arts.

And then there were Friday nights in the Yanceys’ living room, where Maureen and Dewitt led their children, family, and friends in a weekly variety show in which everyone was required to perform. Dewitt trotted the children out to sing “Mr. Sandman” by the Chordettes; the arrangement of which, naturally, he’d taught them. For a time James, Earl, and Martha billed themselves as their own singing group, “The Yancey Kids.” They wrote songs, one of them called “Like a Zombie,” with Earl singing lead and James on drums, convinced that they had a huge hit on their hands. They put on home concerts and made tickets by cutting up sheets of paper. On Sundays there was choir and band at Vernon Chapel, where James, Earl, and Martha sang and James played drums.

On other days at the church there were Boy Scouts for James and Earl, and Girl Scouts for Martha; and during summers, a junior police cadet program where James, among other activities, volunteered to visit the homes of senior citizens. Maureen thought James’s choice was a bit unusual for a child his age, but James told her that he liked hearing their stories.

And they liked him, too. Who wouldn’t? The kid was all ears.

The Hayes clan called the Yancey family “a band of Gypsies,” always moving as a pack, whether walking to the convenience store or decamping from one house to another. They relocated across the street to a new home on Wexford, and then southwest a few blocks to a house on the corner of McDougall and Berry. Everywhere they went, their routines remained.

On one hand, that rigidity made sense in a city that was increasingly depopulated and dangerous. On James’s eleventh Halloween in 1984, 810 buildings across Detroit were set afire during “Devil’s Night,” an annual American adolescent tradition twisted into a grim ritual, equal parts nihilism, protest, and landlord arson. While suburban cynics denigrated Detroit from afar and voyeurs came to gawk, Detroit’s community institutions, including

Vernon Chapel, started offering “Angel’s Night” events as a way to keep kids off the streets. Conant Gardens was spared the worst, much safer and more stable than many neighborhoods closer to the city’s center, but on the quality-of-life spectrum, the community that began in the 1940s as a Black middle-class village now leaned closer to slum than suburb.

On the other hand, Dewitt never wanted anyone out of his sight, and that restricted Maureen’s movements as well. Dewitt could get jealous and downright paranoid when it came to his young wife. Maureen and her siblings chalked up Dewitt’s conservative thinking about women and marriage to him being so much older than her. It was all relative: Dewitt was a far cry from his brother Geno, who lived with a virtual stable of cowed women and whom the Hayes family suspected of being a pimp. Dewitt had a sense of humor that could lift everyone’s spirits; but he could, at any moment, turn dour and deeply insecure. Maureen never knew when those bursts of anger would come.

Perhaps it was because Dewitt disapproved of her taking an office job, or because of the remoteness she felt from her first son, Andre, or the loss of her first daughter, Kenya, but as the years progressed Maureen created a career caring for children. Maureen began watching a neighbor’s boy who had scoliosis; then started looking after a couple of latchkey kids. After taking some referrals from Vernon Chapel, Ruby Williams, one of the church administrators, asked Maureen if she’d join their day care operation and take some early childhood classes to get certified.

“Mr. Yancey would never allow it,” Maureen replied. She called him “Mr. Yancey” now, a measure of the distance between them.

Williams approached Dewitt on her own, telling him how the church might lose the day care if he couldn’t convince his wife to take these courses. Maureen stifled a giggle when Dewitt mentioned that her taking college classes might be a good idea. It had only taken a dozen years for him to come around. Then Maureen discovered that she was pregnant again. It was her birth control that failed, but she didn’t speak to Dewitt for weeks. She had been looking forward to some freedom now that her kids were old enough to look after themselves. Now she’d have to wait. John Yancey was born on October 13, 1986. He looked uncannily like James.

Shortly after John’s birth, Maureen enrolled in classes at the Dearborn campus of the University of Michigan, to which Dewitt drove her, complaining for miles and miles about the weather, and about her attending a white college in the suburbs instead of a school in the city. Maureen took the reins of Vernon Chapel’s day care, but her marriage remained a disappointment.

James, the listener, took it all in: the tension between a father whose dreams had been truncated by the music business and a mother whose dreams had been truncated by his father.

One day Reta Hayes regaled Dewitt with the story of a younger Maureen’s romantic aspirations, imitating her sister in a lilting, saditty voice: “Maureen used to say, ‘I want a haazzzzband! I want a haazzzzband!’” “And that’s just what she got,” Dewitt replied. “A has-been.”

Dewitt and Maureen had programmed James with the music of their lives— jazz, soul, gospel, classical. His ten-year-old body contained at least fifty years’ worth of code: bass lines and drum riffs, melodies and cadences. But as he got older, James began to program himself. Detroit had a Black-owned TV station, WGPR, and on it, a uniquely Detroit music and dance show: The Scene , hosted by Nat Morris, featuring futuristic music and otherworldly dance moves that made Soul Train look tepid by comparison. On the radio, two DJs brought distinct approaches to their shows. The Electrifying Mojo, on WJLB-FM, created an eclectic, ecumenical mix of electronic-driven funk and soul, one of the first DJs in the nation to throw his support behind a little-known Midwestern artist, Prince. Meanwhile, Jeff Mills on WDRQFM balanced New York rap records with a growing crop of local Detroit tracks, some made by Mills’s friends who were creating their own distinct genre of electronic music.

These sounds were different from the music of James’s parents. That difference came into stark relief for James in 1984 with two rap songs out of New York: “Sucker M.C.’s” by Run-DMC and “Big Mouth” by Whodini. These were not normal instruments he was hearing. The drums on these records didn’t sound anything like the drum set he played in church. They were so loud that they seemed to fill every available sonic space: unwavering, relentless, perfect in their uniformity and repetition. The kick drum vibrated so low that it shook the floor. The vocals on “Big Mouth” stuttered, like he did; but on purpose, like they were being cut up somehow, starting and stopping short, starting and stopping again.

James didn’t yet know that these sounds were made on machines.

But in that moment he decided—however this music got made—that’s the way he wanted to make music, too.