Rickie Lee Jones

Rickie Lee Jones
Gallery The Singers Ruby Green Singing

Grand themes seldom require grandiose means, and James Chapin lets a lone singer of spirituals carry on her young shoulders the entire weight of what he had to say.

She might also be singing William Blake's lines:

Look on the rising sun: There God does live,
And gives his light, and gives his heat away;
And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive
Comfort in the morning, joy in the noonday.

And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love;
And these black bodies and this sunburnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

RUBY GREEN SINGING by JAMES CHAPIN, c. 1928
The Norton Gallery, West Palm Beach, Florida

"The symbol of the human gesture interests me a lot. Not the gesture of hands or feet so much as the carriage of the human body and the human head."
- JAMES CHAPIN

"Ruby Green's carriage is like a flower growing towards the sun. Music rises in her like sap."
- ALEXANDAR ELLIOT

back to The Singers