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ROBERTA DAVIS: I grew up in the most racist state that I've ever been in my life called Saint Paul, Minnesota. It's a terrible thing for me to say, but the racism is subtle. In Mississippi, when you go down there, in Louisiana and everything, you better not go here, you better not go there, and in Boston after 10:00 at night, you better not be in Charlestown and everything like that. But everything is so subtle in Minnesota.

And in school, I wanted to take business classes and Mechanic Arts High School wouldn't let me take business classes because all I was going to do was sew, or clean somebody's toilet, or cook in somebody's kitchen. So why should I have to learn how to work a typewriter? So I learned a typewriter at Hallie Q. Brown Community Center.

I typed 90 words a minute, and I was one of the first Black clerk typists hired by a private industry in the State of Minnesota in 1955. And I had to go through a whole lot of stuff to make sure that everybody was OK with hiring somebody else after I left.

SPEAKER: You had to go through a lot of stuff?

ROBERTA DAVIS: Oh, I had to go through a lot of bigotry. So then I decided that the post office was probably the thing that I could get through. So I ended up working at the post office. And I spent a year at Philander Smith College down in Little Rock, Arkansas, because the president of the college came up to our church, and I was playing the organ, and he said-- a pipe organ, and he said that they had a scholarship for me if I wanted to go down to Philander Smith. And so I was one of the first freshmen that went on a six-week singing tour to raise money for college.

And that was very interesting because we were going through the State of Kansas. And so we'd sing in a different town every day. And we were in an airport limousine type car that the gas gauge didn't work and all this other kind of stuff. Anyway, it was so terrible because then I really saw racism as what it really was. And it was like, Oh, yeah, we enjoyed your concert at the church last night, but you can't eat breakfast here, you know.

But I mean, I had to do something like that because I had to find out what was wrong or why everything was going the way it was. My grandparents and four other families started the Camp for United Methodist Church on Fuller and Dale Street Saint Paul. And I was raised in that church believing everything that was said to me about have faith and all of this kind of stuff.

And I don't say that there's anything wrong with having the faith, but at 60 years old now, it's about time for some of this stuff that they're preaching at 11:00 on Sunday morning comes true.

SPEAKER: So you felt even when you were a child, or when you were young, you felt the [INAUDIBLE]

ROBERTA DAVIS: Only from high school. Only after about the last couple of years and after high school.

SPEAKER: But you sensed that contradiction between what you'd been hearing and what was really going on out in the streets and in the business world?

ROBERTA DAVIS: Well, let's put it this way, if you can't get a job, you know that there's something happening if you type 90 words a minute and everybody else is typing 45.

SPEAKER: What did your mother and father do? You said your grandparents started the church.

ROBERTA DAVIS: Daddy came into this state to play hockey. He had a hockey scholarship. And when a nigga showed up in Minnesota at Hamline University with a hockey scholarship, they wouldn't let him sleep in the dorm or anything else like that. He wanted to be a doctor. But after spending about the first half of those cold months in cars trying to find someplace to live and everything like that-- They wouldn't let him in the dorm so he lasted probably a semester.

SPEAKER: And they gave him a scholarship to Hamlin, but then wouldn't really let him in?

ROBERTA DAVIS: Because I guess he was so light, they didn't think that he was Black.

SPEAKER: Interesting. And as soon as they found out, that changed everything?

ROBERTA DAVIS: Changed everything. Well, when I was 16, I started taking classical music lessons because that was all there was in Minnesota, from a lady that was run out of Germany during World War II named Mady Metzger Ziegler. And everybody will tell you we haven't had a teacher like her since she died.

She was a teacher. She really knew what she was doing. And she spent so much time with me. She taught me how to sing. Well, I sang classical music for about 15 years. But then they wouldn't hire me unless it was the day before a concert and somebody got sick, because they knew that I could read music and I could put it all together just like that.

I mean, like, nobody ever came to me and said, well, Roberta, we want you to sing-- In two months, we're going to do this thing, and here's the music, and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Never. Never.

So I went through that stuff, and then one day I woke up after about 12 years, I woke up and I said, hey, this ain't my music anyway. So I said, I'm going to stop reading music and I'm going to start playing again by ear, so--

SPEAKER: So what? Classically trained but didn't really find much satisfaction in that.

ROBERTA DAVIS: Classically trained, gospelly freed, jazz oriented, that's where I am.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

This is a hymn.

SPEAKER: And what is it?

ROBERTA DAVIS: Anyway it's fast.

(SINGING) I must tell Jesus all of my trouble--

But Black people have a feeling in their heart because of all the bullshit that they've been put through in this country. And when I say this country, I know that other countries in the world, because I've been there, are worse, and they would not treat me as well and everything like that. But I'm talking about what the United States is doing. I'm not talking about what I can get in the rest of the world.

OK, so the song, that same song, it comes from the heart.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

It doesn't sound like a hymn anymore, does it? Something like that.

(SINGING) I cannot bear these burdens alone--

I mean, why sing,

(SINGING) I must tell Jesus all of my trouble

I cannot bear these burdens alone--

I mean, sing it with some feeling from your heart.

SPEAKER: In the Jazz world is classical training useful or important?

ROBERTA DAVIS: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Especially to singers that don't want to learn anything. They think, God has given me a natural talent, and all I have to do is open my mouth and sing. But you know something, you can get nodes if you don't sing right. Those are lumps in the middle of your throat, you see?

You can sing for 45 minutes and all of a sudden your throat hurts and everything, you're singing wrong. I can sing for 12 hours and it don't bother me, because I was taught how to sing. You have the only instrument that cannot be replaced. You can buy another piano, you can't buy another voice.

But I mean, that's one of the things that bothers me the most about singers. And what I do the gospel music for about five years and then Manfredo Fest picked me up and I started doing Brazilian music. And then about 1980, I decided that jazz is-- there's something here. So I started going out into New York to find out what would happen.

And the first night that I was in New York, I was looking for a friend of my cousin's named Clifford Jordan, who was one of the greatest jazz saxophone player, but I didn't know it. Coming out of classical music and gospel music, I didn't know nothing about who was in jazz. So I went up there and sang with the guy and come to find out that I was singing with four of the greatest jazz players in New York-- in the world, in the world, really.

SPEAKER: And they were impressed by it?

ROBERTA DAVIS: Uh-huh. Oh, yeah, they took me into a studio and they put me on an album, which is one of the songs that they put me on is on that CD that I just came out with.

[MUSIC PLAYING] On your way home from the store, may I walk you to your door

I would to give you a call, you say you wouldn't mind at all

Can it really be, maybe you're the man for me

Mm, you're sugar and spice and everything nice

You're fire and dice, I better think twice

I met a man, the handsomest in the land

Can it really be you're the man for me

SPEAKER: And that was kind of your first foray into jazz from gospel?

ROBERTA DAVIS: No, that was-- Manfredo was the first one, the Brazilian music.

SPEAKER: How did that come about?

ROBERTA DAVIS: I was singing with Earl Williams, who said, I'm playing up at the top of the Hill, you want to learn some songs? You know, like Funny Valentine and everything that everybody always sings. He said, come on up here to the top of the Hill, and then you can sit in with us and learn some songs.

And I was sitting in with him one night and I'd only been singing up there with him for about three months and Manfredo came through and came up to the top to see Erv, because they were friends, and he picked me up.

SPEAKER: What about the future of jazz? I'm wondering if young folks who are interested in rhythm and blues or rap or hip hop or something, do you think that they may come to a point 10, 20 years from now when those people discover jazz and it grabs them, or are they just on a different wavelength?

ROBERTA DAVIS: It seems to happen that the older you get-- Because jazz is the most complicated music art form that there is. And it takes you a while to find out that you can do something a little different than playing the three note chords that you've been playing for the last 20 years, and you call it Rock, and you can make all this noise that you can and everything like that.

Then you can find out that there are different ways of-- Like, if you take a favorite song, there are different ways of playing that favorite song. But you can't do it unless you have some knowledge.

[JAZZ PLAYING] --where nothing else works there

For all God's children, God given

And there's more on its way

Johnny my [INAUDIBLE] he's just a knock away

[SCATTING]

[APPLAUSE]