from the cutting room floor: don't go chasing waterfalls (in memoriam of rico wade)
NOTE: This is an excerpt from a much larger section of writing that was ultimately cut from my dissertation about Atlanta titled, “The South Got Something to Share.” I share it here and now in memoriam of Rico Wade whose work as a music producer and songwriter contributed to the distinctive sound of the South.
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” was the first poem published by Langston Hughes. The poem, composed when Hughes was 18 and published in The Crisis in 1921, was dedicated to W.E.B. Du Bois. In it, Hughes employs water by the way of rivers to metaphorize the Black experience; tracing the movement of Black life from the Euphrates and Nile rivers of the African continent to the Mississippi River of the American South. To speak of rivers is to acknowledge the fact that our souls bear the imprint of our experiences navigating worlds Old and New to us. Recalling Keith Basso in Wisdom Sits in Places (1996), the practice of place-making is ultimately a way that language maps onto people and communities in the most literal sense.
Since moving to Atlanta I have been intrigued by the fact that this landlocked city has so many streets and neighborhoods named after bodies of water like Cascade Road and Lakewood Heights, both of which offer a history that speaks to the relationship between race and place in the city. A cascade is a waterfall of small height and lesser steepness that descends over a series of rock steps. The term is often used to describe a series of small falls along a river. Atlanta’s Cascade Road was originally a Creek territory until their forced removal in the early nineteenth century. It was also the site of a Civil War victory for the Confederacy. In a more contemporary context, Cascade Road is an area that contributed to the desegregation of Atlanta’s suburbs. When Black families moved into the originally all-white neighborhood of “Cascade Heights,” White families moved farther west in what is known as “White flight.” According to the website of the Atlanta History Center, after Dr. Clinton Warner, a Black surgeon, purchased a home on 20 acres of land in Cascade Heights, Mayor Ivan Allen, Jr., appeased White residents who demanded that a “racial buffer” be built and ordered the construction of a wooden barricade across Peyton Road in southwest Atlanta on December 17, 1962. The barricade severed the main line that connected the White and Black sections of the Cascade Heights neighborhood. This “racial buffer” was meant to prevent additional Black homebuyers from moving into the neighborhood. It was referred to in national newspapers as “Atlanta’s Berlin Wall.” This was a public relations nightmare for a mayor who campaigned on a pro-integration ticket and secured victory due in large part to the Black vote. The barricade in Cascade Heights stood for seventy-two days before a judge ordered for the wall to fall.
Among my earliest childhood memories are of car rides from my family’s apartment in Greenbelt, MD to the Howard University Early Learning Program on the campus of Howard University in Washington, DC where I attended kindergarten. Years later, in a full circle moment, I would graduate with a Bachelor's degree in Communications & Culture from the Howard University School of Communications which is located across the building for the Early Learning Program. My mom always kept the radio on WPGC 95.5 to listen to the nationally syndicated, “Tom Joyner Morning Show.” I can hear the theme song now even as I type: “oh oh oh, it’s the Tom Joyner morning show!” The year is 1995 and my favorite song never fails to hit the airwaves each morning. I sing along to it in the backseat of my mom’s champagne-colored Toyota Corolla. The song is “Waterfalls'' by Atlanta-based group, TLC. My mom and I still laugh about this memory because I sang the lyrics incorrectly for years. See, I thought the chorus went, “Don’t go Jason waterfalls,” and believed that the song was about a boy named Jason who got too close to the water. I kid you not. The correct chorus lyrics, this time in full, are: “Don’t go chasing waterfalls/Please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you're used to/I know that you're gonna have it your way or nothing at all/But I think you're moving too fast.” The song itself is a metaphorical warning against participating in self-destructive behavior, so I wasn’t too far off sentiment-wise.
A waterfall is a river or other body of water’s steep fall over a rocky ledge into a plunge pool below. In a 2018 interview with Jenny Stevens of The Guardian about how the song “Waterfalls'' was made, TLC group member Rozonda ‘Chilli’ Thomas recalls the social significance of the song at the time of its release stating, “Aids is still out there. You still have bullying. You still have drugs. But you have to continue to bring awareness so that people can become more responsible and want to do the right things. You can never have too many records like Waterfalls.” Group member Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins shares in the same interview that the trio wanted “Waterfalls” to be their version of alternative music because it was different from the songs on their first album On the TLC Tip (1992). However, Clive Davis, the head of Arista which distributed their record label, the Atlanta-based LaFace Records, thought that the song was “too deep” and in her words “he didn’t think people would bump up the street to it.” With support from L.A. Reid, co-founder of LaFace Records, the group went against Davis to invest in the song’s now-iconic music video which was directed by F Gary Gary. “Waterfalls'' was the eighth track of TLC’s second album, CrazySexyCool, released on November 15, 1994. It is considered to be the group’s greatest song. “The timing was perfect,” Thomas tells The Guardian, “Organized Noize produced the track. They’d been working with Outkast and Goodie Mob and that funky, soulful sound that was their signature.” Organized Noize perfected their signature sound in Rico Wade’s mother’s home in the Lakewood Heights neighborhood of Atlanta. Here laid the dirt, or the basement crawl space, that cultivated the Dungeon Family and served as their foundation. “The Dungeon” was located at the intersection of Lakewood Terrace and Conrad Ave at the address of 1907 Lakewood Terrace SE. The development of the Lakewood Heights neighborhood began in 1874 with the creation of a water works for the city of Atlanta. When the water works became defunct by 1893, the land was developed into a recreation and resort area known as Lakewood Park (currently Lakewood Fairgrounds) before the area became fully developed as a suburb with a focus on attracting working-class White families from Atlanta. A small creek runs through the neighborhood’s historic district to what is now the Lakewood Park Lake. According to the Lakewood Heights Historic District’s 2002 application to the National Register of Historic Places which is publicly available online, “The inconsistent street patterns of the Lakewood Heights District reflect the development of the neighborhood along roads existing from the Civil War era, namely the roads known today as Jonesboro Road and Lakewood Avenue that are curvilinear, and the construction of the trolley lines and, subsequently, residential development on rectilinear streets.” On June 17, 2021, Airbnb announced a partnership with rapper Big Boi in celebration of Black Music Month that would allow fans to “relive hip hop history” by booking an overnight stay at “The Dungeon” house at 1907 Lakewood Terrace SE. The promotion commemorated the 25th anniversary of OutKast’s ‘ATLiens’ album and at the time allowed guests to book the home for twenty-five dollars a night. A corporate blog post promoting the partnership stated that “Aspiring musicians will have access to a state-of-the-art in-home studio, so they can follow in the footsteps of Outkast and other music pioneers from Atlanta.” The listing titled “‘The Dungeon’ - Live Like a Hip Hop Legend” is still live on Airbnb at the time of this writing. Four guests can now stay in the home for $227/night. The listing has a 4.91 rating from 90 reviews with Big Boi’s son Bamboo Patton named as a “Superhost.”
Bibliography
Airbnb. 2021. "Big Boi invites music fans to stay at the iconic Dungeon Family house." Airbnb News. https://news.airbnb.com/dungeon-family/
Basso, Keith H. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press.
Carlisle, Lois. 2021. "Atlanta's Berlin Wall." Atlanta History Center. https://www.atlantahistorycenter.com/blog/atlantas-berlin-wall/
Hughes, Langston. 1921. "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." The Crisis. Poem. Stevens, Jenny. 2018. "How we made TLC's Waterfalls." The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/may/15/how-we-made-tlc-waterfalls
Lakewood Heights Historic District. 2002. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. National Park Service. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/07ba5421-a9ad-4425-8ad7-2fd53e46f9d6
TLC, "Waterfalls," Track 8 on CrazySexyCool, Arista/LaFace Record. November 15, 1993, song.