![]() ![]() It’s not just the gender pronouns that get flipped, either. Sylvester sang the song as if he was the “She” in question, and, without really changing the lyrics, transformed “She” into a powerful affirming statement about himself, his voice, his blackness, his gender fluidity, his stage presence and his background in the church. The original song was a white Southerner-turned-LA country-rocker’s weirdly idealized imagining of Southern African-American womanhood, about a black woman in the south who “worked and slaved” in “a big old field” and “wasn’t very pretty” but “she sure could sing.” It conspicuously fails to consider the suffering experienced by its subject – it’s as if the Eagles had penned Disney’s Song Of The South. But it’s his reinvention of Gram Parsons’ “She” that stands out from this era. His versions of Neil Young’s “Southern Man” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye” discuss racism and betrayal, respectively, with a gravity and sense of personal experience not present in the originals. ![]() When Sylvester and the Hot Band signed with Blue Thumb Records in 1972, Sylvester took his clever song reinterpretations from the stage to the studio. Tellingly, Sylvester performed it with the “girl” lyric from Warwick’s version. He then formed a rock group called Sylvester and the Hot Band, where he performed his own songs in clubs around San Francisco, as well as covers like Dionne Warwick’s “This Girl’s In Love With You,” which was itself a cover of “This Guy’s In Love With You” by Herb Alpert. Sylvester idolized classic female jazz, blues and R&B singers, so for his shows with the Cockettes he would often perform as singers he loved, like Bessie Smith, Lena Horne and Josephine Baker. Sylvester grew up singing in Pentecostal churches in Los Angeles, but ran away as a teen and ended up joining the Cockettes, a pansexual acid-drag-performance troupe/hippie commune in San Francisco.
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