Womack Sisters debut on Daptone with soul rooted in dynasty
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- The Womack Sisters — BG, Zeimani, and Kucha — are releasing their debut album on Daptone Records, the Brooklyn soul label home to Sharon Jones, Jalen Ngonda, and Thee Sacred Souls, with Dap-Kings co-founder Bosco Mann now playing bass in their live band.
- Their single "If I Let You" went viral last month after endorsements from SZA, Timbaland, Ghostface Killah, Pharrell Williams, Erykah Badu, and Questlove, while "Chauffeur" draws directly on the sisters' stint driving Uber in Los Angeles.
- Labels repeatedly rejected the group's soul direction, telling their manager that "soul's not what's happening right now, here in the States, particularly for brown artists," prompting the sisters to self-fund their career through a cleaning company, a marijuana dispensary, and Uber driving.
- Zeimani lost her husband in Atlanta in 2020 — he was robbed and shot, she said — a tragedy that she credits with reshaping the emotional core of the album, alongside the deaths of father Cecil and uncle Bobby Womack in the years prior.
- The sisters made their recording debut as children on the 1993 family album "Transformation to the House of Zekkariyas" and grew up traveling between studios in the Bahamas and Jamaica and homes in London, Bangkok, and Southend-on-Sea.
- Cecil Womack co-wrote Teddy Pendergrass's "Love TKO" and half of Womack and Womack, whose "Teardrops" the sisters covered in a roaring live set at a London festival; Bobby Womack earned the nickname "The Greatest Soul Singer in the World" before his 2014 death.
Why it matters: Three Black women with one of soul music's deepest bloodlines had to self-fund their career because labels told them soul wasn't viable for "brown artists" — and then went viral anyway, with A-list support validating the sound the industry had told them to abandon.
