Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 295 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.

I admit to a musical bias for female vocalists, and as I’m also a native New Yorker I have a predilection for homegirls. Alicia Keys is one such artist—she is not only a vocalist and a New Yorker, but also an instrumentalist, lyricist, and composer, and Sunday is her birthday. I’m wishing her a happy birthday, and hope you will join me. 

Candace LaBalle and Michael Belfiore have written an extensive biography of Keys at Musician Guide:

Just three weeks after being released, Alicia Keys’s debut album, Songs in A Minor, was certified triple platinum. Suddenly you couldn’t open a magazine, turn on the radio, or tune into MTV without encountering the stunning biracial Keys. With her classical training on the piano, soul-stirring lyrics, and heart-stopping voice, Keys had become a bona fide superstar. Not just another pretty face singing catchy pop, Keys wrote most of the lyrics and music, played all of the instruments, and co-produced the album. Of Songs in A Minor, Keys told Worldpop.com, “[it’s] a journey through my life from the time when I was 14, when I wrote the first song on the album…. All the things I went through, and experienced…. That’s where the title comes from as well, A Minor is one of my favorite keys to play in, and A is the first letter of my name so it really just talks about songs from me.” The album eventually won the artist five Grammy Awards. And her fame was solidified and proven real with the release of her second album, The Diary of Alicia Keys, which debuted at number one on the Billboard Top 200 Albums list and garnered the artist six more Grammy Awards.

Keys was born on January 21, 1981, in New York City to an Italian-American mother and an African-American father. Her parents did not stay together and Keys was raised by her mother, Terri Augello, a paralegal and sometimes actress. As a child, Keys didn’t see much of her father, Craig Cook, however, they remained on good terms. Despite the difficult life of a single mom and the poverty in which she often struggled, Keys’s mother was determined to nourish her child’s budding passion for music and enrolled Keys in piano classes. Keys told Rolling Stone, “I’ve had a deep love for music since I was four. … Music came before everything, everything, everything. I would risk everything for it.” Despite her commitment, Keys was aware of the financial strain the lessons put on her mother’s meager salary and once begged to quit. “But my mom would tell me, ‘Quit what you like, but you’re not quitting piano.’ She didn’t care what it cost,” Keys told Newsweek. With her mother’s support, Keys learned classical piano by the time she was seven. At eleven she began writing songs.

Here’s that album debut:

I enjoy listening to musicians tell their own stories, which she did in this NPR video:

The NPR video notes:

There are a few elements that reliably form the basis for an Alicia Keys song: heartache or infatuation, an essential tenderness and emotion made heavy with wisdom, a patiently unfurling melody and, of course, that voice, yearning and ready to break, even as it remains in control. Even though these building blocks have helped her stand apart from pop trends while forging a remarkable career, Keys says the making of a classic song is still a mystery to her.

Fifteen years after the release of her first album; 15 years after her first single, “Fallin'” went to No. 1 on the pop charts and became repertoire for televised singing competitions; 15 years after that first armful of Grammys, Alicia Keys says her songwriting has not become any more scientific. “Every time I write a song, I never know how it happens. And I kinda always wanna be like that,” she tells Jason King …. “Some people are very mathematical writers, which is very intriguing. … It’s so opposite from me.”

But, Keys says, “there are ingredients that make it more digestible. And for me, [that’s] mostly a piano and a voice.” Keys was drawn to the piano from an early age, and reaped benefits from the hours of practice she put in while friends were outside playing. “It provided me… focus, the ability to pay attention for a long enough period of time to make progress,” she says. “And the actual knowledge of music, which then unlocked the ability to be able to write my own music and put my own chords and things I heard in my own head to different lyrics I felt. And I never, ever had to wait for anybody to write something for me.”

In the earliest phases of her career, she says, artistic control was the first thing on her mind: “I would go into sessions already prepared with, ‘Here’s different groups of chords: I wrote this, I wrote this, I wrote this, I wrote this, I wrote this,’ because they didn’t believe that I could do all these things, that I could play and that I could produce and that I could actually write. I was like 15 years old, and they were like, ‘I’m sure you have a cute little idea but let’s get to the real music.'”

Here’s more of Keys from Keys in the trailer for “Noted”:

Happy Birthday, Alicia Keys!

Join me in the comments section below for more Keys, and for the weekend roundup of musician birthdays and departures.