LaRhonda Steele has been a part of Portland’s musical landscape for a little over 20 years. Her partner in life and one of her musical collaborators is her husband and keyboardist, Mark Steele.
She is the choir director for the Portland Interfaith Gospel Choir, which is made up of both seasoned vocalists and novice performers representing many faiths and cultures. The group’s mission is to use black gospel music to bring together people of different backgrounds, ethnicities and beliefs to celebrate diversity, social justice, equality and peace.
There are only a handful of other interfaith gospel choirs – one in Oakland, Calif., and another in Arcata, Calif.
“It’s not about color,” Steele said. “It’s about people wanting to experience the freedom that gospel music brings. … The freedom to be spiritual and be connected and be healed.”
Additionally, Steele is music director for Unity West Linn and performs with several local blues, R&B and gospel artists. One of those groups is the Adrian Martin Sextet, which are taking their Nina Simone tribute show, “I Put a Spell on You,” to Portland’s Alberta Rose Theatre on March 19, 2016.
Asked about the changes she has seen in Portland, Steele cited the population growth and the legalization of marijuana, something that she said would never happen in her home state of Oklahoma.
She also talked about the gentrification of the city.
“A lot of the black businesses are gone. It’s become so very – what is the word? Not yuppie. Hipster!” she said.
“We live right in Northeast and have been over here 14 to 15 years. My husband is white, so maybe we were a part of that gentrification? I don’t know."
Suzanne Zalokar: Black gospel music. This sounds like a great opportunity to experience it and learn about it. How can I get involved?
LaRhonda Steele: We have been in existence for about four years. Each year it has grown in size, and so we’ve had to learn how to manage that.
We have auditions two seasons each year. We have had wonderful involvement.
We’ve been a part of the Martin Luther King Jr. celebration that World Arts Foundation puts on each year – the largest one in the country with Ken Berry. We’ve been at that for the past three years. We’ve done the Grotto. This year we are doing A Life for Lynn, a benefit for Dave Kahl and his family. We have been up to Western Washington University.
We also have two large concerts a year, which are our fund raisers. We teach traditional black gospel music, and we teach from a span of history. In a season, we cover several tunes and genres across historical eras.
I love gospel music in the way that you are able to express. I grew up Baptist – not quite Methodist or Catholic, but we were a bit more subdued than what your holiest of Pentecostal expressions are. But it is all so good. You are so free to just express, let it out.
I tell the choir, because the group is largely older white people, I am usually having to pull the expression out of them. I’m like come on. We each know where this music comes from. A song might come from African slavery. If they can sing it in a joyous way, you need to come on with it. So we teach the history of the song and what was going on in the country at the time, and we try to relate that so that people can open up to its expression. It’s really wonderful.
"All singers and musicians that I know, I say, you have got to document your time here. Your gift to the world is important. … Your words are important." – LaRhonda Steele
S.Z.: You are taking a Nina Simone show to the Alberta Rose Theatre. Tell me about that.
L.S.: We’re doing a number of tunes that span her career. She is so deliciously – what is it – I don’t like to use the word “tragic.”
(Her performance) is the full expression of the highs and lows of an artist. That’s what that is. It’s a full expression, not tragic.
S.Z.: There’s nothing that can quite describe the feeling that comes over me when I put on Nina Simone.
L.S.: She has a very different voice. She started as an African-American girl being taught classical piano. That’s what she thought she was going to do. Then she had to drop out of school to support her family. She worked in clubs, playing piano.
She had this classical training along with this gospel and blues, and that’s the style that you hear, that isn’t like anyone else.
S.Z.: I saw you play Jesus Christ a couple of years ago in an instrumental production of “Jesus Christ Superstar.” I have to say, I always suspected God was a black woman.
L.S.: (Laughter) Playing Jesus was really tough. I have been invited as a musical guest at New Thought Center for Spiritual Living for the last decade or so.
David York, who leads the music ministry at the New Thought Center is an Oklahoma boy too. He pushes me beyond what I believe that I can do, and that’s a good thing.
Several years before I played the role of Jesus, I played Mary Magdalene. I had never done anything like that before. So it was all new.
Three years later, I had had the mastectomy and my hair was just coming back from the chemotherapy (Steele had been diagnosed with breast cancer). I don’t know why I said yes to that man. I could have easily said I’ve been through too much and I can’t (take on the role of Jesus). But I agreed to it.
When my kids saw me play that role, I affected them in a way that I didn’t really think about because one of the last songs when Jesus is saying, “Kill me, take me, now,” my kids didn’t like that. I get it, but I’m still here and I’m not going anywhere.
S.Z.: Have you been following the story about air pollution in Portland?
L.S.: A bit. Just a couple of things in the news, but (something caught my eye): Precision Castparts?
S.Z.: They are one of the polluters. In 2013, a team at the University of Massachusetts ranked them the No. 1 toxic air polluter in the country.
L.S.: When I first worked here (in Portland), I worked for a company called Unit Parts. It was a coating company. We coated nails or washers or other (small pieces of metal). I worked there for about a year or so, and then I got pregnant. My husband, Mark, said, “You have to quit this job.” All of the fumes that were being released there with how they treated the metals and stuff?
Precision Castparts was one of the larger clients of Unit Parts. To have that come full circle and to know (personally) what that air is like? You know, it’s kind of scary.
And that was 20 years ago. The company was cited for not dealing properly with their hazardous waste. There were just open containers of whatever was left from the treatment of these metals. And not everybody wore masks. It’s really shocking.
S.Z.: In 2011, you were given a diagnosis of stage 3 breast cancer at 41 years old?
L.S.: Forty-one.
S.Z.: You’ve had five surgeries over four years and a recent check-up that showed no evidence of disease, so you are officially cancer free. Where are you personally in your healing?
L.S.: Through this cancer diagnosis and treatment, I’ve had great loss. I lost two of my best friends, Linda Hornbuckle and Janice Marie Scroggins. That part has been numbing and really difficult.
I am so grateful to be alive. I am grateful to have recovered physically to a degree where I am back in the gym and I’m back to working full time. I’m feeling strong. I still have pain. Every day I have pain from the surgery sites.
Musically, things are happening wonderfully. Mark and I are taking on a new project and, with the help of the PTA, we are starting a choir at Irvington Elementary. It has been wonderfully challenging and purposeful. Working with Louis Pain on the new CD, “Rock Me Baby,” which has been well reviewed (has been a fantastic distraction).
All of these great things are happening and I’m really trying to concentrate and be grateful on those things. And then I lay down and I think about how much my body and my mind have been through and how much that has affected my children.
Emotionally, I’m falling into a place of having the blues. I’m blown away by it all. It makes me sad and grateful. You can be both, right?
S.Z.: “Rock Me Baby” is receiving a lot of acclaim. This month it was No. 8 on the Living Blues billboard – falling between Tedeschi Trucks Band, who came in at No. 4, and Buddy Guy, who came in at No. 15.
L.S.: The conception of it started over 20 years ago. I was at the Waterfront Blues Festival on a gospel show with Janice and Louis (Pain, a B-3 organ player in Portland).
Louis was hiring people for the Portland Soul All-Stars. He hired Linda (Hornbuckle) and myself. That’s when my relationship started to get close with Linda. Then when she got ill, she and her husband invited me and Andy Stokes and Lisa Mann to support and keep her band going.
We would support her and do some songs so that she didn’t have to work the whole night. Louis, at that point, had been working with Linda’s band. When she was sick and getting treatment, there were some gigs she just couldn’t make, and so Andy or I would step in and front the gig.
Louis and Linda did a lot of duo work, so he started calling me for that work, to keep it going. We would literally be on the bandstand looking at each other like (whispered), “I do Blue Moon in B flat.” He’d pull up that chart and we’d just do it on the spot. It went so well that he and I started working together more and more.
(It’s) the music I turn to when I’m happy or sad, at different times in my life. It is the soundtrack to my life.
I always wanted to be blessed to be the soundtrack for someone else. If they are sad or happy that there is a song that they could count on and it would be me helping them through this time.
All singers and musicians that I know, I say, you have got to document your time here. Your gift to the world is important. It doesn’t have to be a $50,000 CD. Go into someone’s basement or kitchen, or wherever you can set up a studio, and record your work. Your words are important.