Allee Willis

We don't have a thread for her? Let's correct that, given this new profile of her.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/arts/music/allee-willis-songwriters-hall-of-fame.html

She nurtured a love of black music and culture, one that didn’t please her father, a Detroit scrapyard owner. (Her mother taught elementary school.) In her basement, not far from where she keeps her an enormous collection of black memorabilia (her former collaborator James Brown loved it and encouraged her to keep collecting), she has framed the note, on scrapyard stationery, that her father sent her when she went off to college: “Stay away from black culture. Dad.”

“I got him back good,” she said. “Can you imagine having a daughter like me? When he passed away, 2002, I got the last word, because the very last thing I ever said to him, I leaned down and I whispered in his ear, ‘I just got the gig to write ‘The Color Purple.’” (She adored her father, she added, but race was an issue between them.)