Much of the buzz around the Womack Sisters has been focused on the trio’s lineage, and understandably so. As the granddaughters of Sam Cooke, the “King of Soul,” the nieces of the legendary singer and guitar player Bobby Womack, and the daughters of the R&B husband and wife duo The House of Zekkariyas (formerly known as Womack & Womack), the Womack Sisters have a truly staggering amount of soul flowing through their family tree.
It is no wonder, then, that the Womack Sisters’ inseparable relationship with their family was immediately apparent as soon as I sat down with Zeimani, BG, and Kucha Womack ahead of their Baltimore concert alongside LA SOM and Thee Sacred Souls on Sept. 22.
“We’re really close sisters,” BG Womack said as they all greeted me, “So we’d love for people to just think of us as family.”
Their introduction was cut short by the adorable sound of a young child running around the room and just generally causing a heart-melting ruckus.
“There’s another Womack sister here. She’s in training,” Zeimani Womack told me as she picked the phone up from off the hotel room carpet. “But it's been a blessing to have [my sister’s children] on tour, though. It reminds me of how we grew up because we were right there from day one with our parents, from the studio to the road.”
Having grown up traveling from London to Kenya to Thailand following their parents around on tour as back-up singers, they never had the traditional school experience.
“[Our parents] would take a tutor with us on the road,” Zeimani said. “So we all have just been together this whole time, and we have the strongest bond in the family.”
“Built-in friendship,” BG added.
The sisters never stayed in a single place for very long, which meant that the only people they could count on being there was their family. Naturally, that meant the sisters built deep, incredibly intimate bonds with each other and their parents.
However, those family connections wouldn’t necessarily spell an easy time breaking into the music industry as they leaped from out of the shadow of their parents. After leaving their parents, who had settled down in South Africa, and relocating stateside, the sisters were forced to take on more unspectacular means of making money.
“[We’ve] work[ed] in restaurants to Ubering [and] being in care — because we've done babysitting, we've done elder care. We've done it all,” Zeimani recounted. “We just started establishing our own lives and just [started] trying to see what we wanted to do… and that's when we decided: okay, yeah, we really do want to do music. It's not just the influence of our mother and father.”
And even when they were making music, they didn’t always find the music industry at its most cooperative, experiencing several major rejections by record labels pushing for a more “marketable” sound.
All of their persistence and hard work paid off, though, with the sisters’ self-release of their debut single, “Darling” in 2017.
“[Darling] was when we figured out where we wanted to go,” Kucha Womack said. “Our voice got stronger, and we were like, okay, it doesn't matter who wants us or doesn't want us. This is the direction we're going.”
After a foray in more contemporary R&B sounds with their 2022 EP “Legacy,” the sisters found themselves still drawn towards the classic gospel-soul sounds of their grandfather.
“We've always been influenced by everything from country to jazz music, hip hop and everything in between,” BG said. “But for ourselves, we've always had the vision that we wanted to be an authentic version of soul music.”
“We really wanted to pick up where [the Womack Brothers] left off,” Zeimani said.
“There’s a certain type of soul, and we were like, how do we merge that into the generation of today?” Kucha said.
They were still being pushed into a more modern direction, but always felt that giving in would have been trading their artistic, spiritual vision of soul music for digestibility.
Therefore, their signing to Daptone Records alongside such nostalgic, soul-driven acts as Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, Charles Bradley, Jalen Ngonda and their tourmates Thee Sacred Souls was more a homecoming than a reinvention.
“[Daptone speaks] the same language. So when we met Bosco Mann and the whole crew, they were like, ‘Oh, band? Horns? This is what we’re doing,’” Kucha said.
“It's all live. It's all human beings operating instruments: real humans and real songwriters coming together and creating stories about life,” Zeimani said. “We want to bring that back because that's where the real heart is. That's where the music feels different.”
They cited peers like Olivia Dean and Baby Rose as joining them in this movement for authenticity in music.
The Womack Sisters are among a number of modern artists reviving traditional recording techniques, recording their self-titled album live in the studio with a backing band. This comes even after technological limitations have rendered such “straight-to-tape” recording methods unnecessary, and they’re not alone. Acts all the way from post-rock darlings Black Country New Road to indie-folk singer-songwriter Adrienne Lenker have taken this approach to recording in the modern era.
“The recording process was very quick because we were ready to go — because we'd been rehearsing for months,” Kucha said.
Recording live allowed the sisters to preserve something they felt is increasingly rare in today’s music buisiness: real people coming together through music.
“It’s no AI involved… We want to keep that alive because our human connection to each other is everything.” Zeimani said.
“Because we use just the raw instruments, it's like we're connected to the future and the past,” BG said.
One of the bonuses of playing with talented musicians all in one room was that, despite not being multi-instrumentalists, the sisters were able to easily communicate their musical ideas and make live adjustments through their voices. BG recalled Zeimani arranging the horns on several of the album’s songs.
Of course, their emphasis on authenticity translates to an immense passion for their live performances.
“You gotta touch the people. I mean, playback's okay, but if you can, get the guys and the girls out on the road and really put together just a beautiful show. I feel like nothing brings people together and fills our hearts more,” Zeimani said.
In particular, the sisters are excited to experience Baltimore, a city they haven’t yet spent much time visiting.
“I love a lot of comedians out of Baltimore, so I can't wait. I was hoping we had enough time to hit some shows,” Kucha said.
“Anybody have any recommendations for restaurants? Just drop them in the comments because we are foodies,” Zeimani said.
Even though we don’t have a comments section on our articles, be sure to keep up with our instagram and we’ll pass on any suggestions! On top of that, I did refer them to The News-Letter’s own Leisure section.
Before we said our goodbyes, I complimented Zeimani’s “I ?? CHICAGO” shirt. Unbeknownst to me, it was actually merchandise from Harry Styles’ upcoming Together, Together tour, for which the Womack Sisters will be joining the five Chicago dates.
“It really is special that we're performing in Chicago because that's where the Cooks originated. They came out of Mississippi, Clarksdale and migrated to Cook County, Chicago. That's where our grandfather was able to find himself musically and get off into the business,” Zeimani said. “It's really special that he chose for us to do Chicago.”
After the interview ended and I was forced to run to Hodson Hall, I was left with the overwhelming impression that the Womack Sisters were not only talented musicians bearing the torches of soul royalty, but also deeply kind and passionate people drawn together by their unbreakable bond as sisters.
Even if you don’t get a chance to catch them at the Pier Six Pavilion next Tuesday (Sept. 22), Harry Styles fans might find it worthwhile to catch one of their Chicago dates as well.
