Mixed race (black, white, Cherokee, Creek) and adopted, the Vancouver soul singer known as GreenTaRA snubs music industry standards while attracting worldwide
attention with her passionate pleas for social justice. Adrian Mack tears the wild child away from her guitar long enough to get the scoop
Tara Donald grimaces slightly as she eases into a booth at Dadeo, a New Orleans-style diner and bar on Cambie Street. The Vancouver-based musician is still recovering from a snowboarding mishap in Whistler, when she took a wrong turn onto a ramp and found herself flying through space, landing on her derrière with a solid thump.
“I have to tell everyone that they should wear a butt helmet,” she laughs, before her expression takes on a flicker of concern. “Hopefully this won’t be the lead to the story. My tailbone’s not the most interesting part of me.”
That’s true. Known to her fans as “GreenTaRA,” the award-winning musician is a self-determined, one-woman affront to the entire music business. After 15 years of being shafted by a mythically savage industry, these days she operates largely independent of it.
“Music is a dirty business, and I have no problem saying that,” she states.
“Look, I wanna make money. I’m not an idiot. But I don’t expect other people to come and do things for me. A lot of musicians think that once they get to a certain level, they can let somebody else take care of the business. But that’s the number one way to get screwed.”
The West Coast certainly has no shortage of well-meaning artists toiling just beyond the mainstream, producing consciousness-raising music that advocates change, spiritual growth, and positivity. Frankly, a lot of it isn’t very good, and some of it—especially at the earnest drum-banging end of the spectrum—is downright ridiculous. Donald’s second solo album, Global Baby, released last September on her own Easy Bake label, is a different beast entirely.
The governing musical vibe of Global Baby sits somewhere between acid jazz and the silky vernacular of ’70s soul. Buttery strings and a bright horn section help to float numbers like “Figure It Out” and “Doin’ It,” while guest-rappers Ndidi Cascade, Belladonna, and Kia Kadiri bring the more timely language of hip-hop on board. Meanwhile, Donald convincingly extends into full-blown reggae for “Controller,” which examines the legacy of Harriet Tubman, a runaway slave from Maryland who led hundreds of others to the Underground Railroad (something that has special significance for Donald, as it turns out—more on that to come).
Donald states that her “real work” is “music for social change.” An upcoming benefit in Texas for the families of the Jena Six, the group of black teenagers charged with the beating of a white schoolmate in Jena, Louisiana, in reaction to a string of allegedly racist incidents, is just one of the events on her calendar for ’08. But the songwriting on Global Baby is personal, too, reflecting Donald’s eye for the micro as well as the macro. Given the odd circumstances of her life, such depth should come as no surprise.
“Truth really is stranger than fiction,” she says, “and my life exemplifies that.”
Orphaned at birth, Donald was raised by her adoptive mother, an outpost worker for the Red Cross who would bundle Tara and her brother into the station wagon for road trips through the Yukon. Her adoptive father was a doctor, a Trinidadian immigrant who passed away when she was four. Of the things he left behind, a live recording of Nina Simone performing the haunting “Obeah Woman” in a Trinidadian church made an early impression. So did her brother’s collection of cassette tapes.
“I remember being 12 and singing Prince’s ‘Erotic City,’” she recalls. “I didn’t even know what it meant!” Donald also names the Wailers, Peter Tosh, and Led Zeppelin as influences, though it was punk that perhaps inadvertently determined her path.
“I was 14,” she recalls, “makeup, safety pins, pink hair. And I was getting into some, as my mom and step-dad perceived them, unsavoury habits.” With a chuckle, she adds, “It’s funny how when you’re little you think you don’t smell like cigarettes.”
Donald was consequently enrolled in the Prince of Wales Secondary School’s TREK outdoor education program, which sparked what would become her lifelong dedication to the environment. “And by the end of that program,” she declares, “I had a totally new perspective on how to treat the world around me. I started going out into nature. I remember the Exxon Valdez happened that year, and we were all like, ‘Come on, we’re gonna clean up those birds!’ Sixty kids, and we meant it. They wouldn’t let us go, and I was crushed.”
After graduating, Donald followed her musical muse to New Zealand, Australia, New Orleans, and Florida, where she remembers standing alone before 60,000 people when the rest of her band chose a day of surfing over a festival gig. “That taught me a big lesson,” she notes. “If I have my guitar, then I can play the show.”
When Donald finally returned to Vancouver in ’98, things really took a turn for the weird, starting with the unexpected arrival of a big brown envelope from Family Services of Greater Vancouver. It’s here that the disparate strings of Donald’s life finally converged.
“I do have an interesting life, from conception,” she stresses, as she runs down the events that would lead to a reunion with her biological parents. “My birth mother happened to bump into my biological father at a powwow at Trout Lake,” she says. “She was like, ‘Hey, I’m looking for my daughter.’ And he said, ‘Who are you?’”
Donald knew that her birth mother was white, and had always been aware of her bio-dad’s African-American heritage. She knew that his grandmother was a slave, and that her family operated an Underground Railroad depot in Ohio. But there was still a surprise in store for her.
“At 29 I found out that Cherokee was a large part of my history, on my father’s side,” says Donald. “And I recently found out Creek, as well.”
With a smirk, she adds, “Global baby, see?
“The circumstances of my birth were so bizarre,” she continues. “My biological mother was put in prison for having some illegal substances when she was two months pregnant. There was a nursing strike in the prison, and she couldn’t get an abortion. She was young, and partying, and back in the early ’70s, it was a big social faux pas to have a mixed-race baby with a black man.”
And so Donald’s birth and subsequent adoption were made inevitable by circumstance, not choice. It was with some trepidation that bio-mom would reveal Donald’s secret history to her some three decades later. Donald, however, was anything but angry or upset. She told her relieved mother, “I think that’s the greatest story I’ve ever heard.”
Invoking the same emotional wisdom that lifts her music out of the ordinary, Donald continues, “Life is so fragile, but the Universe ensured that I made it onto this Earth to do all this stuff that I’m doing. I think somewhere I must have always known that. My biological parents said, ‘I wish we raised you,’ and I said, ‘No, no, I ended up exactly where I needed to be, and every experience in life has led me to where I am, and I wouldn’t change a thing.’”
Concludes the global baby with a warm smile, “Because I love where I am.”
Adrian Mack is a Vancouver-based writer and musician who was nearly born out of wedlock, but not quite. Other than that, his back story doesn’t have much of a plot.
For more on GreenTaRA,
check out myspace.com/greentaramusic
Albums:
Global Baby (2007)
Music for a Mixed Nation (2003)
