D’Angelo’s music was infused with the influence of black women Black culture of the United States

TWhen D’Angelo first reached out to me, he wasn’t alone. His voice was intertwined with Erykah Badu’s on “Your Precious Love,” a duet that sounded like an offering being passed between loved ones. I was fourteen years old, on the verge of adolescence, opening up about my private life. Their voices sounded soft and booming – almost timid. A cover of the classic Motown record written by Ashford and Simpson and sung, memorably, by Marvin Gaye and Tammy Terrell, the churchy call-and-response nods to the past for DiAngelo and Erika while a low-key tone Boom Babs Reflects contemporary trends on the FM dial. It was a crossroads sound, working two ways at once, and the mixture and hybridization of it all held promise for the future.

It wasn’t long until D’Angelo’s 1995 debut film, Brown Sugar, was being shared, circulated, and analyzed among my female friends. Even though we were immersed in the era of shiny, high-string suits in hip-hop, we noticed how he insisted on subtlety. That was in the nineties; Crack and the crime bill have destroyed our neighborhoods and damaged our pride. His images seem to seek to reclaim her. His music videos had a relaxed and smoky feel to them. Tracks like “Lady and Me” and “That Dreaming Eyes of Mine” showed women in all shades of brown twirling under the warm lights and D’Angelo’s sincere gaze. I had dozens of first loves, I also had many fears, and a bunch of dreams for the future – D’Angelo’s songs seemed to take over my streams.

Pioneering soul singer and multi-instrumentalist Michael Eugene Archer, born in 1974 in Richmond, Virginia, died last week in New York City at the age of just 51. His death has sparked a global outpouring of grief and remembrance for the artist who fused soul music with the sacred, the sensual and the airy for a new generation. Female listeners, in particular, have long been attuned to his art. Maybe we can feel the woman inside his voice. Even when he sang alone, his music carried the influence of collaborators, muses, pastors, and church mothers who shaped his sound, his arrangements, and his emotional intensity.

His duet on Lauryn Hill’s “Nothing That Even Matters” was another hymn about devotion. The simultaneous finger taps beat like a heartbeat, and the lyrics said “You’re part of my identity.” What truer thing can be said about the concentrated learning of childhood in the dawning of womanhood? First high heels, first heartbreak, first time I knew I wanted to write. “Oh to be a pear tree – any A tree in bloom!” Zora Neale Hurston wrote about protagonist Janey’s awakening to herself and her world in “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” I was in bloom, and music helped me find that.

“N“Eo-soul,” a term coined by music impresario Kedar Massenburg to market to young singers who revere their parents’ recordings, now resembles a discredited term: D’Angelo himself said he never claimed to play it. But there was a moment when something new shook in commercial rhythm and blues. Jill Scott spewed her own melodies of sincerity, self-love, And separation, and incense. Angie Stone’s African aura shone through, and her velvety voice captured our hearts on ballads like “No More Rain” (In This Cloud). She was a major collaborator of D’Angelo’s, a co-architect on his debut and a co-writer of many of his most evocative tunes. And it’s worked both ways: every day, since its 1999 debut Titled Black Diamond, It was a very rhythmic and unconventional feminine account aided by D’Angelo with her pen.

Around the same time, high-tech R&B songs like TLC’s “No Scrubs” dazzled men without an account. The reaction of the male rap group Sporty Thieves, No Pigeons, brought it right back to the women. D’Angelo’s, Angie’s, and Jill’s spirit stream presented a more harmonious vision of coexistence between the sexes. Even if it’s not always rosy.

D’Angelo’s vision of love felt easy. His seamless fusion of the sacred and the sensual brought to mind another church-raised prodigy, Aretha Franklin, which he echoed in the verses of the Latin jazz piece, Spanish Joint. Franklin complained about all the ways Dr. Feelgood loved her, while insisting that she “never left the church.”

The currency of soul music is sweat. Drops of wetness on Whitney Houston’s upper lip. James Brown labored until his clothes were soaked, moaning, “It’s a man’s world, a man’s world,” as though he were both a promise and a threat. I was in a college dorm when I first saw D’Angelo’s video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel), a single from his second album Voodoo. The clip showed close-ups of the artist’s face and torso. Drops of sweat, frame after frame of shiny brown leather. It is an ecstatic performance, full of wails and screams, but also a subtle dance of retreat, tension, release, call and response. He sang about spiritual ecstasy and sensual pleasure at the same time. He enjoyed his body in front of us. He did not separate the divine from the physical, nor did he separate the two worlds as if they were in conflict.

Now, after his death, we know that his efforts toward a comprehensive theology and a unified voice were far from easy.

By the time Voodoo came out in 2000, critics were calling D’Angelo the “R&B Jesus,” who had come to save us from banality. They place him in the lineage of soul men like Marvin, Donnie, and Al Green — men who screamed and grunted with great brilliance but who sometimes succumbed to their own contradictions. The son of a preacher, D’Angelo first displayed his talents at the Pentecostal church his parents ran, the Assembly of God’s Refuge. His father led the congregation, but his mother, Marian Cox, also served. “She spoke with passion and fire,” according to her 2023 obituary. She was known for her powerful prayers and caring for the less fortunate — especially women — in her community. Most critics considered that women helped raise D’Angelo and failed to consider that they had any influence on his sound.

While directing choirs, and playing organ and keyboards during the service, the young artist noticed that contemporary gospel coverage from groups like the Hawkins offended some of the elders of his church. The sound was very funky, very close to the secular voices found on the radio.

Marian Cox was not the only minister in D’Angelo’s maternal line. His grandparents ran a congregation thirty miles west of Richmond. It was deeper in the red clay Piedmont, along the James River, a major artery for the local slave trade. After emancipation, black families settled along its banks and built independent farming communities and a constellation of churches where they could worship as they wanted. In this church, dancing was permitted. And the drum.

It was the Rev. Alberta Cox, D’Angelo’s beloved grandmother, who told him he could sing whatever he wanted without fear of being cursed. “I spent a lot of time with her,” the artist says in the 2019 Dutch documentary Devil’s Pie. She assured him that holiness can move, sweat, and suffer. When she died in 2002, shortly after D’Angelo finished the Voodoo Tour, the artist fell into a deep depression that led to him withdrawing from public life for more than a decade.

In the 2025 documentary Sly Lives! (Burden of Black Genius), about the legacy of multi-talented funk and rock musician Sly Stone, D’Angelo talks about the pressure to endure. “It could be unbearable, man,” he said. I wonder if he also means the burden of genius. The film imagines the genius alone – and male: D’Angelo appears among peers like Q-Tip and André 3000, with only Chaka Khan as a counterpoint. But Stone’s most famous band featured women on trumpet and keys, and many of D’Angelo’s most influential compositions were written, arranged, or conceived with women. Isolated male genius is both a myth and a lie.

In 2015, D’Angelo told talk show host Tavis Smiley that he borrowed some of his enthusiasm from female gospel quartet Maggie Ingram and the Ingramites. His guitar, spare and delayed, was reminiscent of Etta Baker’s Piedmont blues, all restraint and quiet complexity. D’Angelo has been a synthesizer for centuries, a musician who crafted one sound out of many histories—compression and release, sensual and sacred, holy soul and punk house. And the women were there all the time, which pushed him toward the whole thing.