73 Facts About Linda Tillery

Linda "Tui" Tillery was born on September 2,1948 and is an American singer, percussionist, producer, songwriter, and music arranger.

Linda Tillery began her professional singing career at age 19 with the Bay Area rock band The Loading Zone.

Linda Tillery is recognized as a pioneer in women's music, with her second solo album titled Linda Tillery released on Olivia Records in 1977.

Linda Tillery has been a professional musician for her entire adult life and has had a long career as a backing or supporting vocalist for mainstream artists as diverse as Santana, Bobby McFerrin, Huey Lewis and the News and the Turtle Island String Quartet.

Linda Tillery was born in 1948 to parents who migrated from Texas to San Francisco during World War II.

Linda Tillery was born on the block of Fell Street where the SFJAZZ Center currently stands.

Linda Tillery's father was a carpenter whose first job after moving to California was at the Hunters Point Shipyard.

Linda Tillery says her parents were terrible singers but they loved music and had a large collection of 78 rpm records.

Linda Tillery admired Ethel Merman's big voice, going into her parents' acoustically-pleasing bathroom and trying to imitate Merman's song "There's No Business Like Show Business".

Linda Tillery is a self-taught singer, but her formal music education began at age 13 when she studied the classical bass at Lowell High School in San Francisco.

Linda Tillery was allowed to play the drum kit and other instruments such as the bassoon in school because her teacher recognized her superior musical abilities.

Also around age 13, Linda Tillery attended a picnic in Pittsburg, California where she saw Vi Redd playing alto saxophone.

Linda Tillery graduated from high school in 1966 and worked for a year while attending City College of San Francisco.

Linda Tillery says her parents always wanted her to be a business major but she says she "got bored very quickly" with college.

Linda Tillery first came to prominence as the lead singer in San Francisco group The Loading Zone starting in 1968.

At least six singers had auditioned for the job but the 19-year-old Linda Tillery had an edge because she had phoned beforehand to make sure she was what the band was seeking.

Linda Tillery walked through the door in a post office uniform, with little white cat-eyed glasses, and I said, that's our girl.

Linda Tillery was singing for us by the time we opened for Cream at Winterland.

Linda Tillery's mother made her a floor-length ruffled red leather cape.

One account shows that Linda Tillery left the group in January 1969, rejoined in March 1970 through 1971, and left The Loading Zone for the final time in 1972.

Linda Tillery signed with CBS Records and released her debut album titled Sweet Linda Divine in 1970.

Linda Tillery provided lead vocals and played percussion on the recording, which garnered some enthusiastic reviews but did not sell well.

Linda Tillery sang backing vocals on the Santana III album, including on the hit single "Everybody's Everything" which debuted on the Billboard Hit 100 chart on October 16,1971, peaked at number 12 and remained on the chart for a total of 10 weeks.

Linda Tillery sang backing vocals on the song "Everything's Coming Our Way" from the same album.

Linda Tillery was a member of the West Coast Gangster Choir's vocal trio, the Gangsterettes.

Linda Tillery was introduced to Women's music in 1975 when the Bay Area band BeBe K'Roche submitted her name to Olivia Records to produce their album.

Linda Tillery produced, arranged, sang backing vocals and played percussion on the 1976 eponymous LP, which was the fledgling record label's third release.

Linda Tillery joined the Olivia collective, which became "the pioneering label run by the lesbian-feminist collective that made a place for female musicians, engineers, and producers".

Linda Tillery contributed the song "Don't Pray For Me" to the LP, which was composed by Mary Watkins.

Linda Tillery was the only album she released on Olivia Records, and Tillery left the collective in 1979.

Linda Tillery has performed several times at the National Women's Music Festival, as well as Wiminfest in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Roadwork's Sisterfire festival in 1983, and at the first Southern Women's Music Festival in 1984.

On November 26,1982 Linda Tillery was a member of the all-female band that performed with Meg Christian and Cris Williamson at Carnegie Hall in New York City, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Olivia Records.

In 1985, Linda Tillery released her third solo album titled Secrets on her own independent 411 Records label and distributed by Redwood Records.

Linda Tillery was the LP's co-Executive producer with Ray Obiedo, but acted as primary producer on only two songs, with Obiedo producing all other songs except one.

Linda Tillery was a mainstay in the Bay Area music scene, considered by many to be one of the area's "most revered vocalists since the 1960s".

Also in the 1980s, Linda Tillery began a twelve-year musical partnership with Ray Obiedo, an Oakland-based guitarist.

Linda Tillery was briefly a member of the ZaSu Pitts Memorial Orchestra and performed with the Solid Senders.

In 1993, Linda Tillery was among the performers who celebrated Olivia's 20th anniversary weekend in San Francisco, which coincided with the city's annual Gay pride festivities.

In 1991 while Linda Tillery was channel surfing on her television, she came across a PBS special featuring opera singers Jessye Norman and Kathleen Battle singing spirituals.

Around the same time, Linda Tillery was in rehearsals for the play "Letters From a New England Negro", and the producer sent her a cassette tape containing traditional black folk songs obtained from the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution.

Linda Tillery started by ordering as many recordings from the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution as she could, but soon extended her research into multiple forms of black roots music, including spirituals, work songs, field hollers, and slave songs.

Linda Tillery gathered music from small churches, cotton fields and the "freedom music" of her ancestors.

Linda Tillery performed research at the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, and was introduced to the ethnomusicology studies of Eileen Southern and Bernice Johnson Reagon.

Linda Tillery wanted to talk to the musicians themselves, so she travelled to the sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia to find performers of traditional Gullah music.

The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with Linda Tillery being "flooded" with letters from fans saying how much the music had touched them.

Linda Tillery chooses the material and has arranged about 95 percent of the music for the five-part choir.

Linda Tillery calls the music performed by the CHC "survival music".

Linda Tillery found that voice in 2003 in Lamont Van Hook, the group's first male performer, who brought an Al Green-like falsetto to the group's vocal arsenal.

Linda Tillery had decided by that time that the gender issue was no longer as important as it once was.

Linda Tillery has taught classes and workshops as part of her role as an "activist educator".

In 1987, Linda Tillery performed with Danny Glover in the live National Public Radio production of the musical Jukebox.

Linda Tillery was a founding member of Bobby McFerrin's 10-person ensemble Voicestra, including performing on the soundtrack of Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt.

Linda Tillery formally studied voice with McFerrin for several years, learning about vocal layering and dynamics.

Linda Tillery has appeared in music videos for Bobby McFerrin's The Garden and Big Bear-Earth Project's Will the Circle Be Unbroken.

Linda Tillery was in a Burger King television commercial in 1990.

Linda Tillery performed on the soundtracks of several films by director Marlon Riggs: Color Adjustment, Fear of Disclosure, Black is.

Linda Tillery appeared in VH1 specials with Bobby McFerrin and the Kenny Loggins band.

Linda Tillery was hired in 1992 as a special consultant to Redwood Records' New Spirituals Project, which each year commissioned a female composer to create a "new spiritual".

Linda Tillery sang with the Project every year in concerts held over the Thanksgiving weekend in Oakland, California.

Linda Tillery created and performed the music for the dance Invisible Wings, with choreographer Joanna Haigood.

Linda Tillery was the featured vocalist at a March 13,2005 concert in Sacramento, California to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of composer Harold Arlen.

Linda Tillery was accompanied by the 71-piece Sacramento Philharmonic Orchestra on two seldom-sung Arlen songs, "A Sleepin' Bee" and "I Had Myself a True Love".

In 2011, Linda Tillery acted as musical director for a Bay Area production of August Wilson's play Seven Guitars.

Linda Tillery collaborated with vocalist Molly Holm to create the music for the play black odyssey, a modern-day retelling of Homer's Odyssey representing "ancient Greek mythology thrust upon the high seas of the African-American experience", written by Marcus Gardley and produced by the California Shakespeare Theater in 2017.

In July 2017, Linda Tillery reconnected with Mary Watkins, Vicki Randle, Diane Lindsay and other musicians in a "Womanly Way Reunion Band" performance at the National Women's Music Festival.

In June 2003, Linda Tillery gave the keynote speech at the Phenomenon of Singing International Symposium IV, in Newfoundland, Canada titled "The Voice as an Instrument of Peace and Motivating Force for Justice".

Linda Tillery was a presenter at the November 2009 "Reclaiming the Right to Rock Conference" at Indiana University.

Linda Tillery has had a stroke and a malignant abdominal tumor.

Linda Tillery had bilateral carpal tunnel surgery and has back issues.

Linda Tillery has used crutches since her knee surgery but views that with characteristic humor: if Itzhak Perlman can "drag himself onstage on his crutches, sit down and play his ass off", then I can deal with my physical challenges as well.

On September 2,2023, Linda Tillery celebrated her 75th birthday with a concert at The Freight and Salvage.

Linda Tillery performed two sets, one each with the Freedom Band and the Chocolate Psychedelic Band.

Linda Tillery appeared in a wheelchair, and during a break between songs Tillery discussed her experiences with heart surgery.