The Womack Sisters: “You’re casting spells upon people, their life, and their belief system. So you should make sure what you’re saying and offering is something they can actually grow from”

Somewhere on the long road between El Paso, Texas and Arizona, the immediately likeable Womack sisters are taking time out of their busy touring schedule to chat all things about their superb, eponymous debut album.

We’re getting on famously when Zoom gives up the ghost and we’re rescued by WhatsApp, which is loud and clear, but separating the voices of BG, Zeimani and Kucha becomes increasingly difficult. One voice answers, another finishes the thought, a third chimes in with a clarification – which is… perfect. After all, the Womack Sisters have been doing this their entire lives – it’s called blood harmony.

Blood harmony is one of those wonderfully evocative musical terms that sounds almost mystical, but you know it when you hear it. Think Don and Phil Everly on ‘All I Have To Do Is Dream,’ the Louvin Brothers’ spectral close harmony, The Beach Boys on ‘In My Room’, or the Staple Singers turning gospel into transcendence. Shared genes can mean shared timbre, but shared experience matters just as much.

Siblings who have sung together since childhood instinctively know when the others will hold back or surge forward. With the Womack Sisters, that connection runs particularly deep. Their voices overlap rather than merely accompany one another, sometimes making it difficult to hear where BG ends and Zeimani or Kucha begin. It is not simply three singers harmonising. It is three strands of the same musical DNA intertwining with one another.

And let’s just say that Womack DNA is no ordinary DNA. Their mother, Linda Womack, was the daughter of soul pioneer Sam Cooke; their father, Cecil Womack, was one of The Womack Brothers, alongside Bobby Womack, and later formed Womack & Womack with Linda. Bobby became a soul giant in his own right, while Sam Cooke helped lay the foundations of the genre itself.

“A lot of people also don’t know that our grandmother’s brother is Don Cornelius,” the sisters add. “He was the creator and host of Soul Train, and our grandmother’s brother.”

If Carlsberg did family trees…

“It’s inspiring to be able to look at your family,” they laugh. “If you have a group of bakers and they all baked for hundreds of years, that’s what it’s like for us. Looking back, we can pull inspiration and knowledge from our family tree, and not just the perception of what their careers were like. But we can actually ask, ‘What were some of the hard things and the sacrifices that you had to make?’”

Indeed, from the very beginning, the sisters had a ringside seat to showbusiness. Their family life was already bleeding into the music by 1988, when Womack & Womack released Conscience, home to ‘Teardrops’ – a No. 4 hit in Ireland and a fixture on any disco floor worth its salt.

Baby Zeimani even appears on the album cover. By 1993’s Transformation To The House Of Zekkariyas, the children were no longer merely along for the ride – the Womack offspring appeared on the record itself.

“Our parents included us in every aspect of their career,” Zeimani relates. “So whenever they were doing interviews, anything they were doing, we were always somewhere, not too far away.”

But music was only part of the inheritance. The sisters were also born into motion. As Cecil and Linda took their music around the world, BG, Zeimani and Kucha went with them, growing up less in one place than in a succession of cities.

“It was one city, one country after another,” they tell me. “It became quite addictive after a while. You would almost be uncomfortable if you were in one spot for too long. We spent so much time in London as children, and then in Thailand, we lived in Bangkok for a while. When we were really young, our parents settled in Dublin. We had a really good time there too. We were in the south of France. They had some favourite places they frequently visited and then they just loved to see new cities.”

SOMETHING SACRED

Wait, rewind, you guys lived in Dublin?

“It’s crazy,” they laugh, “we were so young. We weren’t in the city, we were outside, we were in the sticks. There was nothing but horses and sheep around us, it was beautiful.”

Chatting to the sisters, what strikes you, is how gracefully the sisters talk about music – not as a career but as something sacred.

“A lot of people make music for the wrong reasons”, they explain. “They’re just trying to change their lifestyle, get out of the circumstance they’re in. For us, music is really powerful, we’ve seen the impact it can have on the world. You’re casting spells upon people, their life, and their belief system. So you should make sure what you’re saying and offering is something they can actually grow from.”

Eventually, the road led to Los Angeles. The sisters moved there in 2008 and began the long, less glamorous business of building a career – studio sessions, backing vocals, opening slots and, when music failed to pay the bills, ordinary work. That struggle would later find its way directly into the new album. ‘Chauffeur’ is about scraping together enough money to keep making music – the everyday grind transformed, in classic soul fashion, into a song. They take up the story.

“In 2017, we released ‘Darling’,” they relate. “That was our baby. We felt so strongly about the look and the sound and where we wanted to go, and we were so sure about it. And that, luckily for us, tumble weeded in different ways to like-minded creatives. That’s how we ended up with Daptone and Bosco Mann.”

Thank God for Daptone, because before Bosco Mann, here were three women descended directly from Sam Cooke and the Womacks, blessed with voices seemingly engineered for soul music, being told by industry figures that soul was not the direction they should pursue.

They were encouraged instead towards contemporary R&B and pop – safer, more marketable territory, according to the people offering advice. At Penrose Studios in Riverside, California, the album was cut old-style.

“We did this 100% natural all the way to tape,” BG reveals. “I even remember being in the studio and Bosco Mann was showing me the razorblade technique. It was a one-take kind of vibe.”

On release day, the sisters found themselves opening for Al Green at the Hollywood Bowl, while ‘If I Let You’ took on a life of its own online, shared and championed by the likes of SZA, Pharrell and Questlove. After years spent being told that soul was the wrong road, suddenly everybody wants a piece of the Womack Sisters.

The irony is not lost on them, although there is little bitterness – only a sense that patience has finally paid off. I tell them the album sounds as though it might have drifted out of Stax or Muscle Shoals half-a-century ago, a comparison that delights them. And on they roll to Phoenix on a promise – with a European tour now taking shape – that an Ireland date is firmly in their sights.

• The Womack Sisters is out now.