"I'm in the company of many Black women and other women who stand on the shoulders of Blackness and resistance and social justice and change, and all of the folds in between that. I really don't have to explain myself."
— Nnenna Freelon on her new partnership with Scalawag.
Unlike other podcasts on grief, Great Grief by Grammy-nominated vocalist Nnenna Freelon doesn't give you a blueprint for how to get over it. Instead, she offers her own experiences as a wife, a sister, a Black woman, and a powerful jazz artist to help you get into it.
You won't find the traditional interview format here. It's Nnenna's limitless and expressive engagement with grief that we welcome to Scalawag and that will live alongside our collection of grief & other loves essays, beginning September 13.
"Words take you only so far, music is—as poetry is—a different kind of container for grief. […] You can read the lyrics to Chaka Khan's 'Through The Fire.' Okay, but let Chaka sing that. You be like on the floor."
The partnership will release three four-episode series, one for each change in the seasons. Through each, Nnenna interweaves griefscapes of songs and stories.
The first season, titled Great Grief: Wailing Women, focuses on the intimate beauty and irreparable losses we know as Black women, with episodes touching on the shock of widowhood, the bittersweet of sisterhood, and the love-hate journeys many of us have with our hair.
Listen to a 30-second clip:
"Here, here is grief. Transformational, becoming artifact of not only the personal, but the universal. Some call it sorrow-song, and some negro spiritual. Genius-flow is how I see it: Black genius-flow, given freely to the world."
The podcast first debuted on WUNC public radio in 2021, following the deaths of Nnenna's husband, Philip, and her younger sister Debbie. Great Grief finds a natural home at Scalawag this September, where it has evolved to include a live listening experience: part fireside chat, part conjure-sation.
"Real people in real places together. The Great Grief Live experience is a campfire, fireside thing. And the fire is the stories."
Learn more about the next live experience.
The beauty in bringing the podcast to Scalawag is that here, Great Grief can more deeply develop into a space where our griefs and other loves as Black women are fully acknowledged, indulged, nourished, and affirmed.
"I firmly believe when we gather as Black women to create something, we think we're doing a subset of the real work when the opposite is true. We are the root upon which everything else stands. So it behooves us to gather, to get our stories and put them out there."
Now in conversation with a community of powerful Black writers, organizers, and creatives focused on liberation both personally and politically, folks who join the Great Grief community can laugh, cut up, cry, and lay their burdens down.
Discuss with others by joining the Great Grief Facebook group.
That's always what happens in my many talks with Nnenna. Warm, capacious, a bit creatively mischievous—I never know where the conversation might lead, but always know it travels with love.
A Grief of Our Own
"So bring your curiosity as well as your profound losses," and let Nnenna Freelon's Great Grief surround you with stories that minister and sounds that unlock love, joy, contemplation, and yes, grief.
Scalawag knows that for many of us, our grief is simultaneously never news and the only news.
Listen to the latest season of Great Grief with Nnenna Freelon, available now on all podcast platforms.
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The World Since You Left
In this episode of Great Grief, Nnenna Freelon pleads with the moon, the sun, and the leaves about how to get in touch with her beloved Phil again. If grief isn't linear, then maybe sorrow is more than a season—perhaps it's a portal to the unknown.