Entertainment

Marsha Ambrosius’ Black hair magic

MINNESOTA SPOKESMAN-RECORDER — Marsha Ambrosius has been serving vocal magic and hair goals for nearly two decades. She first hit the scene as one-half of the R&B/poetry duo Floetry in 2003, reigning as a natural hair icon before it was even a thing.

Published

7 years ago

May 18, 2019

Oakland Post

By Stephenetta (isis) Harmon

Marsha Ambrosius has been serving vocal magic and hair goals for nearly two decades. She first hit the scene as one-half of the R&B/poetry duo Floetry in 2003, reigning as a natural hair icon before it was even a thing.

Now, the singer/songwriter is repping a brand new flow. In late 2018, she dropped Nyla, her first studio album in four years, rocked an amazing tour with Maxwell that included a fall stop in Minneapolis and headlined her own tour this spring.

As far as her album, when you press play, you know it’s Ambrosius.” I feel like not a lot of artists have that identity,” she shares. “I made it a point to always create and make you feel like [that]. This entire album has a signature Marsha ‘thing’ and that’s lovely.”

The same holds true for the songstress’ hair. Whether relaxing, big chopping or bleaching to get a hair fix, the naturalista has always celebrated the kinks, curls, and magic of her hair. We caught up with Ambrosius for a quick chat about her journey and love for hair.

MSR: Throughout your career, you’ve been known as much for your hair as your sound — what’s that like?

Marsha Ambrosius: Oh, that’s a whole other animal! You could google Marsha Ambrosius hair’ and you will see a million and five changes [laughs]. I’ve never been attached to hair where I needed that length or I needed that style. I’ve been like, “I’m bored, let’s do this.” I’ve had everything from an entire rainbow to just blonde to it falling out because I stripped it down too much and then chopped it all off again and started over. But I think what remained consistent was a giant fro and my natural curls.

MSR: With all these different moments, when did you fall in love with your hair?

MA: From the beginning! This little girl from Liverpool (England) with light skin, green eyes, had the most 4C textured, thick, Black afro you’ve ever seen — and I took pride in that.

As a kid, when I realized that if I put my hair in an updo, if I took it out the ponytail holder, it would stay like that — I thought that was amazing! I told this White girl to her face, “Your hair can’t do this… I am magic!” To anyone else, that’s jokes, but for me that was pride.

MSR: What’s one thing you wish you knew earlier?

MA: I love my hair journey. I love being able to do anything, but I wish someone would have told me sooner about protective styles and not having this stigma on Black women having to wear weaves or sew-ins or lace fronts or whatever it is. Now, I’m like, “Oh your hair is purple. I love this color! I lost my own hair because I stripped my hair down to the bone blonde so I could dye it purple and it all fell out.”

[I thought] people used to wear these things because you didn’t have any hair. I didn’t realize it was because all these women didn’t have the time and you can just get up and go and put one fly wig on! I hate myself right now for even thinking of it that way because what we do to each other is we judge.

MSR: With so many looks must come a ton of products/ how do you go about choosing what to try?

MA: For every Black woman or man anywhere, we’ll try a product when someone says try whatever. You’re going to try the product cause something is going to work for somebody. Not only that, we’ll use five of them at the same time and claim that that’s the magic and that’s okay, too! It can never be one thing, [more like]well actually I use this and this at the same time, but this at night.

MSR: Why is it so important for Black women to celebrate their hair and know that it’s magic.

MA: Because I know what it did for me and ultimately as small as that thing will be for anybody else, how it enabled my confidence in life, period. It was as simple as my hair being my crown.

This article originally appeared in the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder.

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Arts and Culture

IN MEMORIAM: Oakland Dance Legend Reginald Ray-Savage, 67

Savage lived his life as tribute to the teachers who had shared their wisdom on art and life with him. With a palpably genuine enthusiasm and desire to bring out the best in people, and pass the torch to the next generation, he poured into his students, as his teachers and mentors had into him. His infectious energy, love of life, and generosity of spirit inspired countless souls, both inside and outside the dance studio.

Published

1 week ago

June 24, 2026

Oakland Post

Reginald Ray-Savage brought the old-school teaching techniques he learned in the Katherine Dunham Dance Company to the youth at the Oakland School for the Arts in 2003. Courtesy photo.

Special to The Post

Reginald Ray-Savage – dancer, choreographer, and beloved teacher, mentor, and inspiration to many – passed away on May 17. The Oakland School for the Arts dance instructor was 67.

Born Reginald Ray, Jr. in St. Louis, Missouri, on Sept. 5, 1958, he formally adopted the name ‘Savage,’ to honor the great Archie Savage, his mentor at Katherine Dunham’s Performing Arts Training Center where his dance training journey began in East St. Louis, Illinois.

He soon started dancing professionally with Katherine Dunham Dance Company, making dance a way of life. His grit, tenacity, and notorious work ethic brought him scholarships to train at multiple prestigious dance institutions, including The Ailey School (NYC) and Ruth Page School of Dance (Chicago), under the direction of acclaimed ballet instructor Larry Long and Dolores Lipinski-Long.

He danced with several companies including Joel Hall Dance Company, Ruth Page Ballet Chicago, Lyric Opera, Chicago City Ballet, American Festival Ballet, and touring productions of “Music Man” and “A Chorus Line”.

In 1989, Savage moved to Oakland where he started teaching seven days a week, amassing a devoted following that was attracted to his no-nonsense, impassioned, and effective old-school teaching style.

In 1992, at the insistence of his committed core of students, he founded Savage Jazz Dance Company (SJDC). Over a span of 30 years, Savage produced more than 100 original works, and tour SJDC nationally and internationally, performing at Casa del Jazz in Rome to a packed house and rave reviews—the first dance company to receive such an invitation.

Savage built SJDC into one of the Bay Area’s most respected dance companies, creating a signature style known for its combination of disciplined training, blended with rich artistic musical expression, and raw energy.

In 2003, Savage joined the Oakland School for the Arts as chair of the School of Dance. Over the next two decades, he created, built, and maintained a strong dance program, recognized, and respected by other dance institutions for forging well-trained and resilient dancers and human beings.

The depth of Savage’s tough love and care, and the skill of his teaching and mentoring are reflected in the careers of his students who have gone on to dance with the San Francisco Ballet, Martha Graham Dance Company, Mark Morris Dance Group, Janet Jackson, Ariana Grande, and companies across the globe.

Mark Kitaoka, a photographer hired by Savage in 2016, posted a living eulogy on the dance instructor.

“When I see the self-pride he builds in his students I am constantly impressed that people like Savage still exist in our ‘meme’ society,” Kitaoka wrote. “The kids he mentors are fiercely loyal to one another and I’m certain his methods teach each of those kids to put aside social status, race and gender and is replaced by solid loyalty for other souls.

“What Savage contributes to our world cannot be completely summed up in a few meager paragraphs but can be seen in the countless lives of those he has touched. Because of him, our world, and the world of the future is both a richer and better place.

Reginald Ray-Savage will forever be missed, remembered, and lovingly quoted. He is survived by his beloved wife, Alison Hurley, his sister, Sonia, and his brothers, Pierre, and Andre. May his inextinguishable spirit and impact live on in all the lives he touched.

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Oakland Post: Week of June 17 – 23, 2026

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of June 17 – 23, 2026

Published

2 weeks ago

June 20, 2026

Oakland Post

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Books

Book Review: Something We Said: Richard Pryor, A Notorious Word, and Me

Though sticks and stones and words are weapons, as in the new memoir, “Something We Said” by Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, they can also hold people together.

Published

2 weeks ago

June 17, 2026

bpusa-syndication

By Terri Schlichenmeyer

Author: Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Copyright: c.2026, Publisher: Simon & Schuster, SRP: $29.00, Page Count: 304 pages

Sticks and stones may break my bones.

You know the rest of that childhood rhyme, and you know it’s not true: words have meaning, and they can cut like a knife. And yet, though sticks and stones and words are weapons, as in the new memoir, “Something We Said” by Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, they can also hold people together.

The college lecture was supposed to have been about the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.

It was supposed to be a lively discussion, but unintentionally it quickly veered off course. When a White student quoted a movie line featuring the “n-word,” the room went quiet, and Professor Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor panicked.

She’d grown up hearing that word, and seeing it, and she’d experienced the painful feelings attached to it. She knew who wrote that movie line. It was her father, Richard Pryor.

In her first few years, Pryor spent most of her time in a White world, hearing her mother’s tales of her larger-than-life father, and trying to grasp meaning in her father’s albums, peppered as they were with a word that was off-limits to her.

When she was six, she met her father for the first time. She began to visit him regularly.

It was fun at her Dad’s house; though he was sometimes moody, he taught her to fish and play dominoes. She became close with her siblings, fearful of her great-grandmother, and confused about a word that her father’s uncles threw around like a beach ball. It was a forbidden word at her mother’s house, but her father used it. Differently. Often.

The word hurt. She knew first-hand that it did.

“The word became a degrading slur that shackled all Black people together into a single, inescapable tribe,” she says.

So why was it okay for certain people to say it?

Knowing that, in the years since Richard Pryor’s accident and his death from multiple sclerosis, he’s become somewhat of a legend. It is a very satisfying thing, isn’t it? So is reading about him, especially from the viewpoint of one of his seven children. But his is not the only story you get inside “Something We Said.”

Wrapped around the life of Richard Pryor is the life of a word that straddles a line between danger and provocation, a word that author Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor refuses to say or even print. As she tells readers about her father and her loving-but-difficult relationship with him, she warily circles that word, as if it might bite. You may cringe, but she weighs it carefully, helping readers see it as a chameleon before always bringing us back to her father, his work, and his life before and after her and that word.

It’s a push-pull balance that holds readers fast, and keeps them there. It’s perfect for fans of this genre, or Richard Pryor, or of language – and it’s going to make you think. If you want a good memoir this week, one that may send you to your old album collection, “Something We Said” is rock-solid.