Lithofayne’s one-octave singing voice was no secret, she said, but Bobby “Blue” Bland still took her on the road once to sing backup. She said her singing was so bad he told her to “stand way back from the microphone and sing softly, while the other singers were instructed to sing louder and drown me out.” Still, she wrote tunes most of her life. Atlantic Records chief Ahmet Ertegun personally recruited her to his label in the early 70s, and sent her to the iconic Muscle Shoals studios to record. But she was so dissatisfied with the result she would not give her permission to release the album.
Known to her friends as Fayne, Faye or Faytoe, Lithofayne was born with a congenital heart defect called ALCAPA (Anomalous Left Coronary Artery from the Pulmonary Artery), a condition occurring when the left coronary artery, which carries blood to the heart muscle, begins from the pulmonary artery instead of the aorta.
People born with that defect rarely made it out of their 30s, and it could only be diagnosed on a corpse until a diagnosis on living persons was developed just over a decade ago. Fayne learned then why she had been so easily fatigued for most of her life, and that her fatigue had a name.
She also learned that her heart’s ejection fraction constantly hovered in the range that produces what cardiologists call “catastrophic events.” The ejection fraction is the percentage of oxygenated blood the left ventricle pumps out when it contracts. The normal range is between roughly 52 and 75 percent. Fayne’s ejection fraction was in the teens.
“I’ve been given expiration dates more times than I can remember,” she often told me in the dozens of telephone conversations we had after she moved to a suburb of Las Vegas about 20 years ago.
But the expiration date did come on April 22, 2021. She was 80.
Fayne had allowed me to read excerpts from her chapter on Eddie Hazel back when her home-schooled daughter Magic was an honor student at the public high school she had recently entered, and before another daughter FiFi was incinerated in a fiery car crash on a Los Angeles freeway, leaving Lithofayne two granddaughters, Fantasi and Kharisma, to raise.
Andreé Penix Smith, an editor and mutual friend, had arranged for us to meet, telling Fayne I could help her organize and edit the mountain of material she had compiled for her Hendrix book. Bankers boxes sat against one wall in her apartment, filled with notebooks holding the journals Fayne had begun writing when she was 12 or 13 back in Moultrie, Georgia, her hometown. And she continued writing those journals through her years in New York and Los Angeles.
“How in hell else could I have remembered all of these details?” she once told me while giving a blow by blow account of a 1960s fistfight in the alley behind New York’s Palm Café.
Her family was from Moultrie’s across-the-tracks “dirty spoon” neighborhood, but they didn’t live down in “the bowl,” she said, chuckling. “We lived up on the handle.”
Her life had been peopled by colorful characters - Madam Lou Ida, who ran the busiest brothel in town, Dr. Buzzard, an infamous but respected conjurer and caster of spells, and her grandmother who counseled that all you need in life “are a few good White folks.”
She had been born with a caul, a piece of amniotic membrane covering her face - very powerful mojo, especially in the South where it was seen as an omen that could confer good fortune, metaphysical powers and the gift of seeing the spirit world. No matter how much she denied it, a stream of entertainers, like Eddie Hazel, showed up at her door, convinced that she had mystical powers that could enhance or restore their musical talent.
Willie John, whose recording of “Fever” gave Peggy Lee a career, took her to Harlem for the first time when she was 16. He was fond of smacking her on the butt and declaring: “This is good enough to hold church in.”
After she moved to Vegas, we continued talking and exchanging emails and text messages. She gradually began to soften, and began calling me her BTBN (By-the-book-Nigga). But showing affection? No, she preferred the needle. In one email she wrote:
Ed,
The only educated man I allow myself to associate with intentionally.
Let’s talk when you find a bit of extra time (with your square ass).
31 янв 2021
