Jacqueline Woodson - Music lyrics

Each morning the radio comes on at seven o'clock. Sometimes Michael Jackson is singing that A-B-C is as easy as 1-2-3 or Sly and the Family Stone are thanking us for letting them be themselves. Sometimes it's slower music, the Five Stairsteps telling us things are going to get easier, or the Hollies singing, He ain't heavy, he's my brother So on we go... My mother lets us choose what music we want to listen to as long as the word funk doesn't appear anywhere in the song. But the summer I am ten, funk is in every single song that comes on the cool black radio stations. So our mother makes us listen to the white ones. All afternoon corny people sing about Colorado, about everything being beautiful about how we've only just begun. My sister falls in love with the singers but I sneak off to Maria's house where safe inside her room with the pink shag carpet and bunk beds, we can comb our dolls' hair and sing along when the Ohio Players say, He's the funkiest Worm in the world. We can dance the Funky Chicken, tell imaginary intruders to get the funk out of our faces. Say the word so hard and so loud and so many times, it becomes something different to us-something so silly we laugh just thinking about it Funky, funky,funky, we sing again and again until the word is just a sound not connected to anything good or bad right or wrong.