Mother
Tongue
The song came
before the song.
It started with a conversation, not with a piano, not in a studio. My good friend Darnell Kendricks showed me a painting. He told me an origin story that honored the women from his lineage: the mothers he knew (his mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother) and the mothers that preceded them. Specific women and beautiful stories. The way they loved, the way they held people, the way their legacy of love traveled across time, never losing its power.
I remember looking at the work and instantly hearing a groove. Not a groove I'd written. One that was already there, alive in his canvas. The colors had rhythm. The layered fabrics had textures I could feel in my chest. I've heard musicians talk about seeing sound, a phenomenon known as synesthesia. That afternoon, I experienced it.
The song probably took me five minutes to write. It wasn't a labor to produce. It was channeled from the ancestors. It wasn't mine to struggle over. It came through, the way some things do when you get out of the way.
Mother Tongue isn't just about matriarchs. It's about the language we inherit before we have words for it. The way a grandmother's hands move in a kitchen, the way a father's brow changes when he's pondering a critical decision, the way a mother's voice can dry tears faster than tissue, the particular silence a family passes down alongside everything else. These are a mother tongue. We speak it before we know we've learned it.
In my own becoming, I had to reckon with the language I arrived with. Some of it is beautiful. Some of it needed translation. All of it is mine.
Honoring the
Mother Tongue
"This piece was about paying homage to the great lineage of matriarchs in my family: the specific women I knew, and the ones whose stories were passed down to me. Their fingerprints are still on all of us, generations later."
— Darnell Kendricks
For me, creative expression has always been about helping people connect fully. Not just to look at something, but to feel it. Soul speaks through food, through music, through a painting your hands can almost touch.
Darnell Kendricks
Darnell Kendricks is a musician, visual artist, chef, and songwriter, a creative whose life's work has always circled the same question: how do you make someone feel something real?
His visual work, which he calls Soulful Collages, uses acrylic, cloth, canvas, and jewels to build scenes of Black abundance, unity, and joy. They are not paintings you observe from a distance. They are paintings you enter.
Darnell's mixed-media approach is rooted in the same philosophy that drives all his work: that art, like food, like music, should be tactile, communal, and generous. A gumbo of textures and meaning that draws people in and asks them to stay.
He lives in Detroit.
The Declaration
Read it aloud, or listen as Jeff reads it.
- I cannot become who I'm becoming without honoring where I've been.
- I am not condemned by my past. I am a productive byproduct of it.
- I carry what was passed down: the gifts and the weight, the beautiful and the difficult. Lessons learned directly. Lessons assumed. All of it is ground from which I grow.
- I am an overcomer. To stand here today means I have faced everything life has brought me and I am still here. Strong enough for today. Strong enough for tomorrow.
- I honor those who came before me, not by holding them hostage to their mistakes, but with gratitude for what they gave me, seen and unseen.
- I am grateful for my past. I am better because of it.
We are all proven overcomers. We've survived a lifetime of challenges, seen and unseen, to arrive at this moment. And for everything that came before, good and hard alike: thank you.
Mother Tongue
Published by Jeff Ponders Music (Songtrust).