Hallelujah anyway: Through pain and struggles, Tammi Brown lived her life with hard-earned joy

A few days after Tammi Brown died, a circle of several dozen friends and admirers gathered to mourn at the Temple Beth El in Aptos. At one point, there occurred something you almost never see at gatherings of this kind: a loud, sustained, exuberant, even boisterous standing ovation. 

The burst of applause, which came at the behest of the Rev. Deborah L. Johnson of Inner Light Ministries, who was leading the circle, is a fitting and touching way to pay tribute to a performer, and surely, as one of Santa Cruz County’s finest singers and musicians, Tammi had stood in front of many such ovations in her lifetime.

The unspoken assumption — a spiritual assumption — was that Tammi was somehow present, in spirit, to bask in the love of the community she left behind. Whether or not that was literally true is, I suppose, only a matter of belief. But the feeling of standing and rejoicing in the midst of a sudden grief was like experiencing a surprise sunburst breaking through a cloudy sky. And it made a deep sense to anyone lucky enough to have known this special woman.

I’ve known Tammi for more than 20 years, first tracking her as a singer backing up the legendary blues/gospel singer Sista Monica Parker back in the early 2000s. And of all the many conversations and interviews and encounters I had with her, and through all the many times I had seen her perform, I can’t remember a single moment with her that was frivolous or throw-away or mundane.

She exuded joy — not a childish, superficial kind of joy, but a hard-earned, spiritually muscular kind of joy, an outlook on life that acknowledges the contradictions, the tragedies, the ugly injustices, a “Hallelujah anyway” kind of joy. Musicians who have collaborated with her — and the list includes some big names beyond Santa Cruz — will tell you that she had an extraordinary versatility and emotional intelligence when it came to music. But she was gifted with that same kind of dexterity in the realm of spirituality. 

There are many locals who were much more intimate with Tammi than I was. But whenever I saw her, I was amazed at how quickly and effortlessly she was able to move into a meaningful conversation. We talked not so much about music, but about challenges, disappointments and heartaches in the realm of family, relationships, making a living, the brutalities of society, the pains and contradictions of being human. Yet, underneath it all, she could easily conjure laughter, exuberance, wistfulness … joy. It was as if she knew something the rest of us struggled to understand, even in the middle of a health crisis that would eventually take her life: that there’s something beyond this tawdry world of pain and chaos.

Keith Greeninger is one of those who knew Tammi on a deeper level than I did. The long-time Santa Cruz singer/songwriter had collaborated as a songwriter and performer with Tammi countless times. They knew each other in the way that only those who create art together can know each other. 

Last Saturday, the very day that Tammi died, Keith had a concert to do at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center on the same stage that he had shared with her many times. He had seen her in the last weeks of her life and knew what was coming, so the news was no surprise. But still, just hours from headlining a show with guitarist Nina Gerber, he was a bit unmoored. “I was kinda out of my body there for a while,” he said of those moments before the show. 

The concert was sold out, and it was clear that most people had not heard the news about Tammi. The second song of the evening was “It’s a Good Day,” (“It’s a good day/To be on your way, my friend”). During an extended instrumental sequence in the song, Keith took to the mic and announced the terrible news: “It was a heartfelt, but beautiful, gasp [in the crowd],” he said.

Several days before Tammi’s death, Keith sent me a song that the two of them had co-written, a majestic ballad called “Higher Ground,” his deeply burnished growl contrasting with her sophisticated and soaring style. 

“I always joke,” he told me, “that there was just enough devil in Tammi to make her know what it took to be an angel. She was really playful, and she was never afraid to talk about the darker stuff.”

Tammi grew up in the Peninsula community of Los Altos Hills, one of the few Black kids in town. Her father was a Pentecostal minister who loved the spirituals of Mahalia Jackson, but would not allow his children exposure to secular music of any kind. Her mother, however, conspired with other family members to undermine her father’s wishes, opening her up to pop, funk, soul, Motown and other forms of mainstream music. In fact, another relative taught her the old Jerome Kern jazz standard at a time when other kids were still learning their ABC’s. “I just absorbed it like a sponge,” she told me in an interview several years ago.

But her mother died suddenly when Tammi was just 14, and that traumatic loss at such a vulnerable age shaped both her musical sensibilities and her sense of spirituality. While, as a young aspiring singer, she wanted nothing less than to be Chaka Khan, it was the memory of her mother singing gospel music to her that kept tethered to the church.

As a musician, Tammi grew to be a force, funneling her talents into various styles and idioms, in the process turning her into a professional, collaborating with a wide range of giants in her field from Stanley Jordan to Bobby McFerrin. “A lot of people can sing, and a lot of people have a great voice,” said composer Albert Greenberg, who once recruited Tammi to record with him an album of “new” jazz standards. “But Tammi inhabited music. She really went inside the song. She could do every vocal flourish in the world, so the range of expression was just so wide and deep. She was more than a singer, she was a musician.”

After moving to Santa Cruz in the early 2000s, Tammi dove into the local music scene. And I was amazed at how many benefits, festivals and other musicians’ shows she would participate in, whether it was the Planet Cruz Comedy Hour, or the White Album Ensemble, or Rhan Wilson’s “An Altered Christmas.” She said yes to so many things, I was left to wonder which gigs she said no to, if any.

In the fall of 2023, everything changed when she was diagnosed with Stage IV ovarian cancer. At the time, she was helping out a close friend, fellow singer Marla Stone Lyons (who performed under the stage name Star LaMoan), who was in the final stages of the same disease, and soon passed away. At a remembrance for her fallen friend, herself in treatment, Tammi gave a performance of Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” that those who witnessed it won’t forget anytime soon. 

In early 2024, Tammi’s health rallied, and she began performing again, just in time to enjoy being named Santa Cruz County’s Artist of the Year. But the reprieve was not to last. In the late summer, the cancer re-emerged. Still, she leaned on her music to get her through. As late as February, she was performing at the NAACP’s Gospel Night show.

Her friend Rabbi Paula Marcus of Temple Beth El was there that night. “She came in her Ugg boots, looking like she just rolled out of bed. But she showed up. And it wasn’t the voice we all knew. It was … Tammi on her way out.”

Rabbi Paula’s way of describing Tammy Brown’s indomitable spirit of joy through music is to evoke a term from Hebrew tradition: hineni. It’s a term translating roughly to “Here I am,” and is used as a way to express availability to God to serve His will. 

“That was Tammi,” she said. “If God’s calling, she’s, like, ‘I’m here. I’m signing up. My soul is a hundred percent faith.’ You just don’t find a lot of people who have that strong conviction in their faith. Tammi was just filled with it.”