Pianist Bobby West and Visual Artist Lori Precious Unveil
REQUIEM FOR MARY TURNER,
Their Impassioned Masterpiece that Commemorates the Martyrdom
of an African-American Woman
and 135 Other Women
Who Were Victims of Lynching
LOS ANGELES, CA, June 4, 2025 – Pianist/composer Bobby West is a four-decade “overnight sensation” who burst on the jazz scene a few years ago, with two critically acclaimed releases, Leimert Park After Dark (2021) and its 2023 follow-up Big Trippin’. Today he returns with Requiem for Mary Turner, which includes his classical 13-minute oratorio performed by a 22-piece symphonic orchestra, along with 10 other selections that span jazz, classical, gospel and ballad genres.
This is more than just music to enjoy. It is also a powerful tribute to a strong young woman whose story touched Bobby’s heart. There have been more than 4,400 documented cases of Black Americans who were lynched by Caucasian mobs. It is estimated that 136 of them were women and girls. Mary Turner was one of them.
All three of West’s albums were released on the Soulville Records label, co-founded by his partner, visual artist Lori Precious, whose works have appeared at art galleries and museums worldwide. Together, they have collaborated to create this tribute, with Precious’ captivating, butterfly wing-inspired art donning the cover. She also has created 135 other works to pay homage to Turner’s fallen sisters.
Mrs. Turner was born Mary Hattie Graham in Brooks County, GA in 1885. She married Hazel “Hayes” Turner in the same county. On May 16, 1918, an abusive plantation owner, Hampton Smith, was killed. Turner was rounded up, falsely accused of killing Smith, and was lynched on May 18. The following day, Mary proclaimed his innocence, which angered the white mob, and took up arms to defend him before her horrific death. She had two sons and was eight months pregnant when they hung her, set her on fire and cut her child from her body. The baby fell to the ground and one of the members of the mob crushed the infant’s head into the Georgia clay moments before they riddled the mother with hundreds of bullets and killed her.*
Turner’s tragic odyssey was chosen for this album and artwork to symbolize the martyrdom of all these women lynched, not as anonymous victims but real people with names. As this dark door opens to the racial terrorism of American history, it also lets in the healing light of truth.
Precious’ series Requiem for Mary Turner was created in the tradition of artists Jacob Lawrence, Kara Walker and Elizabeth Catlett, artists who have depicted lynching through their art. Precious grew up in the 1960s, lived in Somalia where her father worked with USAID, and is an alumna of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Her works primarily featured the wings of butterflies, and she is partial to themes of veneration, often of women who have been made invisible. The centerpiece of Precious’ Requiem for Mary Turner is an intricate piece of amber-hued wings that radiate outward from the name, Mary Turner, surrounded by a wreath of “flowers” also made of wings. An additional 135 smaller pieces complete the series, each with the name in butterfly wings of the other women and girls.
The genesis of Requiem for Mary Turner emerged in 2002 when Precious was reading about the horrors of lynching and wondered if any women had been lynched. As compelling as that idea was, she felt that the subject was sacred ground.
“I didn’t think a white person should tread on it,” Precious remembers, “I kind of just put it away. But the idea never really went away.”
Still intrigued by the subject, Precious started to investigate. At the time, information on lynching was challenging to find. Through her research at the NAACP, the Ida B. Wells Foundation, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Precious discovered there were indeed women and girls who had been lynched, often for trying to protect their husbands and sons. In 2009 the publication of Crystal N. Feimster’s Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching provided a more complete list of names for cross reference. When the Equal Justice Initiative opened in 2018, their extensive archive on lynching in America became an invaluable resource.
In 2018, Precious shared her ideas and research with Bobby West and Jesse Sharps (Horace Tapscott’s bandleader), thinking that as Black Americans they might want to do something with it because, as she explained, “it was not a white person’s story to tell.”
“To my surprise, they disagreed with me," Precious recalls. “They said, you have this awareness to tell the story. They kind of flipped the script on me. I said, Okay! And I said to Bobby, could I commission some music from you as a partnership? And he immediately said, yes.”
For West, who as a Black Southerner certainly knew of the horrors of lynching and is old enough to remember the murder of Emmett Till, learning about Mary Turner was a surprise. “When Lori commissioned me to do the work, ironically – because I consider myself a scholar on Black America – I didn't know who Mary Turner was. But I was immediately inspired,” West states.
Taking the biographical raw materials of his subject and translating them into an aesthetic statement, West produced a “sound portrait” of Mary Turner. “The music came to me through a spiritual process,” West recounts. “First, meditating on the incredible saga of this poor beautiful butterfly, I began to receive celestial messages and to experience inspired motivations. Then there was music that resounded from within me that I was put to task with notating, orchestrating these themes.”
There have been many vivid musical works about lynching, from the Black classical composer William Grant Still’s opus “And They Lynched Him From a Tree” to Billie Holiday’s immortal protest song “Strange Fruit.” Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts and Mary Lou Williams’ religious music were full of the pain and hardships of Black life. Supported by a symphonic orchestra fluent in both American and European classical genres, West’s Requiem is a moving and magnificent opus that features solemn yet soaring strings, a fanfare melody gently prodded by West’s chords, and woodwinds blowing their pointillistic airs from the bloodstained South of the 19th century to today.
The first musical sentence is based on the opening line of "The Lord's Prayer." As Mary contemplated her horrific fate by the racists who murdered her, it conjures the single most awe-inspiring sentence Jesus spoke. As he hung from a cross, “forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.” Using Mozart’s unfinished Requiem in D Minor as a model for the opus’ structure, West incorporates elements of gospel music to create an “aural biography because he “wanted the piece to end on a victorious, redemptive finale.”
To augment Requiem, West added to the album several more selections. Performed in various combo configurations, these songs further illuminate the life of Mary Turner – from the Baptist church cadences of “A Scene from Sunday,” a pleasing piano/vocal duet with the criminally overlooked singer Maxayn Lewis, who also turns in with West equally elegiac duo performances on the hymn “In the Garden” and “Move On Up a Little Higher.” There is the rousing Latin jazz rendition of Sting’s “Fragile” with shades of Ahmad Jamal and Ramsey Lewis, the abstract embers of the improvised “Spirit Move Sunrise” and “Spirit Move Sunset,” the French Impressionism of another West solo, “Lover’s Reflection On Still Water,” a Chopinesque reading of the pop standard “Never Let Me Go,” and the martial Charles Mingus-like New Orleans funeral dirge “March of the Uninvited.”
In the final analysis, West and Precious resurrected Mary Turner with Requiem, transmigrating Turner’s spirit to a higher place. “I wanted,” concludes West, “to represent that she is free. She is free of all the burdens and tragedy of her short life. I wanted to create a finale that sounds like the ascension of her soul.”
All three of West’s albums were released on the Soulville Records label, co-founded by his partner, visual artist Lori Precious, whose works have appeared at art galleries and museums worldwide. Together, they have collaborated to create this tribute, with Precious’ captivating, butterfly wing-inspired art donning the cover. She also has created 135 other works to pay homage to Turner’s fallen sisters.
Mrs. Turner was born Mary Hattie Graham in Brooks County, GA in 1885. She married Hazel “Hayes” Turner in the same county. On May 16, 1918, an abusive plantation owner, Hampton Smith, was killed. Turner was rounded up, falsely accused of killing Smith, and was lynched on May 18. The following day, Mary proclaimed his innocence, which angered the white mob, and took up arms to defend him before her horrific death. She had two sons and was eight months pregnant when they hung her, set her on fire and cut her child from her body. The baby fell to the ground and one of the members of the mob crushed the infant’s head into the Georgia clay moments before they riddled the mother with hundreds of bullets and killed her.*
Turner’s tragic odyssey was chosen for this album and artwork to symbolize the martyrdom of all these women lynched, not as anonymous victims but real people with names. As this dark door opens to the racial terrorism of American history, it also lets in the healing light of truth.
Precious’ series Requiem for Mary Turner was created in the tradition of artists Jacob Lawrence, Kara Walker and Elizabeth Catlett, artists who have depicted lynching through their art. Precious grew up in the 1960s, lived in Somalia where her father worked with USAID, and is an alumna of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Her works primarily featured the wings of butterflies, and she is partial to themes of veneration, often of women who have been made invisible. The centerpiece of Precious’ Requiem for Mary Turner is an intricate piece of amber-hued wings that radiate outward from the name, Mary Turner, surrounded by a wreath of “flowers” also made of wings. An additional 135 smaller pieces complete the series, each with the name in butterfly wings of the other women and girls.
The genesis of Requiem for Mary Turner emerged in 2002 when Precious was reading about the horrors of lynching and wondered if any women had been lynched. As compelling as that idea was, she felt that the subject was sacred ground.
“I didn’t think a white person should tread on it,” Precious remembers, “I kind of just put it away. But the idea never really went away.”
Still intrigued by the subject, Precious started to investigate. At the time, information on lynching was challenging to find. Through her research at the NAACP, the Ida B. Wells Foundation, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Precious discovered there were indeed women and girls who had been lynched, often for trying to protect their husbands and sons. In 2009 the publication of Crystal N. Feimster’s Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching provided a more complete list of names for cross reference. When the Equal Justice Initiative opened in 2018, their extensive archive on lynching in America became an invaluable resource.
In 2018, Precious shared her ideas and research with Bobby West and Jesse Sharps (Horace Tapscott’s bandleader), thinking that as Black Americans they might want to do something with it because, as she explained, “it was not a white person’s story to tell.”
“To my surprise, they disagreed with me," Precious recalls. “They said, you have this awareness to tell the story. They kind of flipped the script on me. I said, Okay! And I said to Bobby, could I commission some music from you as a partnership? And he immediately said, yes.”
For West, who as a Black Southerner certainly knew of the horrors of lynching and is old enough to remember the murder of Emmett Till, learning about Mary Turner was a surprise. “When Lori commissioned me to do the work, ironically – because I consider myself a scholar on Black America – I didn't know who Mary Turner was. But I was immediately inspired,” West states.
Taking the biographical raw materials of his subject and translating them into an aesthetic statement, West produced a “sound portrait” of Mary Turner. “The music came to me through a spiritual process,” West recounts. “First, meditating on the incredible saga of this poor beautiful butterfly, I began to receive celestial messages and to experience inspired motivations. Then there was music that resounded from within me that I was put to task with notating, orchestrating these themes.”
There have been many vivid musical works about lynching, from the Black classical composer William Grant Still’s opus “And They Lynched Him From a Tree” to Billie Holiday’s immortal protest song “Strange Fruit.” Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts and Mary Lou Williams’ religious music were full of the pain and hardships of Black life. Supported by a symphonic orchestra fluent in both American and European classical genres, West’s Requiem is a moving and magnificent opus that features solemn yet soaring strings, a fanfare melody gently prodded by West’s chords, and woodwinds blowing their pointillistic airs from the bloodstained South of the 19th century to today.
The first musical sentence is based on the opening line of "The Lord's Prayer." As Mary contemplated her horrific fate by the racists who murdered her, it conjures the single most awe-inspiring sentence Jesus spoke. As he hung from a cross, “forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.” Using Mozart’s unfinished Requiem in D Minor as a model for the opus’ structure, West incorporates elements of gospel music to create an “aural biography because he “wanted the piece to end on a victorious, redemptive finale.”
To augment Requiem, West added to the album several more selections. Performed in various combo configurations, these songs further illuminate the life of Mary Turner – from the Baptist church cadences of “A Scene from Sunday,” a pleasing piano/vocal duet with the criminally overlooked singer Maxayn Lewis, who also turns in with West equally elegiac duo performances on the hymn “In the Garden” and “Move On Up a Little Higher.” There is the rousing Latin jazz rendition of Sting’s “Fragile” with shades of Ahmad Jamal and Ramsey Lewis, the abstract embers of the improvised “Spirit Move Sunrise” and “Spirit Move Sunset,” the French Impressionism of another West solo, “Lover’s Reflection On Still Water,” a Chopinesque reading of the pop standard “Never Let Me Go,” and the martial Charles Mingus-like New Orleans funeral dirge “March of the Uninvited.”
In the final analysis, West and Precious resurrected Mary Turner with Requiem, transmigrating Turner’s spirit to a higher place. “I wanted,” concludes West, “to represent that she is free. She is free of all the burdens and tragedy of her short life. I wanted to create a finale that sounds like the ascension of her soul.”
# # #
*For more information on Mary Turner, log on to The Equal Justice Initiative at https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/may/19.
Media Contact: Carolyn McClair PR
(212) 721-3341 | [email protected]
*For more information on Mary Turner, log on to The Equal Justice Initiative at https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/may/19.
Media Contact: Carolyn McClair PR
(212) 721-3341 | [email protected]
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