LUCINDA MOORE
BLESSED, BROKEN & GIVEN
For years Lucinda Moore blamed herself for her father’s death. For a period, she even suffered from low self-esteem, the trauma of being molested as a teenager, and endured a rocky marriage for 16 years just because she wanted to be loved by someone the way that her Daddy used to love her. Now, Moore’s been Blessed, Broken & Given (Tyscot Records) as she proclaims on the title cut of her sophomore CD. “This is my testimony of what God did for me,” Moore confesses. “He’s blessed me with a voice but He had to break some things in me in order for me to be given to the nation. I had to go through some stuff to help somebody else. “
Moore is known for her 2006 breakthrough solo smash “Pressure Into Praise” as well as her cameo appearances on Hezekiah Walker’s evergreen “When We Get Over There,” the vamp of Tramaine Hawkins’s electrifying “Lift Me Up,” and the GMWA Women of Worship Choir’s classic “I Surrender My All.”
The eldest of two girls born to a nurse (Mary Simmons Dobson) and an auto detailer (John Earl Simmons), this searing soprano has come a long way from Bridgeport, Connecticut’s Beardsley Projects. She was born with pneumonia and battled the illness several times during her youth. Her nose ran constantly and she was teased because of it. “You had to fight to survive there,” she says of her tough neighborhood. “I started fighting when I was eight years old. A girl called me snotty nose and started teasing me so I hit her.”
While her parents were working, Moore and her sister Marion spent much of their leisure time with their grandmother, Mother Lucille Wright, who grounded them in the faith at St. John’s Fire Baptized Holiness Church. “I wore skirts all the time,” she says. “At school, the girls wore pants but I couldn’t wear pants because of the teachings of my church, so I wasn’t in the clique. I couldn’t get on drill teams. It made me mean because I was always an outcast.” She felt further isolation after her mother was re-married to a man with whom Moore never saw eye to eye.
The one solace for Moore was music. She was only four years old when her mother brought home Walter Hawkins’ Love Alive LP that featured his then-wife Tramaine on cuts such as “Goin’ Up Yonder” and “Changed.” Moore recalls, “I played that album every day before school. After school, I ran home and played that album. I told my mother that one day I’m going to sing like this lady and I’m going to sing with her one day.”
Before that opportunity transpired, Moore joined Willie Small & the Willie Small Singers when she was fourteen. The group was a contemporary gospel ensemble known across Connecticut for songs such as “I Need Your Spirit.” Then, tragedy struck during her senior year of high school. Moore had a strange feeling on October 23, 1987. “I woke up that morning,” she recalls. “I had not spent quality time with my dad in a long time and the spirit was saying go see your dad.” So, she skipped school and took a bus across town to her father’s place. “We sat there and talked and laughed. At one point, I was in the kitchen cooking and my dad came in and sat me on his lap and started crying. I had never seen him cry before. He gave me the facts of life and told me he didn’t want any man to mess over me or he’d have to kill him. He asked me to sing to him and I sang `You Are So Beautiful’ and `His Eye is on the Sparrow.’ He kept crying and I was wondering what was wrong with him.”
So, about 11 p.m. that evening Mr. Simmons dropped Moore back off at her mother’s home. Around 3 a.m. Simmons’ Aunt Ethel called to inform Moore that her father had been shot to death after accidentally stepping on a man’s foot. “My whole body went numb,” she remembers. “My mom just passed out. Even though she was remarried, I think she still loved my dad.” Moore sang, “His Eye is on the Sparrow” at her father’s funeral but struggled to finish her final year of high school. “I didn’t go to classes,” she recalls. “The principal allowed me to do all of my homework and studying in the music room. I didn’t want to be around anybody and I blamed myself because if I had stayed with him a couple more hours he’d still be here.”
A few months later, music would lift Moore from her depression. Her cousin Jonathan DuBose Jr. (a guitarist known for playing behind artists ranging from Jennifer Holiday to Harry Connick Jr.) called her to sing back-up for her shero, Tramaine Hawkins. “I had a choice to make,” says Moore. “I had won a 2 year scholarship to Berklee College of Music which was my dream to go there. So, I could go there or go on the road with Tramaine. I went with Tramaine.”
A few weeks later, Moore was on the west coast rehearsing to back-up Tramaine on her 1989 Live LP. “There were 8,000 people there,” Moore remembers. “Jesse Jackson was there and everybody who was anybody. I was so nervous. I spent five years with Tramaine and I learned all I could. She took me under her wings like a daughter. She groomed me in terms of my dressing and, my stage presence. I watched her like a hawk. I know so many people because I was with Tramaine all those years and I networked and met the people she knew. “
On the personal front, Moore was still mourning her father’s death. “I was looking for love in all the wrong places,” she confides. “I had a baby out of wedlock, then begged my son’s father [her bass player] to marry me in 1993 knowing he didn’t love me.” Looking back, she says it was a mistake. “I was verbally abused and I accepted it because I had low self-esteem and didn’t think I was pretty,” she says. “Before my marriage, I was molested by a relative. If I didn’t know how to fight, I would have been raped twice. I just wanted someone to love me. My dad was the only man who loved me. A month after he died, I latched on to the man I would eventually marry.”
Moore had been recruited by Hezekiah Walker as a teenager but her mother wouldn’t allow her to travel with his choir but in 1993, she had joined his Love Fellowship Choir. She held down two daytime jobs with Ann Taylor and an aircraft firm during the week and then, hit the road with the choir and later, Walker’s group, Love Unlimited. After years of traveling and ministering with groups, Moore felt like it was time to build her solo career and Telisa Stinson, a gospel music industry veteran, helped Moore lock down a recording deal with Tyscot Records in 2005.
“I started having problems in my marriage,” Moore says of the period when she began to plan her recording. “I was laying on my couch. I was crying everyday. It got to the point that my husband started verbally abusing me in front of my kids. I married my past. And then, `God said why are you stressing out? All of the pressures you are dealing with, turn that pressure into praise. I started writing that song on the spot.” The Caribbean-styled song shot to #13 on Billboard magazine’s Hot Gospel Songs chart in fall 2006 and her self-titled CD debut hit the Top 10 as well. That song catapulted Moore to gospel music’s upper echelon and soon she was appearing on programs with heavyweights such as Prophetess Juanita Bynum and Pastor Paula White.
In spite of her career success, Moore was still suffering behind closed doors as she prepared for her new CD Blessed, Broken & Given. “When I did the first album I was going through some rough stuff,” she says. “But, with this one I was going through a divorce. Emotionally I was a wreck.” Moore carried on the public façade of peace and happiness because often in the church community, these issues are kept underwraps and never dealt with. In order to be truly freed from years of pain, abuse and mistreatment, she would have to undergo an internal transformation with the only One she knew could truly help her…God.
After Moore finalized her divorce, she retreated for several weeks and focused on her music. She wrote the CD’s dramatic title song (and it’s first radio single) to encourage others. “I’m doing it to help other people come out of what they are coming out of,” she explains. “You don’t have to be unhappy and sit in abuse. My whole adult life has been nothing but drama and trauma. The latter part of 2009 to now is my first time of feeling happy and at peace in my adult life.”
Moore and her three sons now live in Greensboro, NC where she attends New Jerusalem Cathedral. Moore is working to spread the message of hope through music and service to others who have been abused and emotionally scarred. She has linked up with a North Carolina women’s organization called Impact that works to help abused women get back on their feet. In addition, a portion of the album sells from her upcoming CD will be donated to the shelter. Moore’s message of hope is one she hopes to share with the world – that only God can heal the pain and prepare one – to be Blessed, Broken & Given.