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"Keep Rising" nominated for a Grammy Award

Singer and songwriter Jessy Wilson   -  
Copyright © africanews
Brent N. Clarke/2019 Invision

USA

A song by female black singer-songwriter Jessy Wilson was nominated for the prestigious Grammy Awards.

The song "Keep Rising" was nominated for best song written for visual media after the track was included in “The Woman King”, the hit movie released this year starring Viola Davis.

"I wrote "Keep Rising" from a space of frustration and internal frustration, but also frustration with what I was seeing in the world. I just sort of like got it out in one day. And I knew that, you know, the message should be one of hope and of resilience", said singer-songwriter Jessy Wilson.

"When they came back, when the studio came back and said that they wanted to use it, and we sort of went back and forth and made lots of adjustments via Gina's (filmmaker Gina Prince-Bythewood, Ed.) input and just tailor making it to the movie, adding in words that felt like the film, and then Gina added Angelique Kidjo, which absolutely blew my mind" admitted the recording artist. 

"I definitely experienced a lot of colourism in the music industry. I definitely experienced being told that I wasn't the right kind of pretty or the right kind of marketable because of my skin tone. And it was really empowering to see a cast full of beautiful brown women existing in their power, existing in their strength and intelligence", concluded Wilson

The winners of the Grammy Awards will be announced on the 5th of February.

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