THE COLOR PURPLE
The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker that won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. It was later adapted into a film and a musical of the same name. Taking place mostly in rural Georgia, the story focuses on the life of African-American women in the southern United States in the 1930s, addressing numerous issues including their exceedingly low position in American social culture. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number seventeen because of the sometimes explicit content, particularly in terms of violence. In 2003 the book was listed on the BBC’s The Big Read poll of the UK’s “best-loved novels”. (More from Wikipedia)
Black Russian had some assistance with the lyrics, perhaps because English is not their native language; they hardly spoke the language at all at the time that they defected. Lyricists who lent a hand include Allee Willis, who co-wrote the lyrics for their beautiful first single “Leave Me Now”. Willis has had a long career as a writer, songwriter, set designer, and artist. Her musical credits are as wide-ranging as can be imagined; together with Stephen Bray and Brenda Russell, Allee Willis wrote the music for the 2005 Broadway musical The Color Purple, based on the 1982 novel, The Color Purple by Alice Walker and the 1985 movie, The Color Purple that was directed by Steven Spielberg and starred Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, and Rae Dawn Chong.
(April 2015/1)
