Lovers of kids’ music served with a hefty dollop of soul will marvel at the new single and music video that popular singer Snooknuk dropped earlier this month, “Do Re Mi,” filmed around the Stax Museum of American Soul Music and the Soulsville campus. Significantly, the track is more fully credited to “Snooknuk feat. Stax Music Academy, Kwamè & Pierce Freelon,” and the first name in that features list should tip you off to the track’s soul bona fides. Indeed, Stax Music Academy (SMA) students are getting used to rubbing shoulders with celebrities as they are increasingly called in to recording and videotaping sessions for major artists.
“We also have a documentary we did with Morgan Freeman that should be coming out hopefully sometime soon,” says Isaac Daniel, SMA executive director. “Then we have several other initiatives we’re working on right now. There have been a lot of students getting opportunities to record.” And since SMA aims, as Daniel says, “to be the number one educational institution in the world to teach rhythm and blues,” its students bring a sense of the city’s soul to every project they’re featured on.
Which is not to say that Snooknuk, aka Cheri Moon, aka Cheri Jacobs, doesn’t bring plenty of Memphis soul to everything she does as well, having grown up here herself. After beginning a career in gospel, chasing her dreams of music led her to work with the likes of Timbaland, Jimmy Douglass, and Missy Elliott, and she’s built a Los Angeles-based life in R&B as well as kids’ material. She’s also down for collabs: In addition to her two albums as Snooknuk, Once Upon a Day: A Little Less Tears (2013) and Once Upon a Day: A Lot More Fun (2014), her most recent bout with fame was the 2022 Grammy nomination for All One Tribe by 1 Tribe Collective, to which she contributed.
Snooknuk & Lucy Kalantari (Photo: Gebre Waddell)
All of which is to say that when the producer and co-writer of “Do Re Mi,” two-time Grammy winner Lucy Kalantari, was looking for someone to collaborate with on this track, Snooknuk was an artist who she knew could deliver. Having already sought out the SMA chorus specifically for this project, she was delighted to discover that Snooknuk was also a Memphis native, and that sealed the collab. Then Kalantari brought hip-hop pioneer Kwamè into the project, not to mention the Grammy-nominated artist, beatboxer, and educator Pierce Freelon.
Somehow, the video weaves all of these disparate elements into a dynamic narrative with an inexorable rise in musical energy over its four minutes. Beginning calmly enough, it features young vocalists Dianna and Ella Waddell (daughters of local music mover and shaker Gebre Waddell) innocently asking Snooknuk, in the role of a Stax Music Academy teacher, how to sing. The resulting lesson may be the most irresistible “Do Re Mi” you’ve ever heard.
Furthermore, as Daniel sees it, it perfectly expresses the blend of learning and fun that SMA aims for. “Initially, it was just a collaborative piece between us and Snooknuk, something that would engage the kids, that they could relate to. But it really shows the progression of how you fundamentally learn. So the ‘do re mi fa so la ti,’ that kind of stuff, is the solfège method that is at the heart of learning how to perform. What we found was that if students bypass that, don’t learn that, as they get older in their progression, they end up missing pieces, right? And the thing is, at Stax, one of the things that we have undertaken the last three or four years is, we want to make sure students are having fun creating music, making music, the whole nine yards, as well as learning fundamentals, so they can flourish or thrive in any musical environment.”
And so the video works on two levels: On one, it’s a message and music track that educates and entertains; on another, the song’s form reciprocates the way SMA itself has grown to encompass the complexities of the modern music industry. “As the song progresses, at the very beginning, they’re using solfège, and as it goes on, it takes on more and more of a contemporary sound, which aligns with what we’re doing,” says Daniel. “Because one thing we’re doing now is teaching kids how to create their own music, their own product, and put it out there, right? And so in the video, the song ultimately goes into a hip-hop beat with Kwamè rapping on it.”
Meanwhile, when recording the song and making the video, the more tech-oriented SMA students were able to learn the nuts and bolts of the trades. “The kids not only got to go behind the scenes, record, and make a product, but they also got to see the whole process. They got to see how you storyboard and how that shapes the project. During the video shoot, they also helped with things like playback, all those different technical tasks. They were working with Brandon McCoy, the videographer, and also assisted with all the lighting. The experiences that Lucy and Snooknuk were able to give to those kids were irreplaceable.”
And, Daniel points out, there will be more of that as SMA’s new partnership with Live Nation Entertainment begins in earnest, just in time for the opening of Live Nation’s Satellite Music Hall. “We always knew Live Nation was coming, and now we’re going to partner with them and give our students opportunities in conjunction with them. Students are getting certified on stuff like Pro Tools, Dante, Logic, and behind-the-scenes stuff, and then working directly with professionals in the field.”
Just as the kids did on “Do Re Mi.” Snooknuk, for her part, was deeply moved by the encounter. “It’s incredibly special to come back to Memphis and create with these young artists at Stax,” she said in a press release. “This city gave me my voice — and now I get to help pass that on.”
