I Am Annie Mae - Making the Musical

In 2024, People’s History in Texas, a non-profit 501(c)(3) research and publishing organization that uses oral history to bring to life the stories of ordinary people and significant socio-political movements, found in their archives two videotapes of I Am Annie Mae – The Musical filmed at Stages Repertory Theatre in Houston in 1989. That year the musical headlined the Texas Playwright’s Festival. We include them here to honor Annie Mae Hunt and Ruthe Winegarten, two Texas women who inspired us and many others to collect, publish, and advocate for Texas women’s history.

“I am Annie Mae: Making the Musical”
by Naomi Carrier
Founder, Texas Center for African American Living History,
Houston Community College professor emerita

Ruthe Winegarten believed in the power of story and the right of every person to tell stories in their own words. In the 1970s she began using oral history to “document the lives of ordinary working-class people who are at the base of all political structures, but who are seldom included in the history books.” (Preface, Ruthe Winegarten, I Am Annie Mae, 1983). ​

In 1977 Ruthe taped seven hours of interviews with the extraordinary advocate and grassroots political leader Annie Mae McDade Prosper Hunt, transcribing the tapes while Hunt corrected and verified the transcripts. Ruthe then worked with co-editor Frieda Werden to produce a manuscript, I am Annie Mae: An Extraordinary Woman in Her Own Words: The Personal Story of a Black Texas Woman, which was published in 1983 by Rosegarden Press and reprinted in 1996 by the University of Texas Press.

Southwest Texas State University hosted an Ethnic Women’s Conference in 1984, and I was attending in order to provide background music for one of the presenting poets. That evening I listened to Ruthe read passages from her oral history of Annie Mae. The following morning, I was sitting across the table from her at breakfast when she said she wished someone would make a musical of her book. The little girl in me began jumping up and down as I answered, “I can do that!” Besides, I was a pianist and poet and had been making up songs all my life, especially since learning to play the piano at age four. My mother gave me my first lesson on my grandpa’s piano. I remember coming back from San Marcos to Houston and writing songs based on Annie Mae’s stories that lent themselves to lyrics. Hence the songs Guts, Gumption and Go-Ahead, Rags, Losing Yo Baby, Working, and A Man Ain’t Going to Have No Baby.

Over the course of the next three years, Ruthe, Annie Mae, and I burnt up the highways traveling between Houston and Austin, Austin and Dallas, even Houston and New York. We were told it couldn’t be done, making a musical out of some woman who quit doing housework to earn a living by sewing and selling Avon products. But just like Annie Mae decided one freezing day at the bus stop to throw heavy socks over her shoes to keep from slipping and sliding on ice, I kept working to write songs like Coming Up from Texas and Once a Year the Peoples Comes Together. Throughout those years, my husband, Eugene Carrier, was traveling all over the world with the B. B. King Band. I attended some world-famous concerts, and I could surely empathize with Annie Mae’s blues because I had some blues of my own.

Annie Mae’s story was everybody’s story in many ways, whether one was rich like the Norrelle’s or you came home late from work with Big Mama watching your kids asleep on your front porch with the key round their necks. Somewhere in between all that, you could relate. Finally, Once a Year the Peoples Comes Together was the gospel finale whose foot-stomping, hand-clapping rhythm brought the house down. After almost forty years, the book has been reproduced, the show has been transformed into a one-woman show, and performances have occurred in Texas, Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Kansas. Annie Mae’s is a story worth telling over and over again. Our thirtieth anniversary production occurred in Houston at the Midtown Arts Theater Center. My last one-woman show was for an elementary school as part of Young Audiences Houston just before Covid. Scoring the music will allow this work to be performed by others, and that is the final phase for public productions.