There she was. At the Kennedy Center Awards in December, standing on a stage in front of everyone from the President of the United States to the people who would be working late cleaning the Center after the audience had left in their limousines. The woman walked out and sang a song that guaranteed that this music would go on forever, on or off the earth, and that the beauty of the human soul will shine as long as there is a sky above. Joni Mitchell wrote the song over 50 years ago. She was sitting in the balcony as a Kennedy Center honoree while her life surely passed before her, and likely Mitchell knew that her own time here on the planet had made for unending moments which will be cherished as long as there are ears to hear and memories to remember.

And the singer, Brittany Howard from Athens, Alabama, touched the heart like only truly great artists can, and gave all those who were watching in person and later on television the gift that will never die. "Both Sides Now" has been played millions of times by almost as many people, but this night of December 5th, 2021 in Washington, D.C. was one for the ages. As Howard shared her spirit, pianist Herbie Hancock colored the song behind her, like he was a living embodiment of a beautiful vista that had no end. Hancock caressed his piano as if he was turning notes into a secret screed from a hidden source. The feeling was breathless.

Whenever a song touches the deepest center of a certain truth, and makes it come alive in ways that can't really be described but are always remembered, it is in those most precious moments that all worries melt away and only true wonder remains. In so many ways, it is the most precious gift that can be given, because it makes eternity seem possible. Not like a philosophical tenet but rather a living, breathing fact of life. It will never be forgotten. Music does that with a momentous simplicity, really, and one that only arrives when it is the right time.

When Brittany Howard came onto the Kennedy Center stage, she carried a hero's aura. By no means a household name, there was a regalness to her that was unmistakable. With a small black pillbox hat sitting squarely atop full-sprung black hair on both sides of her face, wire-rimmed glasses, lipstick as red as red can be and wearing tennis shoes, the Alabama woman let it be known with the first lyrics from one of the greatest songs ever written that history was right around the corner. "Rows and flows of angel's hair / and ice cream castles in the air / and feather canyons everywhere / I've looked at clouds that way…"

The sound of Howard's voice was beyond singing. It was like she was delivering a message from the other side, one that needed to be taken in and lived with, never to disapear. Herbie Hancock's piano was woven into the singer's notes, like a majestic tapestry to be marveled at. Near the end of the song, when the lady from Alabama delivers her heartbroke reckoning with the lyric "So many things I would have done / but clouds got in the way," you could almost hear king tears hitting the floor throughout the audience. Those there in the Kennedy Center that night must all have been feeling deep down in their own beings all the incredible things that are missed in this too-brief earthly ride. And just to be safe that Joni Mitchell's long-ago realization isn't missed, Brittany Howard sang the song's heartbreaking denouement twice: "I really don't know life at all." Yes, twice. Up in the balcony, there was a glistening in the eyes of Joni Mitchell. And President Joe Biden. And everyone else. It was such a singular moment of a cosmic visitation that it will always be here. It is one for the final book.

Brittany Howard's soul does that to people. She is able to stand planted on the stage, looking out into the audience with a sense of destiny. Like she knows the longshot she hit to make it that far, and doesn't take it for granted for a single moment. But even more, Howard is certain she belongs up there, through all the challenges and hardships she's hit along the way. Losing her sister, those long days delivering mail in Alabama, the early nights with her band Alabama Shakes racing up and down the empty backroads searching for a break. Beginning in the music business can be a brutal endeavor, but if the love is there and the strength arrives it is also one of the most wondrous achievements ever, when audiences start to pay cash money to hear and see a band live, and then they buy a 45 or an LP or even just listen online, putting their irrefutable belief that the music means something to them into the band's pocket. That they are going to stand tall and become a member of a growing army of believers. The Alabama Shakes saw that happen before their own eyes. And for a very good reason. They are a great band. From the start, really. But in some ways, Brittany Howard's future started to grow outside her group, and flowered into a movement of those who knew the woman held the knowledge of a golden future right in front of her. There was something in Howard's eyes, almost like a quizzical expression which asked if her fans were willing to risk it all and follow her into a new future. Like betting the farm. That's when the ground below us disappears and a hand of faith has to reach out to help lead the way. There can be no looking back.

When Brittany Howard's first solo album, titled JAIME, was released in 2019, it was a bit quizzical at first. It sounded like Howard had escaped the barrooms and night spots that which helped birth and nurture the Alabama Shakes as surely as if she had set the band's van afire. But it also announced with total surety that a new star had stepped into her previous spotlight. The collection, named after the singer's sister who had passed away, sounded like a great painting looks: there can be nothing else to ever take its place. It will be here for the rest of time, offering vision and joy and adventure and challenge and everything else the very best art brings to life. It also offered a solid rock of belief for the past two extremely challenging pandemic years that we as fellow tenants of this big planet will somehow get through. Even with an album opening song that sometimes sounds like two different songs playing at once, it becomes clear the first track "History Repeats" is a wake-up call. JAIME will not be a sweet walk in the park. It will be a constant revelation of a life just beyond this one. Brittany Howard knows she has a duty to take us places we don't normally go. That is the gig, and she will not back down. Bless her heart. Every song on the album is a sideways slide into a zone we haven't been to. It is sometimes beautiful, sometimes thrilling, sometimes righteous, sometimes even scary. Like we have all been allowed occupancy on Earth to experience what is all around us, but we are also being called to make sure others have that chance as well. The E-ticket must be for everyone, and that feels what JAIME is really about. Brittany Howard knows.

In the world of popular music, there is no surety that someone will appear to match the pure power of all that has come before. Sometimes it feels like the circle of greatness is getting smaller. It probably has more to do with all I have seen and heard than what is being created today. Who will ever be able to have the same impact as seeing Otis Redding in a Houston nightclub in 1966, or the Rolling Stones in a small Dallas auditorium in 1965? They say timing is everything, and to have been so incredibly fortunate to have found myself over and over at such soul-shaking shows the past 50-plus years now feels like being given the permanent private code to an unbelievable kingdom.

As much as I want to wander into such glowing greatness again and to discover someone rewriting all the rules for themselves that will completely blow my mind apart now seems like wishing on long odds. But that is the journey I keep myself on, which has me constantly searching for the musical magic I pray is still there. There is no other way for me to stay really alive. And that is exactly what Brittany Howard reminded me in person last August at the Hollywood Bowl. I am not sure why I went to the Bowl that evening. I just felt pulled to put myself up near the top in the bleachers and see if the spaceship would land and take me away. One song in, when the singer was stomping around the stage and exhorting the 10,000 people there to travel into the ultra zone with her for two hours, I knew once more that against long odds the rocket had landed. It was beyond common sense that such spiritual exhilaration the best music supplies would turn the Hollywood Bowl into a traveling sonic circus that night in August. But that it's exactly what happened. The stage became a believing ground, with the ten musicians and singers helping Howard climb a mountain of soul right before our eyes. As breathtaking as Muddy Waters, Moby Grape, Janis Joplin, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Miles Davis: anyone I've ever seen. That's what Brittany Howard was that night. It is a holy reminder that music holds secrets beyond the everyday collision of molecules. Somehow the sounds rearrange them and for however long those golden moments exist, a new reality fills in all the sights and sounds around us. It gives to those tuned into that fleeting frequency at just the right moment a journey into the music of the spheres.

When making the final additions to the SMITHSONIAN ROCK AND ROLL: LIVE AND UNSEEN book almost six years ago, I could not decide what the last photo should be. In a way, that felt like the most important photo in the book because it pointed to the future. And music has always seemed about the future to me. Where is it taking us? Hopefully forward. And then, a week before the final deadline of the book's publication in 2017 I woke up one morning and said, "Brittany Howard." I didn't even know why those words came to me. Then I realized: that had to be the last image seen in the book. And so it is. Howard felt like the future then, even though it was several years before she headed off on the solo adventure which has taken her to new worlds. But there Brittany Howard is, on that last page. In the very final image she is holding the microphone right in front of her face wearing a Thunderbitch T-shirt from her side project band, with her glasses on and hair falling over her forehead. The woman's eyes are looking into the future with plenty of wonder but not a shred of fear. She is facing forward, ready to go wherever this life takes her. Amidst the vast silence of a photograph she is inviting us to go too. In her song "He Loves Me," there is a sound clip from a preacher in my hometown of Houston: "He ain't worried about nothin'…" The heavenly hand of God holds Brittany Howard's, and hope sings eternal.

By Bill Bentley