Wesla Whitfield
Wesla Whitfield has accomplished a lot since she started singing with her sisters at four-years-old. The SF State graduate has played Carnegie Hall, sang for First Lady Hillary Clinton and performed more than 10,000 shows but today the 63-year-old counts still being able to project her voice across a room with no microphone as a major accomplishment.
“I keep paying my dues,” she said.
Whitfield grew up in a solid redwood California bungalow in the small central California beach town of Santa Maria. Her mother was a housewife and her father worked in the oil fields and getting training for a life in entertainment wasn’t always easy.
When her father broke his back working in the fields, her mother and two sisters got jobs to support the family. A lack of money meant one piano lesson to go around between the three girls so her older sister gave her piano lessons to Wesla, something she didn’t fully appreciate since it was at 7:30 in the morning but something she says she didn’t fully comprehend at nine-years-old.
“I’ve never ever failed to thank her for that,” she said. “I’m sure it was much harder than I realized as a little child for my parents to keep doing that.”
Whitfield would develop her talents through plays in middle school and high school and after a few years at Pasadena Community College, came to then San Francisco State College in the fall of 1968.
That same semester school faculty, the Black Student Union, the Third World Liberation Front and other campus organizations would begin the longest student strike in American history. They wanted to create the first college of Ethnic Studies in the nation – and she had no idea what was going on.
“It was an interesting time for me because I was screaming right-wing and so I never found out really what the strike was about,” Whitfield said, who was a Nixon supporter or Nixonette in high school.
“ …they [students] started coming into the classrooms and they would surround the whole class and we would stop cause it was really scary. And then after that the SWAT team came in and the main path was all lined with these guys in full battle gear. It was scary.”
The strike ended March 22, 1969 but it was still a time of struggle for civil rights as well as anti-war and women’s movements but Wesla stayed away from all that, instead focusing on the development of her talents and “a tiny little voice” with Drama and Dance majors.
With an era of revolt the backdrop, she says marijuana helped her realize the truths of war.
“I was so close minded. I was for the Vietnam war. My God. And I started smoking marijuana and seeing things in a different way.
And one day I was looking at Time Magazine and here was this dead body hanging off the back of a truck, it was a United States soldier and I looked at it and I finally made a connection, cause at the time I was in love with a man just about that same age and it finally came to me: war is killing people. I’m only looking at the Americans but there’s all those other people. This is wrong.”
“That was the end of my Republican days and I stopped wearing little wool plaid skirts that I made myself and here I am. That’s what dope did for me.”
“Shortly after that the light dawned on me and I went far to the left and I’ve been there ever since. I’m sorry that I don’t know what was going on.”
The end of the 1960s would also signal the opening of new on-campus dorms. Wesla moved into Verducci Hall, demolished in 1989 after sustaining considerable damage in the Loma Prieta earthquake.
“I had everything I needed.”
“…and I could see the sun set over the little bridge by the lake. It was a wonderful existence.”
Her two majors would be her main focus but in her off time, Whitfield made trips with friends to the opera or symphony.
“I had season tickets for the nosebleed sections of the opera house and I saw every opera, every season.”
After school, Wesla began working for the San Francisco Opera as a salary chorister, then a singing cocktail waitress and other part-time work to keep afloat until she could sing full-time.
In 1977, while walking home from a rehearsal Wesla was shot several times by a 10 and a 12-year-old, paralyzing her from the waist down.
A year later, her first gig back from “being laid low” was to perform between sets at the Empire Plush Room’s New Years Eve celebration. Throngs of local media would show up to see her return to form, though she says it was a struggle, with no lights, no microphone.
“Everybody kind of listened for a minute and just went on talking. It was horror.”
The Plush Room would become her favorite venue and she would perform the New Years Eve show the next 28 years straight until it closed shortly after New Years in 2008.
Last year she marked a noteworthy milestone, spending half her life in a wheelchair and half walking, something thats brought both pain and lessons.
“I have learned through becoming disabled to see people beyond the superficial in terms of the first impression. I’ve learned that it’s going to be there.
I still have to go through all the hoops and all the things I had in my brain for the first 30 years but once I manage to put them aside I think I see people much more easily and I connect with them much more easily than I ever would have if I hadn’t become disabled.”
Her partner along the way through the shows and 18 albums has been Michael Greensill, who she met in 1982 when she needed a piano player and he needed work.
“We were very proper cause he was still married so we just did nothing about that but it was too great, he couldn’t fight it, cause I’m such a catch,” she said in a sarcastic tone. “And so he left his wife for me. It was just extraordinary.”
The two have now been married more than 26 years.
Greensill’s background in jazz has had an influence on her but Whitfield only performs songs from the Great American songbook, the kind of music you heard from artists like Cole Porter, Frank Sinatra, Billy Holiday and Nina Simone.
“We are dinosaurs,” she said, something she is proud of. Because all the songs are about the story and the human condition, she said, they are timeless.
“People still fall and love. People still get their heart broken. People live happily ever after.”
They have hopes and dreams and goals and ambitions that are met or not met and the great american popular song deals with those things.”
These days, Whitfield and Greensill don’t perform shows all over the world but spend the majority of their time marketing weekend shows at Silo’s at the Napa River Inn in Napa.
