A first-person story 20 years in the making

Poet Ursula Rucker and guitarist Tim Motzer, longtime Philadelphia-based collaborators, will perform Friday as part of the First Person Arts Festival. Their performance will feature a work called “My Father’s Daughter.”

“It’s from a conversation that happened between my father and my mother about 20 years ago,” Rucker recalled. “My father was arguing with my mom – I was sitting on the couch, in the middle, like I usually was – and he looked at me and said ‘Oh, you’re so much like me, you’re your father’s daughter.’ And my mother replied, ‘Well, what about my father’s daughter? You never took care of her.’ That sat with me. And from that moment on, I’ve always wanted to write my mother’s story.”

After Rucker wrote the poem, Motzer added the music. That’s only one of the routes for their collaborations.

“Sometimes Tim has some music and I write to it, or we just create together in that moment. It works all different ways,” explains Rucker.

They’ve performed worldwide and recorded on countless projects, and we welcomed them to WHYY’s studio to perform and talk with NewsWorks Tonight host Dave Heller.