At The Banks downtown, the Andrew J Brady ICON Music Center recently celebrated its grand opening and is loading up on performances for the upcoming months.
And now that the space is ready to welcome visitors and musical acts alike, Hamilton County Commissioner Alicia Reece is making sure the venue pays tribute to some of the city’s most prolific performers.
At the ICON's July 24 opening, Reece unveiled the conceptual art for the Cincinnati Black Music Walk of Fame, a celebration of Black musicians from Cincinnati. Their lifelong achievements will be placed on a green space right outside the venue’s front doors, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported.
Now the Queen City’s most accomplished Black musicians will be celebrated for their contributions to music, Reece said.
"For me, it’s a way to capture our history and put it in stone, and also from these stars, people will be able to come from all over the world,” Reece told WKRC-TV.
The Walk of Fame may later expand to include artists from the Greater Cincinnati area, but right now, the focus is on performers from Hamilton County, the Enquirer reported.
The inaugural inductees for the Black Music Walk of Fame are local legends Bootsy Collins, The Isley Brothers, Otis Williams and the late Dr. Charles Fold.
Bootsy Collins is known as one of the most inventive bass players in Funk music for his hit with American Funk collective Parliament-Funkadelic, "Give Up The Funk (Tear the Roof off the Sucker)." He was inducted as part of the band to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland in 1997.
CityBeat also paid tribute to Bootsy's legacy by renaming the Cincinnati Entertainment Awards' annual Cincinnati Music Ambassador Award — given to homegrown acts who spread the good word of local music far and wide while never forgetting the community from which they sprung — in honor of the music icon.
Fellow Rock and Roll hall-of-famers the Isley Brothers formed their vocal group formed in Lincoln Heights in the 1950s. They were celebrated for their incredible seven-decade career at the 2014 Grammys with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
Lincoln Heights has more representation on the Black Music Walk of Fame in the form of legendary Gospel performer Dr. Charles Fold, who was inspired to sing by a performance of the Cincinnati Choral Union of the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses, according to Maloco Music Group.
Otis Williams (not the similarly named member of R&B/Soul group the Temptations) is a graduate of Withrow High School where he helped form the Charms, a Doo-Wop group that signed on to local label King Records. Interviews with Williams reveal that he refused to be signed to local label King Records without the rest of the band.
Now part of Cincinnati's Black Music Walk of Fame, the careers and music of these artists will be remembered by countless visitors to the Andrew J Brady ICON Music Center, filling a gap in Cincinnati’s music history, Reece noted.
“I would hear these stories but there was no place I could go to, or point to, and capture it,” Reece told the Enquirer. “I could see artists being honored in other cities, other states, other places but never at home. And I started thinking, man, this belongs to us.”
Although these musicians make up the inaugural class, they represent just a small portion of the Black musicians who received their start in Cincinnati. The Enquirer reported in April that inductions most likely will take place on a yearly basis.
Cincinnati’s Black Music Walk of Fame will join the ranks of similar tributes to Black performers such as Atlanta’s Black Music & Entertainment Walk of Fame and The National Museum of African American Music in Nashville, both of which opened this year, according to the Enquirer.
For more information on the site of the Black Music Walk of Fame, the Andrew J Brady ICON Music Center, visit the venue’s website. Haven’t made it down to the river to check it out yet? Check out CityBeat's sneak peek to see what you’re missing.
Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get the latest on the news, things to do and places to eat delivered right to your inbox.
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
