Anita Pointer wrote the first draft of the country song “Fairytale” at a motel in Woodstock while she and her sisters were on tour singing backup for Dave Mason. She was still reeling from the revelation that her new boyfriend, a San Francisco radio DJ, had been married all along—a story so common she’d call it cliché if she didn’t have to plot the next chapter herself. That night she stayed up late running her favorite James Taylor tape on repeat, and the lyrics she wrote channeled his plainspoken style: There’s no need to explain anymore—I tried my best to love you, now I’m walking out that door. Once the tour was over, Anita’s baby sister Bonnie provided the bright and buoyant melody, as if to sustain the momentum of departure.
“Fairytale” became one of several throwback tracks on the second Pointer Sisters album, That’s A Plenty. They also covered the bebop classic “Salt Peanuts” and composed the cheeky, citified “Shaky Flat Blues.” Even the album art looked like an old Aaron Douglas illustration: four women in silhouette, wearing caps and drop-waist dresses, hooked in a Harlem-style chorus line high-stepping offstage. The figures faced left, a subtle sign that this music would move against the grain.
In 1975, “Fairytale” won an unexpected Grammy for Best Country & Western Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group, and Elvis himself recorded a cover. The Grand Ole Opry invited the Pointer Sisters to Nashville, making them one of the first Black acts to headline the genre’s high church—always an ambivalent distinction. When they arrived, racist protestors held signs saying, “Keep country, country!” as if American music were private property and the Pointer Sisters were trespassing from elsewhere. Anita remembers hearing a man shout, “Hot damn, them girls is Black!” But after they performed “Fairytale,” the crowd got quiet, then loud: “Sing it again, honey!” Which they did, three times through. Sometimes, the most familiar stories are the ones that bear repeating—as if, in listening to a new rendition, we might pick up tones, textures, histories, and meanings that reveal hidden hatches in the trap.