TCNJ

22 WINTER 2017 HEN SARAH DASH decided nearly a decade ago to return to Trenton — the city in which she and her dozen brothers and sisters were raised, where she sang in her pastor father's Pentecostal church choir, and where she got her start on a singing career now in its sixth decade — she moved into her childhood home in a West Trenton neighborhood that she describes, with all the tender mercy of a devoted native daughter, as "challenged." Recalling her return to the city over lunch at South Rio, a downtown Trenton restaurant, Dash says it took almost a year before she settled on restoring the three-story, five-bedroom brick house. "I had to decide whether I wanted to keep money in the bank or continue the legacy of my parents," she says. "I chose the latter." At the time of her return, Dash had not lived in her hometown for more than three decades, yet for Trentonians of a certain vintage, she remains something of a cultural touchstone. Passersby still approach her on the street, often with an embrace. After lunch, a parking garage attendant fusses over her when he realizes he's talking to that Sarah Dash. At 71 years old and with a lifetime spent in show business, Dash still carries herself like a diva. The nail polish is crimson. The sunglasses are oversized. And one ring in particular seems to bear the approximate heft of, say, Mount Rushmore. Never let it be said that Sarah Dash does anything halfway. D ASH'S HOMECOMING came full circle five years after she returned to Trenton, when she responded to a Twitter post from Kim Pearson, a professor of journalism. Pearson and her music faculty colleague, Teresa Marrin Nakra, were planning an ambitious digital campaign to document Trenton's rich but often overlooked musical history. They called the project Trenton Makes Music, and it would cover the full symphonic range of rhythms and melodies ever to emerge from New Jersey's capital city, from the fifes and drums that provided the soundtrack of the American Revolution to the emergence of the nightclub City Gardens as one of America's most revered temples of punk rock. " Trenton is, in its own way, every bit as much of a music city as cities like Nashville." The encyclopedic approach would be necessary because Trenton — unlike Nashville, a country town, or New Orleans, a jazz town — has produced musicians across the sonic spectrum. Pearson and Nakra's students would use podcasts, written and oral histories, even live performances to document a wide range of musical styles, from gospel and klezmer to the blues and funk. They would also survey a wide range of musicians, among them Thomas Grice, a legendary music teacher in Trenton public schools who, in the late 1950s at Junior High 5, taught Sarah Dash to play the violin. "Trenton is, in its own way, every bit as much of a music city as cities like Nashville," Pearson says, "except nobody knows it except the people who were part of it." Born in Camden and raised in Philadelphia, Pearson had cultivated an incremental appreciation of Trenton's contribution to American song. She knew about the city's jazz clubs from her days as an undergraduate at Princeton, where she was a classmate of the jazz guitarist Stanley Jordan. Later, she learned of Clifford Adams, a Trenton native and longtime trombonist for Kool and the Gang, when their sons attended elementary school together in Ewing. By and by, Pearson heard about Sarah Dash, who had found fame as a member of LaBelle, the groundbreaking pop-rock- soul-funk-disco vocal group of the 1960s and 70s, and who had recently returned home. So it was in the fall of 2014, in the project's earliest days, that Pearson invited Dash to campus to sit for an oral history interview. But Dash sought a larger voice in the project — she felt obligated to contribute, she says, given her long ties to Trenton's musical community — and she wound up delivering a public lecture on the role of the city's musical culture in launching W BRIAN KILLIAN/WIREIMAGE

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