Corinne Bailey Rae’s energised and anguished creative journey

Corinne Bailey Rae’s latest album, Black Rainbows, is an atlas of capacious faith. Jonathan Evens explores her inspirations in Detroit, Leeds and Ethiopia.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A black and white portrait of a young woman's head against a dark textured background.

www.corinnebaileyrae.com.

Black Rainbows is the latest album from multi award-winning singer-songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae. Part of a project which also includes a book Reflections/Refractions at the Arts Bank photographed by Koto Bolofo, live performances, visuals, lectures, exhibitions and more, the album is inspired by the objects and artworks collected by artist, archivist and curator Theaster Gates at the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago. Bailey Rae attended The Black Artists Retreat there in 2017 and performed in the space. Last year Bailey Rae performed in Black Chapel, the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion designed by Gates. A shared element of their collaborations, work and inspirations are their Baptist upbringings and experiences.

Black Rainbows represents a significant development in Bailey Rae's music and career. By turns angry and reflective, noisy and still, celebratory and keening, original and grounded, the album broadens her musical palette considerably through a marvellous melange of electronica, jazz and punk meshed with soul and R&B. The album ranges from righteous railing against the casual erasure of Black lives and memories to a vision of a world in which we dig our gardens and live, find work and time to dance, in a new utopia. It also extends Bailey Rae’s exploration of and engagement with black history and culture beyond her own experience, through collaborations with Gates and also the Stony Island Arts Bank, which was her inspiration for the album. Her longing, shared in ‘A Spell, a Prayer’, is to arc an arm through history in order to unpick every thread.

Bailey Rae has spoken of the way in which her visit in 2017 to the Stony Island Arts Bank at the invitation of Gates, its founder, transformed her.

“I knew when I walked through those doors that my life had changed forever.”

Two things changed. One was a deeper engagement with the Stony Island Arts Bank's basic premise that black people matter, black spaces matter and black objects matter. The other was developing the confidence, through the example of Gates as artist, lecturer, potter, choir director, business owner, to, as she has said in an interview for Wilful Publicity, just:

"be myself and follow all of my interests and allow all my fascinations and obsessions to come through in my music in the belief that we are all people, and we all have those connections and questions and interests."

Christian Viveros-Faune has written that Gates developed his practice as "an artist-curator-activist", serving "different kinds of communities as an artistic ‘bridge’," out of engagement with the Church, having been both Director of Chicago’s New Cedar Grove Missionary Baptist Church Choir and "an urbanist in Seattle for a Christian mission that ran a housing programme in poor neighbourhoods.” His artistic projects have included processing a 250-person gospel choir he assembled from local churches through the galleries of the Milwaukee Art Museum while singing hymns Gates had scored as a response to poems written by the slave-era potter Dave Drake. The musical offerings of Gates' house band, the Black Monks of Mississippi, also combine spirituals with Zen chants. The Black Monks of Mississippi performed in Black Chapel, as also did Bailey Rae.

His entrepreneurial projects have included the Dorchester Art and Housing Collaborative which consists of 32 units made for those who receive affordable and low-income housing support with a space for theatre and dance, and a mission is to share culture first with the folk residing in the 32 units. Similarly, the bank at 68th and Stony Island was once a vibrant community savings and loan bank but today, through Gates’ intervention, provides the South Side of Chicago with 17,000 square feet of space for innovation in contemporary art and archival practice.

Surprisingly, the kind of faith-informed arts-and-community-connecting entrepreneurship practised by Gates, is not unknown to Bailey Rae through her own background. As a member of Moortown Baptist Church, she was part of Revive, a fresh expression of Church begun by then Youth Pastor Simon Hall. Bailey Rae has said that Hall encouraged the young people in Revive to write their own songs, provided a first guitar for her, and encouraged her to develop a "capacious faith." Her first recordings were on the Revive albums Beautiful Day and Neither Work nor Leisure. Under Halls' leadership, Revive has become a church for people who like Jesus but aren't too sure about church. He has also developed Left Bank as a community arts venue (of which Bailey Rae is a patron) in a disused Anglican church, whilst also setting up The Wren Bakery, a social enterprise using baking and barista training as tools to help women build self-belief and gain transferable skills for employment, and Queer Church Leeds, a community which celebrates LGBTQ+ people and aims to create a safe and open space for both fellowship and discussion.

Bailey Rae has shared her own exploration of faith in her music through songs such as 'I Would Like to Call It Beauty,' ‘Walk On’ and 'The Skies Will Break' and has done so in relation to both grief and celebration. Steve Stockman writes of one such song:

“Love’s On Its Way is a prayer. It begins “Oh Father”, confesses misunderstanding at the great mysteries, looks at the state of the world and then after more confession asks that her response to this world would not be just the prayer but the action of her life."

Black Rainbows ends with a stunningly beautiful track 'Before the Throne of the Invisible God' inspired by a book in the Stony Island Arts Bank about the rock churches of Lalibela in Ethiopia; ancient churches hewn from rock. In an interview with Forbes magazine, Bailey Rae said:

"On one of the pages of this book, it said, it was a picture of a throne that had been made. So it was carved into the wall, solid stone wall. There was a throne and this is where God was meant to sit when God was in the temple. But I really loved that line, the Throne to the invisible God. I thought, before the throne of the invisible God, what else is there to do but kneel? What is the invisible God? What is the thing, the reason, the way we get here, the how, the why, the infinite, the eternal, the thing that makes us all connected?"

This is where Black Rainbows ends. Through its tracks, Bailey Rae takes us on a journey from the rock hewn churches of Ethiopia, to the journeys of Black Pioneers Westward, from Miss New York Transit 1957, to how the sunset appears from Harriet Jacobs' loophole, in order to explore Black femininity, Spell Work, Inner Space/Outer Space, time collapse and ancestors, the erasure of Black childhood and music as a vessel for transcendence. Yet, 'Before the Throne of the Invisible God' is where her energised and empathetic, wracked and anguished, celebratory and creative journey through Black history and the continuing legacy of racism finds its resolution. In a place not of simple submission, but of living the questions raised by a capacious faith where responses to prayer are both the actions of life and also the explorations found on this album.

Review

Art

Culture

Royalty

Weirdness

8 July 2025

5 min read

From witchcraft to statecraft: inside the mind of King James

A new exhibition examines art the monarch commissioned and inspired

Susan Gray

Susan is a writer specialising in visual arts and contributes to Art Quarterly, The Tablet, Church Times and Discover Britain.

A portrait of King James VI, his eyes fix the viewer.

King James, by an unknown artist.

National Galleries of Scotland.

James IV and I devoted his twenties to trying to rid his kingdom of witchcraft. And 400 years after his death, witches continue to cast a long shadow over his reign. While James’ beliefs on evil developed and refined over his 58-year reign, his reputation as solely a torture and femicide perpetrator remains stubbornly hard to shift. For many, identification with the abused, marginalised- yet- magical trumps all other historical considerations.

In the exhibition World of James VI and I, the National Gallery of Scotland presents a more rounded picture of the cradle king, who gained the throne of Scotland at 13 months old and became the first joint monarch of Scotland and England in 1603, on the death of Elizabeth I. The beginning of James’ reign in England saw the first productions of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, King Lear and The Tempest. Inigo Jones’ appointment as Surveyor of the King’s Work introduced the classical architecture of Rome to the country, designing The Queen’s House in Greenwich and the Banqueting House at Whitehall.

The painted ceiling of the Banqueting House by Peter Paul Rubens provides insight into James’ preoccupations. Commissioned by James in 1621, the tennis court sized series was installed in 1636 becoming a memorial to the late King. In The Apotheosis of James I, the King is depicted ascending into heaven on a giant eagle belonging to Jupiter, ruler of the Roman gods. The winged figure of Victory, together with a figure representing Great Britain hold a laurel wreath above the King’s head, in exchange for his earthly crown. Parallels between the King and divine power are explicit, underlined by the figure of Religion holding the freshly translated Bible showing the first words of St John’s gospel ‘In the beginning’ (was the Word). In a side panel to The Union of the Crowns, where the King is presented in a Biblical setting, Minerva, goddess of wisdom is stamping on Ignorance, represented by an old woman, naked and floored.

Rubens’ identification of an old woman as low status and powerless did not come out of thin air. In the social hierarchy of seventeenth century northern Europe, most ordinary people had few rights and women had next to none, entitled only to the legal protection of their husband’s rank. But lack of rights did not prevent women from influencing their communities’ moral tone. The victims of the infamous East Berwick witch trials in 1590-92 and Pendle witch trials in 1612, first came to the attention of authority through accusations and feuds within their own communities.

Daemonologie, published in Edinburgh in 1597, was written following James perceived experiences of witchcraft when storms imperilled his voyage from Denmark to Scotland, returning with his new 15-year-old bride Anne. It is believed the King was involved in interrogations of witchcraft suspects in East Berwick, authorising their torture and execution. One suspect’s ability to recount a conversation from the royal bridal chamber, convinced James the accused were the tools of diabolical powers intent on killing the royal couple. Beliefs around women’s inherent weakness, positioned them as easier prey for malevolent forces:

‘sexe is frailer than man is, so is easier to be intrapped in these grosse snares of the Devill’

In later life James became more sceptical about claims of witchcraft and demonic possession, and searched for evidence to discount what was only the work of fantasy and attention-seeking.

But the King’s family history and tumultuous times he lived through, made the road to discernment a long and winding one. James last saw his mother, Mary Queen of Scots as an 11-month-old infant. His father Lord Darnley was killed in a mysterious explosion, possibly arranged by his own wife. Mary was imprisoned in England by Elizabeth I and executed in 1587 at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire. In the lead up to his marriage James lamented that as a child he was ‘alone, without father, mother, brother or sister.’

The normalcy of removing troublesome relatives is illustrated by a 1605 portrait of Lady Arabella Stuart, attributed to Robert Peake the Elder. The King’s cousin died in the Tower in 1615, where James had her imprisoned, in case her marriage to William Seymour gave her too strong a claim on the throne.

Today’s witches on Etsy may feel they are reclaiming a lineage of folk wisdom and reparation for past wrongs. But willingly stepping into the scapegoat role... has no historical precedent.

Death also stalked James and Anne’s family, with only two out of their seven children surviving into adulthood. Their eldest son and heir Prince Henry Frederick died aged 18, and was mourned throughout Europe in the decades that followed the death in 1612, as he was seen as the great hope of the continent’s future.

The World of King James VI and I is full of visual meditations on death. On entering visitors are greeted with Livinius de Vogalaare’s The Memorial of Lord Darnley, 1567, a substantial canvas, with a crowned, grey-robed infant James, kneeling before his father’s coffin. Darnley’s effigy with hands in prayer lies on top the casket, unicorns either side of his head. An engraving of Prince Henry Frederick’s Hearse, 1640 copy from 1612 original, shows the richly decorated hearse, complete with a wax effigy dressed in the prince’s clothes, which was accompanied by 2000 mourners as it made its way to Westminster Abbey. Eighteenth century artist James Mynde’s engraving The Mausoleum of James VI and I, illustrates the Jacobean era’s fondness for lavishly dressed effigies of the deceased, surrounded by figures of classical deities.

Charm stones, believed to cure sickness in people and animals, formed part of James’ cosmology, together with the new translation of the Bible he commissioned, intended to sound beautiful for this age of oracy. James advocated for Protestantism and the reformation, while being in regular communication with the Papacy. He also brought a more English style of worship to the independent-minded Scottish kirk, insisting they used chalices and altar cloths. The monarch was devout, yet flexible, in his Christian beliefs.

A simple reading of the Jacobean court is not possible. It was a place of ritualised gift-giving, with ciphered and initialled jewels indicating who was in or out of favour, whose power was rising, and whose power was waning. James believed he was sent by God to rule and protect his people, and felt justified in extinguishing anyone or anything threatening his divine project. Self -proclaimed, or community-nominated witches provided useful scapegoats for discontent around James’ rule, underlined in 1605 by the Gunpowder Plot.

Today’s witches on Etsy may feel they are reclaiming a lineage of folk wisdom and reparation for past wrongs. But willingly stepping into the scapegoat role and presenting a blank screen for the dark projections of the powerful, has no historical precedent for bringing liberty or social transformation. Cos-playing the historically marginalised will not make things better for today’s excluded and underserved, but focusing on down to earth, earthly political and economic power will.

The World of James I and VI, National Galleries of Scotland, until 14 September.

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