Upon returning to Los Angeles, Muldrow paired with Dibiase, Ras G, and Sa-Ra Creative Partners, the latter of whom she’d originally written “Master Teacher” for in 2005 for the trio’s unreleased third album, Black Fuzz. Ronald Muldrow and Rickie Byars-Beckwith, her father, and mother, respectively, are acclaimed musicians, with the two having worked with Eddie Harris, Pharaoh Sanders, Roland Hanna, and others. Georgia Anne Muldrow’s life story begins in Los Angeles, California, where she was born to a musical home. That the word that was passed from one black person to another, expanding its reach from the streets of Harlem to the West Coast and eventually into the airwaves for mass consumption, making Muldrow an integral part of woke’s story. As important as the word is to our current political state, it is also important to understand the word’s ties to blackness. I started this journey researching the work of Harlem author William Melvin Kelley, who’s credited with coining woke in his 1962 New York Times essay “If You’re Woke You Dig It,” and traced its use to Badu’s “Master Teacher” almost five decades later.

But I also hoped to highlight the erasure of the people who invented it in its political and racial context - black people.

I embarked on this journey to discover the origins of the word woke because of the uniqueness in its present ubiquity, considering its past is shrouded in mystery.

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