"I remember one time I was in Honolulu with this saxophone player I used to hang around and Johnny Griffin was blowing. I had never heard somebody playing like that. I told my friend, 'You better go practice!". Boy, Johnny Griffin was bad! I was still practicing.
     Anna Marie Wooldrige, one of 12 children, born in Chicago, parents coming up from St. Louis. Abbey's conversation is punctuated with frequent references to her parents and the values they gave her and her brothers and sisters. "My father built our house. He built two houses, one in Chicago and the other in Calvin's Center, near Kalamazoo, Michigan, when we moved there. Calvin's Center was one of the stops on the Underground Railroad. A lot of those folks there were light skinned with straight hair. The runaway slaves married the whites and Indians there. So they didn't socialize with us much.
     "My father actually midwifed my last six brothers and sisters. He knew how to do things, with his hands. He was a handyman" When I asked what was the most enduring value her family gave her, without hesitation, except for the laughter which accompanied her answer, "Learn how to do something.!" And with that droll hilarity, "To go and do something…before we got underprivileged or ghettoized!"
     "I grew up on a farm. My folks never told me about no storks. Never gave us no names to worship. If my mother had put a white man's picture on the wall…" she is remembering how even after her parents separated, her mother provided a continuity to the secular clarity of the values in the house, mainly, self-respect and self-reliance.
     "We had an upright piano in that house. When I was four going on five I would sit in the front room, we called it. If I could sing a tune I could finally play it. No one ever told me to 'stop playing', it was getting on their nerves or anything. No one told me to 'play' either. Neither my parents nor any of my brothers and sisters. It is this openness and directness shaped with the direction of self-knowledge that still animates Abbey's telling of her youth and family. "We slept, all twelve of us, on the floor, on pallets. Yet they produced children who became something. My brother, Robert, is a judge. My brother, Alexander, was the first black tool and die maker in California. A movie star…", she is smiling, impishly. My youngest brother is a VIP at Motorola. There's about 150 of us now, children, grandchildren.
     "The first album I did was with Benny Carter, Bob Russell, Marty Paitch, Jack Montrose, "The Story of a Girl in Love" in 1956. I had met Max in 1954, when I got back from Honolulu. Friends had told him about me, that I was a singer he needed to hear. He was working with Clifford Brown at Hermosa Beach. I remember how beautiful his hands were. He encouraged me. I met Clifford that one time.

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