Exactly 50 years ago – long before Beyoncé crossed over with Cowboy Carter or the breakthrough success of Black female country artists like Mickey Guyton, Brittney Spencer, Yola, Allison Russell, and Rissi Palmer – the Pointer Sisters made country music history with “Fairytale.” The twangy ballad, written by Anita and Bonnie Pointer and later covered by Elvis Presley, won Best Country Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group at the 1974 Grammy Awards, making the Pointers the only Black women to date to ever win a country music Grammy. That same year, the sisters became the first Black vocal group to perform at the Grand Ole Opry.
And then, exactly decade later, the Pointer Sisters entered their massive pop era, racking up four consecutive top 10 Billboard hits: “Automatic,” “Jump (For My Love),” “I’m So Excited,” and “Neutron Dance.” While most artists usually stick to one genre – and if they do attempt to shift genres, it’s not well-received by radio programmers or by fickle fans – the Pointer Sisters always defied odds, expectations, and the commands of their record label, singing R&B, funk, disco, rock, and jazz as well.
“Oh, they tried it! But we were just not a stick-to-one-thing bunch of girls,” Ruth Pointer laughingly states, when asked if there were industry executives who wanted the Pointer Sisters to stay in one lane. “We just really didn’t want to pigeonhole ourselves in one particular area, because we wanted to appeal to a mass audience of all kinds of people. … We were always fearless to try new things.”
The Pointer Sisters did face their obstacles. Ruth recalls that at a Nashville party honoring them, a couple of nights before their big Opry debut, they were mistaken for “the help” and brought back to the kitchen instead of the main reception, and they also experienced “some different situations where we’ve been told to get out of bars, we weren’t welcome, stuff like that.” But they prevailed, in various incarnations. And now that Ruth is the group’s lone surviving member (June, Bonnie, and Anita Pointer died in 2006, 2020, and 2022, respectively), she is keeping her family’s musical legacy alive — performing the Pointer Sisters’ wide-ranging discography, in a lineup that features her daughter Issa and granddaughter Sadako, on “An Evening of Icons,” co-headlining tour with the Commodores that kicks off this week.
“I just wasn’t ready to stop. Anita and I talked about it and she used to say to me, ‘I don’t see how you are still doing that.’ And I said, ‘Well, I still enjoy it!’” Ruth, age 78, says of her decision to keep on touring. (Issa and Sadako started performing with the group in 2009, and Anita retired from performing regularly in 2015.) “I just feel like as long as I can give it back, I’ll try my best to give it back. At some point I probably will shut it down, but I feel like I’ve given a launchpad to both my daughter and my granddaughter; if they want to continue, they know what to do, and they can do it if they want to under the proper circumstances. Yeah, it gets hard sometimes because I do miss my sisters a lot, but I feel like I have them with me all the time. I just ask them to come up onstage with me in spirit when I walk up there and represent them.”
As for the classic song on the current Pointer Sisters setlist that resonates the most or hits the hardest for Ruth when she performs it now, sans her sisters, she answers: “‘I’m So Excited’ is probably the one, because I know that was Anita’s song [as a lead vocalist], and now I sing it. Whenever I have to sing that song, I have her in mind and I try to make her proud.”
It’s an interesting position for Ruth to be in, as the group’s sole survivor, since she wasn’t part of the Pointer Sisters during their inception. “I’m the oldest of all four of us. I had children and I was working a job and my sisters were out doing their thing, and I came in later [in 1972],” she notes. “I was a single parent. I was in the middle of making a life change for myself. I had been in a very abusive relationship with my two oldest children’s father, and I wanted to change my life. So, I embraced it with everything that I had in me, and I thought, ‘OK, wherever it goes, I’m ready. Let’s go.’ … I had no idea where it was going to take me. I didn’t have great aspirations to be a famous singer or anything like that. In my mind, I’m thinking, ‘If I can make a hundred bucks in one night, I’m in!’ I can sing backup for anybody, and I could do that as long as I needed to, as long as I could make a living doing it. And that’s how I started and agreed to come into the group. It just took on a form of its own and ended up being what it is, and I was like, whoa.”
Ruth joined her sisters professionally, and eventually officially, when youngest sibling June was “in and out of the group” due to mental issues stemming from a sexual assault she’d endured at age 15. The family banded together as best they could at the time, with the limited information and knowledge they had. “During those years, we knew nothing about mental health,” Ruth recalls. “She had been in a very traumatic experience when she was a teenager, being raped, and back then people just didn’t talk about the trauma that had taken place in their lives — that we know today still affects you for the rest of your life. Nobody talked about it. Nobody thought it would be something that would linger in your life once you were ‘over it,’ so to speak. I feel like as a result of that horrible experience, she really had some sort of PTSD for the rest of her life. … And there were times when she just could not perform. She would just say, ‘I’m not going.’ I don’t even think she knew how to articulate why, and we didn’t understand why she couldn’t go. She would just say, ‘I’m not going.’” (June actually sat out the Pointer Sisters’ historic Opry performance, reportedly due to physical and nervous exhaustion.)
June, Bonnie, Anita, and Ruth Pointer in 1974 (photo: Stroud/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Ruth battled her own demons, specifically when it came to alcohol abuse, but as a true survivor, she has been sober now for 40 years. “I had my times in that [wild rock ‘n’ roll] world, and it was not a path that I needed to stay on, for sure, to save my life,” she says. But family pulled her through her own crisis.
“I have five children, and at the time when I started to really see myself in that light, which was very dim, my two older children were seemingly following in my footsteps,” Ruth confesses. “And I was a single parent, and I thought, ‘If I’m going to be all they’ve got, then I really need to set a better example as a parent, and this one is not the one that I want them to follow.’ My son Malik actually introduced me to AA, and I started going to meetings in Los Angeles when we were living there. At first I really rejected it because I just couldn’t imagine embarrassing myself, standing in front of people saying, ‘Oh my God, I’m an alcoholic.’ But I soon embraced it, because I wasn’t getting any better. And the first 12-step meeting I went to, I noticed a lot of people were there that I knew and I was like, ‘Oh, this is kind of a recovery party! All these people are here and they seem to be very happy.’ … And so, I’ve just been doing that pretty much ever since.”
Now when Ruth, Issa, and Sadako perform together, it’s a party onstage every night, and Ruth says one of their show’s biggest crowd-pleasers, especially with the women in the audience, is the sultry, sex-positive ballad “Slow Hand” — another groundbreaking track, one that Ruth chucklingly recalls “several radio shows wouldn’t even play” back in 1981 “because they thought it was just too erotic! … I mean, oh, God forbid girls have fun! We’re supposed to get tortured and then have the children? No, no.”
Ruth says the Pointers’ female fans were always grateful for “Slow Hand’s” message, “because there were so many frustrated females that they were like, ‘Hey, hey, [male lovers] need to slow down!’ [The message] was subtle and not blatant or in-your-face, but it was just enough to just give [men] a little tip.” Even the sisters’ strict and religious parents — who’d initially hadn’t even wanted their daughters to perform secular music because they were, perhaps understandably, “afraid of where it would take us, into that world of drugs and alcohol and nightclubs… they were trying to protect us from that” – eventually got on board with “Slow Hand.” Ruth explains, “By that time, my parents had loosened up. They knew we weren’t trying to embarrass our family, and they knew that our intentions were in the right place. My mom used to just kind of giggle about it!”
Anita, Bonnie, and June left behind quite a legacy and rich body of work for Ruth and the next two generations of Pointer women to celebrate, and Ruth reveals that she’s now “talking to some people” about a possible Pointer Sisters biopic based on Fairytale: The Pointer Sisters’ Family Story, the autobiography that Anita wrote with brother Fritz Pointer in 2020. “I hope that it will get done, but we’ll see how it goes,” Ruth says. But she admits that she can’t even imagine what would make it into that proposed film’s final edit.
“I couldn’t name one [life highlight], because I keep thinking of different points in my life and it’s miraculous and unbelievable, sometimes, to me,” Ruth says softly. “I think, ‘Wow. I have really lived.’”
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarify. Watch Ruth Pointer’s full conversation in the split-screen video above.
