Fairytale

This memoir traces the early lives and professional careers of June, Bonnie, Anita and Ruth Pointer, who grew up to become the Pointer Sisters. Their story begins in the 1960s, when they came of age as artists during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. The authors examine how the choices they made and the obstacles they faced, both alone and together, shaped a musical career that lasted forty-eight years. Rivalry over lead vocals and over men runs alongside the closeness of the sisters' bond.

The book also looks at the family at its center. It portrays a wise, strong and devoted father and a loving mother, and it recounts a household of fifteen relatives living under one roof. Other chapters cover the family's roots in the Great Migration of Black Americans in the 1940s, their father's painful removal from a church he had helped build, Bonnie and Anita's role as founding members of the Northern California Black Panther Party, and the chance discovery that launched the group.

Anita Pointer and her brother Fritz wrote the book together, drawing on recorded and transcribed interviews gathered over several years, family photographs and private letters. Fritz, the eldest brother of the four sisters, holds degrees in English, African Studies and African Languages and Literature. He spent thirty years teaching composition, African and African American humanities and history in higher education, and he has written two books and several scholarly articles on African literature. Anita, who has worked on the project for nearly a decade, writes about the sisters' relationships within a family that produced athletes, a college professor and performers.

The Pointer Sisters' music moved across jazz, including scat and bebop, blues, rock and roll, country and western, and rhythm and blues. The publisher presents the book as the first to offer an inside view of the group's formative years and professional life, making it a close look at one of American music's best-known families.