When Tammy Michele Rice was twelve years old, she started writing gospel and R&B songs. She has always loved music; it is one of her driving passions. She started writing poetry after the death of her daughter, who passed away due to leukemia. Though Tammy has been through many tragedies in her life, she has worked through all of them and come away from them stronger.
Tammy’s attitude is strong and upbeat. She laughs when recounting moments of disappointment, such as when Prince did not accept her as a backup singer. She is able to laugh now, she says, because she has come to understand that setbacks are only temporary.
When she recounts the words her psychiatrist told her years ago, her voice is firm and full of conviction: “He told me, ‘Tammy, if you don’t remember anything else, remember this always: you’re going to get rejected in life.’”
Right now, Tammy writes a lot about African Americans and African American history. She also loves writing about celebrities. But she got her start in writing poetry because of the personal tragedy of her daughter’s death at only seventeen. Though she was visiting regularly with a therapist, she said that the only thing that truly made her feel better was writing poetry.
She says, “It’s comforted me. It was the only comfort zone I had then. It made me feel peaceful, to write poetry about her. It lifted my spirit up.”
Tammy’s other passion, besides writing poetry, is music. She collects vinyls and when she was employed she would go to the record store “almost every day – it was my treat to myself, the music.”
When Tammy would drop her kids off at school in the morning, she would always make sure to come back home and spend some time with her albums and her keyboard. She would listen to her favorites – Michael Jackson and Prince, especially – and “start gliding my fingers through the keys,” teaching herself each of the songs.
“I have an ear for music,” Tammy explains. “I would sit down at that keyboard every day and listen to my favorite song, Billy Jean, until I had learned the whole thing.”
Tammy has been shaped positively by everything negative in her life. She learned through a missed opportunity at an amateur singing night at Triples nightclub that she must “always do what you want to do – you don’t always have to listen to what other people say.”
