Audio recording clip of interview with Jerushia McDonald - Hylton & Suzilene McDonald by Claytee D. White, September 23, 2011

Tell me about some of those creative outlets that you found. The creative outlets. When I got to Jo MacKey I was in the drill team, the choir. I think you guys did pretty much the band. I wasn't into playing instruments. I wanted to sing. I wanted to act and dance. So at Jo MacKey, drill team, drama, a lot of drama, and I would always sing. So that's what I did from the time of Jo MacKey all the way up. I discovered an outlet of creativity, to not only discover who I am but to discover the beauty of being creative within an area that is so small and isolated but also suppressed, you see. Suzi, the same question. Tell me about the early life and explain to me the difference in how you saw your childhood growing up on the Westside. Well, a lot of it is the same so far as education. My mother used to drive us all the way to Henderson to go to Saint Peter's every morning, to Catholic school. She even would take two other children with us that were our god brothers and sisters. But while she was playing and doing her thing, I was the one that was in the tree. In front of our house on 418 Madison, or on the side of it ~ what you call it, side, back? - because, you know, it was an alley. So who knew? But there was Hamburger Heaven across the street, Second Baptist Church. But right there was these big, huge-they used to call them pussy willows. We used to get a whipping with these things. I remember them. They were like rubber-band-spanking objects. But anyway, I would go up in the trees because-you're not from here-we had the Brown Derby and the Town Tavern, and on any given night they were performing out there. Ruben's Supper Club. Yeah, Ruben's Supper Club. Regardless to whether or not it was Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday; Vegas is twenty-four-seven. They say if you can make it in New York - New York's twenty-four -- we lived there, it's not. But being in Vegas if it wasn't -- and with us going to Catholic school, we had to go to Catholic Church in the morning and that's at seven. That was with my dad. She talked about confusion. Saint James? Yes, Saint James Catholic Church. And then we would come back and my mother would tell us to go across the street to the Second Baptist church. So you're at this one church that's all staunch and the hands and you bow and you stand up. I had my confirmation and the priest was drunk, so he slapped me pretty well. But we went through all of that. And then right after you'd leave the Catholic Church, you'd go home, I think we'd have breakfast, then we'd have to go to Second Baptist. And then at night we would go over to the Pentecostal church with Bishop C.C. Cox. So it was like a 24-hour party for me. It was all these amazing voices. First we'd go to the church that just sounds like-to me I used to call it grocery store music. Then you go to basically like the discos for disco music and the blues and jazz and stuff from the Derby and all these different places. So you have all these sounds where we were living. But then you had the church. You had Second Baptist that had amazing harmonies. The Pentecostals down the street, they would get down. So we would just be amazed because we really didn't get to go out growing up. My sister Paula did, but we didn't. So a lot of that was like to us they were getting down. In other words, there was this conglomerate of all this different music.