How lullabies are improving health care for Black women and their babies in the Bay Area

Soothing her 2-month-old baby with a lullaby, new mother Shai McGowan and musician Jackie Gage played the original song they co-wrote for the Lullaby Project at the Eastmont Wellness Center in Oakland last week.

“Fall asleep and know it’s true — sweet pea, baby, I love you.”

The Lullaby Project, a new initiative from Alameda Health System out of Carnegie Hall, partners expecting mothers with Noe Music musicians to craft personal, one-of-a-kind songs for their children. McGowan is one of the 10 mothers who showcased their songs during the Lullaby Project’s grand finale on Thursday.

“You sent me a snippet, and I just could not stop playing it,” McGowan said to Gage while introducing the song “Sweet Pea.” “She (her baby) would literally start kicking me if I stopped playing it.”

Thursday’s performance was the second completion of the Lullaby Project program at Highland Hospital and the first of the Beloved Birth Black Centering Program, a pregnancy care program for Black mothers that offers services with Black health care professionals to address racial disparities in health care.

Black mothers face particular hardship in the U.S., where their pregnancy-related mortality is more than three times that of white women, according to the independent health research nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation.

According to the Alameda Health System, Centering programs are shown to reduce racism-based disparities in maternal health outcomes such as pre-term birth and low birth weight.

Musician Jackie Gage, left, plays a lullaby she co-wrote at the Alameda County Health Department in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. The project pairs professional musicians with expecting mothers, and together they compose and sing personalized lullabies for their babies. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group) 

At the Lullaby Project’s finale, mothers in the BBBCP revealed how they had found a nurturing maternal community, one that bonded through their pregnancies that led to both songs and healthy babies.

BBBCP Director Jyesha Wren said she was proud to see the swath of genres and styles during the performances as mothers bounced between more traditional 3:4 timed lullabies, synth-laced R&B, a spoken-word verse and gospel.

“I knew that was going to happen. Black music is so diverse,” Wren said. “Before this group, the Lullaby Project had only been in our Spanish Centering groups, which was also beautiful. But when our team played the Spanish tapes, they were all like, ‘This is gorgeous, but are we going to be able to have our music?’ ”

Shalonda Jones, who just had her fifth daughter, described how the same lullabies had been passed along for generations in the Black community. The Lullaby Project was an opportunity to write her own song, pass it down and add to her family’s culture.

“Music has been such a powerful form of healing for the Black community in the United States,” Wren said. “Gospel is one of those forms of healing. You go to a Black Church, and there’s a lot of healing and medicine in that music.”

In Jones’s gospel song, mothers sang in unison to a one-word chorus: “love, love, love.” As mothers swayed with their infant on their lap, the stodgy hospital meeting room felt like a church service on Sunday. A box of tissues was quickly passed around the room.

Musician Jackie Gage, left, plays a lullaby she co-wrote at the Alameda County Health Department in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. The project pairs professional musicians with expecting mothers and together they compose and sing personalized lullabies for their babies. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group) 

Gage, who worked with Jones and McGowan, initially worried about whether the songs she worked on with the mothers would live up to their expectations. A self-described perfectionist, Gage felt pressure to write lullabies that reflected the immense effort and joy of having a child.

“I wanted to make sure that we capture the importance of the messages they wanted to send to their newborns,” Gage said. “It was a mix of a lot of joy and excitement creating these songs.”

She quieted her perfectionist thoughts with advice from her mentor Meena Bhasin, the co-director of Noe Music: “What we see as not perfect is going to be beautiful to someone else.”

Bridgett Price, another mother in the program, felt an immediate connection with Gage when they met to discuss the themes and ideas she wanted in her lullaby: comfort, trust and a story about family.

“She hit it right on the head,” Price said. “She was even able to make some suggestions, because the song inspired her, as well. I remember she said she felt the song was connected to nature. And I said I would love some nature sounds.”

The song debuted to the class on Thursday, beginning with the sounds of a flowing rainforest. Then a dreamy recording of Price reading a letter to her son: “Dear, Ezra. The Helper.” Price had said earlier that Ezra always calmed down when she heard the words. As if on queue, Ezra was fast asleep in a yellow jumpsuit in his mother’s lap.

“It’s almost like he’s always understood the message of what I wanted to get through the lullaby,” Price said.