Your Bio - "I Yam What I Yam"

Throughout various pages of my website, I ask, “Is your bio an impressive list of accomplishments, awards, places where you’ve performed, places where you will perform and names of your collaborators – orchestras, conductors and chamber music series?”

Or, is your Bio a story… a narrative about you, both the artist and you the person?

What interests your audience the most? Is it whom you’ve studied with, and the major venue where you’ll make your debut next season?

Certainly, you should include your accomplishments: many venues and presenters want that history. Showing you off is how they get people in the seats and, in a way, affirms for the people in those seats that they are in the right place at the right time.

I think they also want to know more about you. They would love to connect with you in some human way, person to person, just as you want to connect your artistry to them.

Short Bio – Long Bio

I want to recommend you visit several websites of well-known and not so well-known musicians, ensembles and composers.

Read their bios, and look for several things: do they have both a long and a short bio?

Are you able to read the long bio from beginning to end? How far did you go before you lost interest? Or, did you find it riveting from beginning to end?

Is their short bio and their long bio an impressive list of performance dates, awards, accomplishments and places where they’ve performed, or are they a story… a narrative? Is it a little of both?

Then, go back and look at your Bio and ask those same questions.

You are not just an impressive list of performance dates, awards, accomplishments and places where you’ve performed. You have a compelling story to tell – maybe multiple stories. Undoubtedly, they are at the heart of you the artist and you the person. Connect both artist and person with your audience in your Bio(s).

“I Yam What I Yam”

In a pivotal scene from Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man (1952), the book’s narrator makes this exclamation: “I yam what I am” as a way of proclaiming his true identity.

“The next day, while walking in the streets of Harlem, the narrator buys a hot buttered yam from a street vendor and eats it greedily. No longer feeling compelled to hide his identity as a Southern black by denying his love for certain foods, the narrator experiences a profound sense of freedom.”  (Ralph Ellison: The Invisible Man; Cliffs Notes® Chapter 13 Summary and Analysis)

“I Yam What I am,” for me is more powerful than “Be Yourself,” but their meanings are exactly the same.

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FYI – “I Yam What I Yam” was Popeye’s catch phrase, and appears in Popeye's theme song, titled "I'm Popeye The Sailor Man", composed by Sammy Lerner in 1933 for Fleischer's first Popeye the Sailor cartoon. (Wikipedia)