Some things just stick with you. Ebonie Smith ’07 was in high school when she first heard her honors chemistry teacher say, “Water is the universal solvent.” Perched atop a stool, feet dangling below the lab table at East High School in Memphis, Tennessee, Smith didn’t think it registered beyond one more lesson in a long day of learning. But more than two decades later, those five words continue to inform her understanding of music.
“Water can pretty much dissolve anything. To me, music is the same way. Music transcends differences,” says Smith, who serves as senior music producer and engineer at Atlantic Records. “Whether you’re in church, listening to the radio, or at a jazz bar, it creates equilibrium and allows us to enjoy each other. That’s how I understand it sonically and culturally. Music always has a function.”
In Pursuit of Music
Around age 4, Smith walked into the living room of her family’s home to find a miniature white baby grand piano on the green shag carpet. (Imagine Charlie Brown’s buddy Schroeder, but swap in a little Black girl, her pigtails dangling over the black and white keys.) Smith was elated. It’s her earliest musical memory, and she was serious enough about playing that her grandmother started taking her to lessons in the third grade.
“My mother had a great influence on my musical tastes,” Smith says, who says she was obsessed with Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5 after her mother gave her a CD for Christmas ’93. “As a child I listened to a lot of hip-hop and contemporary R&B. Some of my favorite record labels during that time included So So Def, Bad Boy Records, and LaFace Records.”
But by the time she walked through Barnard’s gates in 2003, she was more focused on basketball and STEM, having spent three summers in the Math and Science for Minority Students program at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. “My college counselor at Andover recommended Barnard,” says Smith. “She thought it would be a good fit. She was right.”
Smith eventually decided to major in Africana studies but couldn’t escape the music when she got to college.
“Ebonie and I met near the beginning of the school year,” recalls Sydnie Mosley ’07, the founding artistic and executive director of the dance collective SLMDances, who now considers Smith family. “She was in the first floor lounge of Brooks Hall playing piano, and I remember saying hello, sharing a love of music, and showing each other what we could play.”
She doesn’t remember what tune Smith was playing that day, but she does remember being impressed. “She was brilliant,” Mosley says. “And she still is!” In 2021, the two joined forces to create What Does PURPLE Sound Like?, an interactive dance installation inspired by the work of revered playwright and poet Ntozake Shange ’70. “I trust Ebonie so much as an artist. Her insight and the way she is able to metabolize what I’m doing and translate that sonically is a gift,” says Mosley, who calls Smith her favorite musical collaborator.
“I always loved music, but I took it for granted until I got to Barnard and realized I still had that passion and wanted to pursue it,” Smith says from her home in Los Angeles. So she crafted an interdisciplinary program of study for herself that allowed her to focus on technology through classes at Columbia’s Computer Music Center. “Technology is the convergence of my two worlds. It’s a fascinating space where science and music meet, where [the] left and right brain come together,” Smith says.
In the fall of her senior year, she studied abroad at Université de Yaoundé in Cameroon. There, she spent five months working in a studio and playing live gigs with two bands, including one called the Black Roots. “I was singing and doing a little bit of songwriting, but that experience showed me that I liked the functionality of being a working engineer and producer,” Smith says. “That’s when I set my focus on production.”
Stepping Out on Faith
When she returned stateside, she asked her academic advisor, Kim F. Hall, professor of Africana studies and the Lucyle Hook Professor of English, if she could make women music producers the topic of her thesis. “And she was down with it. And not only was she down with it, but she invested in a related music conference that I wanted to throw, too.”
Janet Jakobsen, Claire Tow Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, remembers that conference well. In fact, it was the topic of her very first conversation with Smith. “Ebonie and Kim asked me if the BCRW could sponsor the Gender Amplified conference,” says Jakobsen, who was then the director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW). “It was to be on gender and the production of hip-hop, and it was massive and important and impressive. It was such a great idea that I said yes, and we were able to work together and sponsor it.”
That first event, held in April 2007, drew students to Barnard Hall in droves to hear from Tricia Rose, author of such influential books as Intimacy and Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, and DJ Spinderella of Salt-N-Pepa fame.
“It happened organically,” says Smith. “Barnard gave me the space, time, resources, and guidance to actually realize it. There was so much trust. They treated me like an adult, somebody that they felt had good ideas and great potential.”
Gender Amplified lives on as a nonprofit — with Hall and Jakobsen on the board — supporting Smith’s mission to bolster women and nonbinary music producers via training, accessible studio space, mentorship, and community building. “I get to contribute as she takes a gender-inclusive approach to supporting people who are traditionally excluded from the music business. I believe in the project, and I want to support Ebonie,” says Jakobsen. “Ebonie has a vision. That’s very valuable, and it’s something that you want to participate in.”
Doing the Work
After graduating from Barnard, Smith immersed herself in the industry, heading downtown to New York University (NYU), where she earned her Master of Music in music technology in 2010. While there, she interned at Sirius XM Radio and served as a music production assistant at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, maintaining equipment and helping whenever high-profile guests (think KRS-One, Alicia Keys, and Q-Tip) came to campus. She landed at Atlantic Records in 2013 and has been there ever since. “Making music is my happy place and my love language,” Smith says.
When she’s not working in the studio with chart-topping recording artists, including Lauryn Hill, Santigold, Melanie Martinez, and Cardi B, or with Gender Amplified, Smith serves as co-chair for the Recording Academy’s producers and engineers wing. She earned her first Grammy certificate and platinum plaque in 2016 for her contributions to the Broadway cast recording of Hamilton.
Smith actually likens her work to the experience of a play. “Music production is the process of dressing up songs. If you go to a Broadway play and the curtain goes up and all you see is incredible actors in street clothes, sitting around a table reading the script — no costumes, no backdrop, no set design, no lights, no theatrics — you’ll want your money back!” explains Smith. “Anybody can sing ‘Happy Birthday,’ but production is about how you dress up a great song, how you give it pizzazz. That’s my art: helping other artists facilitate their art.”
Uplifting Black Women’s Voices
While Smith helps others realize their vision, she has plenty of her own, as Mosley and Jakobsen made clear. “I feel a deep responsibility to make music that produces life,” Smith says. “I want my career to be a reflection of my values as a Christian, which at the core is simply to treat people as you want to be treated.”
And though she’s not big on establishing a personal legacy, she’s fascinated by the way music endures. “Recorded music is a cultural breadcrumb; it will tell people of the future about human existence and how we navigated existential questions we all face: ‘Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going?’” says Smith, who, as a child, would routinely spend three days a week at Beale Street Baptist Church in Memphis. “So when I say my music is a ministry, I mean that I’m giving people something that might be useful for them, their kids, and their kids. If I can leave just a few breadcrumbs, then I will have lived a life worth living.”
To that end, she has released several songs as an independent artist. Two of her projects are slated for release next year. In celebration of Juneteenth, she dreamed up a poetry album that will feature her original compositions and the work of African American poets read by revolutionary figures, including Angela Davis. “I wanted to make a project that uses Black women’s narratives and poetry and language to reimagine a new future, one with less senseless killing of our people,” she says. “This record is a love letter to Black women, and so I’m very excited.”
She’s also finalizing a compilation album that reimagines the work of Alice Randall, who in 1995 became the first Black woman songwriter to reach the top spot on country music charts for her song “XXXs and OOOs,” recorded by Trisha Yearwood. “Randall told me, ‘I wrote these songs from a Black woman’s perspective, but rarely are they sung from that perspective.’ So my job was to go down to Nashville and get it done.” The album will feature performances by Allison Russell, Rhiannon Giddens, and Valerie June, among others.
But it’s not just Smith’s work that makes Jakobsen proud. “It’s easy to celebrate people who’ve had success, but to have done it the way that Ebonie has — as an ethical person who is thoughtful and helps others and shares her success — is a whole different thing,” she says.
Smith is clear that her time at Barnard made her the person — and artist — she is today. “Barnard showed me how to look critically at the ways culture and commerce and social consciousness converge. I left with an understanding of my personhood as a young feminist, as a Black person, as a queer person, as an artist, as a technologist engaging the scientific disciplines to create art,” she says. “I’m still benefiting from the perspective that those four years gave me. I’m proud of myself and the person I’ve become.”
Award-winning music producer Ebonie Smith ’07, museum curators on objects of interest, a dance course brings students to the stage, and more!