No Work Is Done: On Sarah Vaughan, A Taste of Honey, and Juneteenth
06/19/25, Los Angeles 11:23 a.m.
No work is done.
That’s the opening line of Fascinating Rhythm,
and right now, how true the line is.
Sarah Vaughan’s music has been distracting me all day this Juneteenth.
A kind of beautiful disruption,
a reverberation in the soul that won’t let me settle.
Her voice moves like a prayer,
sometimes like a secret whispered just loud enough for you to catch it,
sometimes like a storm breaking through the silence of a long, long history.
Today, it’s A Taste of Honey
A song originally written by Bobby Scott and Ric Marlow-
meant to be sweet, light, an easy promise.
But Sarah? She did something else.
She didn’t just sing it.
She dismantled it.
She stripped away the sugar and let the residue speak.
Residue.
That slow drip of memory,
the stickiness left behind when sweetness turns to something more complex-
something deeper, something holy.
She sings not the promise of love,
but of remembering too much.
The ache of holding honey in your mouth
until it tastes like survival, like loss, like history.
Sarah bends the notes, breaks them open,
makes the melody a vessel for quiet rebellion,
for soft insurrection sung in whispers.
Her version isn’t just a cover-
it’s a resurrection,
a conversation with ghosts,
a calling out of the silence where so much has lived unseen.
And on Juneteenth, that feels everything-
Because this day is about memory,
about the residue of a long, brutal history,
about what lingers after the chains are broken,
about the songs that survived the silence,
the voices that were never silenced- but sang anyway.
Sarah Vaughan’s A Taste of Honey is more than a song.
It’s a meditation on what it means to carry that residue,
to turn it into something fierce,
something molten gold-
a voice tasting time itself,
singing it whole, singing it new.
No return necessary.
The honey already knows her name.
And maybe that’s the message Sarah is giving me today:
It’s Juneteenth-
a time to pause, to hold space,
to honor what came before,
to rest in the knowing that
no work is done right now.
Not work of struggle.
Not work of memory.
Just rest. Reverence. Presence.
No work is done today.
And that’s exactly as it should be.
