What or who inspires Gracie’s adventures?
Jay: It’s a combination of where we lived and things that she’s experienced. For instance, the hair song was created when Gracie was going to school and a few “other” children made fun of how her hair looked. My mindset is like “hey, your hair is beautiful exactly the way it is. You don’t have to have it looking certain because society says so”. My goal was to just try and empower her but also realizing that it’s a message that other children need to hear too. That’s why we created that video and the whole concept behind it.
The Bingo song has a lot of New Orleans-style aspects to it and also in the video. That’s because I went to graduate school at Louisiana State University, and lived in Baton Rouge for six years. While there, I spent a lot of time in New Orleans, so we wanted to pay homage and add some New Orleans flavor to that song.
Then other videos like Mary had a Little Lamb, were our way of giving a shout-out to the DMV Area. The real Gracie was born in Baltimore, MD. There are those little things that give us creative direction, but as we continue to put out more stuff we plan to broaden our sound based on places she visits. Our mindset remains on real experiences that are culturally relevant. In our songs, we are not just doing hip hop, we’re not one-dimensional. If you really get into it, you’ll see we throw in Afro Beats and Jazz too, we like to mix it up. I think it’s cool to give children exposure to different types of genres, not just place them in a box.
Sanea: Gracie’s Corner was created to fill a need in children’s educational television. What do you believe was behind enabling the design of this type of engagement for our young ones?
Jay: During the pandemic, when things got crazy and I was teaching from home, and schooling my kids because the whole world was on lockdown. Everyone was spending so much time together, watching what the other person was watching during that time, and began seeing a lot of stuff out there like, I won’t drop names, but seeing the different channels out there that didn’t portray any children of color or it almost seemed like it was an after-thought. Like one of those things where the producer says “let’s not forget about them”. I wanted to see something where we were starring in leading roles and just being completely intentional about our approach to representation. Even with that too, and with a lot of kid’s music, you kind of listen to it and almost want to pull your hair out. I saw an opportunity to do something different and make it fun, make it fresh, and make it where even adults find themselves enjoying it. My daughter, Gracie, always wanted a YouTube channel, but I’ve always been extremely protective about it.
If you ask Ryan and all those different YouTube star kids, their families make a huge sacrifice recording their every moment of the day. I didn’t quite want that for Gracie. I saw this as an opportunity for her to have a YouTube channel, but also be able to maintain her life in a way where she is not in front of the screen and being exposed to the stress of the entertainment industry.
As far as how I did it, going back to my music background, I also have partnered with people. I collaborate with others on producing the beats.
Thus far I have written all the songs that you guys hear of course my daughter does the singing. And, I pretty much made an in-home studio. A lot of people think it’s like a big, huge company or something that’s producing all this stuff, but honestly, it’s a father and daughter duo doing it all.
I write the scripts for the animations and then hire freelancers to do the rest. That pretty much summarizes the whole process. Of course, with YouTube it was rough at first man, I’m going, to be honest with you. Trying to build up that audience was a rough phase. Even trying to become eligible to monetize on that platform was tough. You have to have like 1,000 subscribers, and like 4,000 hours of watched time under your belt before they consider you for monetization. For months on end, I was dumping personal money into producing this stuff and it just seemed like it was never going to work. But, I am very fortunate that my wife, Arlene Gordon-Hollingsworth, was patient because she could have killed me at any point (hahaha!).
Definitely, a lot of money went into this project, and money went to outsourcing. Eventually, more and more people started catching on to it and understanding the value of what we are trying to do, and the rest is kind of history I guess.
Sanea: That’s very interesting. You mentioned the YouTube challenges during the pandemic, did you guys experience any challenges getting started outside of the YouTube issue?
Jay: I guess the pandemic was kind of like a blessing and a curse. Of course, people feel like they missed out on a lot of things outside of the house, but it gave us an opportunity to work on developing the channel and what we were trying to produce. I actually think the pandemic worked in our favor. I realized this need was due to the pandemic. I feel like before the pandemic, being a professor with things go fast — exams, writing, grading homework, and other things, there is a constant influx of stuff to where you kind of lose sight of some things that are going on right in front of you.
As a result of the pandemic, things slowed down, to where I could actually take time to focus on other things. It became so apparent to me because now I was actually tuned into things outside of my work.
Honestly, I was trying to juggle the channel and work earlier on. It wasn’t too bad at first. I was able to maintain my teaching stuff and check on the channel. But as soon as the channel started really taking off it was almost impossible to maintain my professional stuff at the same time. So, I chose to let that go. I turned in my resignation. So now I have been 100% in developing the channel and taking it to the next level.
Sanea: Wow!
Jay: That was a tough decision too because I understand the value of the impact professors can have in the classroom. Then I compared it to what we’re doing with this channel, Gracie’s Corner has almost reached global impact. It’s reaching different families, having fun and children learning from it.
The moment everything hit me was when I turned in my resignation around January 2022. I wanted to make sure the University had time to find someone else. I promise within 2-weeks or maybe less, they had already put out a new job posting. It was kind of like an eye-opening moment. It’s like “man, for years I put my heart and soul into this position”. But it was interesting to see how easily replaceable I was. Seeing how that whole process went after I turned in my resignation, and how easily it was to bring in new people. It’s okay now, they may miss me a little bit but the show is going to continue rolling no matter what. With the channel I feel like it’s almost like a societal impact where traditionally kids’ music is very…. I don’t know, I can’t really find the word to describe it.
Sanea: Non-existent.
Jay: Yeah! So, this is my greater purpose. To make it even better for me, it is a cool opportunity were in the works on these projects or songs that I get to spend more time with my daughter. She actually loves to sing; it’s been like a perfect match.
It doesn’t feel like it’s work, we really have fun whenever we do recordings. My daughter loves these “Bubble Teas”, so my wife gets the bubble tea and we go upstairs in the at-home studio and record for hours.
As far as the frequency of that, right now we probably record 3 to 4 songs a month. It only takes us a few hours to knock out each. So that means on average 27 days out of the month Gracie is just playing around and being a kid. It gives us a cool balance.
For me too, I still have to do a lot of business-related stuff for the channel, but still to have that liberation is priceless.
Sanea: Do you have other children besides Gracie and what can we expect from Gracie’s Corner in the future? Will there be new music, dances, and adventures created?
Jay: Yes, we have two other kids. Selene and Elliott, are 3 and 4 years old. As far as the channel, we have some stuff that’s in the works. One of which that we are working on right now. What you get now is short-form videos, where you hear the music and see the characters. We’re moving in the direction where we are going to create a long-form series, where they’ll be episodes where you can learn more about Gracie as a person. Learn about her family dynamics, what are they like, do they have pet peeves, we are building our narrative for all of that.
Sanea: At Soigne’ + Swank Magazine, we make it our business to highlight and promote positive, uplifting, and meaningful examples of black excellence. What does black excellence mean to you?
Jay: Man, that’s a good question! To me, Black Excellence is pretty much setting any goal or objective and doing whatever it takes to reach it. I feel like black people, in general, have been doing that for years, across the board; in fact, exceeding a lot of goals and objectives that have been put in place to deter us. For me what makes it even more special is the fact that you now consider the shoulders of the giants that we stand on. I can’t imagine before that when things were even worse for Blacks. Just achieving any goal and overcoming objectives in front of you in spite of the obstacles — is true Black Excellence.
Sanea: How can readers connect and support Gracie and her family?
Jay: We are on YouTube and just recently got on the YouTube kids app, which we are extremely happy about. Our target audience is kids, so it was kind of rough only being able to have them connect to our stuff on the regular YouTube app. because parents don’t prefer the regular YouTube as kids could end up going to some other video that the parent would not approve of. With the kids app it’s a safe space for them.
You can also find us on Instagram, our user name is @Gracies_Corner_TV. We’re also on Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and pretty much all of the social media platforms. Our music is available on Spotify, iTunes, and pretty much any other streaming platform.
If anyone is interested in Gracie’s Corner merch, right now we offer in house merch from our online store at www.graciescornertv.com. We have some deals that we are trying to work on behind the scenes, so hopefully our stuff will eventually be available in retail stores. I think it would be phenomenal if we could get that going soon.
