There was a life-changing moment in Destiny Muhammad’s childhood courtesy of a musical comic. She wandered into the den of the family’s home in Compton, California, to find an episode of "I Love Lucy" playing on TV with guest star Harpo Marx sitting down at the harp to play "Take Me Out to the Ballgame."
“He made it look fun and it was beautiful,” Muhammad recalled. “And I was just like, ‘That’s what I want to do.’”
It would take another career and a couple decades before Muhammad ever actually got a harp of her own or even learned to play one. But that Harpo Marx-inspiration eventually rang true — a life where she found herself sitting down at the harp to play with symphonies, in historic halls with top musicians in front of appreciative fans. Somewhere in her ambling trajectory, Muhammad came to a truth.
“I don’t care how old you are, if you are still alive and some level of mobility, go dig up that dream," Muhammad said.
Before the East Bay musician dug up her own dream, there was a long journey she calls "the long way around." The daughter of a Navy father, she was raised on the Port Chicago Navy base in Contra Costa County. Her mother would play the radio, and Muhammad became enraptured with the Beatles, Chaka Khan and Johnnie Taylor.
“I was starting to sing and it felt good to sing,” Muhammad said. “So music was there, was always part of my life on some level.”
Though the Harpo Marx moment planted the harp in Muhammad’s mind, life got in the way of its physical manifestation. The family moved to gritty Compton and then into housing projects in San Pedro where they struggled financially. As she graduated from high school, Muhammad felt the need to embrace the practical so she ended up going straight to barber school and soon opened her own barbershop at age 21.
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But even as she cut hair, there was something in her mind that still rattled around, reminding her she had other aspirations — even if she couldn’t remember necessarily what they were. Then fate stepped in. She started dating a man whose best friend was a harp builder. She got her first harp in1992 at age 30.
“When I got my first harp and I brought it home, the minute I plucked the string in my house, it brought tears to my eyes," Muhammad said, her voice softening to a near whisper.
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Muhammad moved to Alameda a couple years later and started playing her harp at Bay Area farmers' markets for tips. Her most powerful musical memory to this day was the time a disheveled homeless woman heard her play and was so moved she raised money to stuff in the tip jar.
“This woman is absolutely homeless,” Muhammad said. “But she went out, and opposed to keeping the money for herself, she gives it to me.”
Muhammad played at the farmers' markets for some 10 years. It served as a laboratory where she honed her chops in jazz, classical and pop. In a nod to her childhood, she billed herself as the "Harpist from the Hood."
As her skills grew, so did the audiences and the venues. She’s now played with the Santa Cruz and San Francisco symphonies, leading her own jazz trio in performances at SF Jazz, Herbst Theater and the Freight and Salvage. She travels regularly to gigs in New York, where she’s also developed a following. Though she got a later start in music, Muhammad doesn’t view it as a detriment. It was just the long way around.
“For me, it’s a confirmation that the delay was not a denial,” she said, sitting in an ornate wood paneled rehearsal room in downtown Oakland.
When Muhammad plays her harp, the cascade of staccato notes seem to echo a lifetime of defying odds — her trials ringing like the notes of a scale, each struggle building to the next moment.
“I’m grateful for every one,” she said of those travails. "Because each one has catapulted me to the next evolution of what you see here.”
As she tilts back the harp, feet tapping at pedals, singular notes merging together into chords, it’s easy to imagine Harpo Marx honking his bicycle horn, giving her a goofy smile and an over-exaggerated pat on the back.
