These ideas obscure the fact that most white performers who embody them borrow heavily from black musical traditions. At the Grammys, the most memorable "breakthrough" performances came from Nashville artists Simpson and Maren Morris, who both openly demonstrated their debts to gospel and soul. Adele herself is a blue-eyed soul singer who began her education listening to Destiny's Child, Beyoncé's former group, at age 11. "My life is Beyoncé," she said while accepting her honors, at one point asking the very pregnant star if she would be her "mummy." That odd and frankly somewhat inappropriate gush (for one thing, Beyoncé is only eight years older than Adele) may have been inspired by Beyoncé's own extravagant living tableau of a Grammy performance, which conjured African goddesses, her sister Solange and Cher in celebrating the divine side of motherhood. Yet the comment also inadvertently conjured a long and problematic history of black women being asked to serve as "mothers" to white women — as domestics, as often unacknowledged mentors, and as uncredited artistic sources. Beyoncé demurely smiled in the audience, surrounded by her actual family, whom she'd cited in her own speech as the reason she made Lemonade — so that these black children would have images and words that reflected themselves, and not through a whitened mirror. "Often, we become inaudible," she'd said of the "deep Southern culture" Lemonade expressed. Sadly, her loss at least momentarily rendered her inaudible again.