Lalah Hathaway released a new single called 47th Street on August 10, a soul song about the stretch of Chicago's South Side where her father's family lived. The Grammy winning poet J. Ivy opens it, narrating the Great Migration north from the South, and Hathaway comes in after him with her own memories of the streetlights and corners she grew up around.
The record is built on horns. It opens with a burst of them, then settles into a bed of horns, guitar, bass, congas and drums squarely in the shape of 1970s soul. Hathaway said the block was where her father's family lived, and named her grandfather in the lyric: if only these streets could talk, that's where my daddy laid his hat down, sweet Hosea wore the crown.
Her father was Donny Hathaway, the soul singer born in Chicago in 1945 who made The Ghetto and This Christmas and a run of duets with Roberta Flack before his death in 1979, at 33. Lalah Hathaway has built a career at some distance from that shadow: five Grammys, eight studio albums since her 1990 debut, and a low register and polyphonic technique Jennifer Hudson once said nobody else can do.
The song does not stop at nostalgia. It closes on gentrification, with Hathaway singing that you can occupy these streets but you can't evict what lives in me, which turns a family memory into an argument about who the neighbourhood belongs to now. J. Ivy's opening does similar work, tracing the block back to the Black metropolis Chicago became.
47th Street is her first new music since VANTABLACK in 2024, which she followed with a deluxe edition, touring and guest spots, and it reads like the opening of the next record rather than a one-off. It sits in the release calendar with the rest of the month's R&B and soul releases, among them the joint album Erykah Badu and The Alchemist have set for August 28 and the single the pair put out to announce it.
The facts
- 47th Street came out on August 10, 2026
- The Grammy winning poet J. Ivy opens the track
- It is about the Chicago block where Donny Hathaway's family lived
- The arrangement leads with horns, then guitar, bass, congas and drums
- Hathaway names her grandfather, Hosea, in the lyric
- The song closes on gentrification and who the street belongs to now
- Hathaway has won five Grammys across eight studio albums
- Her last album was VANTABLACK in 2024
How this checks out
Confirmed
Reported by 3 independent outlets
Independent outlets reported it separately, enough to treat it as confirmed.
One background citation is listed separately below. It fills in context and does not count toward corroboration.
Cited sources 3
Every outlet that reported this, linked to what it published. Equal credits, in alphabetical order.
Background 1
Context we looked up, with the source for each one. Nobody reported these as part of this story, so they count for nothing toward how well it checks out.
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Donny Hathaway was born in Chicago in 1945 and died in 1979 at the age of 33, after recording The Ghetto, This Christmas and duets with Roberta Flack
Source Wikipedia