Nomy Lamm and Silvia Kohan

“I think if I had seen her perform while she was alive I would have thought it was corny. But looking through her journals I could really feel her spirit, a kind of prophetic voice that was trying to come through her. That’s why I chose the song I did instead of her better-known ‘fat girl blues,’ which I think would have been the more obvious choice. When she sang ‘Spirit Let Your Love Come Through,’ I could really feel it.”>

-Nomy Lamm

Nomy Lamm is a San Francisco-based writer, musician and performer. She performs with Sins Invalid (sinsinvalid.org), a project that produces work on themes of disability, sexuality, and social justice, and writes an advice column for make/shift magazine (makeshiftmag.com), a feminist magazine that centralizes queer, anti-racist and international perspectives. Her band, nomy lamm & THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD, is a flexible platform for collaborations with musicians, poets, visual artists and film makers. She is currently in grad school at SFSU, working on her first novel, The Best Part Comes After The End. For more information, go to nomylamm.com.

Silvia Kohan was an Argentinian-Jewish lesbian singer and songwriter who was known for her big voice, flamboyant costumes and showy stage presence. Her family emigrated from Argentina in 1957 when she was ten years old, and she learned English by singing show tunes. Her only commercial album, Finally Real, was produced by George Winston and released in 1984. Her best known original song was called “Fat Girl Blues,” but it never made it onto an official release. She died in 2003.

From Silvia Kohan’s Archive

Silvia Kohan & THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD
Musical mind-meld with video documentation
2010