Married to a Rockstar is the unforgettable true story of Grammy-nominated vocalist Robbi Hall Kumalo, whose extraordinary life rises and crashes on the unpredictable rhythm of love, fame, and faith. From global stages and recording studios to the quiet corners of recovery, Robbi lived inside the beat of music and marriage—until multiple sclerosis changed the tempo forever.
Faced with losing her voice and identity, she learns to compose a new kind of song—one built from courage, creativity, and divine surrender. Her journey is both deeply personal and universally human, blending humor, heartbreak, and hope as she rebuilds a life that feels more authentic than fame ever offered.
More than a memoir, Married to a Rockstar is a love letter to resilience and reinvention. It asks: when life silences the music you thought defined you, what melody will you write next? Robbi’s answer sings through every page—proof that even when the lights go out, the soul still knows how to keep the beat.
Married to a Rockstar is the unforgettable true story of Grammy-nominated vocalist Robbi Hall Kumalo, whose extraordinary life rises and crashes on the unpredictable rhythm of love, fame, and faith. From global stages and recording studios to the quiet corners of recovery, Robbi lived inside the beat of music and marriage—until multiple sclerosis changed the tempo forever.
Faced with losing her voice and identity, she learns to compose a new kind of song—one built from courage, creativity, and divine surrender. Her journey is both deeply personal and universally human, blending humor, heartbreak, and hope as she rebuilds a life that feels more authentic than fame ever offered.
More than a memoir, Married to a Rockstar is a love letter to resilience and reinvention. It asks: when life silences the music you thought defined you, what melody will you write next? Robbi’s answer sings through every page—proof that even when the lights go out, the soul still knows how to keep the beat.
Date | Place | Beat: May 10, 1956 – Alexandra Township, South Africa
A boy is born into rhythm and resistance.
The day Bakithi Emmanuel Kumalo was born, Alexandra Township was alive with sound — not the polite hum of suburbia, but the raw, unfiltered symphony of survival. Tin shacks shimmered in the heat, washing lines snapped in rhythm, radios leaked penny-whistle jazz, and women’s laughter carried above the rumble of passing trucks. You could taste coal smoke in the air, feel dust on your tongue, and still hear joy rising like a hymn against the odds. Women in headscarves bent over buckets, gossiping in isiZulu and Sesotho. Men shuffled past with bent backs and faraway eyes, on their way to mines or factories that took more than they paid. Apartheid, less than a decade old as law but centuries old in practice, was tightening its grip — pass laws multiplying like weeds, movement itself criminalized, families separated by borders drawn to serve the state. Bakithi’s mother, Elizabeth, worked as a domestic in the white suburbs, often gone for days at a time, scrubbing and polishing someone else’s dream home while hers leaned against the wind. She came back on Fridays with tired eyes and a paycheck barely enough to feed her children. Still, she sang while she cooked, her voice both lullaby and lament. His father, a bandleader who drifted between gigs and promises, was long gone by then, leaving behind his guitar and the echo of applause that never fed anyone.
When the Sharpeville Massacre erupted in March 1960, its shockwaves rattled every township. Sixty-nine unarmed protestors gunned down for daring to demand freedom from the pass laws. Bakithi was only four, but the grown-ups’ whispers and the sudden curfews etched fear into childhood. The township’s rhythm changed; laughter grew cautious, music softer by day but louder at night — rebellion hiding in melody. School was supposed to offer a path out, but for a boy like Bakithi, that path was thin and littered with obstacles. Fees were steep, uniforms costly, and books a luxury. His mother did what she could, but working away from home meant choices — feed the children or pay the schoolmaster. She chose to feed them. When she came home after a week of labor, there were piles of washing, neighbors’ needs, and no energy left for homework. Bakithi didn’t fight it. He didn’t love school. The chalk dust and strict teachers felt like confinement. What called to him was the hum of bass strings, the rattle of bottle caps on a homemade shaker, the chorus of life outside the classroom window. He found other lessons — how to hustle, how to make something from nothing. He began collecting lost golf balls from the course on the edge of the white neighborhoods. Crawling through tall grass in the early morning, he’d fill a sack, clean them, and sell them back to the caddies or golfers who pretended not to know where they came from. Sometimes he fixed bicycles, sometimes he carried groceries for a coin or two. He learned the rhythm of exchange long before he learned economics — quick talk, quicker feet, always the beat of survival beneath it. And whenever he had a moment to himself, he played. By his teens, he was already sneaking into shebeens, shadowing older musicians, memorizing bass lines by ear. The township was his conservatory, the night his classroom.
By the 1970s, his gift had become impossible to ignore. He formed a small band with family and friends who shared the same hunger — a blend of township jazz, soul, and funk that poured out of every garage and backyard in Alexandra. They were young and broke but unstoppable, borrowing amps, mending cables with tape, making rhythm from scarcity. It was during those years that Bakithi crossed paths with giants. He met Victor Ntoni, the revered bassist and composer who showed him that the instrument could lead a revolution. He watched Miriam Makeba return home in spirit through her music, her voice still banned but never silenced. He studied Letta Mbulu’s phrasing, how her tone carried both sorrow and pride. They weren’t friends in the casual sense — they were role models, elders who opened doors just by existing, by showing what freedom could sound like. Still, in the buzzing network of township players, everyone was connected by rhythm, by rumor, by shared resistance. While his mother fought exhaustion and the state fought its citizens, Bakithi fought to be heard. His music became his rebellion — his quiet refusal to live small. He might not have known how to parse a textbook, but he could make a bass line tell the truth.
Date | Place | Beat: 1964 – Brentwood, New York
A girl is born into heritage and harmony.
Across the Atlantic, my own beginning was quieter but no less rhythmic. I was born in 1964, the youngest child of William and Mildred, who had already lived through Jim Crow as dark-skinned Native Americans — my father, Choctaw; my mother, Cherokee. America had measured their worth against the wrong skin, but they built a home where their children would know pride. Our house smelled of soil and sweetness. My father, steady and protective, worked with his hands and believed that growing food was its own freedom. His gardens fed us and reminded us that independence could be cultivated. My mother, quick to laugh but fierce in discipline, carried Virginia’s lessons in her bones. She had walked unpaved roads chased by headlights that meant harm, and she taught us respect for danger — and for our own strength. They didn’t lecture about racism; they didn’t have to. Their silence told the story. Their survival was proof. Every quiet supper, every song hummed while washing dishes was a prayer for endurance.
Date | Place | Beat: 1970s – Brentwood and Alexandra
Two worlds turn in the same tempo of youth and discovery.
I was the youngest of three. My sister, born in 1952, was a teenager by the time the world met The Beatles. Their music hit our house like a fever, and she caught it completely. She loved music so deeply that she pulled me right into her obsession. She shared every wet vinyl record she owned — those freshly played, still smelling faintly of paper sleeves and static — and she made me sit beside her, listening until the grooves became part of our DNA. The Beatles arrived around the time I did. I was barely a toddler, but my sister made sure I grew up fluent in their harmonies. She’d sing lead, I’d find the second line, and soon we had our own living-room band. I learned every Beatles song by heart, though I couldn’t yet spell their names. Ticket to Ride became our anthem, the song we sang so often it turned into the wallpaper of our days. When I think of childhood, I hear that guitar riff and her voice carrying me along. My brother, born in 1957, was the scientist — curious, brilliant, drumming on the kitchen table with pencils as he memorized chemistry formulas. I was the tag-along. He didn’t always want me around, so I invented stories to keep his attention. That’s how Gypsy Moth and Roger were born. Roger wanted peace; Gypsy Moth refused to give up. Their legendary “Washing Machine Dance” — me spinning and flapping around the kitchen — was my first stage. My brother tried not to laugh, but when he did, I knew I’d reached him. My storytelling became our common language, my way to belong.
Those stories foreshadowed everything. Storytelling was my first instrument, the way I turned rejection into rhythm. On Sundays, I sang with the Buds of Promise children’s choir at John E. Durham A.M.E. Zion Church in Brentwood. Hymns like Jacob’s Ladder and This Little Light of Mine weren’t just songs; they were breathing lessons in faith. The organist’s hands leapt between piano and organ like prayer in motion, and my voice learned to lift itself in harmony with a congregation that believed singing could heal. Then there were weekends on the Shinnecock Reservation, where powwow drums echoed like heartbeat and thunder. Those gatherings gave me the other half of my musical soul — the deep pulse of ancestry, the knowing that rhythm connects heaven and earth.
By the 1970s, Brentwood itself was a living chorus. Puerto Rican families filled the neighborhood with festivals, food, and Spanish melodies. English and Spanish intertwined in my ears until life itself felt bilingual — melody and harmony in conversation. The smell of arroz con gandules drifted through open windows while Motown played from our radio. While I was daydreaming through math and inhaling the sweetness from Entenmann’s Bakery down the road, Bakithi was hustling golf balls, building bands, and sneaking into clubs to play bass behind legends. Two children on opposite sides of the world, both shaped by oppression and longing, both finding survival in rhythm — one gripping a bass like salvation, the other spinning stories like a moth circling light. Music was the pulse beneath everything. In Alexandra, it was penny-whistle and defiance. In Long Island, it was gospel and Motown. Both of us learned early that when the world feels unkind, sound will still hold you.
For Bakithi, mastery arrived through hustle, hunger, and the haunting dreams where invisible hands guided his fingers over a fretless bass. For me, it came through language — words, hymns, and stories that turned imagination into sanctuary. Neither of us could have known that those rhythms were already drawing us toward one another, across oceans and injustices, into a shared tempo. His bass lines and my stories were born from struggle but destined for harmony — two sides of the same drum, both devoted to keeping the beat alive.
The 103 pages of Married To A Rockstar tell the rhythmic life of Robbi Hall Kumalo. They capture a promising beginning, the ascent to a lifelong purpose, the marriage, and the daily struggles. Robbi’s story begins in the 1950s, and continues to the present, where she inspiringly commits to helping the younger generation achieve their full potential. Barriers of language, culture, and pursuit threatened Robbi’s budding romance in the beginning. The weariness of the body didn’t slow her down, nor did anything else, and she emerged stronger than ever, all thanks to her faith and love for music.
It’s all about music here. The word music features on nearly every page. Music to express love and convey hope against oppression. Music to celebrate the merger of two worlds. Music to echo the troubling times as experienced in New York, America, and South Africa. Here, Robbi writes: “Now, after decades of music and struggle, I return with stronger fingers, steadier steps, and a voice still carrying. This book is not just memory. It is performance. It is testimony. It is the overture to the next movement of my life.”
The first chapter opens with the events that took place in Alexandra Township, South Africa, on May 10, 1956. This was the day Bakithi Emmanuel Kumalo was born. Robbi vividly describes the scene that welcomes Bakithi into the world, engaging the reader’s senses with sounds and culture and the beauty of the African way of life.
Lastly, the writing is also impressively done, and memoir readers will find Married To A Rock Star a special treat. There is a rhythm in the sentences. There’s simplicity that conveys love, music, sickness, and hope. “Phones rang, typewriters clacked, and somewhere between invoices and laughter, we decided that this time, we wouldn’t let the moment pass us by.”