Songfacts®:

• "Peach Velvet Sky" is a track from Corinne Bailey Rae's fourth studio album, Black Rainbows. Several years in the making, Black Rainbows is informed by an exhibition on Black history by visual artist Theaster Gates at the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago.
• This was the last song Rae wrote for the record. It was inspired by the 1861 book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, written under the pseudonym Linda Brent. The autobiography of Jacobs, a young, enslaved woman, it documents her life as a slave and how she gained freedom for herself and for her children.
• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was the first fugitive slave narrative written by a woman. "I read it when I was 13 or 14 and I think her book should be on the school curriculum," Rae told The Sun. "What she went through and the mental strength and courage she found, as a mother, really affected me."
• Rae wrote the poetic ballad after re-reading Jacobs' autobiography. Jacobs' descriptions of hiding in a crawl space above her freed grandmother's storeroom for seven years to escape the violence and sexual harassment of her abusive owner particularly moved her. The young Black girl read and sewed and secretly watched her children grow up and play around her from a small nook. The song is about the fragments of sunset Harriet Jacobs saw through the tiny crawl space.
  
  "The image of her seeing the peach velvet sky through this tiny loophole was so powerful to me," said Rae. "It was a symbol of hope and resilience, and it spoke to the way that she found beauty and joy even in the midst of such darkness."
• Corinne Bailey Rae co-wrote and co-produced "Peach Velvet Sky" with her husband/producer/jazz musician Steve Brown. They first worked together on Rae's eponymous 2006 debut album when Brown played Hammond organ on "Call Me When You Get This" and co-wrote and co-produced "Seasons Change." They married in 2013.
• The Gregory-Berg directed music video stars British-Nigerian dancer and choreographer Mayowa Ogunnaike with choreography by Sharon Watson. "Sharon and Mayowa had begun developing the choreography for 'Peach Velvet Sky' and called me in to see what was happening," said Rae. "I was speechless when I saw Mayowa dance. The grace, the expression, the heaviness of the subject with the fluidity of the movement. Sharon and Mayowa had put in language which evoked Harriet Jacob's story so poetically, her loophole for viewing the world, the compression which ultimately brought her escape, the mental strain, the physical and temporal endurance."