The show, "Spirituals: From Ship to Shore," featured spirituals sung by black slaves in the 18th and 19th centuries.
|
|
Two collections of less time-specific songs of Rustin's are available on iTunes titled Bayard Rustin Sings a Program of Spirituals and Elizabethan and Negro Spirituals.
|
|
Did you always have the idea of incorporating these spirituals?
|
|
There they sang spirituals and observed a moment of silence.
|
|
Entitled "Spirituals," the collection was about black spirituality at its core.
|
|
And the mezzo-soprano J'Nai Bridges will sing songs and spirituals.
|
|
Such concerts, presumably, first carried black spirituals to wider audiences overseas.
|
|
Anthony Russell, a singer, combines Yiddish folk songs with African-American spirituals.
|
|
Trae the Truth conducted codeine spirituals to honor the Screwed Up Click.
|
|
In between them, the Young People's Chorus sang folk songs and spirituals.
|
|
Spirituals were also amended for political purposes during the civil rights movement.
|
|
She writes beautifully in her memoir "Stand Up Straight and Sing!" about hearing her grandmother singing songs and spirituals, whether happy or melancholy, always "beautiful, deeply soulful and right"; Ms. Norman carried on this tradition with unforgettable spirituals performances.
|
|
Then the music director Alex Nguyen will lead arrangements of hymns and spirituals.
|
|
At the services the faithful prayed and sang homespun spirituals and Hebrew chants.
|
|
Spirituals arose because enslaved Africans assimilated English hymns and made them their own.
|
|
Spirituals arose because enslaved Africans assimilated English hymns and made them their own.
|
|
The label will release a box set of D-Vine Spirituals recordings in 2020.
|
|
The album is a mix of opera duets, classical songs and African-American spirituals.
|
|
Spirituals provided an opportunity to gather together, share feelings, and lament or be joyful.
|
|
In this superb collection of songs and spirituals, he reveals his personality more fully.
|
|
Spirituals that were religious in content but not specifically Christian were Christianized later on.
|
|
Bishop Curry loves to quote African-American spirituals , and sometimes he gets the congregation singing.
|
|
From spirituals to stargazing, the gesture of fugitivity has a protracted history for Black Americans.
|
|
" And something particularly appropriate, she added, when singing spirituals, which she called "black heartbeat music.
|
|
"Early Shaker Spirituals" is McDormand's favorite of the productions she has done with the group.
|
|
My grandmother hovers over the stove flame, fanning it as she melodically hums Kikuyu spirituals.
|
|
But this remarkable collection of songs and spirituals offers an ideal solo showcase for his artistry.
|
|
"You go to almost any black church today, and you don't hear spirituals anymore," he said.
|
|
The group's repertory consists of folk songs, spirituals and a few of Mr. Lloyd's best-known compositions.
|
|
Visitors are invited to don headphones hooked up to Walkmen, which play recordings of African American spirituals.
|
|
The music will also reach into Ms. Myers's songbook, and the black spirituals of the slavery era.
|
|
It doesn't help that Blitzstein's score dabbles in ragtime, spirituals and parlor music alongside more conventional styles.
|
|
Alice Walker, Langston Hughes, Ntozake Shange and Ralph Ellison were all moved by spirituals, jazz and blues.
|
|
"Spirituals are choral harmonies sung by African slaves in the United States," she explained in her show notes.
|
|
Wales Bonner's powerful show entitled, "Spirituals," based on chorale sung by African slaves in the U.S. #lcm pic.twitter.
|
|
Mr. Wilson, a longtime professor at the University of California, Berkeley, grew up listening to jazz and spirituals.
|
|
" She speaks and sings with a Southern accent, she said, which gave her spirituals "even more of me.
|
|
He grew up singing spirituals in church before discovering his lyric tenor voice might be right for opera.
|
|
Which adds more credence to those who believe the President won't be singing old black spirituals anytime soon.
|
|
All day they called me a "well-spoken colored girl" and inappropriately asked that I sing Negro spirituals.
|
|
All day they called me a "well-spoken colored girl" and inappropriately asked that I sing Negro spirituals.
|
|
But you need not have been at Carnegie Hall to hear how Jessye Norman bridged classical and black spirituals.
|
|
The field hands march to and from work in neatly pressed work clothes, singing elaborate choral arrangements of spirituals.
|
|
Now, he probably won't expect the Queen to burst into song, but don't be surprised if Bishop Curry invokes spirituals.
|
|
The black music that Gagneux ended up drawing from was the hypnotic chants of negro spirituals and chain gang music.
|
|
He ended up with a demo—a little incoherent, but promising nonetheless—that fused dissociatively heavy guitars with old spirituals.
|
|
It's an extraordinary musical interpretation of the play, melding British sea shanty styles with heraldic brass, American spirituals, and calypso.
|
|
These matinees conclude with Alvin Ailey's own "Revelations," the troupe's signature work, inspired by the spirituals Ailey grew up with.
|
|
That includes some of the more inspirational R&B from the 1960s and '70s, black spirituals and, of course, standards.
|
|
D-Vine Spirituals closed in 1982, right as synthesizers and digital recording became the norm in gospel, as in secular music.
|
|
And, of course, more "Revelations," the company's staple, created by Ailey in 1960 to a playlist of spirituals, gospel and blues.
|
|
"Spirituals have the power to uplift and to heal, and we certainly need that in today's world," she said in a statement.
|
|
For example: Spirituals from the 19th century were revived during the 1960s and saw tons of success during the civil rights movement.
|
|
Transplanted blacks who suffered under slavery, he said, were united by a centripetal force, which inspired Pan-Africanism, spirituals and the blues.
|
|
The set list features drumlines and spirituals and afrobeat and crunk and classical and dance hall and screw and big band music.
|
|
Editor's Note: The headline has been changed to reflect more specific terminology around African slave spirituals and choral harmonies, which inspired this collection.
|
|
But he made a point, as he wrote in his Times article, of composing his own folk music and spirituals for his score.
|
|
And he argued for the importance of establishing an American concert canon, spanning African-American work songs, spirituals, the blues and Broadway tunes.
|
|
Like the powerful symphony that brought Price national attention, the concerto draws together African-American folk music and spirituals with a silvery Romanticism.
|
|
One half, consisting of lieder, takes place in the Board of Officers Room; the other, of jazz and spirituals, in the Veterans Room.
|
|
You also couldn't miss the fluent spectrum of musical styles, from African worklike meters to rock music, with spirituals and other idioms in between.
|
|
From quilts to spirituals to a well-placed "mmmmhmmm" in mixed company, black women have always spoken to each other in coded, cultural language.
|
|
On Sunday the headline-grabbing soprano Kathleen Battle makes a much-anticipated return with a recital of choir-backed spirituals evoking the Underground Railroad.
|
|
The songs can range from hymns and spirituals to klezmer and pop, and they often spur congregants to form conga lines down the aisles.
|
|
Franklin gave the hymns and spirituals the elastic structure of her pop songs, with plenty of space for her singing to launch its rockets.
|
|
Mr. Lamar's lush and gloomy new show, "Funeral Doom Spiritual," is an assemblage of old spirituals — but it isn't your usual Sunday at church.
|
|
She became a major recording artist at the dawn of the compact disc era, leaving a rich catalog of opera, lieder, spirituals and recitals.
|
|
"I grew up speaking Creole, singing Negro spirituals in a third-world country as a little Latino boy brought up by white missionaries," he said.
|
|
Tracing where rap goes, all the way down to blues and spirituals, tracing the whole path of this way of making art and approaching it.
|
|
Another commissioned work, for the Boston Musica Viva ensemble, was "A City Called Heaven," which has elements of swing music, blues, spirituals and boogie-woogie.
|
|
" Marquese Carter, a doctoral student at Indiana University who specializes in Price's work, said in an interview that she "uses the organizing material of spirituals.
|
|
But he took Hurok's advice, and embarked on a career that stayed largely stuck in the lukewarm waters separating jazz, cabaret, spirituals and chamber music.
|
|
In between movements of Mozart's "Haffner" Symphony, conducted by Mr. Langrée, the inspiring Young People's Chorus of New York City sang folk songs and spirituals.
|
|
The jazz-infused arrangements of the spirituals were played vibrantly by the stylish pianist Joel A. Martin and, in some pieces, the pianist Cyrus Chestnut.
|
|
The Orchestra of St. Luke's performs music including excerpts from Price's string quartets, the "Five Folksongs in Counterpoint," and spirituals made famous by Marian Anderson.
|
|
But this influence is often suavely merged with spirituals and African percussion accents — often deployed in the service of love triangles and mystic conjuring spells.
|
|
"In their concerts they go on a long journey ranging from great jazz hymns and old spirituals to unknown blues and rags," the program said.
|
|
Developed by the filmmaker Steve McQueen, the series aims to explore the story of black music in America from early spirituals to today's diverse forms.
|
|
Norman's 1990 collaboration with Kathleen Battle, "Spirituals in Concert," reveals how Norman blended the structure of her operatic performance with the improvisational style of the spiritual.
|
|
" On Sunday mornings, some of the same people would go to church to sing spirituals like "Lord, I Want to be a Christian in My Heart.
|
|
He listened to one of his black conservatory students, Harry Burleigh, sing spirituals and studied the Louisville music teacher Mildred Hill's scholarship on black folk songs.
|
|
There is a hushed, meditative reverence to the Wooster Group's show "Early Shaker Spirituals," a mesmeric combination of traditional music and dance, based on a recording.
|
|
There's "Hush," a jazzy four minutes that features Rose half-rapping and half-interpolating children's spirituals—a nod to her own split from an upbringing in Christianity.
|
|
Her melodies often follow the modal contour of African-American spirituals, avoiding the outré jazz touches that appear in contemporaneous scores by black and white composers alike.
|
|
That same year, Baruch Whitehead, a music education professor at Ithaca College, formed the Dorothy Cotton Jubilee Singers to help preserve the spirituals she loved to sing.
|
|
Written by Ms. Franklin, the song tapped into the rich history of spirituals, setting the scene for one of her most elaborate interplays with the Sweet Inspirations.
|
|
Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons is a companion piece to the Wooster Group's Early Shakespeare Spirituals, directed by Valk, which also reenacted a vinyl record onstage.
|
|
In the spirituals "Lord, How Come Me Here?" and "Let Us Break Bread Together," among many others, she sent high phrases soaring and sang with ethereal elegance.
|
|
Out of respect, though, he did not quote any existing music, but rather wrote his own songs and spirituals, folding them into a lengthy, ambitious operatic score.
|
|
So apparently Western Michigan University thinks it's ok for WHITE peoples to sing negro spirituals while the instructor talking bout "these songs don't belong to one race".
|
|
So far, via word of mouth and Facebook, it has attracted thirty musicians, who have played at three marches—mostly New Orleans-style spirituals and protest songs.
|
|
" On Sunday afternoon, a choir from Morgan State University, the largest historically black college in Maryland, sang spirituals and "Glory," the Oscar-winning song from the movie "Selma.
|
|
With Tempo as his headquarters, Shipp founded D-Vine Spirituals, a record label for the many artists he'd gotten to know through his ministry and his radio show.
|
|
In the 1920s, James Weldon Johnson and his brother J. Rosamond Johnson set out to catalog and analyze black church music in their two volumes devoted to spirituals.
|
|
Mr. Crumb's deeply poignant "Journey Beyond Time" sets African-American spirituals in a musical hall of mirrors with delicate percussion sounds creating a shimmering aura around the singer's voice.
|
|
We must remember that work songs and spirituals are at the foundation of most of the music that people in the United States, and the world, listen to today.
|
|
Nominees for the revival production category include the Wooster Group's "Early Shaker Spirituals" and Pina Bausch's "Rite of Spring," performed by her troupe, Tanztheater Wuppertal, at the Brooklyn Academy.
|
|
Though the score evokes spirituals, jazz, folk songs, ragtime and Dixieland, the elements of musical theater came through most strongly in this performance, led with brio by Stephen Lord.
|
|
He recently gave a recital of spirituals and arias at Chowan University, in North Carolina, and last summer he sang in a lineup of young artists in Kiev, Ukraine.
|
|
In the end, as Mr Gates notes, some of the richest elements of African-American culture—jazz, blues and spirituals—arose from the grassroots, rather than descending from the elite.
|
|
On "I Know You See Me," he reaches back into the black musical canon, with the singers Melanie Charles and J. Hoard vocalizing references to Nina Simone and black spirituals.
|
|
Within the frame of postmodern dance — and with a heady mix of spirituals, contemporary music and field recordings — he produces a remarkable work that flows seamlessly from start to finish.
|
|
The 90-minute performance, a scholarly exploration of black history in folk songs and spirituals both traditional and contemporary, was a pinnacle of this season's American Songbook series at Lincoln Center.
|
|
JPH: If you go back, W.E.B. DuBois has a book called The Souls of Black Folks and he calls the spirituals the greatest gift African Americans have given to this nation.
|
|
It's not just a dance, but a suite of spirituals relating to the black experience in this country and expressing the trials, tribulations, faith and hope to which everyone can relate.
|
|
Well, "folk music" may not do it justice; Flemons's music ranges over spirituals, blues, jug band music, string band music, murder ballads — just about anything rooted in early 20th-century black culture.
|
|
In between topics, West's choir launched into live performances of spirituals and songs from his catalog of hits, including 2004's "Jesus Walks" and "Selah," off his latest LP, Jesus Is King.
|
|
People cupped candles, and sang spirituals, hymns and "The Star-Spangled Banner" in a roughly quarter-mile long procession that began at Nameless Field and ended at "the Lawn," near the Rotunda.
|
|
The music consists entirely of interpolations of Negro spirituals and folk songs like "Rockin' Jerusalem" and "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize," delivered in multipart harmony by the nine actors playing students.
|
|
Where he once had felt shame about slavery and ambivalence about African-American spirituals, he said, he now marveled at the capacity of black people in America to wrest beauty from pain.
|
|
Both performances will include "Becoming Ailey," a multimedia presentation featuring historical footage of this seminal choreographer, and "Revelations," a signature work inspired by the spirituals and gospel music he grew up with.
|
|
The dance, a collaboration with the Radiotopia podcast Ear Hustle, a nuanced look at prison life, features spirituals and new music created by incarcerated men at San Quentin State Prison in California.
|
|
Swiss-American musician Manuel Gagneux had been fusing genres in response to throwaway 4Chan comments for a little while before responding to an offensively-phrased request to combine black metal and old spirituals.
|
|
For instance, I was very taken by "Early Shaker Spirituals," a Wooster Group show about Shaker songs and dances — and a great example of one tight-knit group turning its attention to another.
|
|
Its first concert series, Soundtrack of America, will celebrate not the European classical sphere but the heritage of African-American music across a broad historical and stylistic spectrum, from spirituals to hip-hop.
|
|
A show like "Early Shaker Spirituals," say — an austere interpretation of an album of Shaker music — might strike you as thrilling or tedious, but either way the intensity of its interrogation is fascinating.
|
|
Its sound is particularly evocative of the early 19703s, when Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield and Stevie Wonder were composing their own epics and jazz musicians like Max Roach were playing spirituals with gospel choirs.
|
|
" She became well-known for her arrangements of spirituals; the great contralto Marian Anderson closed her historic 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial with Price's arrangement of "My Soul's Been Anchored in De Lord.
|
|
A series of spirituals like "Were You There" and "Every Time I Feel the Spirit," it had Mr. Tines, a presence somehow simultaneously childlike and weary, wandering around a stage dotted with empty chairs.
|
|
Mr. Parent compared the "magical night" to a family reunion, or "coming home," recalling how audience members sang and clapped along to the various gospel songs and spirituals sprinkled throughout the Tony-nominated play.
|
|
The men had prepared musical selections — modern spirituals in a variety of genres, including rap, folk, spoken word and hip-hop — to perform for the visitors, who chose pieces to use for the dance.
|
|
The band's output is a blend of African-American spirituals, chain gangs songs, blues, and Satanic black metal (on their newer material, that raw influence has has given way to a slicker modern metal sound).
|
|
Ever since the days of southern tobacco plantations and being chained together with your fellow man singing Negro spirituals, black people heavily relied on prayer and religion to help them get through the toughest times.
|
|
The earliest work songs and spirituals were the basis of the blues that then evolved into jazz, rock 'n' roll, contemporary gospel, R&B, and now hip-hop, as well as many other sub genres.
|
|
Heartbeats, heavy breathing, gunshots, the barking of dogs, massed whispers, weeping, synthesized strings, fragments of spirituals and gospel moans come up against passages of tortured text by Mr. Harris (some of it sampling Kendrick Lamar).
|
|
I was especially moved by the spirituals when she sang with just the piano, like "City Called Heaven," in which she conveyed a poignant mix of longing for the promised city, sadness and childlike innocence.
|
|
On top of free meals, it offers legal counseling, child care, after-school services, recovery groups, a meditation group, an acupuncture clinic, a pregnancy support group, a grief support group, a healing-through-Negro-spirituals workshop.
|
|
His experimental debut, Devil Is Fine, which blended black metal with blues and American slave spirituals, received almost universal acclaim, and a string of hastily-arranged live dates proved that he could deliver live as well.
|
|
She oversaw a "family tree" — intended as a suggestion, not a canon — of music: from unrecorded African-American music through work songs, spirituals, blues, jazz, swing, bebop, R&B, rock 'n' roll, hip-hop and onward.
|
|
An upside-down water fountain evoking Jim Crow-era segregation will intermittently gush 800 gallons of water into a tank, its sound amplified and mixed in with 1930s field recordings of African-American choirs singing spirituals.
|
|
George Gershwin, in an article for The New York Times, called "Porgy" a "folk opera" — a score that drew upon what he thought of as black American music, including blues, prayer songs, street cries and spirituals.
|
|
In her work, as in that of the visual artist Kara Walker, historical genres like spirituals and Motown (and even the racialized figure of Bizet's Carmen herself) take on new, charged meanings in juxtaposition with contemporary forms.
|
|
In it, five of the group's female members (LeCompte, McDormand, Cynthia Hedstrom, Bebe Miller and Suzzy Roche) recreate a field recording of Shaker spirituals made in 1976 at one of the last remaining Shaker colonies, in Maine.
|
|
When he argues in class that it's the joy of spirituals, more than any imputed secret messages they may contain, that demonstrates their real strength, we know that he is speaking also of those who sing them.
|
|
One of America's most popular modern dance companies opens its annual monthlong season with one of America's most popular modern dances: "Revelations," the masterpiece that Ailey created in 1960 to a compilation of spirituals, gospel songs and blues.
|
|
Over five nights from April 5-14, "Soundtrack of America" sets out to explore a "family tree" of American music, from spirituals to hip-hop, with a lineup of 25 young performers to bring out continuities and breakthroughs.
|
|
Their masters often used Christianity to justify their bondage, but slaves converted the scriptures they heard into Negro spirituals, using music to create their own interpretation of the Bible rather than the one that was imposed on them.
|
|
With Haber's background in fashion design and Guest's branding and digital marketing experience, the couple may have just enough tools and industry connections to take crystals mainstream (or, to a niche crowd of stylish spirituals, at the very least).
|
|
Curry, the first black head of the Episcopal Church in the United States, started by quoting civil rights hero Dr Martin Luther King and powered on citing spirituals, medieval poetry and the experiences of slaves in the American south.
|
|
Bishop Curry, in the great tradition of black preachers, delivered a loose, improvisational sermon that began as a meandering discourse but built to a passionate, shouting climax, name-checking Martin Luther King Jr. and slave spirituals along the way.
|
|
The bishop&aposs passionate sermon on the theme of love, studded with quotes from the bible, Martin Luther King Jr and African-American spirituals, was a contrast to the more solemn and muted Anglican style the royal family is used to.
|
|
She is reading early black technologies—negro spirituals, the Big Dipper, and Little Dipper that contains the North Star—as a way to reassess these old technologies that are both subversive and play a fantastical role in the black American narrative.
|
|
The Swiss musician behind it, Manuel Gagneux, boldly blended elements of negro spirituals, prison blues, and blackened metal to create a sound that had never before been presented to the metal world—or to any particular scene, for that matter.
|
|
A clattering score by the composers Philip Miller and Thuthuka Sibisi (the latter serving as conductor) interweaves modernist motifs with Christian spirituals and with southern and western African modes, while a dancer in a gas mask (Sipho Seroto) keeps watch throughout.
|
|
This program concludes with Alvin Ailey's own "Revelations," a signature work that is performed to African-American spirituals, gospel and blues, but the entire afternoon is likely to be revelatory for young audiences getting their first exposure to modern dance.
|
|
For many in the United States, "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" enjoys a hallowed status as one of the cherished of 22015th-century African-American spirituals, its forlorn lyrics invoking the darkness of slavery and the sustained oppression of a race.
|
|
" The same night, Mr. Clinton told a crowd in Mason City, Iowa, that "if you really want to understand Hillary, you just have to understand" she was raised a Methodist, and mentioned one of her favorite spirituals: "If I Could Help Somebody.
|
|
Lamar's performances evoke a haunted, transcendent act of awakened consciousness and composed virtuosity that b(l)end the conventions of goth rock and European classical music, opera and the avant-garde, and spirituals and free jazz, yielding something that is singularly his own.
|
|
Here, the versatile cast ably draws on West African dance and Alvin Ailey-esque motions of struggle and striving, channeling martial power in machete-swipe kicks and resilience through the familiar (but, again, anachronistic) vehicle of spirituals, even in the absence of visible adversaries.
|
|
With all the hubris of the 24-year-old I was, I asked why the magazine chose to send a white man to cover a story in the Mississippi Delta about the blues, an American musical art form rooted in black spirituals and work songs.
|
|
He is a man with a long and serious relationship with the album at the center of this show, a 1965 compilation of work songs, spirituals, blues and toasts, performed by African-American convicts in rural Texas and compiled by the folklorist Bruce Jackson.
|
|
The second production in Ms. Clarke's five-year Signature residency, "Angel Reapers" is nothing like her balletic first, "Chéri," which was all gilded elegance, or like the Wooster Group's recent "Early Shaker Spirituals," an exploration of the movement's music and dance that felt placid and intellectual.
|
|
He approached Maureen Mahon, a cultural anthropologist at New York University, and three other historians to build a family tree of African-American music, beginning with the field songs of the American South, with their call-and-response rhythms, and the spirituals of the earliest slaves.
|
|
The piece explores themes common in Lamar's work: interracial desire, "crackers" (in today's meaning but also the slave-era term for the master cracking the whip), Negro spirituals, apocalyptic liberation, internalizations of white supremacy, reenactments of abuse in the black family, mass incarceration, suicide, and self-recognition.
|
|
It may be the biggest unfiring in opera since Maria Callas's New York comeback: Kathleen Battle, a prima donna whose dismissal by the Metropolitan Opera more than two decades ago made front-page news, will return to the Met next season to sing a recital of spirituals.
|
|
Later I'd learn that the singing of spirituals and praise songs might have gone on for hours, ending with a counterclockwise dance known as a "ring shout," or "shout" for short — a spontaneous outlet of joy and enthusiasm for an enslaved people with few such opportunities.
|
|
After hearing Meade (Lux) Lewis and Albert Ammons at the historic "From Spirituals to Swing" concert at Carnegie Hall in late 1938, Albert Lion approached the famed stride pianists, and a few weeks later, they entered a New York studio and made the first Blue Note recordings.
|
|
Interspersed between the performances of two dozen spirituals by Ms. Battle and the 34-voice choir (conducted by Stephanie Fisher and Rachel Blackburn), there were readings by Jussie Smollett (who acted as narrator) and some choir members of words by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, the Rev.
|
|
During the three-mile journey, the capital city's wartime panorama — wagonloads of wounded Union soldiers, the grave-digging laborers at the first national cemetery, the voices of escaped slaves singing spirituals from their makeshift camps — imbued in America's 215th president the harrowing stakes of his stewardship.
|
|
We are mostly allowed to be servants or sidekicks -- stoic oppressed characters such as Hattie McDaniel in "Gone With the Wind" or Whoopi Goldberg in "The Color Purple" who astound audiences with our ability to sing Negro spirituals and maintain forgiving hearts even in the face of injustice.
|
|
Thanks to a racist comment, he stumbled onto a winning combination: a purposefully unholy conflagration of African-American spirituals, chain gangs songs, the blues, and Satanic black metal that drew lines between Scandinavia and the Delta, summoning both the blasphemous evils of the North and the bloodstained history of the South.
|
|
Quoting everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr., to controversial Catholic twentieth-century theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, referencing African-American spirituals and black enslavement in America, Curry's sermon was a far cry from what might be seen as the "traditional," aristocratic Anglican sermon you might expect from a royal wedding.
|
|
Spending 24 hours filtering 240 years of predominantly American music — battle hymns, black spirituals, war ballads, minstrel tunes, works songs, Tin Pan Alley, Broadway musicals, Motown, Top 40 and lesbian-feminist punk done up in Afro-beat, the blues and Laurie Anderson sci-fi — through the prerogatives of a drag show is daring.
|
|
In the 1950s, at the same time that slave-era spirituals were having a reawakening as part of the American civil rights movement, "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" was becoming a popular drinking song in the rugby clubs and pubs of Britain, where the lyrics were often accompanied by a series of bawdy gestures.
|
|
The album, titled "Volunteer" and due on Friday, is filled not with the spirituals Mr. Secor mentioned (figurative flourishes are his specialty), but with folk-rock testaments to dreaming and striving, tall tales of earthy heroism and galvanizing hoedowns powered by the group's vigorously played acoustic instruments — including fiddle, banjo, mandolin and upright bass — and drums.
|
|
Although the ample score is by Vernon Duke (music) and John LaTouche (lyrics), "Cabin in the Sky" features a couple of traditional spirituals, and this production also includes "Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe," a much-recorded standard written by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg for the movie version, which jettisoned many of the original songs.
|
|
The pianist Sullivan Fortner, a member of Roy Hargrove's quintet, will play a sampling of African-American spirituals; the South African vocalist Vuyo Sotashe will introduce audiences to songs he learned in the townships of his homeland; and Mr. Mwenso, who hails from Sierra Leone, will debut a selection of newly composed anthems aimed at inspiration.
|
|
A warm presence who occasionally sang spirituals to ease tensions at demonstrations, Ms. Cotton was the director of education for Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference; typed his "I Have a Dream" speech in a hotel room in Washington in 21; traveled with him when he went to Oslo the next year to receive the Nobel Peace Prize; and was staying in a Memphis motel room next to his until hours before his assassination in 19913.
|
|