![]() When we sing in a group, we have to listen to one another, adjusting our individual voices to match one another in tone, volume and pitch. Singing can help us understand how to transcend injustice. But as Reagon and Sweet Honey well know, the transformative effects of singing go much deeper than merely being a form of protest. Highlander's original music director, Zilphia Horton, who was a pioneer of using music this way in the 1930s through the 1950s, used to tell her students that people only need to have one thing in common before they can sing together, and that is that they believe in something.Īs generations of movement participants have experienced, music can be a meaningful tool in a protest - civil rights groups famously filled the jails and sang freedom songs to the guards. But group singing has the ability to instantly unite everyone in a room, with no introduction or explanation needed. The sound moves into your heart and pushes it open wider.ĭebate can solidify and sharpen opposing viewpoints a great speaker can encourage throngs of people with sweeping oratory. A single baritone line alone, for example, wouldn't be much of a song but a baritone singer filling in one of five parts, in harmony, takes the listener somewhere. They do this by filling out their music with only their voices. The history of the group, which is currently a quintet, mirrors the effort of the civil rights movement from which it sprung: to raise voices, to empower individuals and to accomplish together what we cannot accomplish alone. Studio Sessions Sweet Honey In The Rock Returns With 'Grace' And while that may be a difficult thing to explain in so many words, the music teaches us on a visceral level. For Sweet Honey, as for the SNCC Freedom Singers before them and countless participants in America's social movements since, the pursuit of freedom requires both bodies and voices. Particularly during the freedom songs, you get the impression they're pulling from every part of their selves to add not only their voices but their entire being to the pursuit of that freedom. ![]() After all, it's not long before their bodies start to move - arms swinging, feet bouncing. Built only on harmony and vocal percussion, the music they make is equal parts declaration and release. ![]() Women sitting in chairs is an intimate thing, and it can feel as though the concert hall or theater is really someone's living room as though these women have been hard at work all day and now is the time to sit down, rest and sing. ![]() Live, they often sit in chairs, in a line across the front of the stage. Though Reagon left the group in 2004, Sweet Honey has continued down the same path it's been traversing for more than four decades, through its 27 recordings - including 2016's #LoveInEvolution - and the 23 women who have, at some point, sung as part of the group. She built upon that concept further when she founded Sweet Honey in the Rock in 1973. Reagon helped cement the role of a cappella singing in freedom movements as part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which got her expelled from college. Reagon burst into a line, you feel the unmistakable power of unaccompanied singing. You can have an intellectual understanding of a cappella singing as the most portable means of music-making, but seeing Dr. Turning The Tables A New Canon: In Pop Music, Women Belong At The Center Of The StoryĮven for students of movement music, it was a remarkable moment. To demonstrate her point, she sang out in her warm, enveloping alto: "Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on. She told us how she learned quickly that gospel hymns were going to be a strong foundation for the civil rights movement's many freedom songs, because most of the black activists already knew them and it was quick and easy to replace the word "Jesus" with "freedom." I looked around the room and saw activists and organizers of all ages on chairs and couches, many standing, some on laps, all eager to hear whatever she had to say. ![]() Bernice Johnson Reagon talked about how she and the SNCC Freedom Singers used music to help change the world. In the 1950s and 1960s, the song was commonly sung as part of the Civil Rights Movement.The music of Sweet Honey In The Rock - shown here performing in 2013 - demonstrates how the pursuit of freedom requires both bodies and voices.įive years ago, in a crowded room at the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee - a now-85-year-old education and organizing center for activists, occasionally called the epicenter of the civil rights movement - Dr. Not only does it refer to freedom in the world to come after death, as many slave spirituals do, but it celebrates their new freedom in the here and now. Like many African American spirituals, the song has more than one meaning. The spiritual "Oh Freedom!" probably came into being soon after the end of slavery. ![]()
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