Saturday, May 24, 1997

Since days of slavery, spirituals have empowered African-Americans

By Deborah Bradley / The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS - As a child, Bernice Johnson Reagon was told that the spiritual "Steal Away" called slaves to worship at a time when gathering was forbidden.

During the service, everyone would circle around a black iron pot, turned upside down to muffle the voices. Here they would pray, and surely many learned the spiritual "Follow the Drinking Gourd" - literally a road map to freedom.

The words spelled out the underground railroad's escape route:

"Follow the Drinking Gourd

"For the old man is waiting for to carry you to freedom

"When the moon rise high and first quail call

"Follow the Drinking Gourd"

By setting out at night, and following the "Drinking Gourd" - the Big Dipper, whose tail points toward the North Star - slaves would surely find their way to the North, and freedom.

These stories and many more are a part of "Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions," a Smithsonian Institution national traveling exhibit on display at the African American Museum in Dallas.

Using music and visuals, the exhibit tells the story of African-American sacred music traditions throughout the 19th and 20th centuries: how slaves used the language in spirituals to communicate and how music has taught cultural history in such songs as "Joe Louis Was a Fighting Man," which told of the prowess of the prizefighter affectionately nicknamed the "Brown Bomber." How the Fisk Jubilee Singers in 1872 first brought spirituals to the concert stage, and how over many years composers, performers such as Marian Anderson, William Warfield, Leontyne Price and others shaped the music that would eventually be today's contemporary Christian music.

"Music is sacred to African-Americans because it is connected to our survival," writes Reagon, the curator of the exhibit. "Sacred songs provide an oral record of a people who, at times, sang what they could not say."

More than two decades of academic research went into this exhibit, and a whole life of living. Reagon grew up in a rural church in Georgia, where her father was a Baptist preacher and she learned spirituals such as "We'll Understand It Better by and By" and "Stand by Me."

"I was born into the African-American culture in the South," she says. "So I was born into the subject. ... I don't see myself suddenly stopping and getting on a new road in order to do this work."

The road may have been the same, but Reagon had a long way to go to reach where she is today: scholar and distinguished professor of history at American University in Washington, D.C.; composer and singer with the a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock. She founded this internationally known quintet in 1973.

During the civil rights movement, Reagon fought against racism in the South and was an original member of the SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) Freedom Singers. She participated in many peaceful demonstrations - one leading to her arrest and suspension from Georgia's Albany State College in 1961.

The civil rights movement "was such a singing movement," she says.

"So much of that music came out of the church. So many of the songs that I had known as a child actually became freedom songs - another part of the story. So my personal journey and my journey as an academic and a scholar is not separate."

She joined the movement full time and then married and had two children. It wasn't until 1971 that Reagon was able to go back to school to study history, at Spelman College in Atlanta. Later she was to go on and get her doctorate at Howard University in Washington.

Reagon's "work in the world" was and is the evolution of African-American culture. So when she was awarded a five-year MacArthur Fellowship in 1989, she knew exactly what to do with the money. She went to the Smithsonian, where she had been working since 1974, and asked to expand her current research on sacred music.

"They asked me what I meant. I said I mean a radio series. I mean publication. I mean an exhibition and I mean recordings."

More than anything, she wanted to make her research available to a wide audience.

"So often, as a scholar, your research goes into a publication, or you read papers to your colleagues, or it goes into an archival collection," she says. "My work isn't finished until I make some major attempt to return that material and the stories and the analysis back to the people who created it."

Heading up a team of 12 scholars, she served as the principal scholar and conceptual producer for the National Public Radio series "Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions," and put together 26 one-hour shows, which began airing in January 1994. She published "We'll Understand It Better by and By: African-American Pioneering Composers," organized a "We'll Understand It Better by and By" national conference in February 1993, and released four Wade in the Water CDs, produced by Smithsonian Folkways.

And, of course, she organized the exhibition, which will go to 16 U.S. cities in four years.

(c) 1997, The Dallas Morning News.

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