DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "AIN'T GONNA LET NOBODY TURN ME 'ROUND")
THE FREEDOM SINGERS: (Singing) Ain't going to let nobody, Lordy, turn me 'round, turn me 'round, turn me 'round. Ain't going to let nobody, Lordy, turn me 'round. I'm going to keep on a-walkin', keep on a-talkin', marching up to freedom land.
BIANCULLI: That's The Freedom Singers, a vocal quartet that grew out of the civil rights movement and provided inspiration for fellow protesters as they faced police, arrest or jail. We're going to remember Bernice Johnson Reagon, a founding member of the group. She died last month at the age of 81.
The Freedom Singers was affiliated with SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Reagon's experience in jail formed a powerful connection for her between political protest and song. Bernice Johnson Reagon went on to become a leading scholar of protest songs. She directed the Black American Culture Program at the Smithsonian Institution, where she produced a record series called "Voices From The Civil Rights Movement." In 1973, she founded the women's a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock. Later, she produced and hosted the Peabody Award-winning NPR series "Wade In The Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions." She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1989. Terry Gross spoke with her before that in 1988.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
TERRY GROSS: Bernice Reagon, welcome to FRESH AIR.
BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON: Thank you.
GROSS: We're going to hear "Guide My Feet, While I Run This Race." Now, how did you first learn this song?
JOHNSON REAGON: I don't know. I don't remember not knowing the song. Therefore, I probably learned it in church. And there is a part of my repertoire that seemed to have come to me by me growing up in a Black community in a Black church. And "Guide My Feet" is one of those songs.
GROSS: This is Bernice Johnson Reagon from her latest album, "River Of Life."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GUIDE MY FEET, WHILE I RUN THIS RACE")
JOHNSON REAGON: (Singing) Oh, Lord, now, guide my feet while I run this race. Lord, guide my feet while I run this race. Oh, Lord, now, guide my feet while I run this race. Lord, I don't want to run this race in vain. Oh, Lord, now, hold my hand while I run this race. Lord, hold my hand...
GROSS: That's from Bernice Johnson Reagon's latest album, "River Of Life." And, again, she's doing all the voices on that through overdubbing. Now, you dedicate that album to the singing tradition of the Black American Baptist Church, especially the Mount Early Baptist Church in Worth County, Ga., where you were baptized. What was the singing tradition you came up in?
JOHNSON REAGON: Well, I call it an unrehearsed congregational style. And what I mean by that is there is a way in which a song is started by a song leader, and the rest of the people in the church come in and join and actually make the song.
GROSS: That's kind of what you were doing by yourself with all of your voices...
JOHNSON REAGON: That's right.
GROSS: ...On the recording we just heard.
JOHNSON REAGON: So that's what influences me when I am creating choral music - that particular congregational tradition.
GROSS: Now, did you sing in a choir, or did the whole congregation sing together?
JOHNSON REAGON: I sang in a choir. This style is older than what is called gospel music. When I sang in a choir, I was in a gospel choir. The first difference is you call a rehearsal. You learn the songs. You learn the part. The congregational style - there is never a rehearsal call as long as you live to learn a song, either words, texts, styles, harmonies. There is no training session separate from going to church, and you learn while you are doing the singing.
GROSS: Now, your father was a Baptist preacher. Did you hear much secular music when you were growing up, or was it mostly church music?
JOHNSON REAGON: I heard secular music, but in the early years growing up, my family was fairly strict so that they did not care that much for us listening to secular music. By the time I got to teen age, my brother, who's two years older than me, would get my mother's radio and take it into the room. And he would play Randy (ph). Now, Randy out of Nashville played blues between midnight and day.
GROSS: This is a disc jockey.
JOHNSON REAGON: That's right. And I learned about Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Howlin' Wolf, Lightnin' Hopkins, all of the blues - B.B. King - between midnight and day, listening to the radio coming into my room. By the time we got into high school, things had just sort of loosened up in the family so that there was more space and more permission to hear and play rhythm and blues especially, and I actually participated in a rhythm and blues group.
GROSS: Now, you went to college at Albany College, which was a Black college in Georgia.
JOHNSON REAGON: Georgia.
GROSS: You were a music major when you went to college.
JOHNSON REAGON: Yeah.
GROSS: What kind of music were you studying?
JOHNSON REAGON: The Euro-classical tradition. I was a contralto - so studying Italian arias and German lieder.
GROSS: That's very interesting since you were so steeped in the music of the church to start singing lieder, an art song.
JOHNSON REAGON: Well, within the school system, the Black school system, when you get to high school, if you're a singer, you begin to do anthems. You learn the "Hallelujah Chorus." You learned "Alleluia." There are staples of the Euro-classical concert tradition you're trained to sing, and you get your first lesson in that bel canto style where you sort of cover the voice. And you learn that in high school so by the time you go to college, you also are operating in that tradition.
You could not, when I was in college, learn gospel in school. If you sang gospel, you learned it in church. Today, you will find on university campuses gospel choirs. But when I was going to school, the music departments actually frowned on the traditional Black vocal song style. So you never received any training in it, and you were basically told, if you were considered a good soloist, that if you sang gospel, you would ruin your voice.
GROSS: When you started to sing with The Freedom Singers, did you feel like you were turning your back on what you were supposed to be doing - learning more about the European singing tradition?
JOHNSON REAGON: That decision didn't come that hard. The first thing I decided was I was going to be in the movement.
GROSS: Right.
JOHNSON REAGON: That got me put in jail. In jail, the only logical songs were the songs that had come out of the Black church. The style I'd always sang those songs in were the Black vocal style. And therefore, it was like I chose to be in the movement, and the movement sort of named the musical content that would work. By the time I got out of jail, I never wanted to leave the relationship I found between singing and a political position. And it was in jail where I found that you could sing a song and it would say exactly what you felt. I'd never experienced that before. But once I experienced it, I made the choice that I would stay with that and have not changed.
Since that time, I have studied voice. I'm always working with a voice teacher. Most of them operate in that Euro-classical vocal tradition. And there are times in Sweet Honey when we use the coloring that is associated with it, but we don't take it seriously.
BIANCULLI: Bernice Johnson Reagon speaking to Terry Gross in 1988 - more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 1988 interview with singer and musical historian Bernice Johnson Reagon. She was the co-founder of the Freedom Singers, and the founder of the a cappella group Sweet Honey In The Rock. She also produced record album collections and radio series about the history and traditions of Black sacred music. She died last month. She was 81 years old.
GROSS: Can you describe how The Freedom Singers were founded?
JOHNSON REAGON: Albany, Ga., was a singing movement, and when the news reporters began to come down, they came down in December '62 as a result of King being arrested. I was already in jail, so I missed most of that, but what they began to write about was the singing. No matter what the article said, they talked about singing. For the first time in my life, I realized that even Black people who came to Albany from other places were hearing singing on a level they had never heard it before.
I grew up in Albany. I never knew that there was anything different about the choral congregational style in Albany, but the students who came out of Nashville to organize - Andrew Young, who came out of Louisiana, with King, to Albany to organize, Dorothy Cotton out of Petersburg, Va., came to - they all talked about the singing in Albany being like no other singing they had ever heard, and as a result of that, Cordell Reagon, who was a SNCC field secretary, and James Forman, who was executive director of SNCC, began to talk about forming a group.
Pete Seeger was somebody who suggested that a group of singers traveling might actually help to build support for those parts of movement activity that did not get on the news, and SNCC was, at that point, trying to go into what they call black belt areas. These are areas in the South where black people outnumbered whites, usually three to one, and if we could break into voter registration in those areas, it would really turn around political power - but knocking on doors and getting people to register to vote is not the same as getting 700 people arrested, and press was very difficult to get, so the Freedom Singers came out of a need to have another kind of structure to generate support about that kind of organizing activity.
GROSS: We call the songs that you sang freedom songs, but some of them were spiritual. Some of them were old slave songs, too, weren't they? I mean, how did...
JOHNSON REAGON: The freedom songs came out of the repertoire first, the standard repertoire of what you were singing, so that you would have a song like...
(Singing) Paul and Silas, bound in jail, had no money for to go their bail. Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on.
That's a spiritual, but that song just moves straight into civil rights movement activity, and you can understand it. If you're in the Black church, you learn about Paul and Silas being locked up in jail. They were really radical SNCC workers. They are the first Christian organizers into Europe, and they go into this town and they're preaching, and they throw them in jail. They start to sing and pray, and as a result, the jail let them out. Well, even though they preach about this in the Black church, if you grew up in a Black family, the best badge you can have is that you never got into trouble with the law, so at the same time you're preaching about these radical Christians organizing, going forth, you're trying to really stay cool within your society.
When you're in the civil rights movement, that's the first time you establish yourself in a relationship that's pretty close to the same relationship that used to get the Christians thrown in the lion's den, and so for the first time, those old songs you understand in a way that nobody could ever teach you, so that songs like "Hold On" - "Eyes On The Prize (Hold On)" - "Oh Freedom," "This Little Light Of Mine," "We Shall Not Be Moved," "We Shall Overcome" - all of those songs were church songs, but they got new meaning as a part of the civil rights movement. Added to that were new songs that people created.
GROSS: You know, you must have also really had to know what song to sing under which circumstances, 'cause there were times, probably, you needed to sing a song to help organize people. Other times, you needed to sing a song to help people find their courage to stand up to what was about to happen. Did you intuitively have a sense of what song to do when?
JOHNSON REAGON: The song that you're supposed to sing that suits the occasion comes up in you if you're in the occasion yourself, so you don't have to make a list if you yourself are a part of what's happening. The song will just come up, and if you're a song leader in the Black tradition, you're socialized as a song leader to know a wide range of songs, and you see people coming up with songs all of the time in church, and, actually, at football games. Everywhere in the Black community there's music, there's this selection and picking, and usually, there's never a naming, now we are going to sing. Somebody starts up a song. If they are good leaders, it's the right song for the moment, so that's something you learn.
GROSS: Was there a time when you were with the Freedom Singers - an example of a time where you sang a certain song and it really kind of changed the mood or brought the mood to the next level?
JOHNSON REAGON: The singing with the Freedom Singers is different, in a way, than singing in the movement on the scene. By the time we formed the Freedom Singers, we were transporting a microcosm experience, so we would be these four people standing in this hall, singing and talking about the movement.
But many times in the movement, one of the strongest things was a song called "This May Be The Last Time." It's a song that is a powerful mood-setter. You can't really sing the song without thinking about the statement you're making, and it says, this may be the last time, may be the last time - I don't know - may be the last time we all sing together, may be the last time we all pray together. Many times, that song would be done just before a march, and it would make you know something of the potential cost that you were going into, and taking the stand you were taking.
GROSS: When The Freedom Singers split up, and when there weren't a constant - when there weren't constant rallies to sing at, and demonstrations, did you feel lost for a while, trying to figure out what to do with your singing and, you know, what to do - what to do with your life, even?
JOHNSON REAGON: Well, Cordell and I got married, so then I left the Freedom Singers before the Freedom Singers split up.
GROSS: Oh, I see.
JOHNSON REAGON: And I had my first child in '64. I traveled with the Freedom Singers in '63. There was another group of Freedom Singers formed, but I was being a mother in Atlanta. I had a period where I had to decide if I was going to do anything, and it was a period of deciding whether I was going to be a singer, and if being a mother and a wife meant that I was not going to be a singer, or if being in the Freedom - not being in the Freedom Singers, did that mean I was not going to be a singer?
So there was a period where I had to really work at that. One wonderful thing that happened - after I had my second child, in '65, Toshi Seeger called me, and she asked - my baby was maybe two months old. She asked me to do a TV show on Woody Guthrie. It was a Camera Three show. Now, I will never forget it, because here I was, with two children, and I'm sure Toshi was understanding in some way that I wasn't clear about how I was going to manage this singing, and then it was like somebody just reached down and said, come and sing, and she got tickets. I flew to New York, did the TV show, but it was very important to me that at a time when I was trying to figure out, there were people watching me, knowing I was going through that transition, and they affirmed me every time as a singer. That was very important.
GROSS: You're in the unusual position of being a scholar of the movement that you contributed to. You know, you were one of the Freedom Singers, but now as a scholar, you have been collecting songs from the movement, and going back and documenting sound recordings from the civil rights movement. Have you learned things that you weren't aware of then that were happening around you? I mean, have you gotten a different perspective as a scholar than the perspective that you had as a participant?
JOHNSON REAGON: Absolutely. I was a SNCC worker, which means I was a radical, and I considered myself in the vanguard, and I saw everything else from that point of view. Being a scholar gives me a chance to back way up and look at a much broader picture. There were things that I didn't know about, for instance, around the March on Washington '63. I knew nothing about the mobilization happening in the labor unions with the churches, the National Council of Churches, to pull that march off. All of that knowing I have only learned as a scholar.
GROSS: Well, I want to thank you very much for sharing some of your research and your personal experiences with us. Thank you so much for being here.
JOHNSON REAGON: Thank you. I enjoyed talking with you.
BIANCULLI: Bernice Johnson Reagon speaking to Terry Gross in 1988. The musical historian and founder of Sweet Honey In The Rock died last month, at age 81. After a break, we remember Gail Lumet Buckley, who also examined race history and popular art. She wrote a book about her own family's history, from enslavement to celebrity. Her mother was singer Lena Horne. Also, we note the hundredth anniversary of the birth of writer James Baldwin, listening back to an interview with Terry Gross from 1986. I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BALM IN GILEAD")
SWEET HONEY IN THE ROCK: (Singing) There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole. There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul. Sometimes, I feel discouraged. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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