Reagon, founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, an award-winning African American female a cappella group, writes eloquently of gospel music and the migration of black people in the U.S. that helped nurture and spread the sacred music. Reagon maintains that studying gospel requires studying the great migration between 1915 and 1949, when 15 million blacks left the rural South and its brutal racism. That migration is the "centering structure" of four essays on the development of gospel music, essays that document changes in the themes of old songs from slavery through more current spirituals, all of which evoke the search for freedom and deliverance. The music changed from a striving for freedom up North, or more likely in the hereafter, to a freedom in the here and now and wherever black people lived. In this slim but powerful book, Reagon uses song lyrics and the history of the music and its composers, including Charles Albert Tindley and Thomas Andrew Dorsey, to put into context the spirit of African American oral tradition and the evolution of gospel music.
Vanessa BushCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"In 1996, the University of Nebraska invited Reagon to present a series of lectures on the sacred song tradition, and these talks provide the essence of the four chapters in this excellent volume. . . . The bibliography is significant and valuable."-Choice (
Choice )
"Reagon, founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, an award-winning African American female a cappella group, writes eloquently of gospel music and the migration of black people in the U. S. that helped nurture and spread the sacred music. . . . In this slim but powerful book, Reagon uses song lyrics and the history of the music and its composers including Charles Albert Tindley and Thomas Andrew Dorsey, to put into context the spirit of African American oral tradition and the evolution of gospel music."-Booklist (
Booklist )
"In the four historical essays that make up If You Don''t Go, Don''t Hinder Me, Bernice Johnson Reagon ratchets up the hybrid essence of the historical essay by adding . . . another genre: autobiography. . . . And justifiably so, for African American spirituality, as revealed through its many musics, defies the telling of its evolution either through music criticism or historical narration. In a phrase Reagon heard during childhood, this tradition is all about ''making a way out of no way''. . . . Reagon''s life-particularly her accomplishments as a singer, historian, and civil rights activist-imparts structure to her essays where the music alone would resist it. As founder and lead singer of the award-winning female ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, she has lived and breathed all forms of African American religious music. . . . As a cultural historian who now serves as a curator emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution and as a distinguished professor of history at American University, Reagon challenges conventional historical methods as useful tools to seek out the deeper meanings of black musical spirituality."-Washington Post (
Washington Post )
"Short but eloquent and pedagogically useful. . . . [a] combination of crisp scholarly narrative with passionate opinion in treating this fiercely complicated subject. . . . This short boook serves to remind us that no deployment of postmodern theoretical apparatus can measure up to honest and vigorous reflection coupled with clarity concerning whose voice is being heard at a given moment."-Chris Goertzen, Journal of American Folklore (Chris Goertzen
Journal of American Folklore )
