Turn It Up - Bernice Johnson Reagon edition

Charles with some favorites from the late, great musician, scholar, and activist

Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon died last week. Her work as a musician, educator, activist, archivist, and community builder deserves far more space than I can devote here. (For starters, check out Fredara Mareva Hadley’s crucial 2017 discussion and Tim Dillinger’s new tribute.) But I wanted to spotlight a few of the tracks that have stuck with me from across her long and remarkable career. Here are a few tributes, representing only a fraction of the treasured legacy that she leaves behind.

SNCC Freedom Singers – “Woke Up This Morning” (from We Shall Overcome, 1963)

Bernice Johnson joined the Civil Rights Movement as a college student in Albany, Georgia, participating in direct-action protests as a member of both the local NAACP and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She co-founded the SNCC Freedom Singers, a group that performed at rallies and acted as musical ambassadors for the Movement as it sought national and international alliances. Not only did the group familiarize audiences with the songs and demands then motivating campaigns for Black equality, but the Freedom Singers introduced them to the musical impulses that propelled them. “Woke Up This Morning” is a perfect example, with propulsive handclaps and interlocking call-and-response vocals reflecting and creating the communal energies that animated Movement protest. Bernice Johnson Reagon – who married fellow activist and Freedom Singer Cordell Reagon in 1963 – is the clarion call atop the quartet’s persistent interplay, reflecting her role as a song leader and presaging the astonishing career to follow.

Sweet Honey in the Rock – “Hey Mann” (from Sweet Honey In The Rock, 1976)

Reagon formed Sweet Honey in the Rock in 1973 with a group of women who she collaborated with in Washington, D.C. The group announced their arrival to the world with a powerful debut album that established the template for their work – now in its sixth decade – and placed them firmly in conversation both with the musical traditions that Reagon and the other members knew so well and with the larger cultural-political work being done by Black women in past and present. Songs like “Hey Mann” demonstrate an additional point of call and response. Sweet Honey in the Rock existed in musical conversation with a golden era for Black women artist-auteurs like Roberta Flack, Aretha Franklin, and Abbey Lincoln, who made similarly vibrant music that traversed sound and subject matter while drawing connections across diasporic and historical continuums. With violin and piano providing subtle accompaniment, and the group’s voices holding her up, Reagon soars through her self-penned love song with a blend of tentative excitement and deep-rooted passion. “I’ve lost a battle,” she admits at the end, “and I’m quite well pleased.” Love and pleasure remained a crucial element both to Sweet Honey in the Rock’s music and the movements – cultural, political, personal – with which they engaged. “Hey Mann” is one of the earliest and one of the most powerful examples.

Bernice Johnson Reagon – “Easy Street” (from River of Life: Harmony One, 1986)

Even while working with Sweet Honey in the Rock and other projects, Bernice Johnson Reagon found time to release a couple of solo albums. This singing is entirely hers, with layered harmonies buttressing tracks that range from faithful re-creations of freedom songs and other standards to tracks that stretch across pop and jazz, and even gesture towards the avant-garde. “Easy Street,” from 1986, is on that end of Reagon’s sonic spectrum, a percolating, syncopating rumination on privilege and obligation. (The production by her daughter Toshi Reagon, then emerging as a powerful artist in her own right, is supple and vibrant.) Her voice pops underneath and floats off in the distance, a three-dimensional world grounded by a lead that bobs and weaves through the mix with piercing reminders. As funky as Sly or Chaka, “Easy Street” reveals yet another facet to Dr. Reagon’s vast landscape, and the trails she walked between them.

Sweet Honey in the Rock – “Run, Run, Mourner, Run” (live) (from Live at Carnegie Hall, 1988)

This live version of a spiritual demonstrates the work of constructing a community through song. Inviting each member of the audience to join their voice with one of Sweet Honey’s members, Reagon builds the song and then reconstructs it, turning the group’s wondrous Carnegie Hall performance into a resonating circle. Such communal music-making was well-known to folk fans – Pete Seeger and others had made it a centerpiece of their performances and practice – and was of course a cornerstone of Black vocal practices in both sacred and secular spaces. But few did it with the skill, sophistication, and supportive humor of Sweet Honey in the Rock. When Dr. Reagon coordinates this performance, building “Run, Run Mourner Run” into a propulsive and polyrhythmic fervor, she is both teacher and assistant to the audience, invoking the de-centered leadership of both SNCC and Sweet Honey In The Rock. Such space-making defined her work, even as she occupied a singular presence within it, bringing everyone into the circle and giving them what she calls “the courage” to join in whether they know the parts or not.

Sweet Honey in the Rock – “Sylvie” (from Folkways: A Vision Shared - A Tribute to Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, 1988)

One of the group’s two contributions to a joint Woody Guthrie and Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter tribute album, “Sylvie” foregrounds the yearning for rest and relief at the core of this and so many work songs. The ensemble moves together, singing the circling, hypnotic melody with tender insistence. And then Bernice Johnson Reagon’s voice soars above, urging Sylvie to “come running” with the water that might provide temporary sustenance. The sound is sustaining, as well, in this unforgettable performance that remains the album’s highlight.

Bernice Johnson Reagon and Bill Moyers – “This Little Light of Mine” (1991)

This clip, from a 1991 interview with Moyers, is one of my favorite examples of what made Dr. Reagon such a valuable scholar on Black song traditions in the Movement and beyond. Discussing the importance of music in both remaking and controlling space, she then shifts to talking about songs the “I songs” of the Freedom Movement, like “This Little Light of Mine,” which both express individual commitment and give strength to the collectivity due to the participation of all of these singular lights. Her voice is nearly as melodious in speech as it is in song, and the influence of her analytical framing remains crucial to those who seek to understand the Movement, the music, and why sound matters.

Sweet Honey in the Rock – “I Remember, I Believe” (from Sacred Ground, 1995)

From 1995, this testimony finds Bernice Johnson Reagon affirming the importance of experience as an affirmation of that which can seem inexplicable. Not only does memory (individual, collective, historical) help remind of the past’s example, but the feeling of rain or the pursuit of justice turns the abstract into reality. Featuring another of her remarkable, gently woven melodies, “I Remember, I Believe” finds Dr. Reagon and her collaborators committing to remember the past, feel the present, and work for the future. In that way, it’s a fitting and beautiful thesis statement for her entire remarkable career. And it’s probably the Sweet Honey in the Rock song that I return to the most.

Bernice Johnson Reagon – “Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray” (from Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Vocal Traditions, 1996)

Beginning in 1974, Dr. Reagon began working at the Smithsonian Institution. Serving as cultural historian and music curator, she oversaw numerous significant archival and curatorial projects that significantly improved the museum’s collections and programming on Black music. Her 1996 project Wade in the Water is one of the most remarkable examples of this work. Based on an award-winning radio series that she produced, and accompanying a major museum exhibition, this Smithsonian Folkways collection features recordings of Black sacred music from across era and location. Dr. Reagon contributed several performances, including this brief, stately performance of a spiritual that like so many from the tradition – often held a coded meaning for enslaved people, sung as a warning to others if a plan for escape had been found out or sold out. It’s only one example of the riches collected on Wade in the Water, and it’s a potent, brief reminder of why this aspect of Dr. Reagon’s work remains so vital.

Sweet Honey in the Rock – “22 Hours In The Day” (from The Women Gather, 2003)

Over the years, Dr. Reagon collaborated many times with her daughter Toshi. Toshi Reagon produced her mother’s recordings, contributed songs to Sweet Honey albums, and the duo even co-wrote an opera based on Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. (And this was all while Toshi Reagon was releasing great music on her own.) On Sweet Honey in the Rock’s remarkable 2003 album The Women Gather, their last studio album to feature their founder, they cover Toshi’s smoldering “22 Hours in the Day.” Spare and sensual, the group’s arrangement – pushed by Ysaye Barnwell’s resonant bass – foregrounds the devotion and desperation of Toshi Reagon’s love-struck lyric. Her mother’s muted lead vocal moves across the song like a fog, bespeaking the deep affinity between these two artistic generations.

Sweet Honey in the Rock – “Ballad of Harry T. Moore” (from The Women Gather, 2003)

Over the years, Sweet Honey in the Rock made tributes to pivotal Freedom Movement figures into a staple of their recorded work. They sang the stories and praised the names of Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and others, paying particular attention to figures whose work was erased or misrepresented. (Here they again worked along the larger efforts by Black women to insist on the historical recognition of pivotal Movement women.) I’m a particular fan of a late example of this theme, “Ballad of Harry T. Moore,” which adapts Langston Hughes’ poetic tribute to the Florida voting-rights activist who was killed along with his wife by racist terrorists in 1951. To accompany Hughes’ poignant words, Dr. Reagon composed a new song that feels like an old classic, with talking-blues verses and an anthemic chorus that could have lifted out from rallies, hootenannies, and concerts in the height of the 1960s folk revival in which she participated as a younger artist and activist. Particularly on her final album with Sweet Honey in the Rock, “Ballad of Harry T. Moore” suggests a continuity with and continuation of the work that keeps the group performing and recording in 2024. They’ll keep going, and keep singing, and we should join them. Because freedom never dies.

Recommended reading:

-Henry Carrigan on the best music books of the year so far, for No Depression

-Caryn Rose on seeing X on their last tour, for Jukebox Graduate

-David McKeel on the 50th anniversary of the Ozark Music Festival, aka “Missouri’s Woodstock,” for KCUR

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