March 17, 2025
Five years ago today, on St. Patrick’s Day in 2020, I set up my website, and the following day (March 18) I posted my first entry in this blog. The U.S. was in the clutches of a cruel and incompetent dictator and on the leading edge of a pandemic whose disastrous consequences would be amplified by said dictator’s denials that it even existed, his idiotic statement that it was “going to go away without a vaccine,” his suggestions that injections of UV rays and disinfectants into the body might cure it, etc. Ultimately, that pandemic would not only virtually shut down the U.S. economy and cost many thousands of livelihoods, but also lead to at least 1.1 million deaths in the U.S. and more than 7 million deaths worldwide. Jobs were lost, homes were lost, schools were closed, poor and immigrant communities and communities of color suffered disproportionally. Factories stood still as hospitals filled to capacity, and freezer trucks were pressed into service as morgues.
Although much of that was not yet forseeable in mid-March 2020, even in those early days of the COVID-19 cataclysm and in that fourth year of the first Tr ump administration it was obvious that the sharing of ideas, information, and communications that articulates our common humanity was becoming more desperately needed than ever. So – partly to process my own thoughts and experiences and share them with others in a fashion less ephemeral than those zillions of Zoom meetings – I started a blog. And because it was also obvious that there would not be much travel in the foreseeable future, I called that blog Journeys.
Today, five years later, the U.S. is again in the hands of that cruel and incompetent dictator as well as de-facto-president Musk. At this writing, they’ve been in office just fifty-six days, abetted by a disastrously corrupt Republican-dominated congress and Republican-dominated governance in most states, and they’ve already wrecked hundreds of thousands of lives, brought to its knees an economy that, under President Biden’s leadership, had become the envy of the world, defied the courts and the rule of law, and engaged on assaults on freedom of virtually every sort imaginable. There’s no way of knowing how much awfulness they’ll bring about this time around, or exactly what that awfulness will look like. But it’s safe to say that before this presidential term is over, that desperate year 2020 will look, in retrospect, like a pleasant walk in the park.
So although I’m not posting as frequently as I used to, I’m still here -- and so is Journeys. Those two things make it possible for me to share three bits of GOOD NEWS here, now. All three of the following announcements have to do with Margaret Bonds, who has been a major thread in the verbal and musical journeys of this blog (the third announcement is in some ways the biggest, so please bear with me!):
AIN’T-A THAT GOOD NEWS (1): In addition to Hildegard Publishing Company’s recent release of Bonds’s beautiful and powerful setting of Hughes’s Note on Commercial Theater (I blogged about this already), ClarNan Editions (an imprint of Classical Vocal Reprints), with the kind permission of the composer’s heirs, has released the first publications of two important products of Bonds’s late Los Angeles period (1967-67; more about these years below): a volume of two songs that Bonds wrote for renowned jazz singer Peggy Lee (1920-2002), who shared Bonds’s interest in the Religious Science movement founded in the U.S. by Ernest Holmes and was, like Bonds, interested in the mind-healing ideas of the New Thought movement. Both songs exemplify Bonds's genius for demonstrating the problems inherent in the conventional barriers between “classical” and other musics, between jazz and other popular styles, between stereotypically white idioms and stereotypically Black ones.
But while that genius itself is well known, these two songs also give voice to aspects of Bonds’s compositional personality that are rarely – if ever – heard. The first, “Don’t Speak,” is a sumptuous song of intimacy and desire, while the second, “Bunker Hill,” is a hard-hitting critique of the human costs of urban renewal and gentrification, named for the storied Bunker Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles -- a district whose poor and underserved community of immigrants and minorities was heartlessly displaced in 1958 so that the area could be redeveloped with high-rise, high-rent, and predominantly white-owned facilities. Neither song has been performed or recorded yet so far as I know (they were just published on March 3), but they’re available at Classical Vocal Reprints and through music sellers everywhere:
AIN’T-A THAT GOOD NEWS (2): And in addition to those publications, Margaret Bonds has now acquired yet another publisher: the St. Louis firm of E. C. Schirmer. (This firm is related to the larger firm of G. Schirmer only in that the St. Louis firm’s founder, Ernest C. Schirmer, was the nephew of Gustav Schirmer and worked for him before founding his own company in 1921. Here’s a brief history.) E. C. Schirmer has plans to publish several of Bonds’s many previously unknown compositions in the Craig Hella Johnson choral series, and this month they launched that project with the world-premiere publications of two of Bonds’s delectable choral songs.
The earlier of these is Supplication (1954). It’s a choral love song with an extraordinarily beautiful piano part that is based on the idea of the “earnest plea” signified by the term supplication and gives voice to two partners’ desire to resume a relationship that has ended – but it dispenses with the term supplication's usual hierarchical connotations, casting all the men’s and women’s voices as humble ones, each deferring reciprocally and speaking respectfully to the other. The text by Bonds’s longtime friend and collaborator Roger Chaney is delectable; Bonds's music, even more so. Here is Supplication in a rehearsal-read by my dear friend Craig Hella Johnson and Conspirare – to my knowledge the first time these notes have sounded since Bonds’s death in 1972):
Once more I offer you my adoration, I offer you my love. Once more I beg of you, heed my supplication. I want to love again, and learn to smile. I want to live again the life you made worthwhile. You are my destiny, my exaltation. Can fate intend for me only consolation? Or will I thrill at last to love divine? This is my tender supplication, this is my plea. |
The other work newly published by E. C. Schirmer is Rainbow Gold. This choral gem was born as part of the “certain line” of art songs that Bonds said she wanted to pursue after she was finally elected to full membership in the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers (ASCAP) in 1955 – a “line” that would foster social activism and celebrate the voices of society’s poor and disenfranchised, especially Black folk. The song was brought out by the New York firm of Chappell & Co. in July, 1956. Then, in the early 1960s, Bonds arranged it first for male chorus and piano and took this on at least one of her two very dangerous tours of the Jim Crow South with Eugene Brice and the Manhattan Melodaires (a chorus of six Black men), and in that connection she explicitly linked Rainbow Gold’s message of doing “good deeds for men” with the ineluctably approaching end of (official and legal) segregation in the South. She also worked very hard in producing two appreciably different versions for SATB chorus with piano (two separate complete drafts before hitting upon what became the final version). A measure of the significance this song held for her was that at the landmark all-Bonds concert given in Washington, D.C., on 12 March 1967 – the concert where her setting of the Du Bois Credo was premiered – she placed the solo-song version of Rainbow Gold immediately after the Three Dream Portraits on texts of Hughes, at the end of the second set: a conspicuous position as that set’s finale.
The final SATB version of Rainbow Gold has been circulating in pre-publication copies for some time now. The more recent performances that I know of were given by my friend Holly Dalrymple and the Southwestern University Chorale in 2023, but let me here share the first known posthumous performance – this given by Frederick Binkholder and the Capitol Hill Chorale (Washington, D.C.) as an encore in two concerts in June, 2022:
There’s a purpose in my slavin’ Underneath this heavy load, For someday I’ll have a cravin’ To be where the Jordan flowed. And the fare that I’ve been savin’ For my ride on Glory Road? RAINBOW GOLD. There’s a lesson I’ve been learnin’ And it’s mighty, mighty clear, That the silver you are earnin’ Brings you lots of things to fear, But the wealth for which I’m yearnin’ Is as free as atmosphere: RAINBOW GOLD. There’s no scale that’s made can weigh it, There’s no bank can hold it all, And the more you have to pay it, It keeps growin’ big and tall. There’s a folly in believin’ You can’t take it with you when All these riches you’re achievin’ No one else can use again. It’s the pay you’ve been receivin’ While you did good deeds for men: RAINBOW GOLD. |
AIN’T-A THAT GOOD NEWS (3): The biggest news, in a way, is that as of March 11, 2025, Margaret Bonds finally has a book-length biography – this published by Oxford University Press in its Composers across Cultures series (formerly the Master Musicians series). Although this book in some sense roots back to my earliest encounter with Bonds’s music back in Tallahassee, Florida, in the mid-1980s, active work on it dates only from the last seven years. Those who have done any work at all with the substantial body of primary sources pertaining to Bonds know already that although at least three separate plans for book-length biographies were laid already in the months following her sudden death in 1972, those plans came to nothing. This book is thus fifty-three years too late.
In any event, the e-book is now here and the print volume will be published on 25 March (both available through all major booksellers). Although it is Bonds’s first book-length biography and as such (like all first book-length biographies) only the outset of the journey of modern scholarly explorations of the massive and convoluted complex of biographical and musical legacies of Margaret Bonds, its 368 pages, plentiful figures, and more plentiful music examples offer several significant additions to, and revisions of, what’s already been done:
Most obviously, the book refutes the widely repeated portrayals of Bonds as a creative exponent of a male genius (Langston Hughes) who left her beloved Chicago to follow him to New York, flourished in more-or-less constant collaboration with him until his death, and then sank into an alcohol-fueled and artistically rudderless depressive decline when she was persuaded to move to Los Angeles in a futile bid for success as a film composer in the wake of his passing. Those widely repeated portrayals of a woman who attached herself to a man, drew inspiration from him, and collapsed without him are not only at odds with what all the reliable primary sources show, but also enactments of a male-chauvinist biographical and historiographic mode of women’s biography that pretends to be sympathetic to its subject while actually reducing women to the role of affirming male genius and female dependency. (That’s all explained in the Preface.)
The book offers the first substantive investigations of Bonds’s two extended and artistically fruitful California periods (1942-43 and 1967-72) (Chapters 3 and 5). These two periods also shed new light on the nature of Bonds's relationship with her husband, Larry Richardson, and her daughter, Djane (SPOILER: most of what you've heard is wrong).
The book delves into some of Bonds’s richly textured familial relationships – including not only the well-known (but hitherto only superficially documented) roles played by her matrilineal heritage, but also the complex and tension-fraught influences of her distinguished father, Dr. Monroe A. Majors, in her creative life and her activism (passim).
The book shows that while, as much recent scholarship has shown, Margaret Bonds was a progeny of the Chicago Black Renaissance, she herself was distinctly skeptical of that culture: after moving away from Chicago for good in 1939, at age twenty-six, she identified with New York and (later) Los Angeles, not Chicago; she returned to her native city for only five short visits in the remaining thirty-three years of her life; and she spoke with undisguised disdain of some subsets of that city’s culture as “the Reflected Glory Group.” The book thus offers nuance to our understanding of Margaret Bonds’s personal and professional relationship with Chicago, which, absent that nuance, is poised to become another misguided commonplace about Margaret Bonds (passim).
Although it’s well known that Bonds revered her mother, Chicago salonnière Estella (Stella) Bonds, it’s never before been shown that for at least two periods Estella Bonds actually moved in with Margaret and her husband, in New York – and the depths of the crisis that Estella Bonds’s death brought upon her daughter have never been plumbed, nor has the means by which Margaret Bonds recovered from that crisis. This book deals with those matters – in the process offering the first substantive discussion of Bonds’s Mass in D Minor (this, along with her three lost symphonies, being one of the most vexing musical mysteries of her creative life) (Chapter 4, with discussion of the Mass in D Minor in Chapter 6).
Finally, the book’s closing chapter (Chapter 6) is a 100-page survey of Margaret Bonds’s verbal and compositional legacies categorized by genre. Although a hundred pages could never do justice to a compositional legacy of more than four hundred remarkably rich works in a wide array of genres, this is more than has ever been offered before, and it includes excerpts from unpublished as well as published compositions.
So yes, I’m glad this one is out – not because it’s perfect (God knows it's not, and considerations of length forced me to leave out, for the time being, much that needs to be discussed), but because writing it has been a labor of love and, due to Margaret Bonds’s genius and work, an inspiration. The only downside (of sorts) is that when I wrote the book several works that have been published in these opening months of 2025 were still unpublished, and in the book I draw attention to their still-unpublished status (which was true at the time but no longer is). In that sense, Margaret Bonds was outdated before it was published. But in this instance that is a good thing, for it means that our world now has more of Margaret Bonds's compositional utterances at its disposal, not fewer.
Let's return to where I started: these morsels of good news will be of little interest to the racists, the sexists, the misogynists, and the rest of what Hillary Clinton rightly called the basket of deplorables who are devoting their all to dismantling and destroying as much as possible of what’s good in this hurting world. But for the people of good will in that same hurting world, there’s something there to welcome, to embrace. I hope that music lovers will embrace the music of Margaret Bonds by listening to it; I hope that teachers will embrace it by teaching it also; and I hope that scholars will embrace her voice by refusing to accept its marginalization and insisting, in the face of the considerable inertia effected by conventional wisdoms and society’s entrenched racism and sexism, on exploring its rightful positionality as a worthy peer of the canonically celebrated voices that have overshadowed it for decades.
The voice of Margaret Bonds is a voice for our time -- for us -- and the example of her activism offers fertile soil for a way forward in our own desperate times.
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