A Gratis Program Note
[Note: Margaret Bonds’s Christmas cantata The Ballad of the Brown King is increasingly popular, but many modern performances circulate incorrect and outdated information. The program note below, adapted from information provided in my forthcoming biography of Bonds, is available for free reuse by anyone interested in doing so, in order to counter the further circulation of false information about a historic composition and a musical masterpiece.]
Few works better exemplify Margaret Bonds’s career-long attributes of unswerving originality and barrier-breaking activism than The Ballad of the Brown King. Challenging the resolute segregation of society by collaborative affirmation of her Black heritage, The Ballad of the Brown King debunks the traditional whitewashing of the central narrative of Christianity and history in general. It is a musical retelling of the Christmas story with emphasis on the participation of Balthazar, whom Pseudo-Bede (Manegold von Lautenbach) in the eleventh century had described as the “dark, fully bearded king” who visited the Christ child with two other magi. And it is a retelling that – thanks to the collaborative friendship between Bonds and Langston Hughes – puts the traditions of the classical cantata as familiar from the works of Bach and others into the service of a historically accurate, Black-inclusive, and Black-affirmative celebration of blues, calypso, gospel, and jazz as well Euro-American classical idioms, complete with pointed allusions to the spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”
The history of The Ballad of the Brown King is emblematic of the artistic collaborations that pervaded Bonds’s career from about 1930 until her death in 1972. As Bonds explained it in an interview in December 1971, the work was born of the confluence of baritone Warren Coleman’s invitation to Bonds to help promote Blacks in the relatively new medium of television, her own prior experience with the writings of French poet Jean Le Seyeux (1894-1957; Bonds was proficient in French), and her recently initiated project promoting Black composers’ music with George McClain and his newly formed chorale. With these factors in play, Bonds invited Langston Hughes to contribute the poem (though the work’s title, she later recalled, was her own invention). Bonds reported that she doubted Hughes would accept that invitation – his skepticism of the Christian church and his agnosticism were well known to her – but “bless his heart” (as she put it), he did accept, sending her a first version of the text on September 17, 1954.
The result made history. On December 12, 1954, with the composer at the piano, George McClain conducted his newly formed sixteen-voice chorale in a Christmas benefit concert for the Dance Education Center at the East Side Settlement in Harlem. The white press, predictably, ignored the event – but it was hailed nationwide in the Black papers, with influential Chicago publicist Gladys P. Graham publishing a syndicated column titled “It Happened in New York” and noted composer and author Carl Diton (also in a nationally syndicated article) heralding the work as the climax of the concert. “Miss Bond’s [sic] creative work,” Diton noted, “revealed clear, iridescent harmonies, with three Allelujah’s [sic] scattered intermittently, gaining successively in Negroid, rhythmic impact.” Bonds and Hughes then shelved the cantata despite this impact, but as the Freedom movement gained headway in the early 1960s they returned to it – revising it, adding two movements, and energetically promoting it in advance of the performance. The premiere of the reworked version took place, in a now-lost version employing piano-duet accompaniment, to a packed house in a concert produced by the Emergency Committee for the Southern Freedom Struggle on Sunday, 11 December 1960, at the Harlem YWCA at 50th St. and 8th Ave; the work was dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The program also included Christmas spirituals and a community sing. Theodore Stent, M.D., conducted the Westminster Choir of the Church of the Master, and Margaret Bonds and Evelyn Wallace were the pianists.
The attention garnered by the earlier 1954 performance was now redoubled – so much so that performances (from manuscript!) quickly were scheduled around the U.S. and in the Bahamas, and white music publisher Sam Fox Music (then the second-largest music publisher in the U.S.), quickly snapped up The Ballad of the Brown King for its catalog. The work was published with piano accompaniment in mid-1961, and Bonds also orchestrated it, completing that project in the late summer of that year. By December 1961, the cantata was also available on a rental basis in Bonds’s own orchestration (rarely heard today), and its success was so great that Bonds and Hughes also wrote a Lenten and Easter counterpart, Simon Bore the Cross, in 1962-63 (though circumstances forced them to abandon that project before its creators considered it complete).
The other factor that fueled the success of The Ballad of the Brown King is what will be affirmed in this performance: the genius of Margaret Bonds’s music. In a 1967 “reminiscence” written for Lindsay Patterson’s volume The Negro in Music and Art, Bonds quipped that her music was often “jazzy and bluesy and spiritual and Tchaikovsky all rolled up into one.” And that polystylism, at once virtuosic and seemingly effortless, suffuses The Ballad of the Brown King – from its gently lyrical opening declaration that “of the three wise men who came to the king, one was a brown man, so they sing,” through the extraordinary sweetness of “Mary Had a Little Baby” and the delicate exoticism of “Could he have been an Ethiope,” with its joyous realization that “of the kings who came to call, one was dark like me!,” to the gospel-infused jubilation of the closing “Alleluia.” Throughout, listeners will be treated to the unique and barrier-breaking genius that was the overarching unifying feature of Margaret Bonds’s music from the mid-1920s to the end of her days. In creating that music, she offered her world and ours a composition that, in its own eloquent ways, beautifully and joyously rejects society’s persistent acceptance of hatred and its calls for division – ingeniously taking ideas, styles, and themes that time and custom resolutely kept apart and bringing them together in a truly timeless work of art. – John Michael Cooper
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