On 23 June 2024, at 4:00 p.m. CT, the Houston Ebony Music Society, Inc., and Houston Ebony Opera Guild will offer a magnificently conceived program of compositions that chronologically trace the dream of freedom and its price. Titled Our Freedom Wasn’t Free, the program was organized by Dr. Jason Oby, Professor of Music and Acting Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Behavioral Sciences at Texas Southern University. It is a “Juneteenth Concert of Tribute” that explores the music of the cause of freedom for African Americans.
It is a concert as significant as it will be beautiful. And it will take place in Houston’s historic Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, founded by formerly enslaved Americans in January 1866 – Houston’s first African-American Baptist congregation. After meeting in a brush arbor for a year, the congregation opened its first sanctuary in February 1867 and in 1875 moved to the current building, designed by formerly enslaved architect Richard Allen (ca. 1830-1909). The church is the only remaining part of Houston’s original Fourth Ward, and in 1976 was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Because this concert in that historic venue occurs in the midst of the ongoing Republican-led project of curtailing freedoms of every sort for all except big corporations and the ultra-rich, it will serve as a reminder for today, and for future generations, that those who cannot buy freedom in the United States must win it. It’s a physical and spatial reminder, in other words, of the pastness of the present and the presence of the past in the ongoing struggle for freedom and equality for Black folk.
The concert will be conducted by Dr. Oby, with Dr. Vicki A. Seldon performing as pianist. It’s organized in three parts:
The first, titled “Prelude to Freedom,” begins with Margaret Bonds’s (1913-72) SATB/piano setting of Langston Hughes’s iconic celebration of the proud and beautiful strength of the timeless heritage of Black folk worldwide: “I’ve known rivers: / I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. / My soul has grown deep like the rivers. . . . I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.” After continuing with Katherine Kennicott Davis’s (1892-1980) song about the “Great Emancipator” Abraham Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks (1784-1818), and moving to the Civil War itself (this in Civil War folksong settings for soloists with chorus by René Clausen [b. 1953]), it offers a landmark performance of Florence Price’s cantata Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight (about which more anon).
Part II is titled “The Dream of Freedom.” This section offers three classic choral works: Dr. Raymond Wise's arrangement of There Is a Balm in Gilead, Dr. Jeffrey L. Ames’s I’ve Been in the Storm So Long, and Moses Hogan’s (1957-2003) I Got a Robe.
And Part III (“The Fight for Freedom”) explores the ongoing struggle to realize the dream that inspired Part II. The solo soprano will open this with the traditional Oh, Freedom, followed by a solo tenor presentation of Dr. John Cornelius II’s brilliant setting of Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel. The men’s chorus will then perform Moses Hogan’s Go Down, Moses and Dr. Rollo Dilworth’s Harriet Tubman (for male chorus, drum, and bass). The celebration in song of the fight for freedom then closes with Hogan’s stirring setting of Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel and – in a tradition of the Houston Ebony Opera Guild – a performance of Dr. Roland Carter’s setting of Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing, an anthem whose distinguished history is a sonorous tribute to the same dream of freedom extolled in Part II of this concert. (On that history, see Dr. Marvin V. Curtis’s plenary address to the twenty-fifth anniversary conference of the African American Art Song Alliance, here – and prepare to lift your voice and sing when Dr. Curtis finishes!)
It’s a program brilliantly and poetically conceived, this – one whose vision will transport listeners in the bustling fourth-largest city of this country to a past that, but for that profoundly beautiful and tragically elusive dream of freedom and the music that gives it voice – would likely be impossibly remote to today’s audiences. If you’re able to attend, I hope you’ll do so (details).
But now: readers who know me may be surprised that I gave so little space to Florence Price’s cantata Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight. There’s a very simple reason for that: there’s too much to say about this work to fit into this first part of the post. So that particular work – the seldom-heard and powerful, but extraordinarily enigmatic, magnum opus of Price’s choral oeuvre – is the subject of Parts 2 and 3 of this post. They will go live on 23 May, exactly one month before the Houston Ebony Opera Guild’s landmark performance in the context of its 2024 Juneteenth concert.
In the meantime, thanks for reading – and if you’re in the Houston area, I encourage you to consider attending this wonderful concert next month!