Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from Audreen Buffalo's article "Sweet Honey: A Cappella Activists," which appeared in Ms. magazine (©1993 by Lang Communications, Inc.).

In 1973, Bernice Johnson Reagon, vocal director of the D.C. Black Repertory Theater, was urged by members of the Washington, D.C.-based company to organize a singing group. Sweet Honey in the Rock was the happy result. Using the original instrument—the human voice—aided only by shekere, tambourine, and microphone, the ensemble has built a reputation as the world's premier female a cappella ensemble [a group that sings without musical instruments accompanying it].

In helping birth Sweet Honey, Reagon brought sure knowledge of music's informational and transformative power to the task. Her musical mission is rooted in the rural southern church pastored by her father. "For the first 11 years, our church had no piano, and I'm still an a cappella singer. I grew up singing in the nineteenth-century congregational tradition—a style that can be traced to Africa."

In describing that tradition Reagon says: "Spontaneity is one of the characteristics that mark congregational singing. Singers create as they go along. Although a leader introduces the song, there is no solo tradition. Once the song is raised, the group joins and the creation becomes collaborative. You must be open to what will happen to the song and you in performance."

Reagon's life continues to be informed by the Georgia community into which she was born and her early civil rights activism with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She, Rutha Mae Harris, Cordell Reagon, and Charles Neblett were members of the SNCC Freedom Singers. Appearing at hundreds of freedom rallies and mass meetings during the early 1960s, they were the movement's singing newspaper—reporting and defining the actions and issues from the civil rights war zones where they were frequently arrested. In many ways her mission has not changed.

Spirituality, consciousness-raising, social responsibility, healing, and—most of all—love resonate at the heart of Sweet Honey's repertoire. Songs such as "Patchwork Quilt," "Are My Hands Clean?" and the Grammy-nominated "Emergency," address AIDS, worker and environmental exploitation, and racism.

The first song Reagon taught the group was one she'd never sung but remembered from her youth, "Sweet Honey in the Rock." "When I asked my father about its meaning, he said it was a parable that referred to a land where, when rocks were cracked, honey would flow from them." Reagon came to interpret this as a metaphor for the legacy of African American women in the United States. Within many African traditions rocks are considered living spirits. "So too, sometimes, we, black women, have had to have the standing power of rocks and of mountains—cold and hard, strong and stationary. That quality has often obscured the fact that inside the strength, partnering the sturdiness, we are as honey. If our world is warm, honey flows and so do we. If it is cold, stiff, and stays put—so do we."

Reagon, Ysaye Maria Barnwell, Nitanju Bolade Casel, Shirley Childress Johnson, Aisha Kahlil, and Carol Maillard are the women who currently compose the musical collective. Over the years more than singers have been members of the group.

The group meets, in the ancient way of women, communally. Each is aware of the others' unique contributions. Each serves as a master teacher in at least one repertoire or singing style and apprentices in an area covered by another member. They write, produce, discuss points of view, and develop ideas for songs and treatments.

The fluid communal spirit of the group is manifest in every performance.

"People who respond so enthusiastically to Sweet Honey hear their own inner echo. They hear their names called, their thoughts confirmed," says Reagon.

"After a Sweet Honey performance, people often ask, 'Why do I feel so good after hearing songs that deal with issues I usually find paralyzing to think about?'

"Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are. They're the prod that moves you forward.

"The civil rights movement was the most wonderful thing I experienced in my life," Reagon muses. "Day by day, I found courage to be who I was. Finding courage. Taking the risk. There was something about doing things that I had always been warned would kill or ruin you. Well, I did get suspended and I did go to jail—things I had been told to avoid at all costs. But I found that if you avoided everything that was a risk, there would be many things you'd never know about yourself."