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Nothing but Love in God’s Water: Volume 2: Black Sacred Music from Sit-Ins to Resurrection City
Volume 1 of Nothing but Love in God’s Water traced the music of protest spirituals from the Civil War to the American labor movement of the 1930s and 1940s, and on through the Montgomery bus boycott. This second volume continues the journey, chronicling the role this music played in energizing and sustaining those most heavily involved in the civil rights movement.
Robert Darden, former gospel music editor for Billboard magazine and the founder of the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project at Baylor University, brings this vivid, vital story to life. He explains why black sacred music helped foster community within the civil rights movement and attract new adherents; shows how Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders used music to underscore and support their message; and reveals how the songs themselves traveled and changed as the fight for freedom for African Americans continued. Darden makes an unassailable case for the importance of black sacred music not only to the civil rights era but also to present-day struggles in and beyond the United States.
Taking us from the Deep South to Chicago and on to the nation’s capital, Darden’s grittily detailed, lively telling is peppered throughout with the words of those who were there, famous and forgotten alike: activists such as Rep. John Lewis, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, and Willie Bolden, as well as musical virtuosos such as Harry Belafonte, Duke Ellington, and The Mighty Wonders. Expertly assembled from published and unpublished writing, oral histories, and rare recordings, this is the history of the soundtrack that fueled the long march toward freedom and equality for the black community in the United States and that continues to inspire and uplift people all over the world.
Bernice Johnson Reagon, photographed by Dane A. Penland in 1981, was one of the leaders of the Albany Movement, an extraordinary song-leader and activist, she later became one of the foremost scholars on African American protest music. Courtesy Smithsonian Institution Archives, Historic Images of the Smithsonian, #81-15021-20A.
A Birmingham Police Department photograph of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (to right of center) talking to his best friend and closest aide Ralph Abernathy at the A. G. Gaston Hotel on Fifth Avenue North in Birmingham. The man to the left of Abernathy, with his back to the camera, appears to be the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth. Birmingham Post-Herald Photographs. Courtesy of the Birmingham Public Library.
Two Mississippi Freedom Summer volunteers clap and sing Freedom Songs. Image Courtesy: The Mark Levy Collection, Miami University Archives, Oxford, OH and The Civil Rights Archives of the Queens College/CUNY. http://digital.lib.miamioh.edu/fs/.
Pete Seeger leaving a concert in a church in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, on July 14, 1964. Notes accompanying the photograph indicate that the temperature reached 100 degrees inside the church that day during heat of the Mississippi Freedom Summer. Wisconsin Historical Society, WHS-97481.
SNCC staffers, including Fannie Lou Hamer (far right) and Chuck Neblett (center) address Mississippi Freedom Summer volunteers in the Western College for Women auditorium, June 1964. McCain Library and Archives, The University of Southern Mississippi. Randall (Herbert) Freedom Summer photograph.
Activist/author/folksinger Julius Lester plays guitar and teaches Freedom Songs with Freedom School students at Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Hattiesburg during the Freedom Summer of 1964. McCain Library and Archives, The University of Southern Mississippi. Randall (Herbert) Freedom Summer photograph.
Following a performance of In White America by the Free Southern Theater, actors, singers and residents of Hattiesburg join hands and sing “We Shall Overcome” in True Light Baptist Church. The Free Southern Theater toured throughout Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964. McCain Library and Archives, The University of Southern Mississippi. Randall (Herbert) Freedom Summer photograph.
Two unidentified women clapping and singing Freedom Songs at the Freedom School Convention on August 8, 1964 in Meridian, Mississippi. Wisconsin Historical Society, WHS-98834.
Photographer Yoichi Okamoto catches Martin Luther King with a rare smile during a meeting with President Johnson on the proposed Civil Rights Act legislation. Photographed January 19, 1964 in the Cabinet Room. Photographs courtesy of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, LBJ Collection.
Flanked by portraits of murdered civil rights workers James Earl Chaney and Andrew Goodman, an unidentified man in Atlantic City, New Jersey, sings Freedom Songs during a nighttime demonstration at the Democratic National Convention in August 1964. The photograph is from the records of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Wisconsin Historical Society, WHS-98097.
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