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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 Expertly assembled from published and unpublished writing, oral histories, and rare recordings, this is the history of the soundtrack that fueled the long march toward freedom and equality for the black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.
Led by James Bevel (second from right), demonstrators protest the segregated Post House Restaurant inside the Greyhound Bus Station in Nashville, March 3, 1960. Nashville Banner Archives, courtesy of the Nashville Public Library Digital Collection.
Guy Carawan leads the singing of freedom songs at a mass meeting at Fisk University in Nashville on April 21, 1960. The meeting was held to protest the bombing of the home of African American attorney Z. Alexander Looby. The photographer also identifies Matthew Walker (far left), Peggi Alexander, and John Lewis (far right). Nashville Banner Archives, courtesy of the Nashville Public Library Digital Collection.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Kelly Miller Smith confer as an unknown singer performs at Fisk University in Nashville on April 21, 1960, following the bombing of the home of African American attorney, Z. Alexander Looby. It is during this speech that King said, "We will say, ‘Do what you will to us, but we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer.’" Nashville Banner Archives, courtesy of the Nashville Public Library Digital Collection.
John Lewis (left), Archie E. Allen, and other students representing the Nashville Christian Leadership Council protest on Jefferson Street in Nashville during the Freedom March, March 23, 1963. Nashville Banner Archives, courtesy the Nashville Public Library Digital Collection.
Commissioner of Public Safety Theophilius E.“Bull” Connor was the most ardent – and dangerous – foe of the civil rights movement in Birmingham in April and May of 1963. Birmingham Post-Herald Photographs. Courtesy of the Birmingham Public Library.
Under the watchful eye of a North Carolina state trooper, African Americans sing protest songs and clap their hands on the lawn of the Executive Mansion in Raleigh, NC, 1963. State Library of North Carolina, North Carolina Digital Collections, Civil Rights. Courtesy of The News & Observer and State Archives of North Carolina.
Emergency personnel on the street in front of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church following the bombing on September 15, 1963 that killed four young girls. Birmingham Post-Herald Photographs, courtesy the Birmingham Public Library.
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.