February 26, 2021
When Wallace Willis created his mournful song, “Steal Away to Jesus,” he voiced his suffering in slavery with a lament that has evoked a powerful response through the ages and across the world. “Steal Away” has touched poets, presidents, queens, composers, and blind street musicians.
The song speaks to brokenness and sorrow across ages. It has spoken to a blind street singer in Macon, Georgia in the 1950s trying to make a living singing “slave songs” with a collection cup tacked to his guitar, and to an English composer who heard in it the suffering of the Nazi pogroms against Jews in World War II.
Every February when we celebrate Black History Month in the United States, and when we teach it in the classroom or to our youngsters at home, the perfect accompaniment to books and stories is Black music. Black music here was born out of trouble and strife, out of uplift and joy, out of resistance and survival. It has existed since the beginning of our time here in the United States and the diaspora. Black music is rooted in the continent of Africa, and it will carry us into the future.
Though Black music has taken many forms over time, changed with each generation, and been performed in many different cultures by ethnic and racially diverse artists, many of whom are not Black, there is a fundamental thread that ties it all together: Black spirituality. When I speak of spirituality, I do not mean religiosity, though many Black musicians and their music have come out of the Black church. I speak of a force that combines both the will to endure and survive with the joy of life.