February 12th, 2021 at 6pm EST
Kashiah Hunter
Join us for a performance by Kashiah Hunter (of Kashiah Hunter and the ATL Crew!) A favorite at the Brooklyn Folk Festival and the Steel Guitar UnConvention, Kashiah Hunter plays lap and pedal steel guitar in the Sacred Steel gospel tradition. Sacred Steel is a musical style and African-American gospel tradition that developed in a group of related Pentecostal churches in the 1930s. Since then, Sacred Steel has grown and flourished in churches and beyond!
February 21st, 2021 at 6pm EST
Vienna Carroll
Vienna Carroll is a singer, playwright, actor, historian and herbalist. Vienna learned music from the Black Ladies of her youth, including her fearsome great grandmother who played guitar to country singer Minnie Pearl on Saturday night radio but only proper Pentecostal chords in church on Sunday. Vienna’s latest CD, “Harlem Field Recordings,” grew out of her project “Folk First: Black Roots Music” celebrating early Black music
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Sister Rosetta Tharpe performs onstage with the Lucky Millinder Orchestra, circa 1938. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Playlist
Louis Jordan, Caldonia
Little Richard, Rip It Up
So much of the rock music you hear today would not exist without the innovation of black artists throughout the decades. February is Black History Month, and all month long, we ll dive deep into the Black Roots of Rock and Roll with a special guest, music journalist John Morrison.
Throughout this four-part series, Morrison will play music from some of the black innovators of rock and roll. Like Louis Jordan s 1945 hit Caldonia.
By Dayne Rugh, For The Bulletin
Historically Speaking: Lebbeus Quy’s Fight for Independence
The Declaration of Independence famously asserted, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” These words have rung loudly in the halls of our American government and in the minds of Americans everywhere.
But the fact is that these words did not fully encompass every individual living in America. For generations, large populations of individuals and families forcibly transported across the Atlantic were not considered people, they were considered property. One of those individuals was Lebbeus Quy of Norwich.
Lebbeus Quy lived a life of enslavement under Norwich’s Daniel Brewster. Born and baptized in the year 1753, Lebbeus was among over 200 African Americans living in Norwich before the outbreak of the American Revolution. Norwich became the 12th largest city in the American colonies by 1774 and at the same time had one of the largest Black populati