Mims Auditorium
Howard Payne University’s Symphonic Band and Jazz Combo will present a concert honoring black composers and musicians in honor of Black History Month on Tuesday, Feb. 23, at 7:30 p.m. in Mims Auditorium.
Pieces by Harry T. Burleigh, Thomas Dorsey, Edward “Duke” Ellington, Jester Hairston, Scott Joplin and others will be performed during the concert. Frank Nelson, assistant professor and director of bands, said the concert is a unique opportunity to honor influential black artists and their cultural impact.
“We would really like to have our HPU and community friends and family come together as we honor many black performers and composers who have influenced our day-to-day lives in many ways,” said Nelson. “The evening will be filled with great music, entertainment and learning as we share a little history of these great artists.”
On this day in Black History…
In 1865, Henry Highland Garnet (December 23, 1815 – February 13, 1882) an African American abolitionist and orator becomes the first black minister to preach to the United States House of Representatives.
In 1900, For a Lincoln birthday celebration, James Weldon Johnson writes the lyrics for “Lift Every Voice and Sing”. With music by his brother, J. Rosamond, the song is first sung by 500 children in Jacksonville, Fla. It will become known as the “Negro National Anthem”.
In 1903, American baritone opera singer Todd Duncan, the first performer of the role of Porgy in Porgy and Bess, is born in Danville, Kentucky. Duncan would be the first African American to sing with a major opera company and the first black person to sing in an opera all white cast, when he performed the role of Tonio in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci with the New York City Opera.
Having had the privilege of spending over 40 years living out my call to ministry in the heart of Lansdale at St. John’s United Church of Christ, the faithful folks
The Night Job Trio a school administrator, MD and attorney and Oakland’s Bethlehem Lutheran Choir performed with stunning clarinet improvisations.
A remarkable circa 1990 recording of Martin Luther King’s favorite gospel hymn, “Precious Lord,” has been posted on YouTube, accompanied with visuals and quotations from the Civil Rights Era. It has been added to a YouTube playlist of jazzy interpretations of African-American spirituals and gospel hymns featuring the “Night Job Trio,” multiple percussionists and Oakland’s Bethlehem Lutheran Choir.
The music on the playlist, directed from the piano by Alice Wildermuth O’Sullivan, includes stunning improvisations by virtuoso clarinetist Clarence Warren on “Just a Closer Walk,” “Motherless Child,” “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me,” “His Eye is on the Sparrow,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Angels Watching over Me,” and “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho.” They can all be found on the “Night Job Trio�
Link Copied
William Henry Dorsey was an information hoarder. An African American of means who lived in 19th-century Philadelphia, Dorsey suffered from a “malady” that afflicted others of his era: archive fever. He spent much of his long life he was born in 1837 and died in 1923 clipping newspaper articles and pasting them into one or another of nearly 400 scrapbooks, organized by topic.
Dorsey’s scrapbooks represent a bricolage of one man’s far-ranging interest in African American history and culture. He clipped articles mainly from northern newspapers, Black and white, including some extremely rare publications. The scrapbooks hold articles on Black emigration schemes, fraternal orders, actors, and centenarians who lived through slavery. Dorsey devoted one scrapbook to an 1881 North Carolina convention of Black Republicans, one of many such gatherings at which African Americans envisioned post-emancipation political futures. He devoted another scrapbook to lynchings,