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.
A Sunday service at NorthStar in Durham.
“There’s a New World Coming” is a song the great Georgia-born singer Bernice Johnson Reagon recorded in 1975. In the early 1960s, Reagon was a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Freedom Singers, and in 1973 she started Sweet Honey in the Rock, a celebrated Black female a cappella group. But in “There’s a New World Coming,” which appears on her album
Give Your Hands to Struggle, Reagon sings alone: “There’s a new day coming! / Everything’s gon’ be turning over / Everything’s gon’ be turning over / Where you gon’ be standing when it comes?”