Ellington

Sweet Honey in the Rock shows up and shows out. This hurricane of African American women whirling, playing percussive instruments, moaning, humming, laughing, soothing, sassing, singing. In voices as deep as the Atlantic Ocean, as high as the sun at noon. These Grammy-winning musicians charm and challenge, scold and inspire, teach history and tout freedom, touch souls and tackle the heavy issues from AIDS to race. They placate, they push, they raise hell, they heal.

With voices that are instruments, Sweet Honey in the Rock sings provocatively of injustice, greed, war, distress, hope, domestic violence and courage. Their words comfort and cut like razors. They blast unrighteousness in all its forms: oppression, exploitation, apathy. They force their audiences to grapple with the tough questions, and it is clear from their pre-song raps that these women have grappled with them themselves: Are your hands clean? Would you harbor me?

Founded in 1973 by Bernice Johnson Reagon, this unique, a cappella group merges message and African-American music (jazz, gospel, spirituals, blues) in breath-taking ways. Reagon, who retired on the first of this month, was a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee singers, and traveled the country 40 years ago teaching movement songs.

She drew together four women with the mission of preserving black music and inspiring activism and change through song. The first song the group learned was "Sweet Honey in the Rock," based on a parable Reagon's Baptist preacher father had taught her. The song title became the group's name, and Reagon has said during performances that it is an apt metaphor for black women: strong as rock on the outside, but sweet as honey on the inside.

Over the years, the group has grown to six singers and a sign language interpreter: Shirley Childress Saxton, Louise Robinson, Aisha Kahlil, Carol Maillard, Arnae Burton, Nitanju Bolade Casel and Ysaye Maria Barnwell.

They are mothers, classical musicians and composers, actresses, Ph.Ds, friends, and extraordinary songwriters; they are warriors. They bear witness in a world that is insane, and they demand that people at least try to change it for the better. They leave their audiences not quite the same.

I spoke with Dr. Ysaye Barnwell, who has performed with Sweet Honey since 1979, from Minneapolis.

JFP: Sweet Honey has always been concerned with social issues and injustices. Your songs are issue-oriented, and provocative, and get people talking. In the wake of 9/11, the collapsing of dot.coms, the downsizing of corporations, the continued spread of AIDS, and war, what are you writing and singing about these days?

Ysaye Maria Barnwell: There are some songs that were written since 9-11 that appear on our 30th-anniversary CD, and some of them we are performing. One of them is the title song of that CD, and it's called "The Women Gather." It's written by Carol Maillard, and it simply says that if we can pull together out of the incidents like 9/11, Columbine, the murder of Amadou Diallo in New York—all of those incidents, and it says: The women gather crying tears that fill a million oceans. And that people are dying needlessly and senselessly all over the world, and it's a way of acknowledging that there is a lot of loss and a lot of grief, and that there are people who are tormented by this grief who are coming together, and it just puts us on notice that we need to pay attention.

And another song, which is a song that I wrote, is called "Let Us Rise In Love." It was really triggered by a couple of things, by 9/11, and by really grappling with what kind of response should we have. Is it possible, in this country, to have a response that's founded in some moral ground? Coming out of the Civil Rights Movement—where the movement was grounded in the moral values of love and nonviolence, everybody involved in the movement—that was their moral grounding. Everything that was initiated came out of the principle of love and nonviolence.

So I really felt that my personal bottom line was that we have to rise in the amount of love that we demonstrate to the rest of the world. It's the last thing that we want to think about because when you're attacked, you get angry, you get afraid; and the last thing we want to articulate is some form of love. But love that allows us to listen. We kept saying: "Well, why are they doing this to us?" But we never listened to the response. And it takes an amount of love to listen to the response. To really say, "OK, let me sit back, let me take a deep breath, and listen." And then form some response that is based on that active listening and based in some moral principle.

So the second verse of the song says: Though we've been voyeurs of foreign pathos, the tide has changed, and now we grieve at home. Though we're victimized by terror, we're not innocent, so where is the courage to change what we condoned?

And we have songs that speak specifically to war, and so we sing "Study War No More," and we also sing a song called "Peace," which was a poem by a French poet; it was translated and set to music by Nitanju Bolade Casel.

Has Sweet Honey's mission changed during its 30-year journey?
I think it's possible to have a mission that remains the same for a very long time, but it's flexible enough to allow you to grow. And I think that's what we have done. So if you have in your mission that you want to preserve the traditional vocal music of African-American people, and you want to extend that tradition, it allows you to create a whole new thing. It allows you to sing about a broad number of issues. So I think our mission statement has stayed the same, but has allowed us to grow in a number of directions.

During our 30th year, even though we are an a capella group, we did a collaboration in 12 cities with Bernice (Reagon's) daughter, and her band, and that was very different for us. We want to collaborate with other artists from time to time; we want to try new things. We want to understand other genres besides the one we think we excel in. I think there's room to grow. And, of course, every time a new woman comes into the group, she brings her own influences and we grow.

How many times have new women come into the group?

That's happened 22 times. We've had 22 women in the group. Bernice Johnson Reagon just retired. And the two (new) women who have come into the group are really members of the family. Louise Robinson was one of the original members of the group. And after a number of years, she decided to come back. We're really excited about that. And the other woman, whose name is Arnae, has been working with us as a substitute for a number of years, so she knows who we are, she knows the material, and, I think, is really excited to come on as a full member.

She is the founder of the group, and a powerful, powerful force. I'm sure you all felt a lot of emotions because of Dr. Reagon's leaving. Will the dynamics of the group change as a result of her retirement?

The natural emotions, but I think she's trained us well. ... She announced it a year ago to us, and after working through the year, we're really OK. We're excited about the new grouping, and we're looking forward to the tour.

What I hear from people is how bold you are, and how wonderful it is that you put certain issues on the table. What response do you get from people after you perform?

When people come and talk to us individually, most of the time, it's not issues, per se, that they respond to, it's really some personal thing that's been touched inside of them. People will come and say; "In the past several months, I've lost my husband, or my brother or my sister or my child or whatever, and I was so depressed, I didn't even want to come tonight. And I feel like I've been healed.

Or they come and they say: "You black women make me feel so proud to be a black woman." They say those kinds of things. There are some people who come and speak to us about issues, but, by and large, people respond to what the music does to them, what the messages do to them.

I wrote a song called "Will You Harbor Me?" And, it is kind of a litany that asks the question if I'm in need of help the way, for example, slaves who decided to escape were in need of help, or the way a woman who is being abused would be in need of help, or any other circumstance you can think of. Whether it's somebody that's a refugee from a war-torn country or whatever; if that person was in need of help, would you harbor them? And it's a hard question because it might be against the law to harbor them. Or, it might be somebody whose position you disagree with. So it's just an open question. If I come to your door, would you harbor me? And if you are any one of these things in the list: a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew, a heretic, poet, exile, refuge, woman running from home, a child, a person with AIDS, would I harbor you?

And in there, I mention a Haitian, a Korean, and a Czech?, and at the end of the concert, a Korean woman came up to me and said: "I've never heard Korean mentioned in any song in my whole life." It's things that appear small, things that we write or things that we say and can't imagine what the impact will be.

What experience stands out for you as a particularly powerful one?
We've had some amazing experiences. One year—it's been about 10 years ago now, on my birthday, because my birthday is Feb. 28—on my birthday we sang on the stage of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. Now, I tell you, that was something—because I was a child and saw those young children trying to go to that school and being jeered by a ... very angry white crowd. A mob. I couldn't understand why adults would be screaming at children like that, because I was a child myself. It just didn't make any sense. I was terrified for those black kids every day as I watched them go to school. And here we were singing on the stage of that school to an integrated audience with (civil-rights acivist and Little Rock Nine adviser) Ms. Daisy Bates sitting on the front row. Now that kind of experience is just something I'll never forget. Because when you've lived your life and you can actually acknowledge that change has occurred, it's a powerful thing. We might not be all the way there, but change had come.

This is a historical year—the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the 40th anniversary of Freedom Summer. Where do you think we stand on race?

We're not going to ever be perfect. So we will always have things to work on. And I think that's what life is all about .... I can look at '54 and say: heck yeah, we've made some progress; we ain't done. But heck yeah. I remember coming through Quitman County, Miss. Marks. In 1973. ... A white dentist who refused to give anesthesia to black patients; he put his knee in the patient's chest in order to pull his teeth out. I saw that. I saw that. ... I feel like we've made a good amount of progress [since then].

Sweet Honey is truly an original group. Nobody does what you do like you do it. What do you want people to think, or feel, when they experience Sweet Honey in the Rock?

I want people to think: That group sings the most incredible music. Music that comes out of black culture. Music that teaches and reaches my soul. That would be on the broad side of what I would want people to think. We are great musicians. We sing great black music. We're talking about what's going on in the tradition that great black music has, and we're doing it with some style and some flair, and we're touching people.