Black Nativity, Langston Hughes’s self-described "gospel-song play," which recasts the story of the birth of Jesus in a rich milieu of African-American culture, debuted at New York City’s Lincoln Center in 1961. Thirty-three years ago, it become a holiday tradition in Boston thanks to the work of John Andrew Ross, who today remains the annual production’s musical director and producer. (Black Nativity is presented by the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Roxbury; Elma Lewis, the founder and director of the Center, is the executive producer and director.)

Ross was aware of the musical stage work’s debut, which had been part of Lincoln Center’s opening celebration. He had attended a touring-company version that stopped in Boston and featured the great gospel singer Marion Williams. But his own involvement with Black Nativity, whose 2002 edition opens next Friday, began when a group of students at the Elma Lewis School at the National Center of Afro-American Artists came to him seeking direction on how to become a harmony singing group.

Ross, a musician and music educator, recalls that he suggested some theory classes "and laid out a plan for them, and they asked if they could stay a while longer and use the piano when we were done speaking. They started harmonizing, and I noticed they didn’t really have anyone directing how they used their voices, but then I heard this really striking voice emerge. That got me to thinking. If they needed some kind of direction, maybe I could develop a project they’d be interested in. So I got the idea of doing Black Nativity. I expanded on the idea of the production I’d seen, and I thought we could involve the school’s children. So we staged Black Nativity in December 1970 for our national board meeting."

From there, the National Center production grew to include members of the community. After a few years, enough people came to fill the school’s 400-seat auditorium to standing-room-only capacity. Multiple shows had to be scheduled. Then, as the METCO program took hold and children from urban Boston began to attend suburban school, their friends and teachers from outlying towns also started to attend. Word of the all-volunteer production’s quality and its delightful gospel-drenched retelling of the most famous Bible story spread until finally, in the 1980s, Black Nativity moved into the Opera House. When the Opera House closed, the production relocated to its current annual location, the spacious Tremont Temple.

"After 33 years, we’ve got what has essentially become a village," Ross explains over the phone from his Roxbury home, just a few doors from where he grew up on Townsend Street. "It’s one great organism, but it’s intergenerational. This year we have a girl who’s five coming on stage for the first time. The script, which follows the Books of St. Luke and St. Matthew, and the selections of gospel numbers and Christmas songs delivered in a way that draws on black gospel music, stays the same, but the dynamic of all of these people coming together changes."

Something akin to fate may have cast 61-year-old Ross in his longstanding role, or at least determined his interest in producing Black Nativity. "Langston Hughes was my father’s fraternity roommate in college. When I was a kid, he used to come to the house. Knopf had its offices here in Boston. They were his publishing company, so he was back and forth between here and New York on business. So from time to time when he came to our house, he’d give me his latest book.

"I found the whole thing very fascinating. I didn’t realize at the time that he was the poet of the Harlem Renaissance. I knew that he was somebody who was well known, but I only came to understand his full stature when I was an adult. To me, when I knew him, he was just ‘Uncle Langston.’ "