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Sweet Honey in the Rock’s Bernice Johnson Reagon may be leaving the legendary a cappella group, but not before coming to Boston
BY TAMARA WIEDER
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SWEET HONEY in the Rock has been coming to perform in Boston since 1978. And every time they’ve come, Sweet Honey founder and leader Bernice Johnson Reagon has been an essential figure on the stage. But if and when Sweet Honey in the Rock come to Boston in 2004, Reagon will be conspicuously absent. That’s because come January, Reagon — an award-winning composer for the likes of PBS’s Eyes on the Prize and We Shall Overcome — intends to leave the critically acclaimed a cappella group, 30 years after she founded it in Washington, DC. Sweet Honey fans need not fret yet, though: Reagon will be with the group when it lands in Boston next week, one of 13 cities to which it’s bringing its 30th-anniversary celebration concert, EveningSong, a collaboration with Reagon’s daughter, Toshi Reagon, and her rock band, Big Lovely.
Q: What made you decide it was time to leave Sweet Honey? A: It was sort of paying attention to an inside voice. My work, as a singer, began in the civil-rights movement over 41 years ago, so although I’ve been in Sweet Honey for 30 years, my career as a singer extends another 10 years earlier. Sweet Honey has been my longest unbroken work, and probably in terms of music, my most intense and rigorous work, primarily I think because of the travel. So moving past, say, the 25th year, which was the quarter-century mark for the group, I began to pay attention to a not-bouncing-back sort of thing after our trips. Traveling and doing back-to-back concerts with no down time between has become more and more difficult for me. And so it was this past fall when I felt like I was actually hearing something inside saying, "It’s time for you to step aside." And I worked on it internally for a while, trying to listen to it rather than pushing it aside because it didn’t fit my external sense of what I wanted to do. Then I talked to people who were very close to me, and at the end of the year I told the group that I would be leaving, and that I was telling them then so that if there was a possible chance of the group continuing, we could not only celebrate the 30th year, but also use that year to make real decisions about what has worked, and what might be better to do once I was not with the group. This group has had a lot of change in personnel, but I’m the one person who’s always been there, so my sense is this is the biggest challenge in terms of personnel that the group has met. It’s been a really stimulating and challenging process, with a lot of the unfolding actually to take place after I am gone. It feels like some kind of passage of life, almost like a surrendering and learning and actually doing work without guarantee, which teaches you so much about faith and going forward even when things are not clearest. My sense is that if we are successful with this, it would be an important model. It would be good for me to work with something for 30 years and find that in that work, I’ve actually created a foundation that might go forward. One of the clearest things that came to me in the personal process that I went through was that I separated the fact that it was time for me to leave from whether or not that would have an impact on whether the group stopped or continued. And that was huge, because when I first thought about it, it was all connected. When I separated it, I really realized that it was okay with me on some level if the group stopped, and it was okay with me if they went on, but neither of those things was my decision. And there was something really powerful that happened when that came to me. And there was something freeing about it. So when I went to the group, I said, "You know, I’d like to know if you’d like to try to continue, but I also will be okay if you don’t." I just have a place in myself where I could be very satisfied with the 30-year work, and also just awe-inspired if somehow we’ve created something that goes beyond us. And they took about two weeks, and then they called me together and said, "We’ve decided we want to continue." Then the work began, because it’s one thing to make a decision; it’s another to begin to do the structural work to try to understand how to best do that, which required a shift in leadership. Q: Did you ever imagine, back in 1973, that you’d still be performing with this group 30 years later? A: Absolutely not! I didn’t know if there was a group when I called the first rehearsal. When we did the first concert, I didn’t look further than the next concert. I didn’t have a five-year vision, saying nothing about a 30-year vision! I remember the seventh-anniversary concert, where we were standing at All Souls’ Church, and I said, "It’s been seven years." And this thing clicked inside my head, like, gosh, maybe there’s something here. Q: It took you seven years to believe that? A: Well, the way I do my work, and I think it’s from my mother: I look at what is right in front of me, and I call it "doing steps." Some people walk without ever paying attention to the steps. Their eyes are someplace down. My mother gave me some sense of, sometimes you really can’t know how you can reach a goal, but you might know how to pick up your foot and put it so it’s not in the same place it was. So in working, creating things that don’t exist — which I’ve done a lot of in my career as a scholar and as a musician — I’ve paid attention to where we were and watched out for where we could go for the next step. So that seventh-year awareness was just sort of taking the step and then looking up and saying, wow, we’ve come a little distance. Maybe there’s something. You’re for a moment thinking, we might have something that we can go on. Then the minute you think that, you look at your feet, and your work is not to get lost in the magic of dreaming that, but to look at your feet, take the next step using everything you have to make it solid. And I think that’s why we’ve had 30 years. Q: What was the original goal, when you called that first rehearsal 30 years ago? A: Singers in my workshop said that the music I was using to train them in theater should be performed from the concert stage. So actually the vision of a certain kind of repertoire, as a concert repertoire, was not mine. My students, my workshop members, fell in love with the range. It was the first time in my life I tried to teach the 19th-century things that I’d grown up with. It was amazing to me that young African-American singers, who did doo-wop, gospel, and jazz, fell in love with the taste of that singing, the weight of it, the swoon of it. So after a few of them said it to me once or twice, I called the first rehearsal. Q: How important do you think music was to the civil-rights movement? A: The culture of the civil-rights movement being Southern-based and black meant there was going to be music. How much music there is in a movement is generally determined by whether you have a culture that already is a music-drenched culture. You can’t really import it. There are movements that really are not great choral-singing movements, and that’s because the people struggling to organize for freedom don’t come out of a choral-singing culture. But we did. The music gave us a way of expressing to each other and to all of the states we had to move in what we felt and what we were about. It was extraordinary and very important. Q: Sweet Honey come to Boston every year. What is it about this city that keeps you coming back? What are the audiences like here? A: We’ve been coming to Boston since 1978. First, there is the surprise that there is a Sweet Honey community [in Boston]. That community changes and grows. We are live-performance singers, so our work is performing before an audience. That’s the center of our work. So to that extent, Boston is not unique: it is a community that has responded to the sound of our singing, that calls us back every year. That kind of thing isn’t anything I could have imagined. That’s almost like the development of a Sweet Honey community without geography, almost like a grassroots approach, because we’ve never been played on Top 40 radio; we’re played on community radio, on public stations. And people have responded to that. I think because we have been steady in our work, and we also have been changing in our work, so that even though we have stayed the same, when you hear us, you will hear something about what is going on in your contemporary world. And I hope the group always has that range and complexity in its repertoire. I think it has really meant that there’s always somebody else to tell: "Here’s a group coming; have you ever heard them? Come to their concert." Q: Tell me about what you’ll be doing at your upcoming show in Boston. A: This is not a Sweet Honey concert that we’re performing in Boston. We created a musical production, and it is in three sets, and it is a cross-genre, cross-generational song journey with Sweet Honey in the Rock and [my daughter] Toshi Reagon and Big Lovely. This is a 30th-anniversary project we’ve done. This show will be performed only 13 times, and Boston is one of the cities. We are very excited about sharing our musical journey, almost through the vision of someone who was nine years old when we started, who is a powerful musician in her own right; we can hear our music in her music, but her genre is rock, she has a rock band. So this is a statement of a cappella and the rock aesthetic, and it is also a statement that sometimes people should listen to each other across generations, and see how they’re connected, how they can walk together, how they are similar, and how they are different. You don’t lose yourself if you taste the other. Sweet Honey is not going to become a rock band, and Toshi’s not going to go a cappella. Q: What kinds of music do you listen to when you’re at home? A: I’m a composer, so most of the time I’m working on my music. This afternoon, I’m producing a CD of a musical I wrote, so today all of the music I’m listening to is from that show. Sometimes people ask me, "What do you listen to when you’re not working on music?" And I say, "When is that?" Q: After you leave the group, what do you think it’ll be like to go to a Sweet Honey show and sit in the audience? A: I don’t know — that’s not on my list. For me, what is so important now is to move through the next few months with integrity, and to work as hard as we can to carefully make this next step. I feel if I have life, and health, I will still be a musician. I will still be a historian. I will still be a radical. And there will still be something for me to do. Sweet Honey in the Rock perform on November 14, at 8 p.m., at Symphony Hall, in Boston. Call (617) 266-1200. Tamara Wieder can be reached at twieder[a]phx.com
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