Dr. Guy and MusiQ Department artists Bridget Ramsey and Vince Anthony have a busy touring week, with performances in Virginia on Thursday, February 21 and Saturday, February 23 followed by a can’t-miss program at Philadelphia’s esteemed Saint Paul’s Baptist Church on Sunday, February 24. We discussed the tour dates with the trio, who made clear a set of important through-lines for the shows, which emphasize the communal and genealogical practice of black music-making and spirituality, which are entwined and deep-rooted over centuries of black life in America.
The first of these three performances will be held at the University of Virginia on Thursday, February 21 in support of A.D. Carson, Assistant Professor of Hip Hop and the Global South at the esteemed university. Carson—a recent Ph.D graduate and new hire at the university—found himself in a peculiar space for an academic: His dissertation, Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics Of Rhymes & Revolutions, received national coverage on outlets such as NPR. Why? The dissertation took the form of a hip-hop record, a 34-song album. Alongside a panel of scholars including friend-of-the-blog Jack Hamilton, Dr. Ramsey will take part in an interactive roundtable (and perhaps jam a song or two) to accompany the release of Dr. Carson’s latest record, Sleepwalking 2. The roundtable begins at 5:30PM at Minor Hall Auditorium on the University of Virginia campus.
Two days later, Dr. Guy and the band continue on to the University of Richmond to deliver the 2019 Neumann Lecture, which is part of the “Contested Frequencies: Sonic Representation in the Digital Age” conference. The performance will take place at 7:30PM at the Camp Concert Hall on Richmond’s campus.Following in his successful Provost’s Lecture at our home institute, the University of Pennsylvania, in 2018, Dr. Guy will once again present the stirring audio/visual multi-media experience Hide/Melt/Ghost. An accompaniment to his forthcoming book, Soundproof: Black Music, Magic, and Racial Intimacies (though in reality it is so much more than just accompaniment), Hide/Melt/Ghost is an extra-sensory experience, a musical history of early American slave songs that explores the social bonds and community values of black music in antebellum America, blurring the lines between past and present through media and song. “With a particular focus on the paranormal practice of enslaved Africans, the event—which is profoundly enveloping to experience in person—blurs historical and critical lines,” we wrote earlier this year.
“We’re constantly adding more music to the Hide/Melt/Ghost project,” Ramsey told me as he prepared new arrangements and ideas to continue to build the breadth and scale of the project. “Living with this music that, in some cases, is many centuries old is a relationship. We’re breathing new life into it but also addressing it as parts of a repertoire.”
He cites experimentations with an iconic spiritual, “Wade in the Water,” among the latest additions to the Hide/Melt/Ghost songbook and one he feels fits perfectly in this setting. “It’s a teaching piece,” he says, “But when I’m doing arrangements, it’s never academic. We put our spin on them to connect across time. And when something is that ubiquitous, when you put a little spin on it like the ones we’re doing, it really makes people sit up and listen. That’s what I’d say about all of these pieces: They’re our takes on the body of songs.”
(Also make note: We’re getting closer to the culmination of the Hide/Melt/Ghost performances with the looming date at Harlem Stage on Saturday, March 9. As Dr. Guy has worked and reworked the repertoire, much of his thinking has been with an eye towards the New York date, where the space and scale of the performance will allow his vision to be fully realized. “Harlem Stage is probably where it’s meant to be,” he says definitively. “All of these are leading up to that.”)
This type of reclamation project prompts a necessary question: How should an artist balance remaining faithful to the specific origins of these songs and trace their long-historical trajectory while still maintaining strong ties to the origin story? For Dr. Guy, the approach is surprisingly simple: To maintain a grounding in the historical past, the thoughtful restorer needs only one thing. “Always sing the melody,” he says, with a mix of mirth and gravity that shows he grasps the humor of such a simple suggestion but means it.
“These songs started out as just melodies—without fancy accompaniment. Harmony, timbre, and variation became a way to layer the sonics over time,” he explains. “It says so much about how much of a template they are for the spirituality of African American people. People change and the times change, but those songs stand and they can bear the weight of any artistic invention.”
That lineal musicality will be on full display on Sunday, February 24th as Dr. Guy and the MusiQ Department take the stage at St. Paul’s Baptist Church in Philadelphia’s West Poplar neighborhood. Helping kick-off our home church’s three-year capital campaign, the band has designed a program that—unlike Hide/Melt/Ghost—more clearly fuses the traditional with the modern, showing the many resonances of black music and spirituality.
Over the next year, Dr. Guy will present three concerts at St. Paul’s, all taking two genres and combining them. Sunday’s effort will fuse well-known spirituals with jazz instrumentals, followed by a Jazz Vespers Juneteenth service and a gospel/hip-hop fusion in the fall.
Beginning at 3:30PM, MusiQology’s Spirituals to the Blues: Sacred & Secular Music in the Black Experience will bring the rich stylistics of jazz instrumentation into new interpretations of well-known classics and highlighting the talents of a number of well-known Philadelphia singers and favored collaborators, including V. Shayne Frederick and Mollie Ducoste. Tickets, which cost $20 (which will go to the capital campaign), include lunch and can be purchased at the doors.
Paired with a Wes Montgomery tune, the mythical walls of “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho” come swinging and tumbling downward. The aforementioned “Wade in the Water” is mellifluous with a rich new piano arrangement. The oldest and most precious songs of black America maintain their vitality and message in the new context.
It’s a project that hews closely to the wider mandate of the church and its community, which has been an essential part of the city’s cultural and spiritual fabric since 1883. “We are really into social justice into St. Paul’s, and we prioritize that over doctrinaire religious forms and fashions. We prioritize things like helping the disadvantaged instead,” Dr. Guy, who’s also a member, explains. “So we don’t think about sacred and secular as most churches might; we maintain a more open attitude about things because we’re actually trying to reach people and come to them.”
“It’s part of why I joined—to be able to be in a historic church that has a lot of members that have been there their whole lives…their parents, grandparents…to honor the tradition but also come in as a millennial and be accepted and combine the two worlds through combining styles of music into one,” Bridget Ramsey shares. “It’s not like, ‘This is a traditional church and we sing these old hymns because that’s that.’ We’re open to all kinds of music and all kinds of art, honestly.”
“I think what we do in the concert really does mirror the life of the church,” Vince Anthony adds, suggesting that the church’s familial and community history lives on and changes, but some things stay constant. “I find the members of St. Paul are traditional people but who are open to new ways of thinking about old traditions.”
This admixture—of old and new, tradition and innovation—makes such a musical experience a fitting way to engage with black history. “The tradition of black music straddles the sacred and the secular,” Dr. Guy says. And reconsidering these secular songs recontextualized as sacred is our great opportunity to step into that living, breathing space.”
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