I learned that if you bring black people together, you bring them together with a song. To this day, I don't understand how people think they can bring anybody together without a song.
Interpretation
Music is a powerful unifier that can bring people together regardless of their backgrounds.
Bernice Johnson Reagon emphasizes the importance of music as a means of unification among people, particularly within the Black community. She suggests that music transcends barriers and fosters a deep connection, and questions how true unity can be achieved without the influence of song, highlighting its vital role in communal bonding and shared experiences.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the role of music in cultural events.
When the culture is strong, you've got this consistency where black people can grow up in these places with this voice just resonating about our special-ness in the universe. And I always say you're in trouble if you get too far away from that core that grounds you.
Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are.
The voice I have now, I got the first time I sang in a movement meeting, after I got out of jail... and I'd never heard it before in my life.
Few rappers realize the genre sprang from West African griots through Delta slave songs to jazz poetry and the comedic trash talk of 'the dozens.'
I never listen to the radio to keep up with current trends.
'Society's Child' was a real hard record to start with. That's all you want is for you to put your first record out and have people screaming at you in the streets. But it taught me right away that what I was doing was valuable and important.
I cannot give a single concert at which I do not play one piece after the other in an agony of terror because my memory threatens to fail me. This fear torments me for days beforehand.
Theres no way in the world I can feel the same blues the way I used to. When I play in Chicago, Im playing up-to-date, not the blues I was born with. People should hear the pure blues - the blues we used to have when we had no money.
It is Billie Holiday who was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence on me.
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