WACO, Texas – “Marching to Zion: Celebrating and Preserving Black Sacred Music” – Baylor University’s 2014 Pruit Symposium – will bring together leading voices in Black gospel music for conversation, celebration and music on Thursday, Oct. 23, through Saturday, Oct. 25, on the Baylor campus.
Civil rights hero and musician Bernice Johnson Reagon, Ph.D., a founding member of the Freedom Singers; choral master and author James Abbington, Ph.D.; and Dwandalyn Reece, Ph.D., curator of music and performing arts at the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture, will be keynote speakers. The event also will feature three Black gospel music concerts open to the public.
“This brings together some of the world’s top experts on Black sacred music,” said Robert F. Darden, associate professor of journalism, public relations and new media in Baylor’s College of Arts & Sciences, and founder of Baylor’s Black Gospel Music Restoration Project. The project acquires, preserves, records and catalogs at-risk Black gospel music from past decades, when records and tapes were prevalent.
“It has been many years since there has been a national symposium devoted to the music that is the foundational music for all American popular music,” Darden said. “We intentionally set out to ‘cover the waterfront.’ We wanted to have someone speak to every possible facet of gospel music. We have an expert on hip-hop and gospel music, on the depictions of female gospel artists in cinema and TV, we have someone speaking to the use of sacred music in the African-American megachurch tradition, we have an expert on the home of gospel music – Chicago – we have someone speaking to the more recent stars of gospel music, like Andrae Crouch and Walter Hawkins, and we have someone speaking about the intersection of the civil rights movement and protest spirituals and freedom songs.”
From a scholarly perspective, the symposium is “a long overdue outlet for the best new research on America’s greatest original art form,” said Darden, author of “People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music” and “Nothing but Love in God’s Water: Black Sacred Music from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement.”
He noted that two representatives from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., will talk about the Smithsonian’s efforts in preservation, including an update on the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture, under construction on the Mall in Washington, D.C.
“There is a direct Waco connection to the NMAAHC,” Darden said. “The gospel music will be provided by Baylor’s Black Gospel Music Restoration Project.”
Beyond the scholarly and preservation aspects of Black sacred music, “it’s exciting to share the passion of a lifetime for people who only know about this music from TV and movies,” Darden said. “Nothing compares to the real thing.”
For registration or more information, visit www.baylor.edu/pruit .
