Sweet Honey in the Rock

Long before American audiences were marveling over the exotic, interlaced harmonies of the Bulgarian Women’s Choir, the women of the a cappella African-American quintet, Sweet Honey in the Rock, were lifting up their big, shimmering voices, weaving elements of gospel, blues, soul, folk and reggae into a repertoire of exultant and thought-provoking feminist and political songs.

This Friday night, during their annual New York City appearance at Carnegie Hall, Sweet Honey will again break out traditional and contemporary songs that explore and celebrate the range of the African-American women’s experience.

Not surprisingly, Sweet Honey’s concerts bear hallmarks of old-fashioned religious revival meetings. The group’s founder and artistic director, Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, is not only the daughter of a Baptist minister, but is also a former civil-rights activist, whose 1960s quartet, the Freedom Singers, provided inspiration to desegregationists.

“We like to do church songs,” Reagon said of Sweet Honey, in a recent phone interview from her office in Washington, D. C., “because that’s sort of the university of black choral singing in this country. We also like to do new things, songs on topical issues, and especially some songs that celebrate the fact that we’re women, and the knowledge that the issues we struggle with are important enough to hold the stage.”

Sweet Honey’s various concerns have been holding the stage for 16 years. In that time they’ve struggled with most issues of importance to African-American women and their communities — poverty, apartheid, racism, family violence — as well as love, birth, death. Emerging from the vocal workshop of the Washington, D. C. Black Repertory Theater, and taking their name from the first song sung there, Sweet Honey eventually settled into a five-part configuration because group leader Reagon prefers the fifth-line harmony which disrupts the clean quartet sound.

Sweet Honey have enjoyed success over the years, primarily with non-mainstream audiences who’ve sought out their eight albums released on the Chicago-based independent label, Flying Fish. Now, they appear to be poised on the brink of wider acclaim. Last year, their anti-apartheid song “Emergency,” released on the group’s 1988 double LP “Live at Carnegie Hall,” was nominated for a Grammy in the Contemporary Folk Music Category won by Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” They did pick up a Grammy in the Traditional Folk Music category, for two cuts on the compilation album of Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie songs, “Folkways: A Vision Shared,” released by CBS Records to benefit the Smithsonian Institution’s acquisition of the Folkways record label. “We’ve got a respectable following, but in a small, alternative way,” she said. “But it seems that [the producers of ‘Folkways’] began to listen to all the tapes they had to consider, and they felt that the work we’d done was very important to the overall statement they wanted to make.”

There are other, more personal gratifications: After 16 years of leading Sweet Honey in the Rock, and more than 10 years as director of the Smithsonian Institute’s black culture program (now she’s a curator in the Division of Community Life, Smithsonian National Museum of American History), Reagon was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, one of the so-called “genius grants.”

She was equally delighted and stunned. “I have used unconventional means to get my work done, and I don’t expect people in an establishment orientation to understand my work . . . The fellowship was awarded to me, they said, for my work in African-American culture, which they broke down into two parts — for my work as a scholar, and my work as a composer and performer . . . I felt that somebody had really looked at the full range of what I try to do with African-American culture, and held it as a unified statement, even though it exists in two very distinctive institutions. I certainly feel that way about it, so it was very pleasing to me that somebody else got that message.”

Reagon refuses to predict Sweet Honey’s future (“I was shocked when I realized we were celebrating our seventh anniversary,” now almost 10 years ago), or her own, though she plans to complete research begun at the Smithsonian with some of her fellowship money.

“Right now I’m now interested in African-American worship communities that still practice traditions going back well into the early Nineteenth Century,” she says. “They’re oral traditions. It’s an oral culture. And it’s perfect for the technology of today — television, recordings, radio, film.”

Any or all of these media may see projects develop from Reagon’s research, once it’s completed. “I live hard,” Reagon concluded. “I use everything up, so that at the end of the day, there’s nothing left. But there’s a lot of satisfaction in that, in my life.”

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