Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing: A Call for Justice
As some of you already know, I have recently signed a contract with a publisher for the release of my first book of memoirs. Also, as I wrote in my last blog, I was recently asked to participate in a panel discussion presented by the Harry T. Burleigh Society during its conference titled "More Than the Promise of the American Myth: Rethinking Burleigh & (Ella) Sheppard in the Second Gilded Age." Other participants on the panel included the descendants of composers Harry Burleigh, Ella Sheppard, W.C. Handy, J. Rosamond Johnson, and Bob Cole. The Fisk Jubilee Singers - whose concert the Burleigh Society presented the night before at Carnegie Hall - had included my father's arrangement of the spiritual "Steal Away" on their program. So it seemed fitting to include me in a conversation on the handling of copyrights and the preservation of historic recordings, as I had produced a documentary film on my father's life along with its soundtrack CD.
It is one thing to have an awareness of the racism and discrimination that my own parents endured; but to sit on a panel with descendants of other survivors of American racism simply intensified my emotion. Ella Sheppard's father, for example, was able to purchase his own and his daughter's freedom from their master, but was not allowed to purchase his wife's (Ella's mother's) freedom. The family was divided because of the whims of their white owners. Ella's mother was sold to a plantation in Mississippi, and her father died soon after they arrived in Ohio after escaping race-riots in Nashville; so she knew extreme poverty and starvation. She was able to make a life for herself after returning to Nashville as a composer, arranger, member of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and eventually becoming a member of the Fisk faculty. Years after the end of the Civil War, she found her elderly mother in Mississippi and brought her back to Nashville to live in her home.
We are still struggling to make sure that Ella Sheppard receives credit for her work, since her name did not appear on many of her arrangements. I suppose