Liberty or Death Suite (2004)

Artwork: ©Annie Ruth

Commissioned by MUSE-Cincinnati’s Women’s Choir, Catherine Roma, Director, premier performance, June 25-25, 2004. This work was commissioned in commemorate the Grand opening of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

…growing up in segregated Southwest Georgia, our teachers taught us about Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. It seemed that these women and the lives they led as leaders during the time of slavery were a model to my teachers and then to me about what it really meant to be Black and woman. Harriet Tubman’s life and those who dared to travel the Underground Railroad continue to signal to us that there will be times when one might face a situation that cannot be expressed as a ‘life and death’ issue. The time might come in each of our lives wher we understand that there is a place where staying alive is not an appropriate marker for the action required. Liberty, freedom is something that I think of as being essential enough to risk losing my life to gain it. So for Harriet Tubman and many others who have walked this path. I call this composition Liberty or Death Suite.

—Bernice Johnson Reagon

In 2004, Dr. Reagon was commissioned to write a work to commemorate the The Grand Opening of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, and to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the New Spirituals Project – a unique program by designed to commission women of color to compose spiritual works that address contemporary struggles for freedom and justice. The project was founded by Linda Tillery – musician, producer and self taught musicologist.

The ‘Liberty or Death’ Suite," was commissioned  and performed by MUSE, Cincinnati’s Women’s Choir, as part of the New Spirituals Concert Series in June 2004. The composition represents a unique musical expression of the myriad elements that inspired historical ‘life or death’ battles for freedom and survival, and which continue to sustain us in our ongoing struggles against oppression in contemporary times.

Peace Village Catches the Spirit 2

by Steve Sunderland

She came out, a gentle looking older Black woman, wearing an African pant suit in many colors of brown and green, eyes flashing, and with a surprising quiet voice, almost humming,

We’ll stand the storm, it won’t be long
We’ll anchor by and by
We’ll stand the storm, it won’t be long
We’ll anchor by and by

Slowly, the hundreds of us gathered to hear Dr Bernice Johnson Reagon, began to learn this chant, wave after wave of sound coming and going across the expanse of a new church, Allen Temple AME at Jordan Crossing,

We’ll stand the storm it won’t be long
We’ll anchor by and by…

Bernice Johnson Reagon shifted to her major point: “in being alive, we acknowledge the possibility of surviving the impossible things in our lives. We invent within ourselves and understanding of persistence: it is possible for us to actually live to find a shore.”

Dr Reagon was invited to come to Cincinnati for the premier of her new work, celebrating Harriet Tubman for MUSE: Cincinnati’s Women’s Choir. Peace Villager and MUSE choral director, Dr Catherine Roma, had seen the importance of this legendary singer of the Civil Rights Movement creating opening music for the inauration of the Underground Freedom Center. Dr Reagon’s roots stretch back to the early 1960s, to a group of singers that were formed out of the Albany Movement by SNCC that toured the nation singing the songs being heard on the marches, rallies, and jails across the South. We learned the basic songs from her, in churches, on picket lines, in training sessions and in the marches that dominated our work. She went on to document these songs in archives, recordings, exhibitions, film scores, and radio series based in her work for more than 20 years at the Smithsonian Institution. There as a historian she has made a place for music and the larger culture of the freedom effort and African American culture. Recently while celebrating her 30th anniversary of her amazing choral group, Sweet Honey In The Rock from which she recently retired, she had been asked by Dr Roma to consider accepting a commission for new work to Cincinnati’s historic expression of freedom and justice, The Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

Harriet Tubman, she continued, had a powerful image of what music and song is. These songs, she knew, could extend your ability to withstand the storm until you could do better.

Having songs in her work is amazing. It reminded the slaves that she would persist no matter what happened to her, continuing to inspire others to seek freedom, following ther stars and moving, holding on, wading in “God-troubled waters, I thought of myself in the same way: Is there a way in my music that I can assist those moving through our times with integrity. And helping us to know that we are not out of our minds in the way we see and feel about our experiences in this world.

We’ll stand the storm it won’t be long
We’ll anchor by and by…

“Don’t forget,” she continued, “that Harriet Tubman was challenging the property laws of the country by declaring that slaves should be free and taken to freedom. Each slave leaving a plantation was stealing property that belonged to someone else and people who assisted those slaves were guilty of the same crime. The Underground Railroad was that experience that had citizens providing safety for escaping criminals even at the cost of their lives and property. What was truly amazing is that the idea of participating in helping slaves escape moved beyond an idea of building a church with false rooms to hide slaves, or having wagons with false bottoms for hiding places for slaves. To put yourself in the same jeopardy as the people running away was different, unbelievable and inspiring for today’s freedom movements.”

As the choir took the many words of Reagon’s spirituals, laced with Tubman’s strengths, I was transported to a deep place in our history, almost as if the words and music could make freedom both historical and contemporary simultaneously. The MUSE choir and the audience merged into a great sound of the railroad, moving, crawling, stepping, walkin, and running to Jubilee. We rose at different times, waved at the chorus, sang our versions with the choir, and celebrated that old, tired, strong, and beautiful lady we had come to feel as Freedom. Harriet dance out of the blend, spun down the gigantic front of the church, and led us in our effort to leave slavery, to leave ignorance, to leave coldness of feeling, and into the light, the water, the journey and the sounds, the yells, shouts, and songs of ex-slave and still-abolititionists.

Healing rainbows appeared above us, dotting the walls, helping us to feel that special and amazing moment when freedom came…

We’ll stand the storm it won’t be long
We’ll anchor by and by…

To be continued…