Music

Overview

Excerpted and revised from Sing Out Magazine article: “I Hear Music All the Time” Bernice Reagon, January/February, 1971

I hear music all the time. I have always heard it: so much sometimes that it seems I could never get enough of it out. Many times feeling on the verge of bursting because there is only one me and one voice. Something in me wants to get rid of my physical shell and be a song. This morning I heard sounds from Mt Early in me...last night Son House’s Death Letter Blues crep into my room, and then the hymn There is rest for the weary and then tunes I'd never heard before. They never sound new to me, my new songs. Sometimes it feels as if they have been there waiting, and they just feel like they come through me as a way to have fuller being as sound through me on their way to somewhere else. Sometimes I feel that music is in the air like currents and in order to hear, they need the air moving through instruments – like ‘my voice riding on the rising wind’ bringing song into hearing spaces... Music, here all the time, looking for a way to get beyond before and beyond hearing. Some songs I recognize, and can place. Many times they come in sounds and feelings; no words – crowding in and through me commanding to be sung, to be used, to be let out.

The music that has found release through me has always been related to Bernice Reagon, African in America. My songs usually have to do with struggling against oppression, with the feeling of keeping afloat in spite of it all...

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