Good evening and welcome to our Waltham Public Library program, The History of Black Music with Dr. Cherise Barron. This is part of our series, A Year of Black History. My name is Deborah Hoffman and I organize programs and events for the library. Thanks for tuning in.
Before we start, I want to let you know how the evening will go. Our speaker will do a 40 to 45 minute. presentation and then she'll field questions. To ask questions via the chat function, use a Google account to sign into YouTube and feel free to write your questions at any time and then I'll read them during the Q&A. Dr. Cherise Barron is an assistant professor of Africana Studies and Music at Brown University.
She earned her PhD in African and African-American Studies with a secondary field of study in... Ethnomusicology from Harvard University. While her research, writing, and presentations have explored a range of topics in African American religion, music, and history, her current book project centers on contemporary Black gospel music.
This work elucidates the marked shifts away from previous eras of gospel performance and culture which have defined the last 30 years of gospel. Thank you so much for joining us tonight, Dr. Barron. Thank you.
I am thrilled to be here and I'm just going to share my screen with you all. If you will bear with me. I want to say while I'm getting my screen together that I am just thrilled to be a part of this series, a year of the history of Black, a year in Black history. Forgive me for misstating the name of the series, but at any rate, I'm thrilled to be a part of it. It's so exciting and insightful, and so I'm excited to share and excited to see what questions we'll get in the Q&A.
All right, I think I have sorted out my technical challenges here, and we are going to try once more to share. Here we go. All right. So again, I am going to be talking about the history of Black music.
And before I jump in, I just want to define ethnomusicology because I am an ethnomusicologist. And I know that I didn't really understand what ethnomusicology was until I was in grad school. So ethnomusicology is the study of music that is outside of the European art tradition or outside classical music.
or it can be considered the study of music in a socio-cultural context, or more simply we could think of it as musical anthropology. And so my work as an ethnomusicologist and as a scholar of African-American religious history and culture brings me to the history of Black music, and I'm very excited to share. Now in this presentation that I'll give today, I'm going to spend a lot of time talking about early black music history up to around the middle of the 20th century and then we'll fast forward to the music that we hear that we've been hearing in recent times and that will allow us to open the discussion up to talk about any era of gospel music that or gospel or any genre of black music that you'd like to talk about.
So, With that being said, I'm going to play a bit of music and this represents one of the oldest forms of black music that we have. And if you know what genre this is, feel free to put it in the chat. I will go, I shall go, I shall go to see what the end will be.
So many of you may already know that that is a spiritual. We just listened to a bit of the Fisk Jubilee Singers singing a spiritual. And the spirituals were a music form that gets birthed during the period of slavery, but also the second great awakening. So in the 1800s in the United States, we know that slavery as an institution in this country has been thriving for centuries by this time. But the Great Awakening was a religious movement, a Christian movement, and that Great Awakening helped to spread Christianity throughout the United States.
And during this time, enslaved folks were also being converted to Christianity. And as they took those European hymns that they were being taught, they mixed it with the music-making forms that they had kept with them that they had brought from West Africa, and that birthed the spirituals. Now, many people have lauded the spirituals, one of them being Bohemian composer Antonin Dvorak, who said in 1893, the future of this country Speaking of the United States, must be founded on what are called the Negro melodies and those melodies are American.
So in this time in 1893, by this time this music had gone around the world and folks were recognizing that this was a uniquely American music and that it was a music that was coming from people of African descent. in the United States. We also have the great scholar W.E.B. Du Bois speaking about the importance of the spirituals in his book, Souls of Black Folk. And in that book, which was published in 1903, he says the following about the spirituals.
The Negro folk song, the Negro folk song, the rhythmic cry of the of the slave stands today not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side of the seas. It has been neglected, it has been and is half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood, but notwithstanding it still remains as the singular heritage of the nation. and the greatest gift of the Negro people."He goes on to say this, he says,"'But the world listened only half credulously until the Fisk Jubilee singer sang the slave song so deeply into the world's heart that he can never wholly forget them again.'"So let's talk a bit about the Fisk Jubilee singers who took this music around the country and around the world. This was a choral group that was put together at Fisk University and HBCU in Tennessee. And these student singers took the spiritual music that enslaved folks had been singing and they concertized it, or they made it align more with classical music so that it would be palatable to people who were used to listening to classical music. And they took that music again, they took it around the world, they performed for kings and queens, and raised quite a lot of money for their school doing so. So I want to play just a snippet of the Fisk Jubilee Singers singing in 1909, one of the earliest recordings that we have of them. And they're singing Swing Low. Swing low sweet chariot coming for to carry me home. The Fisk Jubilee singers were taking this music that was being sung on plantations and they were turning it into a music form that could be recognizable and celebrated among people who weren't familiar with the original music. But The original music sounded a bit different from the concertized spirituals that we've come to know and love. And so this gives us an opportunity to talk about some of the characteristics of black music that we really hear when we listen to music that's, that when we listen to any black music, but that we'll particularly hear when we listen to spirituals that are not so concertized. So what are some of the characteristics of black music? What makes black music black? Well, part of what makes black music black music is the Africanisms or the African retentions. That means the linguistic or cultural aspects of African culture that are evident in this music and in the performance of the music. And some of these characteristics include Call and response or antiphonal singing. Call and response singing is a style of singing in which one person sings a line and then the group responds. And the group may respond with a repetition of what the lead may have said or they can respond with something totally different. But it's this interchange that is very much a part of black music making. So call and response is very important. And then this idea of singing together, making music as a group, where we are not only harmonizing together, but everyone can add a little bit of their own flavor to the sound. Everyone can add your own decoration of a note here and add your own rhythms there. And all of it comes together to form something that is greater than. the individual pieces. That group singing is a hallmark of Black music making. Another characteristic of Black music making is the use of vocables. Those non-words like all those kinds of sounds. And I know as I've said that you can think about songs that you've heard where vocables are being sounded. That is very much a part of Black music making. And finally, I'll talk about syncopation and polyrhythmic composition. Syncopation is putting emphasis on weaker beats. So what does that mean? When we think about music, most of us, if we've studied music at all in school, we've been taught about common meter or beating out time in sets of four. One, two, three, four, one, two. Three, four, one, two, three, four. When we think of the music as four beats in a measure, the strongest beats are the first beat and the third beat. But black folk are known for clapping on beats two and four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. That is an example of syncopation. putting emphasis on what would be considered weaker beats. And then polyrhythmic composition is simply sounding many rhythms at the same time, layering rhythm upon rhythm in such a way that a new composition is created by using several different rhythms together. Now this is not an extensive list, this is not an all-inclusive list of African retentions that can be found in Black music. I'm sure you can probably think of a few more yourself, but these are some that really stand out and that I expect that you'll be able to notice as we play more music samples through the rest of this presentation. Now, you may also be saying, well, we have call and response in other kinds of music and group singing and all of these things. They're not just in Black. And that's certainly true, but there's a certain kind of implementation of this music and this calling of African cultural aspects in this music making that makes Black music somehow unique in the use of these music making utilities. And so with that being said, now that we've... we've understood a bit of of what makes Black music black. I want to now play a bit of a song that would sound more like the spirituals that folks would have been singing on the plantations or while they were enslaved before they would have been concertized by groups such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers. And in this clip that I'm about to play, I do want you to listen for a call and response and the group singing. vocables and syncopation and multiple rhythms being sounded at the same time. This music that is going to be performed was produced by Bernice Jackson Reagan, the great activist and artist, and this was recorded in 1994. Now, when you hear this music, it will also probably sound to you, if you're familiar with Black church music, it will sound like what's called a congregational song. And we know that... a lot of the music that enslaved folks were singing can be traced straight into Black church music forms. So let's hear a little bit of this song entitled Lay Down Body. I'm feeling a little while on your radar I'm feeling a little while on your radar I'm feeling a little while on your radar Lay down a little while and at the end I hope you could hear the clapping, how it changed, which was giving us an example of polyrhythm. So again, that music is more emblematic of what enslaved folks were probably singing on the plantations. And then that music gets concertized and taken around the world by the Fisk Jubilee singers. Now, the Fisk Jubilee singers begin right after. the Civil War ends. We know the Civil War ends in 1865 and with the end of the Civil War comes the emancipation of enslaved peoples in the U.S. and the giving of citizenship to those who had formerly been enslaved. During this period, the government sets up some structures to help folks who had previously been enslaved reach for the American dream. But with the Great Compromise of 1876 and going into 1877, we see the end of the Reconstruction period. And with the end of Reconstruction, we know that the military gets pulled out of the southern states. The military had been in the south and they were helping to protect the lives of Black people. But once they are removed, And once reconstruction ends, then we see a period in which a lot of terror is enacted on Black people. We see the rise of sharecropping and lots of other war kind of terroristic treatment of Black people, I should say, that takes place. And during this period, this period becomes known as the nadir. The historian Rayford Logan calls this period, this post-reconstruction period, going into the turn of the century, the nadir or the lowest point in African American history because of all of the suffering that Black people were facing because of racism in the United States. As a result of that, in the 1910s, we see masses of Black people moving out of rural areas in the South. To cities, to big cities in the South and to the North, they're even moving West. This is called the Great Migration. So we get a mass movement of black folks in an effort to escape a lot of the oppression that is happening in the South. And with this movement to the North and to the West and to metropolitan areas in the South, like Atlanta, so cities in the North like Chicago and New York and Philadelphia, in the West, you know, we see folks moving to California. In the South, they're moving to places like Atlanta. As they're making these moves, they're taking their music. They're taking their music with them. And the mixing of the music as folks are moving during the Great Migration gives birth to a lot more music forms that we all come to know. This music gets commercialized, and it gets commercialized under the name of race records. Race records, that's actually the category of music that was taken up. And in these race records that were being recorded starting in the 1910s, we're getting blues, we're getting preachers preaching sermons on records, we're getting gospel music, all of this is taking place on these race records. So I want to play an example of an early blues number performed by Mama Smith. She's performing a little bit of the verse of Crazy Blues. Let's take a listen. Yeah, she's got some blues about a man not treating her right. And we see... the blues getting taken up, but also in the period in the 20s, moving out of the late 1910s into the 1920s, blues is really flourishing, jazz and gospel are really beginning to grow. And I want to talk a little bit about gospel music because that is an area that I spend a lot of time studying. And so some of the early composers of gospel music include Chance Robert Tindley, who gives us the song, I'll Overcome Someday, which eventually becomes We Shall Overcome, the song that we're familiar with in protest singing. And then we also have the figure of Thomas Dorsey, who is considered the father of gospel music. And he didn't really found gospel so much as he really made it normalized in black churches where gospel music at first was not being sung because folks wanted to hold more to the traditions of European church forms. But with Dorsey, we see the rise of gospel and the spread of gospel in those churches in the north that Would have originally not wanted to do that kind of music. So he helps standardize it. He helps take it around the nation and make it popular in black middle class spaces. Because remember, those who were in the rural south, those who had moved north and were starting churches and storefronts, they were doing gospel music and it was flourishing in Pentecostals churches. It was flourishing in rural Baptist churches, but Thomas Dorsey helped to popularize it in middle class black churches. And then ultimately it goes even into the mainstream. One of the people who helped to make gospel music popular and who took gospel music around the world was Mahalia Jackson. She was a singer who toured with Thomas Dorsey for about 14 years. She was also the first gospel singer to perform at New York's Carnegie Hall or Carnegie Hall. And she even sang Take My Hand, Precious Lord at Martin Luther King Jr..'s funeral. She was known to be an inspiration to Martin Luther King. And she helped to popularize Take My Hand, Precious Lord. Now, Thomas Dorsey wrote Take My Hand, Precious Lord in response to the death of his wife in childbirth. And he writes the song, and it has become perhaps one of the most well-known gospel songs of all time. Mahalia Jackson recorded and has sung that song in many places, and so I just want to play a little bit of Mahalia Jackson singing this revered classic song, Take My Hand, Precious Lord. I should take my hand, let me stand. Take my hand, precious Lord. Mahalia Jackson helped to popularize gospel music and she was known the world over for singing gospel. But in the middle of the 20th century, uh around the second world war and certainly once we move out of the second world war a lot of folks who grew up in church and who were originally gospel singers began to take the gospel sound back out to um secular music marketplaces and they popularized it through soul music and rock and roll uh uh rosetta tharp is one artist who helped to basically create rock and roll, but also Sam Cooke. So let's hear a little bit of Sam Cooke, who was a gospel singer turned crooner, soul crooner. Let's hear him singing a little bit of You Send Me. You know that I think it's worth hearing Sam Cooke talk a little bit about what he thinks or what he thought at the time made his music so popular because he was quite a popular artist. Here we're going to just see a tiny clip of him being interviewed by the popular culture icon, Dick Clark, in the middle of the 20th century. Here we have Sam Cooke. I estimate this way. I've been in the business now, Dick, for about six years, and I haven't had a song that wasn't a hit, so I was on the charts, I think, from the time I started until now. This is an amazing record. Now, Sam, most people don't get to do this. What's the answer? Now, here's a man whose career so far is about six years old in this field, not counting what went on before. What's the secret? I think the secret is really observation, Dick. What do you mean? Well, if you observe what's going on and try to figure out how people are thinking and determine the times of your day, I think you can always write something that the people will understand. He says, if you're listening to what's happening, if you're observing, you can write music that people will understand. I wanted to play that because I believe that the history of Black music is this history of Black artists responding to, but also reflecting what is going on in Black society at that time. Black music has always been speaking to and speaking for Black people in the United States. And so we've seen that happen at every era. We saw it with the spirituals when they were singing, Swing low, sweet cherry, coming for to carry me home, singing about the great hope of salvation and rescue from slavery. We see it. in even in the blues and we see it in what Sam Cooke is doing. And he spoke so eloquently about that. But I want to take a little time to go back to a clip that started to play, which is Elvis Presley singing a little bit of You Ain't Nothing But a Hound Dog as we talk a little bit more about rock and roll. You ain't nothing but a hound dog, I could cry all the time. You ain't nothing but a hound dog, I could cry all the time. Well, you ain't never gonna rather have your hand on a friend of mine. Now, why would I play Elvis Presley singing Hound Dog in the middle of a presentation on black music history? Well, I'll tell you, because once we move into recorded music, uh the recorded music industry and commercialization of of black musics we find a cycle in which uh black people often in um impoverished or or poor areas um whether they're urban or rural they're creating musics they're innovating and creating music um that is transforming communities and then that music gets picked up commercially and it goes in different places um And we see even with rock and roll being a direct descendant of black music. So I wanted to play Elvis Presley singing Hound Dog because that song is so popular in American, you know, in the American culture. But many people may not know that it was originally recorded by Big Mama Thornton about four years prior to Elvis Presley performing it. So here's Big Mama Thornton singing, You Ain't Nothing But A Hound Dog. You ain't nothing but a hound dog, still singing about man problems. Big Mama Thornton sings that in 1952. That was her greatest hit. Now, We've moved from the 1800s where we saw the spirituals moved into the post-Civil War era, and we see the rise of concertized spirituals. We moved post-Reconstruction into the nadir and then into the Great Migration where we see the rise of blues and the rise of gospel, the rise of jazz. And then we moved into this period where we're seeing soul and rock and roll. become prominent in America. And in this period post World War II, which we know ended in 1945, we see Black artists coming back from the war, or we see soldiers coming back from the war, and wanting to have the rights that they know that they should have in the United States after having served overseas. We see the rise of the Civil Rights era in the 1950s and the 1960s. The civil rights era didn't start with Martin Luther King. There's what's called a long civil rights period. So for decades, civil rights protests and action had been taking place. But we saw in the era of Martin Luther King, a kind of galvanization and music is fueling this movement. We see folks like Mahalia Jackson, again, singing. and she sings even at the March on Washington. And let's hear just a little of her singing How I Got Over at the March on Washington. Tell me how we had a love love love, how did I make it over? Well, the way that I could be Jesus, made the dark in me. The man that led us up foot, you know he hung on Calvary. And I'm gonna thank him much for how he taught me to never let me down. Yes, we're going to thank God because he never left me. She's singing that at the March on Washington, which is where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.. gave his historic I Have a Dream speech. In fact, she was the one cheering him on to to speak the words that have become so famous from that speech. But during the civil rights era, that golden or classical era of civil rights activism, we see not only church folks singing protest songs like We Shall Overcome and Mahalia singing How I Got Over, but we also see contemporary R&B artists taking up protest in their work. We see that in Martin Gaye. We see it. We see even these emphasis on Blackness and the beauty and power of Blackness in the works of people like Aretha Franklin. But one of the things that we see in this era moving in the latter part of the 60s is the rise of Motown music. And we see how they create a formula for creating music that comes from Black folk, but that is taken up. by folks around the country regardless of race. And so here we have an example in the Supreme Court. baby baby baby don't leave me oh please don't leave me all by myself i have got this yearning burning yearning feeling inside me deep inside me and it hurts so and it hurts so bad um So we see all of this great music bubbling up and at the end of the civil rights movement we see the rise of funk which is quite um quite a popular music form that's aided by James Brown who is singing music that is speaking of the the valor of blackness and speaking out against racism. but also creating these new music forms that eventually get taken up in hip-hop. All right, come on. All right. Hey! Now, hopefully in that clip that we just played of James Brown, you heard vocal bulls. You saw him dancing, using his whole body in the process of music making, and lots and lots of rhythm and percussion. going forward this funk music is again it's taken up in hip-hop and we see hip-hop um post the civil rights movement in the early 1970s when we've moved um to a a more integrated america um there is a lot of economic um depression among black communities and we see especially in the bronx Folks who are suffering from the blight in the Bronx. They are making music and creating cultures that are responding to the problems that they're seeing. So hip hop is originally born among Black and Jamaican and Latino youth. And it is a kind of protest. This early hip hop music is a kind of protest music. Now, today, we see hip hop as a very commercialized music. It's very commercialized, but that original music was very much so speaking to the issues of the day. So as I summarize, because as I mentioned at the beginning, we would spend a lot of time in the early Black music making periods and then fast forward to the present. We know that with the rise of the Black Lives Matter era, we have seen music that is pulling from hip hop, but also is pulling from these histories of Black protest and R&B and soul music making. And this is especially exemplified in Beyoncé's performance of her song Formation at the Super Bowl. And so I want to play a bit of that. It's about a minute and a half. And with that, I will conclude and we'll open it up for questions. So let's see Beyoncé. and see how she's referencing earlier periods of Black music and protest in her Formation performance. Who to me, you got some coordination You just might be a Blackfield Gates in the making Alabama, Indiana Make that Negro with that Creole makeup Texas Bama I like my baby hair with baby hair Thank you so much for listening to this presentation. And I want to reiterate. that the history of Black music is a history of observing and speaking to the issues of the day in Black communities across the country. Thank you so very much. And thank you so much for that fantastic presentation, Dr. Barron. It was especially wonderful hearing all those music clips and to have you put it all in context for us. It was really wonderful, so thank you. We do have a couple of questions for you, so I think we should get to those. One viewer says in the quote from W.E.B. Dubois, he said the spirituals were quote persistently mistaken and misunderstood can you talk about what he meant by that right so when he says that the spirituals were uh consistently mistaken and misunderstood and i'm just going to try to share that once more um when he says that he's talking about those unconcertized spirituals those spirituals that folks would have been singing that didn't sound polished to the ears of those who are used to listening to classical music. So the harmonies would have been different from what was expected. The rhythms, the sounding of multiple rhythms and the engagement, the ways in which the groups, the whole group or the whole community engages in that music making, it was looked down upon. At first, it was considered to be a kind of miss. misrepresentation of European music, as in Black people aren't able to perform classical music correctly or sing these hymns correctly. It wasn't originally recognized as a different music form that was melding two different cultures'worth of music. And so it was not until the Fisk Jubilee singers made it more palatable. to the ears of those who were more used to classical music. It wasn't until then that people recognized that there was actually there was actually worth and value to this music. So that is what I understand Du Bois to be saying in that quote. Thank you. Thank you for that. Thank you for that question. Yes, thank you. We have several more questions. Also, can you talk a little bit about Nina Simone and her music? Oh, I'm so glad someone asked about Nina Simone. Nina Simone was a Black artist, Black musician. She was a concert pianist. She was trained as a classical musician, but she had tried in her early life to succeed as a classical artist, but found more success actually singing other forms of music besides being a concert pianist. She ran into some racism that kind of hindered her. hindered that but she was quite an artist activist around the middle of the 20th century she gave us the song to be young gifted and black which she adapted from some work work that the playwright uh lorraine hansberry had uh written uh so she gave us uh young gifted and black which aretha franklin later records again she also um was quite an outspoken advocate so much or activist against anti-Black racism, so much so that her commercial success was in some ways impeded by her outspokenness as an activist against racism. And she was quite distraught about that because she wanted to be this great classical artist but she also wanted to see America do right by Black people and to see her career suffer because she was speaking out against injustice. She just, it was heartbreaking for her. But she did perform at Carnegie Hall. She did have a quite storied and famed career, but it's clear if you study her work and study her her own talking, what she says about her career, it was hindered. She didn't have the kind of success that an Aretha Franklin would have, that Aretha Franklin had, because she was so outspoken against racial injustice. Okay, thank you. Thanks for that question. We have a thank you from the audience. Thank you for creating this platform. Thank you so much for this presentation. It was very enlightening. Thank you. This has been wonderful and I appreciate your time with us. Loved having the music clips included. Thank you for all these kind words. Thank you for staying with me. It doesn't feel like it was an hour presentation. I enjoyed every minute of it. Thank you very much. Observing the issues of the day in Black histories across the country, are there specific genres other than hip-hop that you see as speaking into the Black experience currently? What a fabulous question. Thank you to the person who posed that question. So do I see it in other music forms today? On the commercial scene, right, the big commercial scene, hip hop is so dominant that it's hard to not see it primarily in hip hop. When we think about hip hop, hip hop is birth. We give. We give a birth date or birth year to hip-hop around 1972, 73, right? And then by the 1990s, hip-hop is, it's a force and it is the biggest music in Black American music. But it's also quite visible in American music more broadly. So we understand that the American music industry is raced. It's been raced basically from the beginning, right? We start with, you know, we start with the... If we think of starting the industry in the early days and even how we end up with race records, which were albums that were created for and to advertise to and for Black people, the music industry is race. We see it in charts, right? There's pop music and there's R&B. There's, you know, we had soul and then we had rock and roll, right? And all of this kind of representing race. I'm saying all of this to answer this question because hip hop is so interesting in that we've seen since the 90s, it has become a part of the American mainstream. it has become a part of the global mainstream right so it's no longer just um just a race or just a black music it's part of the american mainstream even though it's still its own you know chart that or you know it charts separately as hip-hop which is black um it is a global and an american mainstream music so it's not surprising that we see um hip-hop as being the place where people are trying to speak to the issues of Black people, because hip-hop has basically taken up so much air and for a long time. And in my estimation, that's very different than what we've seen with other, you know, other Black musics in the near past. But are there other musics that are doing this kind of work? Of course, if you think about non-commercial or those hip-hop artists who are not on the mainstream, not as big, right, they're not humongous, they're doing this work. But also we see gospel artists like Kirk Franklin, who re-recorded Lift Every Voice and Sing. That was a song that was recorded by the literal renaissance man, James Weldon Jackson, way in the early part of the... the 20th century he's re-recording that and he's trying to speak to the issues of the day in various musics that he's doing and in his collaborations with um artists who aren't gospel artists but are well-known popular artists um so we see it there i think we also we also see it among um jazz artists um and classical artists we see it in the taking up of um a lot of uh operatic works by a lot of composers like Damian Sneed, and there are others who are making music in classical and who are recording music in jazz. We see it with folks like Robert Spud Seawright, who put out a whole album that is basically riffing on Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches. And he is a jazz and gospel artist, Robert Spud Seawright is, I should say. So we're seeing it. So it's it's there. It's just hard to see because hip hop is so visible. But but it's there. The other thing, too, is that in the civil rights era, I think when we think about speaking to the issues of the day, I think most of our minds immediately go to the classical era of the civil rights movement where we see church folk or the music of the black church. being taken up in protest. And we see artists like Aretha Franklin and Martin Gaye who come out of the church taking up protest even in their commercial Black music making. Today, the relationship between the Black church and Black Lives Matter is different than what it was during the classical era of the Civil Rights Movement. And so we haven't really seen yet a real push of music coming out of the Black church, which is the space where I think a lot of people would be expecting it. So it's harder to identify where the music is coming from, because the Black church for so long has been this place where music bubbles up, innovation bubbles up, but the relationship of the Black church to the protest movement and to Just Black society in general today is a little different. So it's causing us to have to reorient to figure out where protest music or where music that's speaking to the day really is, which speaks to why we even got the question, where is the music? That was a very long answer to a short question. Thank you for that. We do have several more questions. So I'd like to. keep going and I hope you're okay going a little bit over. Okay that's fine. Let's see you touched on this a little. The history of Black music seems to be closely tied to the Black church and religion. Do you think that is still the case today, and are there any artists that are continuing this tradition? So, my immediate answer is yes. The Black church is still influential or still a site of creativity in Black music making. I will say that it's no secret that many artists, Black popular music, artists and musicians have bemoaned the state of Black church music in the, let's say in the last, you know, 10 to 15 years. There has been a rise of praise and worship music that, and this is a music that we tend to think of arising out of the hippie movement. So hippies getting saved or being converted to Christianity. And then they create this music that is pulling from, it's pulling from Black choir music, it's pulling from rock and roll, it's pulling from the folk music that are going on in the 60s. And it creates this new music form that's called praise and worship. Eventually, praise and worship makes its way into Black churches. And it becomes... a dominant music form in a lot of churches because it's very easy very easy to perform very easy to implement um and and some consider that to have stifled some of the creativity uh in the music that coupled with um uh the the the uh reduction of of people who attend church regularly uh and so you're not and the movement toward Black church structures in which you have a more professionalized musician team. So you're not birthing musicians who are raised in the church. So we've entered a period where it seemed as if Black church music or the Black church spaces weren't really creating the new creative music that we were expecting it to always have. Now, in the last five years or so, I... we've seen a bit of a turn. Some wouldn't like to hear me say something like this, but folks who are hip-hop artists, but very, very visible, like Kanye and Chance the Rapper, they've helped shine the light on Black church music and help people to realize that the church still exists and that music is still being made there. And so we're seeing a bit of a revival. or we're at the very early stages, I think, and I hope, as a gospel music practitioner, as well as a scholar of gospel music, I think we're in the early stages of a bit of a revival of music in Black churches. And so we're going to see more influence of the Black church moving forward. But absolutely, it's still there. It's still there. We see it in Kanye. We see it in Chance. We see it in a lot of other artists as well. Thank you. I'll try to answer more succinctly moving forward. Listening to the music, I became a serious vinyl collector. Chicago, Detroit, Ohio, and Philadelphia. I'm so grateful that the legends are appreciated internationally. Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. And vinyl's still in style, so that's good. That's good that they're collecting. Here's another comment. Much of today's Black protest music seems to be in response to police brutality and killings of Black people. And then one last question for you. Are there other issues facing the Black community that often get sung about in Black music today? Are there other issues that are being sung about? There is a genre of music that I would consider a protest music and that is Afrofuturism. So this is a kind of music, it's a Black music in which it takes up Afrocentricity or kind of pointing to Africa or of cultures that are of African descent, but also mixing in science fiction. and space a lot of times, introducing space or water, these sorts of things get taken up as part of the science fiction in the world that is created in this music. And that in my mind is another form of protest. That music, we see it in the parliament, Funkadelics, in George Clinton with the mothership. We see it in Janelle Monáe and her music. You know, in her, I want to say dirty computer. where she's basically, I may have the album name wrong, but Janelle Monáe is definitely engaging in Afrofuturism, as well as speaking to issues for the Black queer community as well. We see Afrofuturism being taken up by folks like Erykah Badu and Andre 3000. So that is another form of protest music that we can hear, where we can hear issues. And it is also a kind of creating or envisioning of a world that is better than the one that we inhabit right now. So it's a different kind of protest, but it's a calling to something better, something more, and an imagining of a different kind of existence than the everyday oppression due to racism that we see today. I actually think that's a great note to end on. So thank you for that. And I want to thank all of you for tuning in tonight. Thank you, Dr. Barron. You were fabulous. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being such a wonderful hostess as well. Thank you. And I'm going to, because we're already past eight o'clock, I'm going to end this live stream. Thank you, everyone.