Bernice Johnson Reagon on Australian radio

Bernice Johnson Reagon, of the Freedom Singers, Sweet Honey in the Rock and the Smithsonian Institute, interviewed by Andrew Ford on "The Music Show" Australian ABC Radio, Aug. 17, 2002. Transcript at:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/musicshow/stories/2002/658714.htm

discusses 'If You Don't Go Don't Hinder Me'

The music on the community base level documents what's happening to the people and what people think about it. And it really is historical evidence that needs to be considered by anybody trying to reconstruct American culture. You must, if you're serious and have integrity as a historian, consider what people are creating to sort of support their lives and support their efforts to move and change their lives.

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... and performing after 9/11

One of the things we found in performing in the aftermath of September 11th was how much people who came to our audiences carried with them. It was not simply loss or the sense of unsafety, but also how were you going to handle all of the things that were thrown up in the air? One, an airplane is a bomb; two, the whole airline system was shut down; three, I don't know from one minute to the next whether I am safe or not. A sort of coming of age. The other thing that was really a crisis was the idea that there is still too much of a notion in our country that it's a white country, and therefore when you have something like that bombing and then the identification of a particular ethnic group as the carriers of that attack, then those American citizens who may look like some stereotypical notion were actually in great danger and there were all sorts of quickie lessons going out in our culture, saying "Look, Americans look all sorts of different ways. Don't beat them up, don't kill them, you might be really beating up an American citizen." So we as a culture, have been rocked by this and we found that our repertoire, that talked about the importance of respecting people no matter where they come from, and not pre-judging people because of their history or their legacy, remembering little things like Nelson Mandela was called a terrorist, just not allowing yourself to be caught up in a situation where you're not thinking and you're not questioning and you're not participating in a discussion because you're afraid that if you question or you criticise a move you might not be patriotic. And Sweet Honey's repertoire has been very, very important in trying to embrace that complexity of what we are facing. As we did that, then Enron fell apart, and then it was WorldCom, and they tried to say it was an aberration, but every time we looked up, we were saying how messed up is this economic system? And so the people who come into our audiences carry all of that, because that day their pension might have been wiped out. And we have songs that deal with all of those kinds of challenges and so our work has been fairly intense. We come to Australia with a very, very heightened sense of the importance of having music that embraces and names the complexity of challenges we face.