The New Negro Spirituals Songbook

We are taking part in a legacy that stretches back to the beginning of music. Inspiration for these arrangements came from a lifetime of exposure to the Negro Spiritual. Over decades of hearing and singing this music, I struggled to reconcile the profundity of the art form with the simplicity of the arrangements available. It was a dissonance that I first noticed as a kid, when I joined my first professional chorus. The Lucy Kinchen Chorale, based out of Oakland CA, championed the spiritual in concert, and their arrangements were incredibly lush and powerful. But any time I would hear Spirituals elsewhere as solo pieces, they sounded comparatively square and simple. That struck me as strange. Even as a teenager, I realized that the terrible circumstances endured by our enslaved ancestors demand a greater sense of reverence for the art form that grew through them. 

And so, I started creating my own arrangements of the songs that I like best, based on the soundscapes that I was hearing in my head. I wanted these arrangements to match the grand scale of emotion that the songs suggest, and their history demands. After twenty-plus years of writing and tweaking, I had collected enough material to create an entire one-man show. This songbook was the next natural step in that journey.