Pictured: Corey Barksdale‘s Budda Bar I, Acrylic on Canvas 48″ x 24″

by Dr. Carl Dupont

It is a great honor to tour the country with the American Spiritual Ensemble. The group’s mission, to preserve and celebrate the Negro Spiritual, fulfills a professional goal of mine as a teacher, performer, and researcher interested in promoting the intellectual legacy of black musicians.

However, and most significantly, performing with the group also fulfills a desire I have to communicate with my ancestors. In this country’s infancy Africans and their descendants were prohibited from acquiring literacy in an attempt to control their reality in service to a white supremacist agenda.

In response, these mothers, fathers, architects, farmers, dancers, healers, inventors, mechanics, and preachers became musical storytellers in order to create music that could tell of their experience during enslavement. Without the aid of pen or paper they implemented the Negro Spiritual as a musical tool to transmit their hopes, dreams, fears, and aspirations into the present.

Whereas some people proudly show off their family’s tartan or crest, I can look to the Negro Spiritual as my connection to the past. I can hear the voices and feel spirits of the ancestors singing to me as I sing to them.

When I am performing with the American Spiritual Ensemble, I am on stage with a generation of talented opera singers that have sung in major opera houses and concert halls all over the world – and I can feel how proud we are making the ancestors – who endured the harshest of conditions – so we could thrive.

Honoring their sacrifice by keeping their music alive is a privilege and a duty. It reminds me to keep pressing towards a day for full equality and inclusion.

Dr. Carl Dupont is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. To learn more about the American Spiritual Ensemble, click here.