Behind The Quilts

[Music] good evening um welcome to tonight's program behind the quilts a musical experience which is offered as a live stream event in conjunction with the exhibit quilts and the stories they tell that's currently at the sandy spring museum in sandy spring maryland i'm lauren kingsland i'm a quilt maker and teacher and the executive producer of the exhibit first tonight we'll have a tour of about 40 quilts to share with you then we will hear from grammy award-winning musicians kathy fink and marcie markzer we'll learn about the uhuru quilt appeal from founder carol williams and guild member tammy morrow both of whom have pieces in the show and finally alice and weiss uh will the director of the museum will moderate a question and answer period before we begin the program a few thank yous are needed first of all thank you to maxine morgan for special as she deserves a special mention as the liaison to yes yeah a round of applause for maxie for her heroic uh coordinating of the call to artists the jurying the photo shoot collecting the quilts in display ready condition and personally delivering all of the uhuru quilters guild quilts to the museum for us thanks maxine this would not have been the show it is if it weren't for your hard work we really appreciate it um thank you to kathy fink for her boundless energy and her partnership her desire to make better quilts led to the application to our application for a maryland state arts council grant that kept us quilting together even during the pandemic we both adapted to 2020 together one of my very first zoom lessons was with kathy who was in mountain retreat in north carolina i was still here in maryland and we were trying to do this which you know we've learned but thank you kathy kathy envisioned this concert and has been the driving force behind tonight's live stream event kathy's quilt kathy has quilts in the show as a result of our apprenticeship together and her quilts authentically reflect her stories and represent hours of quilting experimentation as she stepped out of her comfort zone as a successful musician to try another medium bravo cathy i want to thank sandy spring museum for their partnership in allowing an in-person exhibit to happen here during the pandemic with strict social distancing and cleaning of course and masks and all of that thank you to this to the sandy springs staff for their support of this and the other virtual events that were related to the quilt show we put this exhibit into their schedule in january of 2020 little suspecting what was going to happen in that intervening year so they have worked really well with us to try to let this continue to happen even though we had to do it in a little different way the performance tonight is supported in part by the maryland state arts council the msac involvement in fact began in 2019 with the folk life apprenticeship grant with kathy and we're very grateful for their con their current support for the artists and the events related to this exhibit thank you also to jim robison productions for the videography of the tour you're going to see and tonight's musical segments art music and stories are forms of communication without an audience a listener a witness they can be very one-sided conversations thank you for being here tonight to hear our stories please enjoy quilts and the stories they tell hello i'm lauren kingsland today i'm at the sandy spring museum in sandy spring maryland to share with you um an exhibit called quilts and the stories they tell there are 10 artists whose work is represented here behind me is the work of kathy fink who is a grammy award-winning musician and this exhibit came to be because kathy approached me about studying with me through a grant from the maryland state arts council an apprenticeship grant i'm a quilt making teacher for the smithsonian i've exhibited i've made quilts and exhibited quilts for many many years so i was delighted to think about working with kathy to help her develop her skills as a story quilt maker the the work that kathy did kathy has six pieces in the exhibit i have pieces from my life's work that are particularly story pieces and we really wanted to include stories from other voices in this i met angela lanier whose work is uh included in this exhibit when she and i were working on humanities days at montgomery college angela is a faculty member at montgomery college in here in montgomery county maryland and angela is a member of the uhuru quilters guild so i was talking to angela about quilts because it's something we both really care about and she offered to approach her guild about contributing their story quilts so thank you angela for the introduction to the uhuru quilters guild of prince george's county and this is a primarily african-american quilt guild we i'm just thrilled to have a wide variety of voices telling their stories in this exhibit each of the quilts will we'll i'll be talking about the the show in detail but each of the quilts tells a particular story of the maker and that's really interesting but the quilt also tells just by what it is tells the story of who the maker is the the elements of material culture if you've thought about that who the who the maker is what her life experience has been what's her education what materials are available to her what has happened to her in her life how much time she has to work on this what kind of a workspace she has everything about the maker shows up in the quilt in addition to the story of the the story that she thinks she's trying to tell so there's a lot of subtext this piece is one of mine this is called modulation i made the story behind this is that my older son was about to leave home about to go out into the world so here's my house and my myself and my husband and our other son and there we are in our little safe house and one person is about to leave so it's about hopefulness and the natural cycle of things this was the only way i could talk about that this quilt is by shirley hodge it's called think about aretha franklin i believe there have been challenges in the uhuru guild that have to do with music that everybody loves so this is part of that and next to think uh by shirley hodge is a piece by catholic catherine wilson called sankofa beauty and this is it incorporates two adinkra symbols sankofa and dwafe uh so the the story of that is what catherine was trying to explain this piece is by carol williams it's called african ladies and this was in honor of a book by margaret musgrove called ashanti to zulu which was an alphabet book for children that was particularly afrocentric she was very excited about that book and this and made this piece this piece is by katherine wilson it's called ancestral spirits and it addresses the transatlantic passage and honors those lost during that during that time the gold she said the gold represents the value of the human cargo this is kathy fink's piece called names it's about the aids quilt project in 1989 panels to commemorate people who had died of aids the projects the names quilt projects director cleve jones heard a song that kathy wrote about this project and wrote to her and she had a connection then with cleve jones this is this quilt is also by kathy fink it's called empty chairs and she was thinking about her response to the pandemic this is also photo transfer images of pictures that she took of chairs that are now empty as a symbol of how how pandemic has affected us and our connection with people this quilt is by tammy morrow called aretha franklin and she wreath franklin is tammy's favorite performer queen of soul this quilt was made as part of an uhuru challenge here we have angela lanier's a tale of japan angela was fortunate enough to have an extended visit to japan and she has shared her trip all the highlights of her trip with us in this quilt winifred wallace made this piece in response to the tragedy of the falling of the twin towers in 9 11 on 9 11 in new york another one of the great outpouring of feeling individual feeling and and civic um grief that happened around the time of 9 11. sandra ely's piece bugging sisters is about her own childhood with her sister and the things that were important to them at that point when you look closely at this piece there are little tiny praying mantises all over the background sandra and her sister found this interesting natural object and brought it into the house not realizing that it was an egg sack of praying mantises who then hatched during the night and there were little tiny praying mantises all over the house maxine morgan's piece these arms of mine was made as part of one of the uhuru quilt guild challenges musical challenges this is based on a song by otis redding which her father loved and this evokes memories and stories of her father for her kathy fink's peace love found and lost was based on the discovery of a stack of love letters written from her father to her mother before they were married apparently kathy's family had a very kathy's parents had a turbulent relationship and kathy was thrilled to realize at the end of her mother's life when she found these pac these letters that there had been a real spark between them early on so this this piece is supposed to go be read up and then down the other side she used photo transfer and lots of embellishment to try to tell the story of love found and lost this is tammy marrow's quilt negro spirituals this is also a response to a challenge from uhuru about music each block represents a song when i come to the end of the journey going to shout all over god's heaven go down moses this little light of mine for example he's got the whole world in his hands tammy put these all together to honor that whole tradition of the negro spiritual this quilt is by tammy morrow and it's about black history month it is a group project so the different the different blocks were made by different individuals in the group and then put together in honor of black history month this is maxine morgan's quilt shaggy which is uh has photo transfers of the family dog who is clearly a very important part of the family this quilt is by carol williams it's called school days carol is a retired school teacher so the education of children is really important to her that's the theme of this quilt she's also the person who made the african ladies quilt that we saw elsewhere in the show that's about the ashanti to zulu african-american alphabet book winifred wallace made this piece it's called train tracks and it's her abstracted idea of the railroad tracks that were part of her childhood environment in new york city kathy pink's piece baby makes four commemorates uh a particular moment in the family's timeline they've just had the baby everything is in motion and she comes says in her description this is just one frozen moment in time when everyone is still these four pieces are my own work lauren kingsland they're all from my journal page series when i have some particular story to tell i like to work in eight and a half by 11 sheets as though i were writing or drawing in a journal so these are from that series this one right here is called so many ideas in graduate school i was told to pick one idea and build on it and make that into the project that was going to be my life's work except i can't that's not really how i work i have lots of ideas all the time and so rather than thinking of my ideas as a seed to plant to get one fruit tree i thought of my ideas as a rice paddy lots and lots and lots of little seedlings put together to make something this piece is called the emotional pond i was going through a particularly traumatic disruption in my life i was in the process of getting a divorce and every day i woke up with a different emotional state and i imagined for myself that i was a pond and each day a different bubble would come up from the depths of the muck at the bottom of the pond of a different emotion i sing in the choir i really love singing in the choir it's a very important it's a very important part of my life during the pandemic we've not been able to sing together and we have done some zoom choir compilations each person's singing alone to a camera and then the piece is put together so this is my response to zoom choir this is called tree stump and regrowth about having to make a change in my life and what i thought was my life getting cut down and then up it comes again in a new place kathy fink made this t-shirt quilt out of um garments that belonged to her partner and musical comrade marcie marxer kathy and marxie have had a wonderful long career as musicians involved in music for kids and music for social justice and music for fun so um these are shirts that belong to marcy this t-shirt quilt is also made by kathy fink kathy made this in a class that she took with me at the smithsonian in 2017 and i believe that this is where kathy and i met in terms of being quilters together we had kathy and marcy and i met years ago at the gaithersburg arts barn when they were performing there but kathy took my class and made this t-shirt quilt and decided she really really wanted to do more quilt making which is how we came to have the grant which is how we came to have the show this quilt is called the road home i made this quilt as a community participation project when i had my studio in the gaithersburg arts barn years ago there was a home and garden tour going on in the community and when people stopped into the arts barn while they were on the tour they were given a chance to write on a piece of fabric a response to the prompt home is dot dot dot 78 people wrote on fabric and told me what home is for them there's everything from someone's street address to home is where i feel loved home is where the grandchildren are home is my happy place home is an oasis for most people home is the place where they are with someone that they love this is my piece called blown out of proportion it reads from the top left to the lower right i was the pta president when my children were in elementary school we had this lovely idyllic happy little neighborhood everything was wonderful then there were some incidents and rumors got started and there was a great deal of upset and as a community leader i heard all about everybody's upset and it looked to me like our lovely little house the lovely little community was blowing apart so each of the houses is the same shape but they're just distorted and darkened and the windows break and it was completely all falling apart years later i exhibited this piece in a shelter for women who were experiencing homelessness and while i made the quilt to start with the ideal and fall apart the women at the shelter saw the quilt read the quilt in reverse they knew about things having fallen fallen apart and they saw it as an aspirational piece things coming together things moving toward a place of wholeness and harmony i've uh this piece is also by me lauren and it's called 80 roses when my mother turned 80 she was given 80 long-stemmed red roses as a birthday gift that is a lot of flowers a lot of flowers we used up all of our vases and all of the neighbors vases we had flowers everywhere i wanted to commemorate that really generous gift and this is a kaleidoscopic version of 80 roses there are actually eight wedges here each of them with 10 ribbon roses so and here in the center is the vase 80 roses okay sandra ely loves making portrait quilts and using fabrics that are patterned and not skin tone to create the illusion of an image when she showed this to her friends in progress they all said oh i see a baby i see an unborn baby in here she had not intended to put that in but this gold area looked to her friends like an unborn child which is why she has titled this baby on my mind sandra ely created this piece called blood on my hands commemorating four children who were killed by their mother which is a you know a gruesome story and uh makes me very you know makes me very sad we're all very sad to hear about this i think this is a particularly important story to articulate today because during the pandemic many many children are stuck at home with their parents who are stuck at home and all the pressures of all the changes that we've all been through are perhaps putting more children in danger and it's a good reminder to adults to watch negative feelings that come up and fight against them to be kind to our children not to let this happen these two small quilts are mine the upper quilt is called lady in a bottle and it was my story of feeling trapped in a situation that i couldn't control the lower picture is a barn portrait of a building that was on my grandparents farm in southern indiana where i played as a child next to these is a quilt by sandra ely called the slave the vest family history she has text written by one of her ancestors about their experience of being taken from africa brought to this country being a slave so this this is really her family history it's a very a very moving and poignant piece this panel is the first in a six quilt series that i did uh called quilted mementos that project was funded by the mayor the montgomery county arts council thank you very much and it was an opportunity to honor influences on my work as a quilt maker so this is a double wedding ring pattern traditionally the double wedding ring is made as a gift for weddings and commemorating love and long-term marriage um i had a long marriage and now i'm divorced and happily divorced but it was a transitional situation and this making this piece that is not traditionally colored and as a as a double wedding ring usually is was a really good way for me to process the shift from thinking i was loved in a certain way in a certain place to having to recreate a sense of being loved this is the back side of the love rings panel and this is called red hot it's an improvisationally pieced quilt which means that all the scraps from the other side and lots of other red pieces i had were sewn together as they came to my hand there's a fabric in here that has glow and dark lips so it was originally made for the joe boxer company when they made recreational garments for men and this is about passion this is about hakcha shirley hodge created this very powerful quilt called billy's fruit inspired by the song by billy holliday strange fruit with the trees this piece by shirley hodge called fall four flowers gone but not forgotten commemorates the death of four girls in the 1963 bombing of the church in birmingham alabama gone but not forgotten this panel called garden of eden is also part of my quilted mementos project and this is about that peaceful place of stillness that we have in each of us which is always available when we need to be rejuvenated grandmother's flower garden is a traditional hexagonal pattern i grew up sleeping under grandmother's flower garden patterned quilts that my own grandmother had made and the flower garden pieced motif seems like the perfect flip side to the peaceful garden on the other side sarita brewer has shared this marvelous family pictures album quilt with us she made this in a class with started this in a class with debra haynes who told her that a quilt will talk to you it will tell you what it needs and what it needed was images of her entire extended family so it just grew and grew and grew as she added pictures she's left one spot up here for family members yet to join the family this piece is also part of my quilted memento series this is a story that i have not been able to tell from my whole life because this path is how i see numbers in my head they've ever since i was old enough to understand about numbers as a very small child they have followed this curving path that goes up and down and around and around so when i do mathematical activities in my head i am running back and forth along this road i don't know if anybody else thinks of numbers that way but that's what i get and so this is really the first time i've been able to to articulate that what's really interesting is that um as the numbers get larger um they're i've just put numbers in at the the tens but following this path as i've as i have moved through life been 10 years old been 20 years old and so forth whenever there's a turn in my mental map of numbers when i'm that age there has been a major shift in my life and that as i was making this i was thinking back what happened when i was 30 what happened when i was 40. so i don't know if i have a prescience about how my life is going to go but anyway it's a an interesting idea to play with and it was a very fun thing to to play with as i was working on this piece this final panel in my quilted memento series is three separate areas honoring three important inspirations for my work at the top is a sample of a pattern called the irish chain it's a very simple traditional pattern i remember being put down for a nap as a four-year-old under a quilt that looked like that and i had a really hard time sleeping because i was analyzing how that quilt was made you know here's the little square with two white and two colors but wait here's a bigger square with two white and two pattern oh i was so excited i was so excited the middle the middle panel here is a pinwheel pattern and this is made out of samples of men's suiting fabric and this is in honor of the first quilt that i ever made by myself which was made out of scraps of men's clothing i had a job in an alterations room at a men's clothing store when we shortened pants for men they would just cut off the extra material before hemming and all this extra brand new material went into a box and they let me have the box of scraps so i made a quilt in this style out of that as my own first quilt here in the bottom is a reproduction of a painting by american artist frank stella the original of this painting is about 100 inches square which is big for a painting not big for a quilt but big for a painting it hangs in the national gallery of art down at the smithsonian i saw this about maybe 1987. something like that i was on a field trip with my family down to the smithsonian i had a child in a stroller and came around the corner and there was this amazing big painting what thrilled me about it was that i could imagine it's sewn into a quilt because it was concentric squares so lots of straight lines and two color progressions going at once the pink getting darker and the the primary colors i was very excited it made and that composition could be in a museum there was no reason in the world that a thought like his that happened to be done as a quilt should not also be given viewing in a museum and in this quilt by katherine wilson called get over it she addresses the issue of depictions of black children and watermelon and there's a lot of interesting writing on here uh the historical descriptors about that and this beautiful photo transfer of two lovely well-dressed you know healthy children black children who happen to be enjoying a piece of watermelon this is a quilt that i made this summer 2020. it was part of a call to artists to make quilts on the theme of why i vote by the national women's art caucus and i wrote on fabric just in marker reasons that i vote and then i used a a wonderful technique called the one snip star to fold a piece of fabric in such a way that i could make one clip with a scissor and get a five-pointed star american history lore has it that this was the technique that betsy ross used to create the five-pointed stars on the one of the original flags that she made i i'll take that you know i'll give betsy ross credit for understanding radial geometry so that's what this is and as i was working on this um john lewis passed away during the end of july and we were all thinking about the upcoming elections and voting and and people being disenfranchised being sure people got to vote so the outer border of this is part of a quote by john lewis that was published in the new york times in july 30th of 2020 you must use the power to vote because it's not guaranteed you can lose it i want to thank you so much for visiting our exhibit quilts and the stories they tell we appreciate your time here in this virtual visit with all of these quilts i hope that during the run of the show between now and the middle of march 2021 you will be able to come to the museum and see the quilts for yourself i want to encourage you to tell your own story in your own way thank you very much for your attention um i as i listened to this i realized that there are so many stories in that exhibit that i don't know well enough to tell you if you can at all get to the museum on the wall next to each quilt is the artist's story in their own words their story about what they put into the exhibit so if you happen to live near enough to sandy spring union make a uh you know make a reservation put on your mask and go and enjoy the show in in person because there's there's a lot of great stuff to see i would like to move our program along and introduce kathy and marcy kathy take it away i think my interest with quilting began in the late 1980s when the names quilt the aids memorial quilt was first shown on the national mall there were just under 2 000 panels each one 6x3 with the special things of a person's life who we've lost sewn into those panels with incredible grief and love and there they were all on the mall together a year later there were 40 000 panels and that year i volunteered with the quilt i made some lifelong friends i wrote five songs in honor of the aids memorial quilt and it began a journey that my partner marcy and i took of performing all over the country for various different aids quilt displays educational events and even a tour throughout japan touring with the japanese quilt volunteers who were bravely standing in front of audiences holding the panels talking about the lives of the people in those quilts well i made a quilt for this project based on the names quilt and some of the people that i knew and some other people who really inspired me here we are 30 years later as i was making my quilt about the quilt the pandemic hit and 30 years later i made another quilt of pictures of empty chairs signifying people that we've lost when we expected to have them at our thanksgiving dinners and our christmas dinners and our birthdays and our celebrations and so i took the original name song that i wrote in the late 1980s and added another verse to it and it's called names a patchwork of thousands of precious names there must be someone that you know woven together [Music] and i know that my name could be there and i feel the pain and fear and as human love and passions do not make us all the same we are counted not as numbers but as names we grieve for the lovers and families i pray they'll meet again someday but until that time i will carry flame as the numbers will not forget their names and i know that my name could be there and i feel pain and fear and as human love and passions do not make us all the same we are counting not as numbers a lover a carpenter a father a friend a sister minister a mom each memory helps us to go on and i know that my name could be there and i feel the pain and the and as fear love and passions do not make us all the same we are counting not as numbers but as names thirty years later and we suffer again we know it didn't need to be empty chairs are families friends the future's up to you and me and i know that my name could be there and i feel pain and fear and as human love and passions do not make us all the same we are counted not as numbers but as names and as human love and passions do not make us all the same we are counted not as numbers but as names thank you so much kathy that was amazing that was really really lovely well it was really an amazing experience making both of those quilts one of them there there are as as lauren said there's so many stories and part of the story behind my quilt about the names quilt is the original quilt that i tried to make which was a potential masterpiece disaster of physics [Laughter] with approximately a thousand pieces in it and i got deep into these drawings of what i wanted to do that at one point i just realized you know that replicates what the quilt looked like on the mall but it doesn't tell the emotional story that i wanted to tell and i scrapped approximately i'd say a hundred hours worth of work and effort and said i'm starting over and lauren being the amazing teacher she was she said well uh that's what happens and of course i'm used to that with songwriting but when you scrap a song that that you've worked on for a long time and you start another song it's a much shorter thing than working on something for a hundred hours and tearing it up and saying i'm starting over but it was great and it allowed me to tell the true story of the people that i actually knew who are on that quilt one of the people that we gave a close-up of was a friend of mine named david lemos who was the second executive director of the aids memorial quilt and so there's a real letter from him and the only other story i'm going to tell you about is from my friend jamie bates who was a volunteer with me i think the second year that the quilt was on the mall and we became very good friends and on that quilt is a letter from jamie where he wrote to me after we had become friends and we'd been corresponding quite a bit and it was pretty much before the internet he wrote me a handwritten letter and he said i'm planning my memorial would it be okay to use your music i want to use your songs about the quilt and somewhere i have that letter but i have no idea where it is so we just kind of replicated pretty much what it said and put it onto that quilt and it's uh it's a way of remembering these people and we personally know unfortunately a few people that we've lost from covid and it really made the connection for me to those empty chairs and i originally posted on facebook hey folks send me pictures of your people in the chairs that they love to sit in and then send me a picture of the empty chair and a few people sent me things that didn't have anything to do with what i asked for and then i just said okay i'll just use my imagination and i spent a weekend taking pictures of representations of of who we've lost so you know there there are the stories in the quilt they're the stories behind the quilt and then there's the story of lori and kingsland going yeah just keep going just keep going well there's also a story behind the uhuru's quilter's guild and i had the great pleasure of interviewing two members of the guild one of them being the founding member and i'm going to ask michael to um to cue that up carol williams is the founder of the guild in this video she tells the story behind how she did this we did the video on zoom together and i think you're really going to enjoy the history of this wonderful collection of quilt maker i am a native washingtonian i grew up in deanwood which is far northeast i think it's ward 7 and um i like like you had my one semester of home egg my grandmother had a treadle machine so i played around with that made doll clothes um and in i think for junior high graduation present my mom bought me a singer sewing machine whatever was was um good in 1967 and i had that machine for oh a long long long time i never really stopped sewing i just got into different interests i went from clothing and learning how to do everything with clothing that i wanted to do to crafts and i made dolls and teddy bears and tote bags and all kinds of crazy things um cross stitch uh cruel work hand embroidery i love and um then i decided okay let's do quilting i went to an exhibit i think at the renwick and i was fascinated by the quilts and decided okay this is something i want to try um i went to um i learned a lot from books and uh i live in in southern prince george's county and there was a group in the early 90s that the oxon hill quilters who had an annual show at the oxford hill library and i went to the show and they had a little card saying that they welcomed new members so i contacted the group and when they found out that i wasn't a middle-aged white woman they were kind of reluctant to add me to their group so i said okay let me find something else so i was reading an issue of quilters newsletter magazine and there was a mention of a group called the national association of african-american quilters and they were based in baltimore i contacted the person in charge uh actually she was the founder of the group barbara piatella i joined the organization and she gave me a list of people in prince george's county were also members and uh i contacted them i sat down and wrote about eight or nine handwritten notes because that was what you did and invited them to a meeting at the oxford hill library eight people came so it was nine of us and we met in one of the small rooms in the library and we decided we liked each other enough that we wanted to meet again and we've been meeting since 1994 march of 1994 and we've grown from eight people to a hundred and three at the last count at that first meeting when we once we decided we wanted to meet again we talked about a name we've wanted something with freedom in it but we didn't want to steal the name of the group the freedom be in a in alabama we said okay well what is freedom in another language well how about swahili so we got the swahili dictionary from the librarian looked up the word freedom and it was uh that's how we we got our names african ladies was part of a block exchange or challenge one year and they are from a book called ashanti to zulu which was the first abc book with people of color in the pictures margaret musgrove i believe was the author i used some of the illustrations as inspiration to make those blocks and just played with african fabrics that's the quilt that won the blue ribbon at prince george's county fair the other one school days is what's called a round robin i provided the background and the little school house on the corner on a little hill then passed it to the next person in the group and other people added the apple tree dirigible jack and jill going up the hill and the little dog we welcome everybody thank you carol wonderful to hear the story of the beginning of your guild and uh thank you so much for um for joining our project here i look forward to spending more time with the uhuru quilters and hopefully we can think of some other fun things to do together this whole exhibit has been incredibly inspiring needless to say one of my biggest inspirations is lauren kingsland who went on this journey with me me being her apprentice for a year through the maryland state arts council then the two of us putting this whole project together and the glory of her quilts is just so inspiring to me particularly i have to say that i love the virtual choir i love all of lauren's work but the virtual choir is a piece that i felt compelled to purchase and put in our home because in the pandemic we're all working in this virtual world and still trying to make art and still trying to make connection and in that art and connection lauren connected with the uhuru quilters guild and every one of those pieces is an incredible inspiration and so in honor of them i wanted to sing this song that i learned through my work with the highlander center in newmarket tennessee the highlander center is the place where long ago rosa parks went for workshops many weeks before she decided she wouldn't go to the back of the bus where martin luther king jr went for workshops where people like woody guthrie and pete seeger sang had workshops did social justice work and this song was composed by our friend guy carowan it's called ain't got a right to the tree of life now in the spirit of community we're going to have our virtual choir right here because we want you to sing with us and here's how it goes a little call and response i'll sing ain't you gotta write you sing back with marcy ain't you gotta write ain't you gotta write aunt you gotta write and then all together we sing ain't you gotta write to the tree of life like this [Music] right [Music] [Applause] everybody [Music] it [Music] [Applause] [Music] sisters [Music] of [Music] i'm [Music] god [Music] is [Music] right you [Music] one more time with us [Music] my ain't you got it right by guy carawan inspired by his work in the georgia sea islands where he and his wife candy went to work on voter registration in the 1960s literacy projects and while there they took their music and exchanged music with people who spoke the gullah language bessie jones the georgia sea island singers and uh much more happened and that song came from his experience there and after seeing the whole exhibit in person which i can't recommend high enough and i want to tell y'all i'm about the most conservative person around when it comes to going out in public even with my masks on ask lauren i wouldn't go to the museum i directed the video without going into the museum because there were going to be too many people but marcy and i did go to four was too many for us we did go to the museum and looked at everything and i i it's a whole you're having a great experience now but seeing it in person is another whole thing and i really recommend it they don't allow more than six people at a time and it's very carefully done and you know if you're double masked these days i say give it a whirl [Music] you

Channel: Montgomery Municipal Cable

Views: 79

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: MMCTV, Montgomery Municipal Cable, Montgomery County, Montgomery County MD, Maryland, Maryland County, Government access channel, MoCoMD, Mo Co MD, Kensington, MMC

Id: MSwx19Pkrjg

Length: 61min 32sec (3692 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 27 2021