Bernice Johnson Reagon, the founding father of the ladies’s a cappella group Candy Honey within the Rock, died on Tuesday in Washington. She was 81 and died in a hospital, based on her daughter, Toshi Reagon, who didn’t give a trigger.
Bernice Reagon was an unique member of the Freedom Singers, a vocal quartet that offered songs to encourage civil rights protesters getting ready to confront the police. The Freedom Singers have been related to the Scholar Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which despatched them to occasions throughout the South, in addition to to the Newport Folks Competition in Rhode Island in 1963.
She went on to earn a doctorate in American historical past from Howard College in 1975 and to direct the Black American Tradition Program on the Smithsonian. There, she curated a set of blues, gospel and non secular music.
She based Candy Honey within the Rock in 1973, drawing on African American music traditions from the church and the fields with unique songs. The group appeared at every thing from rock festivals to Carnegie Corridor, weaving political messages into their music.
Reagon was additionally a composer, advisor and performer on notable tv and radio sequence, together with the documentaries Eyes on the Prize (1987), in regards to the civil rights motion, and Ken Burns’s The Civil Battle (1990), to which she contributed We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder to the soundtrack.
She was a producer and host of Wade within the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions (1994), a Nationwide Public Radio sequence on Black church music that received a Peabody Award. She additionally was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1989 and was a distinguished professor of historical past at American College from 1993 to 2003.
Along with her daughter, Reagon is survived by a son, Kwan, her life companion, Adisa Douglas, siblings Jordan Warren Johnson, Deloris Johnson Spears, Adetokunbo Tosu Tosasolim and Mamie Johnson Rush, and a granddaughter.
