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Bernice Reagon, co-founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock who soundtracked the Civil Rights struggle – obituary

Bernice Reagon, who has died aged 81, founded Sweet Honey in the Rock, a powerfully polemical all-female a cappella ensemble who mined a rich seam of African-American music including blues, jazz and gospel; while rooted in the church, the group’s message was equally relevant to secular audiences with its focus on songs about politics and freedom.

Sweet Honey, whose name comes from a verse in Psalm 81 about a land so rich that honey flows from the rocks, made frequent visits to this country, including a two-hour set at the Royal Albert Hall in 1988. A Daily Telegraph critic observed that while the first part was a lecture on the Third World, the second was an uplifting demonstration of their sheer technical skill and mastery of harmonic forms, ranging from something akin to plainchant in Song of the Exiled to African chanting in Stranger Blues.

Bernice Reagon wrote many of their numbers. “The music must be powerful and intense,” she told the New York Times. “And the range must be wide… I insist that in the course of the evening we shatter people’s concepts about what should come out of women’s throats.”

By the time they played a packed Royal Festival Hall in 1999, Sweet Honey’s themes were broader than ever, with songs about domestic violence, corporate greed, racism, Aids and the environment. Yet the music remained exhilarating. As Bernice Reagon once said: “You cannot sing a song and not change your condition.”

She was born Bernice Johnson near Albany, in south-west Georgia, on October 4 1942, one of eight children of a Baptist minister and his wife. Her father’s church did not have a piano and she was raised in a tradition of unaccompanied singing and handclapping.

 

 

The Freedom Singers in the early 1960s, l-r, Charles Neblett, Rutha Mae Harris, Cordell Reagon and Bernice Reagon - Archive Photos/Getty© Provided by The Telegraph

Her arrest while taking part in a protest march against segregation helped with making sense of the music from her childhood. “I was in jail when I learnt what the church songs meant,” she told The Atlanta Constitution.

It also led to her expulsion from Albany State College, and she ran off to stay with the musical campaigner Pete Seeger and his wife Toshi. Seeger suggested that she form the Freedom Singers, a touring vocal quartet to harness support for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s civil rights campaign. The original members included Cordell Reagon, whom she married in 1963.

 

 

Performing with Pete Seeger at the Poor People's March in Washington in 1968 - Diana Davies/AP© Provided by The Telegraph

The Freedom Singers criss-crossed America, creating a soundtrack to the civil rights movement with songs such as We Shall Overcome, Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho and We Shall Not Be Moved. Bernice Reagon told how their music “served to bind segments of the black community together in jails and on marches”. 

It also became her life’s work. Having completed her degree at Spelman College, Atlanta, she received her PhD in 1975 from Howard University in Washington DC for her study of black choral music.She formed Sweet Honey in 1973 and the following year joined the Smithsonian Institute as folklorist and director of the Black American Culture Programme, nudging that venerable organisation towards a wider interpretation of the country’s history. Later she was professor of history at American University in DC. 

In 2003 Bernice Reagon’s pop-infused opera The Temptation of St Anthony (with the experimental theatre director Robert Wilson), based on Gustave Flaubert’s hallucinatory novel about the third-century hermit who is tempted by the pleasures of food and sex, was seen in London at Sadler’s Wells. Although the lyrics strayed from pastiche biblical (“Everything begotten will die”) into West Coast psychobabble (“Does matter matter?”), they were, noted Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph, “simple, serviceable and beautifully sung”. 

Bernice Reagon’s marriage to Cordell Reagon was dissolved in 1967; his murder in 1996 remains unsolved. She is survived by their son and daughter.

Bernice Reagon, born October 4 1942, died July 16 2024