We're gonna have a good time - music, race relations and religion

Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1992 by Marlene Lily

I looked at her in astonishment. "Where?"

These days, when one of the many fine soloists at my Baptist church begins to sing, I sometimes feel I'm back in the Eastman Theater in 1958, listening to Velma Middleton. The words are different, the subject matter is different, but the rhythms and the harmonies are the same. The feeling is just as intense, maybe more intense. It's not unusual for people to cry in church; in fact, it's expected. There are boxes of tissues situated all around the sanctuary to be used by people who are weeping - for whatever reason. I feel no embarrassment when I'm moved to cry. Sometimes I go home exhausted and have to sleep for the whole afternoon.

When the hormones of adolescence were coursing through my veins, songs about love lost and found touched my deepest feelings. And it was feeling that I was seeking - and finding - in black music all along. Now that I'm nearing fifty, and the end of my journey is in sight, songs about human love are not as appealing as songs about Divine Love. I'm more interested in where I'm going than in where I've been. And after four years in the choir at Community, I'm still thrilled to be no longer in the audience, as I was in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, but up front with the singers and musicians who back up the soloists, the magnificent soloists, who are everyday people - nurses and office workers, teachers and sales clerks and deliverymen - not media-made stars. I'm thrilled that my voice is part of the harmony, my clapping hands are part of the rhythm I've loved for so long.

I marvel that I found my path to sanity and reality in the midst of the confusion our world offers to young people. I marvel even more that it was not where anyone said it would be, but "where it felt good." An old R&B song said, "Come on, let me show you where it's at! Come on, let me show you where it's at! Come on, let me show you where it's at! The name of the place is - I like it like that!'"

Jalaluddin Rumi, the great thirteenth-century Sufi poet, said, "Pay attention to what draws you." Carlos Castaneda said, "Follow a path with heart." I didn't understand what that meant when I read it back in the early seventies, but without understanding, I was doing it, led by grace and by the responses of my own inner being.

What happened to Jimmy? I haven't talked to him in sixteen years. The last I heard, his father had died and he was running the shoe store. A few years ago, I sent him a note about my church and the choir - enclosed a newspaper article about a white man with lung cancer who was singing in the choir. There was a color picture of him in his choir robe, singing with an oxygen tube in his nose. When he died he had a black gospel funeral. After all the times Jimmy and I sang and danced to "When the Saints Go Marching In," knowing it was a New Orleans funeral song, I actually sang it at a funeral, and I wanted him to know that. In my note, I asked him if he still had the Armstrong Plays W. C. Handy record, and if he did to make a cassette of it for me.