Yasmeen Williams | |
|---|---|
 Sweet Honey in the Rock performing in Japan in 1980 | |
| Background information | |
| Birth name | Betty J. Williams |
| Genres | A cappella, Gospel Music |
| Occupation(s) | singer, songwriter |
| Instrument | vocals |
| Website | www |
Yasmeen Williams (Also known as Betty J. Williams, Bheti Yasmeen Williams, and Yasmeen Bheti Williams-Johnson) is an American gospel singer and former member of the African American a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock.
Yasmeen Williams is the daughter of Baptist preacher Rev. Dr. Edgar L. Williams [1] and Deaconess Gladys E. Weaver Williams. [2] [3] Her father pastored the Second New St. Paul Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. for approximately 45 years. [4]
Williams grew up during the gospel explosion in Washington, D.C. As a youth, she received her training in gospel music from her cousin, Dr. Shirley Ables-Starks [5] [6] of the Joy Gospel Singers [7] and her aunt, Vara Simpson, the founder of two gospel groups – The Service Gospel Singers and The Spiritualettes, who were often featured on the Metro D.C. WOOK Radio Station for early Sunday Morning worship.
According to a recent interview, [8] in the mid 1970s Williams attended the Smithsonian Folklife Festival (then the Festival of American Folklife) and came across a stage that was set up like an old "stoop." She saw a group of Black women sitting on this simulated porch dressed in African attire. [9] As they began to sing a cappella, Williams shared that she could "see my sister’s face in each of those women," and she had the vision of singing with them one day. That group was Sweet Honey in the Rock.
About a year after she first heard them sing, Williams joined the D.C. Black Repertory Theatre Company. A community funded program, it was under the directorship of actor Robert Hooks and his wife Rosie. [10] The leader of Sweet Honey in the Rock, Bernice Johnson Reagon, was the Director of the theatre's Music Department. [11]
In 1976, after hearing Williams sing in class one day, [12] Bernice Johnson Reagon, asked Yasmeen to audition for Sweet Honey in the Rock and she was accepted into the group. [13] [14] She sang with Sweet Honey for 17 years. While her full-time involvement ended in 1985, she often returned for special events and recordings. [15]
Sweet Honey in the Rock traveled the world singing and grassroots organizing. [16] The group was booked internationally by Roadwork, another woman's group that was co-organized by Bernice Johnson Reagon and Amy Horowitz. [17] [18] [19] Roadwork not only worked with Sweet Honey in the Rock, but also created Sisterfire, [20] an urban, global multiracial women's cultural festival that brought together diverse women artists like Sweet Honey in the Rock, and other radical women artists. Williams was part of Sweet Honey in the Rock during this time period along with Bernice Johnson Reagon, Evelyn Harris, Patricia Johnson, and later Ysaye Barnwell, and was heavily influenced by the management and organization of Roadwork. [21]
The recipients of numerous awards, including a Grammy for their work on Folkways: A Vision Shared – A Tribute to Woody Guthrie & Leadbelly. [22] Sweet Honey in the Rock is an American institution which is featured in the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of American History. [23]
Major recordings and performances while Williams was active in the group include:
Yasmeen Williams, "Timeless." We Who Believe in Freedom: Sweet Honey In The Rock – Still on the Journey, edited by Bernice Johnson Reagon, Anchor Books Doubleday, 1993, pp. 75–86.
Williams has recorded four solo albums and contributed to two others with JeffMajors. [28] [29]
Mike Joyce, a columnist for The Washington Post who covered Williams and the D.C. music scene [38] [39] [40] wrote, "Opening was Yasmeen, the local singer best known for her work with Sweet Honey In The Rock. Her rich alto voice produced some sumptuous chest tones and silvery highs as she moved from a gospel tune to songs composed by Billie Holiday and Bob Dylan." [41]
Richard Harrington from The Washington Post said this of Williams' contributions to Sweet Honey: “The readings of the church standards are excellent, but the most memorable moments come in Sweet Honey’s introduction of two stunning West African songs ‘When I Die Tomorrow,’ uncovered at a Baptist church in Liberia and re-arranged by Yasmeen Williams-Johnson, is a compulsive swirl of polyrhythms and congregational communion.” [42]
Yasmeen is the mother of Summer Williams and has six grandchildren. [43]
Sweet Honey in the Rock is an all-woman, African-American a cappella ensemble. They are a three-time Grammy Award–nominated troupe who express their history as black women through song, dance, and sign language. Originally a four-person ensemble, the group has expanded to five-part harmonies, with a sixth member acting as a sign-language interpreter. Although the members have changed over five decades, the group continues to sing and perform worldwide.
Bernice Johnson Reagon was an American song leader, composer, professor of American history, curator at the Smithsonian, and social activist. In the early 1960s, she was a founding member of the Freedom Singers, organized by the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the Albany Movement for civil rights in Georgia. In 1973, she founded the all-black female a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, based in Washington, D.C. Reagon, along with other members of the SNCC Freedom Singers, realized the power of collective singing to unify the disparate groups who began to work together in the 1964 Freedom Summer protests in the South.
"After a song", Reagon recalled, "the differences between us were not so great. Somehow, making a song required an expression of that which was common to us all.... This music was like an instrument, like holding a tool in your hand."
Ysaye M. Barnwell is an American singer and composer. Barnwell was a member of the African American a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock from 1979 to 2013.
Carol Lynn Maillard is an American actress, singer, and composer. She is one of the founding members of the Grammy Award-winning a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock.
Thomas Andrew Dorsey was an American musician, composer, and Christian evangelist influential in the development of early blues and 20th-century gospel music. He penned 3,000 songs, a third of them gospel, including "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" and "Peace in the Valley". Recordings of these sold millions of copies in both gospel and secular markets in the 20th century.
Lucinda Gayl Williams is an American singer-songwriter and a solo guitarist. She recorded her first two albums, Ramblin' on My Mind (1979) and Happy Woman Blues (1980), in a traditional country and blues style that received critical praise but little public or radio attention. In 1988, she released her third album, Lucinda Williams, to widespread critical acclaim. Regarded as "an Americana classic", the album also features "Passionate Kisses", a song later recorded by Mary Chapin Carpenter for her 1992 album Come On Come On, which garnered Williams her first Grammy Award for Best Country Song in 1994. Known for working slowly, Williams released her fourth album, Sweet Old World, four years later in 1992. Sweet Old World was met with further critical acclaim and was voted the 11th best album of 1992 in The Village Voice's Pazz & Jop, an annual poll of prominent music critics. Robert Christgau, the poll's creator, ranked it 6th on his own year-end list, later writing that the album as well as Lucinda Williams were "gorgeous, flawless, brilliant".
Sallie Martin was an American gospel singer referred to as the "Mother of Gospel" for her efforts to popularize the songs of Thomas A. Dorsey and her influence on other artists.
Toshi Reagon is an American musician of folk, blues, gospel, rock and funk, as well as a composer, curator, and producer.
Reagon is a surname. People with that name include:
Cordell Hull Reagon was an American singer and activist. He was the founding member of The Freedom Singers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a leader of the Albany Movement and a Freedom Rider during the Civil Rights Movement.
The Freedom Singers originated as a quartet formed in 1962 at Albany State College in Albany, Georgia. After folk singer Pete Seeger witnessed the power of their congregational-style of singing, which fused black Baptist a cappella church singing with popular music at the time, as well as protest songs and chants. Churches were considered to be safe spaces, acting as a shelter from the racism of the outside world. As a result, churches paved the way for the creation of the freedom song. After witnessing the influence of freedom songs, Seeger suggested The Freedom Singers as a touring group to the SNCC executive secretary James Forman as a way to fuel future campaigns. Intrinsically connected, their performances drew aid and support to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the emerging civil rights movement. As a result, communal song became essential to empowering and educating audiences about civil rights issues and a powerful social weapon of influence in the fight against Jim Crow segregation. Their most notable song “We Shall Not Be Moved” translated from the original Freedom Singers to the second generation of Freedom Singers, and finally to the Freedom Voices, made up of field secretaries from SNCC. "We Shall Not Be Moved" is considered by many to be the "face" of the Civil Rights movement. Rutha Mae Harris, a former freedom singer, speculated that without the music force of broad communal singing, the civil rights movement may not have resonated beyond the struggles of the Jim Crow South. Since the Freedom Singers were so successful, a second group was created called the Freedom Voices.
Songs of the Civil War is a compilation album, released in 1991 by Columbia, that presents an assortment of contemporary performers recording period pieces and traditional songs, most of which date back to the American Civil War.
"Go with Me to That Land" or "Come and Go with Me (to That Land)" is a traditional gospel blues song recorded on April 20, 1930 by Blind Willie Johnson with backing vocals by Willis B. Harris, who may have been his first wife. It was released as a single on Columbia 14597-D, backed with "Everybody Ought to Treat a Stranger Right".
"What Are They Doing in Heaven?" is a Christian hymn written in 1901 by American Methodist minister Charles Albert Tindley. As of 2015, it has become popular enough to have been included in 16 hymnals.
Pearl Williams-Jones (née Williams) was an American gospel musician.
Flora E. Molton was a street singer and slide guitar player who performed gospel and blues music in Washington, D.C., from the 1940s to shortly before her death. She played slide guitar in the "bottleneck" style commonly employed by rural blues musicians, and she played the harmonica and tambourine.
Radical Harmonies is a 2002 American independent documentary film directed and executive produced by Dee Mosbacher that presents a history of women's music, which has been defined as music by women, for women, and about women. The film was screened primarily at LGBTQ film festivals in 2003 and 2004.
Gwendolyn Rosetta Capps Lightner was an American gospel pianist, arranger, and choir director and an influential figure within the Los Angeles gospel community. She was best known for her work as accompanist for Mahalia Jackson, and she was also a session musician for recordings by the Pilgrim Travelers, the Soul Stirrers, Brother Joe May, and Doris Akers. Lightner was also an active leader within the Baptist church for many years. Bernice Johnson Reagon, scholar, founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, and curator emeritus in the Division of Community Life and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History called Lightner "a brilliant exponent of classical gospel playing."
Portia Katrenia Maultsby is an American ethnomusicologist and educator. She is a professor emerita at Indiana University Bloomington and specializes in African-American music. She founded the university's Archives of African American Music and Culture in 1991.
Sacred Ground is an album by the American a capella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, released in 1995. The group supported the album with a North American tour.
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