Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon (1942-2024)

A glimpse at the life and work of this trailblazing singer-songwriter/scholar/activist

I have had three different newsletters started for the past week and a half.

But when Toshi Reagon posted of her mom’s death in the middle of the week, I knew that the next edition of God’s Music Is My Life would be entirely dedicated to the great Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon: activist, singer/songwriter, ethnomusicologist, curator, producer, thinker and seer.

She first came into my periphery as the child of a feminist mother who frequented women’s bookstores in the eighties. Sweet Honey in the Rock, the group which Dr. Reagon founded and led for thirty years, found themselves in our car’s cassette player with their 1988 release, Live at Carnegie Hall, the project that brought the group their first Grammy nomination for its track, “Emergency.”

It wasn’t until 2012, after a near-death medical crisis, that Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon’s work rocked my world. Barely able to walk or sleep, I happened upon two documentaries: Radical Harmonies, which chronicles the incredible world of Women’s Music and featured Dr. Reagon, and Raise Your Voice, which is exclusively about Sweet Honey in the Rock. As I wrote in the very first God’s Music Is My Life post in 2021, Dr. Reagon’s vision completely re-directed my course. Music that was spiritual, cultural and political was what I’d wanted to create…and she did it brilliantly. She was a model that I began to study and learn from.

I searched for everything I could find: every album, every book, every pamphlet, every interview. I was lucky enough to see her in person twice: once at the Brooklyn Museum with her daughter, Toshi Reagon and poet Sonia Sanchez and again with Toshi at Skidmore College. Her ability to engage and draw an audience into a song, nudging them to sing along and become part of the song with her, was singular and effortless. She wrote about the importance of that act in the Sweet Honey anthology, We Who Believe In Freedom. She wrote:

“By going inside ourselves and singing specifically out of our lives, our community, and our world, we try to help those listening, in the sound of our singing, to create a celebration based on what they can embrace that is real to them at that time. And again, it is in church (where I first heard songs started by song leaders calling the congregation to help ‘raise’ the song into its own life) that I learned how to create that space. Our audiences are often urged to help us out with the singing, to embrace all that makes up who they are. With those experiences and with that load, they can lift and celebrate being alive at this time with this opportunity to choose, to be clear, and to be heard.”

From her rise to the national stage during the Civil Rights Movement as a member of the Freedom Singers to her emergence as a soloist on the folk scene in the late sixties to her presence in the Women’s Music movement with her group, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Dr. Reagon utilized song as a means of unifying audiences and raising consciousness on deep levels.

Rest well, Dr. Reagon…and thank you for the song.

Below are just a few great examples of the terrain she covered in her incredible journey.

To read more about Dr. Reagon, click here.

I also highly recommend reading Dr. Reagon’s seminal speech, Coalition Politics, which you can access here.

Toshi Reagon and Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, Skidmore College, 2015 (Photo by Tim Dillinger)

For more on Women’s Music