Tuesday Tones

I kind of screwed up my calendar this year, which means that I missed the start of Black History Month when posting last week’s selection. For the last bunch of years I’ve been using this month to feature Black music in this space, and I’ll be doing that for the balance of February here (and probably into March). As is often the case, I’ll be featuring composers I’m not familiar with but should be. I’m starting with a work that is featured on an album that was suggested to me by the YouTube Music algorithm, and now, reading about the composer as I write this, I’m struck by the sad experience of this composer’s life and the fate of her music after her life ended. The composer is Margaret Bonds, and the piece is Montgomery Variations (1964).

Margaret Bonds (1913-1972) was among the first generation of great Black American musicians to achieve genuine renown in the classical music world. She was a close friend of Langston Hughes as well, to the point that his death plunged her into a depression that she never really managed to overcome. Bonds died of a heart attack at only 59 years of age, and because she had no will, the disposition of her archives–her compositions and her papers–was messy, to put it mildly. Many of her compositions were lost and some were literally rescued from refuse piles. To this day the copyrights of Bonds’s surviving works are murky, providing a stark example of the absurdity of extending copyrights as long as we have. Margaret Bonds has been dead for over fifty years, and she has no living descendants or heirs…and yet, we are still over a decade from the earliest her works might reach the public domain.

The work today, Montgomery Variations, is just that: a series of variations on a theme, in this case the Black spiritual “I Want Jesus To Walk With Me”. Bonds composed this work as tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. after visiting Montgomery, AL in 1963. Montgomery was a key location in the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s, and the Montgomery Variations are a meditation on those struggles and the way they played out. Bonds wrote her own program notes for the work (via):

“The Montgomery Variations” is a group of freestyle variations based on the Negro Spiritual theme, “I want Jesus to Walk with Me.” The treatment suggests the manner in which Bach constructed his partitats – a bold statement of the theme, followed by variations of the theme in the same key – major and minor.

The words are as follows:

I want Jesus to walk with me.
I want Jesus to walk with me.
All along my pilgrim journey,
Lord, I want Jesus to walk with me.

In my trials, Lord, walk with me.
In my trials, Lord, walk with me.
When my heart is almost breaking,
Lord, I want Jesus to walk with me.

When I’m in trouble, Lord, walk with me.
When I’m in trouble, Lord, walk with me.
When my head is bowed in sorrow,
Lord, I want Jesus to walk with me.

[Bonds continues:] Because of the personal meanings of the Negro spiritual themes, Margaret Bonds always avoids over-development of the melodies.

“The Montgomery Variations” were written after the composer’s visit to Montgomery, Alabama, and the surrounding area in 1963 (on tour with Eugene Brice and the Manhattan Melodaires).

In December 1960, “The Ballad of the Brown King” was dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr., and presented at Clark Center, YWCA in New York, by the Church of the Master and Clark Center as a benefit to Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Langston Hughes, the author of the text, was present on this occasion.

Decision
Under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. and SCLC, Negroes in Montgomery decided to boycott the bus company and to fight for their rights as citizens.

Prayer Meeting
True to custom, prayer meetings precede their action. Prayer meetings start quietly with humble petitions to God. During the course of the meeting, members seized with religious fervor shout and dance. Oblivious to their fellow worshippers they exhibit their love of God and their Faith in Deliverance by gesticulation, clapping and beating their feet.

March
The Spirit of the Nazarene marching with them, the Negroes of Montgomery walked to their work rather than be segregated on the buses. The entire world, symbolically with them, marches.

Dawn in Dixie
Dixie, the home of the Camellias known as “pink perfection,” magnolias, jasmine and Spanish moss, awakened to the fact that something new was happening in the South.

One Sunday in the South
Children were in Sunday School learning about Jesus, the Prince of Peace. Southern “die-hards” planted a bomb and several children were killed.

Lament
The world was shaken by the cruelty of the Sunday School bombing. Negroes, as usual, leaned on their Jesus to carry them through this crisis of grief and humiliation.

Benediction
A benign God, Father and Mother to all people, pours forth Love to His children – the good and the bad alike.

Here are the Montgomery Variations by Margaret Bonds.

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