INTERVIEW: Sweet Honey in the Rock to celebrate 50 years at NYC’s Town Hall
Photo: Sweet Honey in the Rock will perform at The Town Hall in New York City. Photo courtesy of Christopher Robinson / Provided by Cindy Byram PR with permission.
Sweet Honey in the Rock, the powerful and poignant music group, is celebrating 50 years of harmonic excellence in 2023. They will honor this milestone with a special concert Friday, March 24 at New York City’s Town Hall. In that historic venue, audiences will be treated to the expert singing of original vocalists Carol Maillard and Louise Robinson, in addition to Nitanju Bolade Casel, Aisha Kahlil and Navasha Daya, according to press notes. Herman Burney will play on bass, and Barbara Hunt is the ASL interpreter for the evening.
Maillard, a Philadelphia native, is particularly excited for the concert event, but a few short days before the gig, she was still waiting on the final setlist for the evening. The reason? Each concert is programmed by a different member of the singing group, and The Town Hall engagement will be led by Bolade Casel, which keeps Maillard and the rest of the members on their toes and ready for anything.
“Each one of us takes a turn to program a show,” Maillard said in a recent phone interview. “There may be some recollections, some videos, some stories. There might be a photo montage. I don’t know what she has planned yet, but we’re going to do some songs that people remember. We’re going to do some new material. We’ll do some of our standards. We’ll talk about things like we always do and welcome the audience to sing along, and hopefully everybody will be pretty rowdy and raucous and have a good time and talk back and sing loud.”
This is experiential music that is interconnected by spoken narrative and calls for social justice. The singers with Sweet Honey in the Rock, who have performed just about everywhere, including the White House, believe in passing on an important and positive message to the assembled crowd. They want to transform the audience with their songs and move with their words. As a press release for The Town Hall concert contends, this female-led African American vocal ensemble gives voice to the voiceless and disenfranchised.
Maillard seems particularly happy to be back on stage. The COVID-19 pandemic sidelined Sweet Honey, like all touring acts, but they are back and ready to celebrate 50 years in the music industry.
“Each person has their own style in how they want to engage the audience and tell Sweet Honey’s story and share the music and the messages,” she said. “Everybody has their own way of doing it, so it’s always exciting. And, we also understand that things can change in the middle of the show. You might have a setlist, but the person in charge might say, ‘Take that out. We’re not going to do that. Let’s do blah, blah, blah.’ And so we rearrange our system and our sensibilities, and we go with whatever the flow is.”
This 50th anniversary is “precious” for Maillard, who has performed on Broadway in everything from Don’t Get God Started to Home. She was there in the beginning when a group of actors in Washington, D.C., decided to come together and try out a few musical genres, including blues, spirituals, R&B, hip hop and African choral traditions.
“When we first started out, we weren’t thinking we’re going to be a singing group forever,” said Maillard, who did leave Sweet Honey for some time but came back in the early 1990s. “We all were doing our theater and acting careers, not trying to be a professional singing group. The singing group came out of the work that we were doing in our theatrical studies — music, dance, scene study, improvisation and stagecraft.”
They were part of the D.C. Black Repertory Company in the early 1970s, and Bernice Johnson Reagon, who would become the founder and vocal director of the company, was asked to start a group with 10 singers (men and women at the time). The original intention, according to Maillard, was to stick to the D.C. area and play local shows. Now, this many years later, they are the preeminent voices of a cappella singing, bringing African American history and culture to thousands of people. They are Grammy-nominated, have more than 20 albums and are favorites of Michelle Obama.
“So the fact that we’ve been here for 50 years blows my mind, and that’s the best way I can say it,” Maillard said. “It blows my mind because I can’t think of a female group singing the kind of music that we sing, traveling the way we do. We’re not commercial, so everything is very basic in terms of how we get around and the places where we perform. And we perform in some amazing theaters, so my mind is blown that we are still out here and making new music … always creating, thinking about what’s happening in the world, sharing our opinions and thoughts about how to make it all just a little bit better for each person, for your community and your family, country and the world spread out. So my mind is blown. I was there in the beginning, and now I’m here years later. … I hope there’s always going to be Sweet Honey in the Rock in the world.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Sweet Honey in the Rock will perform Friday, March 24 at The Town Hall in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
