Concert of African American spirituals meant to inform

By Bill Doyle
CFP Correspondent

WORCESTER - Pianist Olga Rogach and baritone Ron Williams will hold a free concert at Christ the King Church at 7 p.m. Friday, Nov. 8. They call it an “informance” rather than a performance because they plan to inform the audience while they perform.

Through music and narration, they will present African American spirituals that were sung by slaves before emancipation and as well as piano works of 20th century songs by African American women composers, including Florence Price, Margaret Bonds and Betty Jackson King.

“These spirituals and the history behind them are just amazing,” Mr. Williams said. “These were songs that were sung by the slaves sometimes to keep them on pace as they picked cotton or whatever they were doing out in the fields, and it was also a way of comforting themselves and finding hope for a better life.”

The concert is named “Crossing over into Campground” because slaves would sometimes meet on a Sunday afternoon in a campground where they could be together away from the eyes of their masters.

Before they perform “Wade in the Water,” Mr. Williams and Ms. Rogach will explain the history of the spiritual. Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave, traveled to the south more than a dozen times to free slaves via the Underground Railroad. She urged slaves to head to the streams, rivers and lakes to avoid being tracked by bloodhounds.

In biblical times, Joshua and the Israelites crossed the Jordan River to freedom. Before emancipation in 1863, African American slaves strived to cross the Ohio River to the freedom 
of the north.

The duo’s “informances” often evoke emotions from the audience.

“People leave with tears in their eyes, usually,” Ms. Rogach said. “A lot of people get a lot of information that they never, ever knew.”

Mr. Williams, 72, lives in Marlborough and he grew up in Michigan, but he journeyed several times to Alabama where both of his parents were raised. Mr. Williams, son of a Baptist minister, visited the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, site of Bloody Sunday on March 7, 1965, when police attacked Civil Rights Movement demonstrators as they attempted to march to the state capital, Montgomery.

Ms. Rogach is familiar with the spirituals because she has performed them with her choir and guest singers during the 25 years she has spent as music director of the First Parish Unitarian Universalist of Northborough.

The two have performed together for a decade for the Greater Worcester Opera Company and since last December they have presented nearly a dozen programs of African American spirituals and 20th century songs by African American women composers who battled racism to publish their works.

Ms. Rogach and Mr. Williams have performed at a few churches, but Christ the King will be their first Catholic church.

Dr. Elise Jacques, a retired gastroenterologist, sings and sometimes plays the piano in the Christ the King folk and festival choirs. For the past decade, she has been taking lessons from Mrs. Rogach to fine tune her classical pianist skills.

Dr. Jacques has attended several concerts performed by Ms. Rogach and Mr. Williams and with the blessing of Ellen Linn, Christ the King’s director of liturgical music, she asked Msgr. Thomas J. Sullivan, pastor, to invite Mrs. Rogach and Mr. Williams to the church and he agreed.

“There’s a great deal of spiritual depth,” Dr. Jacques said. “It tells a lot about the history of our country in the way we came out of slavery, but it also brings to mind what the African Americans went through during that horrible period. There’s spiritual context to all of that. It’s just a beautiful program.”

Mr. Williams said of Dr. Jacques, “We have our own groupie.”

“The parish is more than just liturgy,” Msgr. Sullivan said. “We try to advance the culture in progressive ways and thinking too.”

The parish’s music ministry, encompassing the two choirs, is sponsoring the concert that is open to the public.

“The greatest scar in American history is slavery,” Msgr. Sullivan said, “and African-American music, particularly songs that dealt with pre-emancipation slavery, are just so important. Those people found their hope in God. So it’s religious in that sense, but it’s also cultural.”

Msgr. Sullivan sent emails to Christ the King's parishioners as well as local colleges, professors of American African Studies and African American churches in hope of attracting as many people as possible whether they are Catholic or not.

The concert is expected to last about an hour and a half including a 10-minute intermission and will be followed by a reception in the Johnson Room.

Mrs. Rogach received a Master of Music degree in piano performance at St. Petersburg Conservatory in Russia and later joined the faculty there. She emigrated to Worcester in 1991.

Mr. Williams is a renowned singer, lecturer and vocal instructor. He has achieved national recognition for his work with opera companies in San Francisco, Detroit, San Jose and Boston.