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"At the same time all this was happening, there was a folk song revival movement goingon, so the commercial music industry was actually changed by the Civil Rights Movement."
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"When can you understand that the music you play is very good? It is when people look at you but see no one, no one but the music!"
"As the strings of a lute are apart though they quiver the same music."
"To understand fully the importance of music, you must try to image a world without music! Such a world would be a world of hopelessness and boredom!"
"As I fingered my way through the songs, I felt my worries slough away. My music has always been the best remedy for my dark moods. As I sang, even my bruises seemed to pain me less."
"So when a man surrenders to the sound of music and lets its sweet, soft, mournful strains, which we have just described, be funnelled into his soul through his ears, and gives up all his time to the glamorous moanings of song, the effect at first on his energy and initiative of mind, if he has any, is to soften it as iron is softened in a furnace, and made workable instead of hard and unworkable: but if he persists and does not break the enchantment, the next stage is that it melts and runs, till the spirit has quite run out of him and his mental sinews (if I may so put it) are cut, and he has become what Homer calls "a feeble fighter"."
Explore more quotes by Bernice Johnson Reagon
"Personally I discovered that you could go through the academy as a young scholar, come out, and almost immediately have an impact on the academic environment."
"The voice I have now, I got the first time I sang in a movement meeting, after I got out of jail... and I'd never heard it before in my life."
"The Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, actually, was an effort to put something on the mall in Washington so American tourists could walk through America, and in their minds everything on the mall would be American."
"I learned that if you bring black people together, you bring them together with a song. To this day, I don't understand how people think they can bring anybody together without a song."
"I was at the Smithsonian for twenty years, and I'm still at the Smithsonian as a curator emeritus, and I still plan to figure out what that means for me at this point in my life."
"Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are."
"In fact when Sweet Honey was ten years old it was too big for me to run, and I knew it, but I ran it for another thirteen years because I couldn't convince other people to really do it. And this year, I'm not running it."
"One of the biggest things I understood in a program like that was that it allowed more young African American scholars to do field research in the Caribbean and in Africa than had ever happened before in the history of the country and since."
"It makes sense that whatever the topic is, it's more compelling if you can provide the audience with a range of perspectives, and you can cross disciplines. And you don't have to control what people take out of it."
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