Songs for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
Several of our classes at Cedarwood have been working on singing and playing new songs in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Black History Month.
Our thanks to our Music Director, Diana Bright, for helping the students record their parts and stitch them together so we can hear their collective voices, even when we are apart!
Lift Every Voice and Sing
Our Black National Anthem is a hymn written as a poem by James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) in 1900 and set to music by his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson (1873-1954), for Abraham Lincoln’s birthday in 1905.
Amazing Grace
Amazing Grace was written by clergyman John Newton (1725-1807). Once he was a slave trader, and then he was enslaved himself but continued to be part of the slave trade after he was freed. It wasn’t until years later that he finally came to understand the atrocity of the slave trade. In 1788, he wrote an important paper called “Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade,” in which he lays out in very clear language how wrong the slave trade is and states:
I am bound, in conscience, to take shame to myself by a public confession, which, however sincere, comes too late to prevent, or repair, the misery and mischief to which I have, formerly, been accessary. I hope it will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was, once, an active instrument, in a business at which my heart now shudders.
This rendition of Amazing Grace is performed here by our Class of 2021 eighth graders.
Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
Swing Low, Sweet Chariot was composed by Wallace Willis, a Choctaw freedman in the old Indian Territory in what is now Choctaw County, near the county seat of Hugo, Oklahoma sometime after 1865. He may have been inspired by the sight of the Red River, by which he was toiling and which reminded him of the Jordan River and of the Prophet Elijah’s being taken away to heaven by a chariot (2 Kings 2:11).
Some sources claim that this song and Steal Away (also sung by Willis) had lyrics that referred to the Underground Railroad, the freedom movement that helped Black people escape from Southern slavery to the North and Canada.
It is sung here by our Class of 2026 third graders.
Diana Bright has found solace in music her entire life. Born in Portland, Oregon, she feels fortunate to have a family that loves the arts and music. She has taught and played violin in many genres, danced ballet, jazz, modern, tribal bellydance and flamenco, performed in musical theater, worked in interior design, performed in a pop band, managed a recording studio, opened a vocal academy, and is now the Music Director at Cedarwood.
Diana is fueled by her love for teaching music to children and promoting their health for their future. Music, like love, is a universal language that will carry our children through the most difficult of times and she is grateful to help them be more than a passive witness of its power.