Two Trips to the African American History Museum
I can’t believe that I chronicled neither my 2016 nor my 2019 visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC)! ** Sigh ** Anyway, since I’m hoping to return to the museum during this month (August, 2024), I at least want to leave a blog post marking the earlier visits. December 26, 2016 I visited the NMAAHC for the first time just three months after it opened to the public in September 2016. (I have always been thankful that it opened before the change in presidential administrations because I believe that they would have done all they could to “kill it in the crib.” The wait list for tickets was months long, especially if a group wanted tickets. Still, the Joneses descended en masse to see our history gathered on one site at last. My nephew and godson volunteered to be my escort, which at that…
You Study Long,…
Monday, March 7 I woke up in a hotel bed in Bloomington, Indiana. I had one purpose for my stop-through there: to begin filling the holes in the information I had gathered on recordings of Negro Spirituals. At this point, I’ve identified more than 4,000 entries that met my criteria for the project, but quite a few are missing data that I believe are critical to making the results useful to the singers and voice teachers I hope to inform. Although a very early start would have given me more time to study, I decided not to push it since I was still tired from the MLA conference I’d just attended. Still, I was pulling into the parking lot a block away from the School of Music at the Indiana University at around 11:15. (Two things here: one, the students seem unconcerned about the potential of being run over by…