TV Review : A Spiritual Lesson in ‘The Songs Are Free’

The meaning behind the title of Bill Moyers’ loving document on the life and work of Bernice Johnson Reagon, “The Songs Are Free,” is twofold (at 10 tonight on Channels 28 and 15, at 9 on Channel 24).

Reagon, founder and powerful lead voice of the politicized a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, tells Moyers how the communal singing of the African-American community is based on the idea that anyone in the group can lead the song. It’s free for the taking.

At the same time, the songs are about freedom. Reagon, an archivist at the Smithsonian Institution, has culled and documented African-American history and music, and we see how she has managed to make one amplify the other. In lecturing on spirituals to an audience of church singers, she talks about where the songs come from--above all, that the act of singing is one of liberation.

In a revealing moment, Moyers and Reagon reveal how culture changes meaning: For Reagon, “This Little Light of Mine” is about self-worth, while Moyers’ white Baptist upbringing viewed it as a hymn to humility. As a child of the civil-rights movement, Reagon saw how spirituals became songs of resistence and how, in the face of bigots, the song maintained “the air as your territory.”

Reagon’s own activism is wonderfully framed in a film context, where we see her as a young woman singing with the group, the Freedom Singers, or demonstrating with one of her role models, Fannie Lou Hamer, who fought for inclusion of blacks on the floor of the 1964 Democratic Party Convention. She frets over today’s music (she connects 2 Live Crew’s sexism with militarism and corporate pollution), but concert segments of Sweet Honey in the Rock suggest that popsters could learn a thing of two from Reagon and company.