Sweet Honey Sticks to a Time-Tested Recipe

While trumpet blasts heralded Jericho’s fall, the Biblical account says it was the massed cry of human voices that finally made the walls come tumbling down.

It is impossible today to comprehend how such a shout must have sounded. But in listening to Sweet Honey in the Rock, thea cappella folk-and-gospel group from Washington, D.C., one is reminded just how potent a force the voice alone can be.

The five women singers who make up Sweet Honey may not be up to a Jericho-style demolition job, but their sound has the harmonic reach, dynamic force and rhythmic drive and complexity to seize and shake an audience. Add the authority of their music’s high ideals and deep moral convictions to the sheer presence of their voices, and Sweet Honey in concert can be an irresistible force (the group sings Saturday at Chapman College in Orange).

Sweet Honey’s music is anchored in the spirituals of Southern black churches, but its wide reach also encompasses traditional African folk music, work songs, blues and original settings of contemporary poetry.

The group’s thematic focus flashes between the eternal and the topical; its essential subjects are the laborious, often-thwarted reach for freedom (Sweet Honey’s founder and leader, Bernice Johnson Reagon, added her singing voice to the Civil Rights crusades of the 1960s as a member of a group called the Freedom Singers) and the power of music to stir, and perhaps transform, the soul.

Speaking over the phone recently from her home in Silver Spring, Md., Sweet Honey member Aisha Kahlil admitted that there are nights when she just doesn’t feel up to the task of stirring souls and making the sound of freedom ring. On those nights, Kahlil said, she looks to the power of the group and its messages to do some transforming work on her own spirit.

“Definitely, there are times when you are just tired. But once you get out there, you draw from the other people’s energy, the energy of the collective. Sound is a healing thing, anyway. Just the sound going through you is enough to motivate and inspire you. It always seems to work, somehow, because of the sound and the content.”

Sweet Honey operates as a democracy, but one headed by a powerful chief executive--Reagon--who exercises veto control.

“We talk about things as much as possible” in weekly group meetings that double as rehearsal sessions, Kahlil said. “But when it comes down to the end, she’s going to be the one who has the final say.”

All five singers contribute songs and arrangements, and all alternate lead-singing duties. (The regular Sweet Honey performing unit includes a sixth member who gives sign-language interpretations of the music.)

They also take turns as concert hosts. Night by night, the job of choosing the evening’s song list and introducing and explaining the repertoire shifts from member to member. To take some of the pressure off of Reagon, the members of Sweet Honey also have begun rotating responsibility for press interviews on a month-by-month basis.

Still, Reagon stands as the first lady of Sweet Honey in the Rock, which she founded in 1973 and whose current lineup includes Kahlil, Evelyn Maria Harris, Ysaye Maria Barnwell, Nitanju Bolade Casel and sign-interpreter Shirley Childress Johnson.

Like the other members, Reagon has a full-time job outside the group, working as an archivist and historian at the Smithsonian Institution and carrying on research into her specialty: the culture of the black church in her native rural Georgia. Two years ago, Reagon won a $285,000 MacArthur Foundation award for her musical and historical work.

Kahlil, who grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., had an extensive background as a dancer, actor, jazz singer and teacher when she joined Sweet Honey in 1981. It wasn’t her resume, though, but something about her look that led to her chance to audition for an opening in what until that point had been a frequently changing lineup.

She was at a low ebb when she came to Washington, she said: Her marriage had failed, her interest in pursuing a Broadway acting career had waned, and a chance to tour Africa with a performing ensemble had fallen through.

She was busing tables at a vegetarian cafe in Washington when Evelyn Harris, a member of Sweet Honey since 1974, asked whether she was a singer.

“It’s a mystery to me to this day why she asked me,” Kahlil said. “I went to the audition, and I got the part.”

Kahlil’s early background had been in classical music. In college, though, she turned more toward African-American art forms.

“It was more of an evolution, than a conflict” that brought about her switch from European-based to African-influenced expression,” Kahlil said. “Once I began to realize who I was politically and socially, my interest moved toward black theater and black dance. At the time I was coming up, I thought I was going to be an actor and a director. I never thought I would be doing so much singing.”

In 1984, Kahlil and her sister, Nitanju Bolade Casel, founded their own company, the First World Theater, to pursue their interest in theater and dance. Bolade Casel has also been a member of Sweet Honey in the Rock since 1985.

Blues singing has become one of Kahlil’s fortes in Sweet Honey, even though she had little affinity for the blues when she joined.

“Bernice thought I had a talent for singing the blues, so I went along with it,” she said. Kahlil remains something of a reluctant blues-woman: on nights when she gets to call the tunes, Kahlil said, she will include just one blues selection, compared to the three or four blues numbers she might sing when other members are picking the material.

Lately, Bobby McFerrin and the pop-gospel group Take 6 have shown that there is a large market for a cappella music. Kahlil said she enjoys their music, but sees no temptation for Sweet Honey to dip into the mainstream.

“I think a lot of people out there don’t want to hear the message songs about what’s happening on the political or social scene,” she said. “For us to go out there for the fame and money, I don’t think it would be Sweet Honey in the Rock anymore.”

The group, which typically performs only on weekends because of its members’ outside careers, came closest to a mainstream forum when it recorded a Leadbelly work song, “Sylvie,” for the 1988 album, “Folkways: A Vision Shared.” The Grammy-winning compilation of new interpretations of Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie folk tunes also included tracks by such pop powers as Bruce Springsteen, U2 and John Cougar Mellencamp. Reagon’s 1987 solo recording of the spiritual, “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder,” also was prominently featured in the widely hailed PBS historical documentary, “The Civil War.”

On its own, Sweet Honey records for the small independent folk label, Flying Fish (the group also released a 1989 children’s album, “All For Freedom,” on the Music for Little People label). The group is currently at work on its 10th album.

As with most politicized folk acts, Sweet Honey does a good deal of its preaching to the converted (some of the biggest applause on the group’s 1988 album, “Live at Carnegie Hall,” greets a song celebrating the defeat of conservative jurist Robert Bork’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court). While Kahlil cites Sweet Honey’s determined political slant as one reason the group isn’t suited for the mass pop audience, she feels it also has been able to reach listeners on a purely emotional level that goes beyond politics.

“There are a lot of people ready for the message, but a lot of people come to Sweet Honey when their friend or mother or sister or brother drags them to a concert,” she said. “And they end up being touched.”

* Sweet Honey in the Rock sings Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Chapman Auditorium at Chapman College, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. Tickets: $20 and $25. Information: (714) 997-6812. Part of the proceeds will go to Hart for the People, which provides food for the homeless in Orange’s Hart Park, and to Huber House, a residence for AIDS patients.