This Juneteenth, Play the Music You’ve Always Known
The Daily quoted the Black folks who heard the Proclamation:
Sarah Ford said, “When freedom come, I didn’t know what that was.” Her uncle came to the yard and yelled, “Everybody free, everybody free.
Molly Farrell, a Texas bond woman, said, “Everybody talk about freedom and hope to get free before they die. Me and my mother left right off. Most everybody else goes with us. We walked down the road, singing and shouting to a beat of the band. My father comes the next day and joins us.”
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When it’s played with soul, music has a certain kind of magic. It illuminates. It shines. It pierces your heart and opens your eyes. The veil is lifted, and you see the Truth.
Sarah Ford and Molly Farrell heard that illuminating music in 1865 when news reached Texas that they were free. 150 years later, can you still hear the music? Or is it drowned out? The soundtrack to our lives first plays at home. But what do our childhood homes actually remind us? When you picture the conversations you did and didn’t have with your family, what emotions rise up?
Dr. Riana Anderson, a professor of Health Behavior, spoke about “Black Families and Mental Health.” Her childhood in Detroit came up:
I noticed that there were a lot of memorials, right? So there would be flowers, balloons, bears wrapped around a pole or post . . . And I remember very clearly when there was a shooting in front of my house one year, and we had this memorial in front of my house. It’s this reminder of what’s going on in the environment around you. So, you’re supposed to be commemorating this person. But for me as a young child, I just remember it being something that I now know as traumatizing or triggering. But at that point, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. What is this feeling that I have every time I look at it? This feeling of dread or this feeling of anxiety . . .
Dr. Anderson’s family didn’t want to forget their loved ones who were taken too soon. But in the process, little Riana was conditioned to fear and lost her sense of home. For many of us today, these “fear markers” still dominate, like some whispered curse that holds power over us. Our minds return to these sunken symbols, turning them over and over again.
100 years after Juneteenth, Bob Marley, in the prophetic and timeless way only he could, sang about release from this psychological trap:
Won’t you help to sing
These songs of freedom?
’Cause all I ever have —
Redemption songs,
Redemption songs.
Emancipate yourself from mental slavery;
None but ourselves can free our minds . . .
Bob Marley knew the sound of redemption. Likewise, when Sarah’s uncle and Molly’s father heard the music on June 19, they marched. They sang. They felt the freedom in their bones. They banded together and sought new homes. The proclamation crescendoed, like a mighty trumpet sound. The celebration flowed from the inside out. Because jubilation explodes in song before we know the words. Because freedom and movement, truth and sure-footedness— they go together.
Music frees the mind
Do you ever wonder what happens in jazz musicians’ brains when they improvise new riffs? Neuroscientists have some idea. Researchers studied these technical wizards of the stage, peering into the electric flows through their nerves, the chemical jumps between synapses.
Musicians creating jazz riffs exhibit neurological disinhibition: a freeing of the mind. The process-oriented “left brain,” with its many restrictions, opens up. The “right brain” (normally a passive observer) becomes free to channel its own power. To create. To construct a new tune.
The jazz maestro is freedom, personified. In that moment of epiphany on stage, he is “The Magician” fully expressed. He knows a new melody without needing to contemplate it. When he plays, everyone in the jazz hall hears something new, unique, free from history’s baggage.
This is why we come back to the singular musicians, the great storytellers, the visual artists who see what we don’t see. Their art reveals to us what we ache for. Their generosity invites us to partake, to enter rarefied realms. The artist takes us home, into the sacred space within.
And when we hear the music, all there’s left to do is shine, like the sun reflected on the marching bands’ trumpets — gold on Black — leading where only glory awaits.
