Evelyn Harris to be honored at community sing-in

NORTHAMPTON — The Northampton Community Music Center will honor the memory of longtime member Evelyn Harris with the Evelyn Harris Community Sing-In at First Churches of Northampton on Thursday, April 30, at 7 p.m.

The event will feature a performance by the Ujima Singers and will reunite alums of the Ku’Umba Women’s Choir, which Harris directed for 15 years.

The public is invited to join in song as the Community Music Center revisits some of Harris’ standard and beloved repertoire. This event is free and open to the public.

Harris celebrated her 20th year as a faculty member of the Northampton Community Music Center last June and performed with the Afrocentric music collective that she founded, the Ujima Singers, just a week before her sudden passing last December. To honor her legacy and promote the power of music as activism, the Ujima Singers will present a free program of acapella music that Harris taught at NCMC, inviting the community to lift every voice and sing.

The program will feature music from Sweet Honey In The Rock, the black women’s acapella group that Harris was in for 18 years, and popular spirituals and freedom songs of the African American canon.

“Prior to the Ujima Singers, Evelyn directed the Ku-Umba Women’s Choir at NCMC for 16 years. Over this time, she instructed over a hundred women in music of the civil rights movement and other music of the African American canon, a powerful act of community education,” said Indë Francis, marketing coordinator with the Community Music Center. “Because the Ku’umba Women’s Choir disbanded in 2021, most of these women have not had the opportunity to gather in grief or in song. The Evelyn Harris Community Sing-In will be a powerful moment for both ensembles to unite in their shared repertoire and transmute our grief and civil unrest into harmony.”

Harris was born in 1950 in Richmond, Virginia, and demonstrated her voice from as early as five years old when she was admitted to her children’s choir that had an age minimum of seven. Growing up in tumultuous times as Richmond was slowly desegregating, Harris graduated high school as valedictorian in 1968 and went on to attend Howard University as a voice major.

While attending college, Harris was part of a class of activists who successfully got the university to accredit gospel choir and a jazz program into the music department. Eventually, when living in D.C., Harris auditioned for the African American women’s acapella group, Sweet Honey In The Rock, and from 1974 to 1992, found great mentorship and sisterhood with the ensemble.

She moved to the Pioneer Valley in 2002 and eventually found a powerful community connection through her voice and shared love of music, and for her desire to create space for Black music in the valley.

“Her voice alone inspired thousands, and those who knew her personally were blessed by her vivacious energy, pouring back into her in turn, so that even at her lowest, the singer was fiercely upheld by her friends,” added Francis. “As she became more invested in the Valley, Evelyn dreamt of creating a space in the Northampton area as a beacon of Black art, intergenerational community and political education through music.”

Harris was hired at NCMC in 2005 to teach private voice lessons and to succeed Justina Goldren in directing the women’s vocal ensemble, A Little Lunch Music. In 2006, the ensemble was reimagined to better represent Harris’ specific strengths and background and was renamed the Ku’Umba Women’s Choir.

In the wake of the pandemic, the ensemble eventually disbanded. For years, Harris and NCMC Executive Director Jason Trotta envisioned a program that would provide space fr connection and collaborative expression among members of the Valley’s BIPOC community, inspired by the exploration of the music of the African American diaspora and civil rights movement that had been the focus of Harris’ work. After many years of planning and discussion, the Ujima Singers were born in 2023,

The group continues to provide an intergenerational creative space now under the direction of Franics, who is a Northampton-born artist.

“We invite everyone in the community, especially those whose lives have been touched by Evelyn Harris’s musicianship, to join us. As Evelyn would have it, her passing is an occasion to lift our voices as resounding echoes of the great, great impact that hers has had on our community,” added Francis.

Francis said they hope to see a great turnout for this celebration of Harris’ life and impact in the community.

“We look forward to filling the First Churches’ sanctuary with soul,” added Francis. “In this time of particularly devastating fascism on the part of the American government, this program will equip our community with protest music and the courage to speak and act in solidarity with one another. We are honored and grateful that Evelyn chose our community to activate through her work, and we show our thanks by pushing on in her legacy and demanding justice through song.”