Praise for The Sterling Brown Project
If you want to understand America you have to travel the "southern road." The poetry of Sterling A. Brown comes deep from the soil; it contains a mixture of folklore, blues, humor and a reminder that every goodbye ain't gone. The Sterling Brown Project is built on tradition and imagination. It's a literary excavation of discovery, a musical interpretation of poetry written by a man whose work came after the New Negro Movement. It's all made possible by the genius of Cornelius Eady, a blues lover with a voice that reminds us that the Sterling Brown Project is the big pot on the stove filled with sounds that are timely and delicious. — E. Ethelbert Miller
E. Ethelbert Miller is director of the African American Studies Resource Center at Howard University. A self-described “literary activist,” he is the author of the memoir Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer (2000). His collections of poetry include Andromeda (1974), The Land of Smiles and the Land of No Smiles (1974), Season of Hunger / Cry of Rain (1982), Where Are the Love Poems for Dictators? (1986), Whispers, Secrets and Promises (1998), and How We Sleep on the Nights We Don’t Make Love (2004).
Cornelius Eady’s brilliant settings in The Sterling Brown Project, and his band’s performances of those settings, do two things. They wrap us up in straight-no-chaser blues, and they remind us again how fresh and unexampled a poet Sterling Brown is — a poet of trenchant ironies and contradictory tenderness, who rendered often harrowing historical experience with lyrical precision, wild linguistic inventiveness and energy, and clarity and perpetual grace. — Vijay Seshadri
Vijay Seshadri is the author of 3 Sections (2013) which won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, as well as Wild Kingdom (1996); The Long Meadow (2003), which won the James Laughlin Award. He has worked as an editor at the New Yorker and has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, where he currently directs the graduate non-fiction writing program.
Where Poem meets Song, that is Cornelius Eady’s terrain. The New Blues. Electric Soul. — Bob Holman
Bob Holman is the founder of the Bowery Poetry Club and the author of 17 poetry collections (print/audio/video), most recently The Unspoken (YBK/Bowery), Life Poem (YBK/Bowery), The Cutouts (Matisse) (PeKaBoo Press) and Sing This One Back To Me (Coffee House Press). Bob Holman has taught at Princeton, Columbia, NYU, Bard, and The New School. He is the original Slam Master, a director at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and creator of the poetry record label, Mouth Almighty/Mercury.
Sterling Brown's achievement signals an embodiment of the blues as the will to live, as the essential beauty of African American transcendence, and this multi-disciplinary project born in the cultural stewardship of Cornelius Eady is a song and testament to the resilience of black culture and what that means for all of us.” — Afaa M. Weaver
Afaa M. Weaver is a professor at Simmons College, director of the Zora Neale Hurston Literary Center and the Writing Intensive at The Frost Place; Fulbright Scholar, National Endowment for the Arts and Pew Foundation Fellow, and recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.
The Sterling Brown Project by Cornelius Eady is a stunning and incredible reimagining of Brown’s bluesy, soulful poems set to new music and sung beautifully by Cornelius. Sterling Brown is the Godfather of Spoken Word and performance poetry, and Eady demonstrates why he is in these recordings. Brown’s poetry comes alive in Cornelius Eady’s voice and in his original music. Sterling Brown is an important part of American Poetry, and Cornelius Eady offers him much deserved R.E.S.P.E.C.T. — M. L. Liebler
M. L. Liebler is the author of 15 books and chapbooks including Heaven Was Detroit, I Want to Be Once, RESPECT: Poets on Detroit Music, and Wide Awake in Someone Else's Dream (winner of The Paterson Poetry Prize for Literary Excellence and the 2009 American Indie Book Award). Leibler is the founding director of both The National Writer's Voice Project in Detroit and the Springfed Arts: Metro Detroit Writers Literary Arts Organization and was named the 2017-2018 Murray E. Jackson Scholar in the Arts at Wayne State University.
No other poet-musician has given a better love treatment of an American poet so often ignored, whose classic works steeped in folklore, tall tales, satire, and often rough treatment of Black folks in American history. In songs based on some of Sterling Brown’s classic poems, Eady and Rough Magic’s songs take on a life of their own. In these tunes, Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, and Joan Baez reside. I hear America singing redemption songs at a time when folks are still taking to the streets to remind the world that Black Lives Matter! …This masterful music project — populated with sharecroppers and sheriffs, with white riots and Black folks surviving the madness of police brutality with strong women and men who keep a-coming is a fascinating exploration of Black poetic tradition meeting today’s moment with a mélange of Black American roots music that is right on time.… — Tony Medina
Tony Medina is the author/editor of seventeen books for adults and young readers, Medina has taught English at Long Island University's Brooklyn campus and Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY and has earned an MA and PhD in English from Binghamton University, SUNY. He is the first Professor of Creative Writing at Howard University in Washington, DC, Medina's latest books are I and I, Bob Marley (Lee & Low Books, 2009), My Old Man Was Always on the Lam (NYQ Books, 2010), Broke on Ice (finalist for The Paterson Poetry Prize, Willow Books/Aquarius Press, 2011), An Onion of Wars (Third World Press, 2012), The President Looks Like Me (Just Us Books, 2013) and Broke Baroque (2Leaf Press, 2013).
Black organizing & Black liberation in the spirit of Sterling A. Brown
BYP100 activists pose after a Confederate statue is toppled in Durham, North Carolina. (Photo by Rodney Dunning)
In his seminal work, Between The World and Me, Ta-Nehesi Coates writes,
“You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this.”
In the context of this project, the work of Sterling A. Brown — and of all the artists featured on this site — is embedded in legacies of Black resistance to oppression. They created: out of nothing; out of scraps of cardboard; out of prison-shop leather, out of a willingness to stare into the sun of their own terror: Black joy, Black beauty, Black truth, and a spiritual engine for the journey to Black liberation.
Art without action is decoration; to take aesthetic pleasure from the work of these artists without continuing the struggle they dedicated themselves to, as Ta-Nehesi Coates makes plain, is to dishonor their work.
For this reason, we ask you to donate your time and money to the grassroots organizations fighting for Black lives today:
Read Cornelius Eady’s forward in the new edition of The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown
Edited by the late distinguished poet Michael S. Harper, this classic collection includes a new foreword by award-winning poet Cornelius Eady and the original introduction by Michael S. Harper, as well as introductions to Southern Road by James Weldon Johnson and Sterling Stuckey. The result is a tour de force by one of the most distinctive poets in American letters.
The Poet Laureate Of The Jim Crow South:
forward to The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown
These days, it’s difficult to turn on the radio, or internet, or cable TV, and not feel you are living deep inside of a poem by Sterling A. Brown; Trayvon Martin, a black teenage boy, shot down while on a Skittle run; Sandra Bland, a black woman, pulled out of her car at a traffic stop for asking “why” when the cop ordered her to put out her cigarette, then found dead, hung in her cell days later, Eric Garner, put into a choke hold and wrestled to the sidewalk by cops for selling loose cigarettes, his cries for air, to be allowed to breathe ignored:
They swung up Johnny on a tree, and filled his
Swinging hide with lead …
It didn’t come off at midnight
Nor yet at the break of day
It was in the broad noon daylight
When they put po’ Will away…
They got the shotguns
They got the ropes
We git the justice
In the end …
That sound you hear, of black bodies falling, are they landing in the 1930’s when these lines were written, or are they right outside your window? There’s a part of me that regrets we’ll never again read new verse from Sterling A. Brown on this topic, but then, really, is there any need for Mr. Brown, the poet laureate of the Jim Crow South to repeat himself? The only items missing from these poems are clicks, likes and body cams.
The art of Sterling A. Brown is the art of a poet who refuses to blink. In his poems, as you will read, black folk are allowed to be, so the warts of a people are allowed to co-habit with the heroic. In my teen aged years in the ’60 and ‘70’s, that was called the art of being “real”. In that, I believe he was ahead of his time.
How do you live black, knowing that at any time you can be killed for being black? That question is the at core of the poetry of Sterling A. Brown, which still works as a revelation. His reply is long, complex, like a blues with an infinite variation of verses. And though the dialect and players may be different, because he got it right, the circumstances still sound like us.
Cornelius Eady
Professor of English
SUNY Stony Brook Southampton
Co-Founder, Cave Canem Foundation
One More
Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes, album artwork by Jacob Lawrence (1967)
Jacob Lawrence was born September 7, 1917, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where his parents had migrated from the rural south. After dropping out of school at 16, Lawrence worked in a laundromat and a printing plant. He continued with art, attending classes at the Harlem Art Workshop, taught by the noted African-American artist Charles Alston. Alston urged him to attend the Harlem Community Art Center, led by the sculptor Augusta Savage, who helped him to secure a job with the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. Lawrence was one of the first artists trained in and by the African-American community in Harlem. Throughout his lengthy artistic career, Lawrence concentrated on exploring the history and struggles of African Americans.
His early paintings were biographical accounts of key figures of the African diaspora. He was just 21 years old when his series of 41 paintings of the Haitian general Toussaint L’Ouverture was shown in an exhibit of African-American artists at the Baltimore Museum of Art. This was followed by a series of paintings of the lives of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.
Lawrence completed the 60-panel set of narrative paintings entitled Migration of The Migration Series, in 1940–41, which depicted the Great Migration of hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved from the rural South to the urban North, fleeing the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan. The exhibition of The Migration Series made him the first African American artist represented by a New York gallery and brought him national recognition.
In 1999, he and his wife established the Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation for the creation, presentation and study of American art, with a particular emphasis on work by African-American artists. Lawrence continued to paint until a few weeks before his death from lung cancer on June 9, 2000, at the age of 82