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).