We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $1 USD  or more

     

  • Buy the Full Digital Album

  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    Includes unlimited streaming of Wide as Heaven: A Century of Song by Black American Composers via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 3 days
    Purchasable with gift card

      $15.99 USD or more 

     

about

How fitting that this album begins with two songs by Harry Thacker Burleigh (1866–1949) of Scranton, PA, best known for his published arrangements of spirituals, beginning in 1901 with Plantation Melodies, Old and New. His most famous arrangement was perhaps “Deep River,” still regarded by many as the definitive version. In 1892, a few months after Burleigh entered the National Conservatory of Music in New York, the great Czech composer Antonín Dvorˇák was appointed its director. Burleigh and Dvorˇák soon became fast friends, spending evenings together in which Burleigh would sing spirituals and plantation songs. Many have speculated that the haunting English horn melody in the Largo of Dvorˇák’s “New World” Symphony had its inspiration from those evenings.

Burleigh composed over two hundred original songs. Here are two, published during the height of his success as an acclaimed baritone soloist. First is the touching parlor song “Elysium,” with text by James Weldon Johnson (more famous as author of “Lift Every Voice,” set to music composed by his brother, J. Rosamund Johnson). The second, “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors,” is an unashamedly melodramatic setting of Walt Whitman’s poem of the same name. For Whitman, “Ethiopia”
represented the Black race. An old slave woman, wearing a turban the colors of Ethiopia, salutes the American flag as she watches General Sherman’s troops march by. When a passing Union soldier asks, “Who are you, dusky woman?”, the woman tells of “the cruel slaver” that brought her across the sea as a little child, captured “as the savage beast is caught.” Burleigh’s piano part imitates the sound of snare drums and
briefly quotes the tune “Marching Through Georgia.”

lyrics

Ethiopia Saluting the Colors
(Walt Whitman)

Who are you dusky woman, so ancient hardly human,
With your woolly-white and turban’d head, and bare bony feet?
Why rising by the roadside here, do you the colors greet?
(’Tis while our army lines Carolina’s sands and pines,
Forth from thy hovel door thou Ethiopia come’st to me,
As under doughty Sherman I march toward the sea.)

Me, master, years a hundred since from my parents sunder’d,
A little child, they caught me as the savage beast is caught,
Then hither me across the sea the cruel slaver brought.

No further does she say, but lingering all the day,
Her high-borne turban’d head she wags, and rolls her darkling eye,
And courtesies to the regiments, the guidons moving by.

What is it fateful woman, so blear, hardly human?
Why wag your head with turban bound, yellow, red, and green?
Are the things so strange and marvelous you see or have seen?

credits

from Wide as Heaven: A Century of Song by Black American Composers, released March 1, 2024

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

New World Records image

New World Records Brooklyn, New York

Anthology of Recorded Music, Inc., which records under the label New World Records, was founded in 1975.

We are dedicated to the documentation of American music that is largely ignored by the commercial recording companies.

contact / help

Contact New World Records

Streaming and
Download help

Shipping and returns

Redeem code

Report this track or account

If you like New World Records, you may also like:

Bandcamp Daily  your guide to the world of Bandcamp

On Bandcamp Radio

Featuring interviews with LA music scene pillar Kamasi Washington, and new London-based duo Mrcy.

listen now