Our Souls Have Grown Deep Like the Rivers

Our Souls Have Grown Deep Like The Rivers - Black Poets Read Their Work

2 CD's (in one zip file)
Read By Various

Book Description
Track Listing Below

A very smartly assembled two-disc compilation of African American poetry, Our Souls Have Grown Deep Like the Rivers digs deep to unearth a wealth of unheard and rare material spanning almost the entire 20th century. The collection features some of the greatest names in black literature, and--as Al Young points out in the liner notes--it can be a revelation to hear, for instance, Harlem Renaissance leader Langston Hughes pronounce the word "Harlem" with utter pride and joy. Other notables include Ishmael Reed, Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, Gil Scott-Heron, Maya Angelou, Rita Dove, W.E.B. DuBois, the Last Poets, Public Enemy, Wanda Coleman... You get the picture--it's sort of a greatest-hits of black spoken word. But it's too scattershot a set to be called definitive--anyone can bemoan the absence of this or that poet--but it is also a tremendously interesting document of hope and loss and rage and joy and perseverance--and, above all, remarkable poetry, works that each gain from the original authors' reading of their poem. Amiri Baraka's sonorous recitation of "Bang, Bang Outishly," a beat-era work dedicated to Thelonious Monk, is worth the price of admission by itself.

Tracks
1-01 Langston Hughes - The Negro Speaks of Rivers
1-02 Langston Hughes - I, Too
1-03 W.E. B. DuBois - The Atlanta Years
1-04 Claude McKay - If We Must Die
1-05 Claude McKay - St. Isaac's Church, Petrograd
1-06 Claude McKay - The Tropics in New York
1-07 James Weldon Johnson - The Creation
1-08 James Weldon Johnson - We to America
1-09 Arna Bontemps - Nocturne at Bethesda
1-10 Countee Cullen - Heritage
1-11 Melvin Tolson - Dark Symphony
1-12 Sterling A. Brown - Ma Rainey
1-13 Sterling A. Brown - Strong Man
1-14 Margaret Walker - For My People
1-15 Margaret Walker - Kissie Lee
1-16 Gwendolyn Brooks - The Mother
1-17 Langston Hughes - Dream Montage, Good Morning Harlem, Same in Blues, Comment on Curb
1-18 Gwendolyn Brooks - We Real Cool
1-19 Robert Hayden - Those Winter Sundays
1-20 Robert Hayden - Frederick Douglas
1-21 Maya Angelou - Sepia Fashion Show
1-22 Maya Angelou - To A Man
1-23 Amiri Baraka - Freedom Suite (for Sonny Rollins & Franz Kline)
1-24 Derek Walcott - Crusoe's Island
1-25 Audre Lorde - Dahomey
1-26 June Jordan - In Memoriam, Martin Luther King Jr
1-27 The Last Poets - Run Nigger
1-28 Lucille Clifton - Admonitions
1-29 Nikki Giovanni - Nikki-Rosa
1-30 Al Young - A Dance For Militant Dilettantes
1-31 Michael S. Harper - Dear John, Dear Coltrane
1-32 Michael S. Harper - Rueben, Rueben
1-31 Nikki Giovanni - My House
1-32 Ishmael Reed - Flight To Canada
1-33 Ishmael Reed - Betty's Ball Blues
1-34 Sonia Sanchez - Wounded In The House of A Friend
1-35 Sonia Sanchez - Song No. 2
1-36 Al Young - A Poem For Players
2-01 Wole Soyinka - Muhammad Ali At The Ringside
2-02 Etheridge Knight - Hard Rock Returns to Prison From The Hospital For The Criminal Insane
2-03 Etheridge Knight - The Idea of Ancestry
2-04 Amiri Baraka - Bang, Bang Outishly
2-05 Amiri Baraka - Rhythm Blues
2-06 Amiri Baraka - Shazam Doowah
2-07 Colleen J. McElroy - The End of Civilization As We Know It
2-08 Lucille Clifton - Cruelty
2-09 Lucille Clifton - Lucy (part 6)
2-10 Jayne Cortez - Endangered Species List Blues with The Firesplitter Band
2-11 Wanda Coleman - I Live For My Car
2-12 Wanda Coleman - Nigger Rhythm Rhymes From The Blues Part of Town
2-13 Al Young - Lester Leaps In
2-14 Quincy Troupe - Poem For Magic
2-15 Nikki Giovanni - I Am She
2-16 Marilyn Nelson Wanier - Tuskegee Airfield
2-17 Yusef Komunyakaa - Facing It
2-18 Yusef Komunyakaa - Venus's-flytraps
2-19 Ntozake Shange - Rise up Fighters (Okra Takes Up With A Rastafari Man, She Can't Hold Back, She Say Smilin)
2-20 Mbembe Milton Smith - A Poem To Thrill The NAACP, Or A Black Family moves to The Suburbs
2-21 Gwendolyn Brooks - The Near-Johannesburg Boy
2-22 Gil Scott-Heron - The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
2-23 Ethelbert Miller - Helen
2-24 Ethelbert Miller - Helen & Martha
2-25 Ethelbert Miller - Martha & Helen
2-26 Ethelbert Miller - My Brother Returns From The Monastery
2-27 Rita Dove - Shakespeare Say
2-28 Rita Dove - After Reading Mickey In The Night Kitchen for The Third Time Before Bed
2-29 Rueben Jackson - Jamal's Lamentation
2-30 Rueben Jackson - Self Portrait
2-31 Allison Joseph - Barbie's Little Sister
2-32 Kevin Young - The Slaughter
2-33 Anthony Butts - Nocturne
2-34 Public Enemy - Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos
2-35 Tracie Morris - Project Princess
2-36 Saul Stacey Williams - Ohm
2-37 Carl Hancock Rux - No Black Male Show

Our Souls Have Grown Deep Like the Rivers.zip

For those who are not familiar with these works, here's an excellent review (also included in the zip file:

Entertaining and enlightening, OUR SOULS HAVE GROWN DEEP LIKE THE RIVERS: BLACK POETS READ THEIR WORK is an invaluable collection of original voices born of the African-American struggle. This authoritative two-CD set of 20th-century black poetry assembles more than 70 writers reading their own work and covers the art form from the Harlem Renaissance to the present. The different styles here constitute a vast verbal journey that takes the listener from the traditions established by W.E.B. DuBois to the more progressive turns of rap visionaries Public Enemy. Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Maya Angelou orate with resounding clarity; Nikki Giovanni, Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, and U.S. poet laureate Rita Dove lend rich nuance and textured dialect to their beautifully worded lines; and tracks from Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, Gil Scott-Heron, and the Last Poets create a context for the performance poetry of contemporary "spoken word" artists. The live recordings in particular harbor a great warmth and intimacy, adding to a sweeping sense of history that, neither pedantic nor overbearingly political, respectfully represents some of the greatest moments in African-American literature and performing arts. ~Christopher Stackhouse
--------------------------------------------------
Audio books tend to be inherently dubious, but the instances in which the format transcends its most common application—bringing literature designed for the casual reader to those not inclined to pick up a book—can make up for the spools of Dean Koontz prose committed to tape. This new anthology of works written and read by black poets is one such instance. More than an audio supplement to The Norton Anthology of African-American Poetry, Our Souls Have Grown Deep Like The Rivers works beautifully on its own terms, thanks to the careful selection and arrangement of compilation producers Rebekah Presson Mosby and Ted Myers. Spanning from pre-Harlem Renaissance material to a track by poetry-slam veteran Carl Hancock Rux, Souls features a wide range of talent, material, and experience, some unearthed from the Library Of Congress and other sources, some recorded commercially, and some commissioned especially for the collection. Of the older material, it's a minor miracle that someone had the foresight to record it, especially given the general condescension directed toward black artists even at the height of the Harlem Renaissance and the golden age of jazz. In fact, many of the recordings of earlier poets are from late in life, a fact rarely illustrated in the recordings themselves: Melvin B. Tolson still sounds assured reading his "Dark Symphony" 25 years after its composition, while Sterling A. Brown's tribute to Ma Rainey, recorded in 1973, makes it sound as if the blues legend lived just down the street. The best readers—Nikki Giovanni, Al Young, Yusef Komunyakaa, E. Ethelbert Miller—alone justify the collection, but the later material, which not only translates well to the recorded format but often depends upon it, reveals its necessity. Alongside the obvious fusion of poetry and music (Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Poets) are works informed as much by musical influences as literary ones: a Langston Hughes performance featuring Charlie Mingus, Sonia Sanchez's blues-like work, and the later efforts of Amiri Baraka, which rely as much on complex rhythms and pure sound as mere words. Hip-hop has made the distinction even less clear. Only one track by Public Enemy represents hip-hop itself, but its influence remains powerful in the collection's most recent efforts, some of which (Tracie Morris' half-rapped "Project Princess," Saul Stacey Willams' DJing rhapsody "Ohm") don't make sense as anything but recordings. Closing as strong as it opens, Our Souls is remarkably consistent for a collection that spans a century.

Replies

Anson (Bob) Roberts October 10, 2010 at 7:56pm

For those who are not familiar with these works, here's an excellent review (also included in the zip file:

Entertaining and enlightening, OUR SOULS HAVE GROWN DEEP LIKE THE RIVERS: BLACK POETS READ THEIR WORK is an invaluable collection of original voices born of the African-American struggle. This authoritative two-CD set of 20th-century black poetry assembles more than 70 writers reading their own work and covers the art form from the Harlem Renaissance to the present. The different styles here constitute a vast verbal journey that takes the listener from the traditions established by W.E.B. DuBois to the more progressive turns of rap visionaries Public Enemy. Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Maya Angelou orate with resounding clarity; Nikki Giovanni, Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, and U.S. poet laureate Rita Dove lend rich nuance and textured dialect to their beautifully worded lines; and tracks from Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, Gil Scott-Heron, and the Last Poets create a context for the performance poetry of contemporary "spoken word" artists. The live recordings in particular harbor a great warmth and intimacy, adding to a sweeping sense of history that, neither pedantic nor overbearingly political, respectfully represents some of the greatest moments in African-American literature and performing arts. ~Christopher Stackhouse
--------------------------------------------------
Audio books tend to be inherently dubious, but the instances in which the format transcends its most common application—bringing literature designed for the casual reader to those not inclined to pick up a book—can make up for the spools of Dean Koontz prose committed to tape. This new anthology of works written and read by black poets is one such instance. More than an audio supplement to The Norton Anthology of African-American Poetry, Our Souls Have Grown Deep Like The Rivers works beautifully on its own terms, thanks to the careful selection and arrangement of compilation producers Rebekah Presson Mosby and Ted Myers. Spanning from pre-Harlem Renaissance material to a track by poetry-slam veteran Carl Hancock Rux, Souls features a wide range of talent, material, and experience, some unearthed from the Library Of Congress and other sources, some recorded commercially, and some commissioned especially for the collection. Of the older material, it's a minor miracle that someone had the foresight to record it, especially given the general condescension directed toward black artists even at the height of the Harlem Renaissance and the golden age of jazz. In fact, many of the recordings of earlier poets are from late in life, a fact rarely illustrated in the recordings themselves: Melvin B. Tolson still sounds assured reading his "Dark Symphony" 25 years after its composition, while Sterling A. Brown's tribute to Ma Rainey, recorded in 1973, makes it sound as if the blues legend lived just down the street. The best readers—Nikki Giovanni, Al Young, Yusef Komunyakaa, E. Ethelbert Miller—alone justify the collection, but the later material, which not only translates well to the recorded format but often depends upon it, reveals its necessity. Alongside the obvious fusion of poetry and music (Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Poets) are works informed as much by musical influences as literary ones: a Langston Hughes performance featuring Charlie Mingus, Sonia Sanchez's blues-like work, and the later efforts of Amiri Baraka, which rely as much on complex rhythms and pure sound as mere words. Hip-hop has made the distinction even less clear. Only one track by Public Enemy represents hip-hop itself, but its influence remains powerful in the collection's most recent efforts, some of which (Tracie Morris' half-rapped "Project Princess," Saul Stacey Willams' DJing rhapsody "Ohm") don't make sense as anything but recordings. Closing as strong as it opens, Our Souls is remarkably consistent for a collection that spans a century.

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