Leaning on the piano in front of the altar of the Church of the Redeemer, Mae Gibson Brown leaned on the piano and guided a collection of gospel singers in singing — and making a bedrock New Haven festival — “Better.”
The pianist began to lay down a groove, a steady pulse with his right hand, a more syncopated bass with his left.
“People come,” sang the assembled members of the Voices of the Community Choir — composed of New Haven’s Salt and Pepper Singers and others — who were getting ready for to perform a first-ever International Festival of Arts and Ideas gospel show on the New Haven Green mainstage this Friday at 6:30 p.m.
The singers started a little tentative.
“Come on,” Brown said, standing now, egging them on.
“People go,” the singers sang, a little louder. “Your life has been / out of control. You’re confused / don’t worry your soul.”
Brown sprang to life, raising her arm, punctuating the first three words. “It will get better / better / it will get better / better. God is in control.”
“I’m Not Sitting. I’m Standing.”
The show Brown is organizing for Arts and Ideas on Friday “is called ‘Made in New Haven’ because I felt there was a lot of talent here that had not been tapped or even acknowledged,” Brown said in an interview before the rehearsal Monday night. So the show will include not only a massive choir, but quartets, soloists, and a rapper.
This reflects both the state of gospel today as it reaches out to broader audiences — including secular ones — while staying close to its long tradition in black churches.
It also reflects the 80-year-old Brown’s own approach to the music, as founder with Sheila Bonenberger of the Salt and Pepper Gospel Singers, an interracial gospel choir that began in 1984. Bonenberger had heard Brown and her family sing and asked if she could join. Brown said yes. But, Bonenberger said, “Mae said, ‘if you want to sing this music, you have to understand where it comes from.’”
Courtesy A&I
Brown and Bonenberger.
She brought Bonenberger to her church, which at the time was the Agape Christian Center. (Brown is now a congregant at St. Matthew’s Unison Free Will Baptist Church on Dixwell Avenue.) “Mae held my hand the whole time,” Bonenberger said.
The choir grew, and has been going strong since. It sang at the Apollo once. “The curtain rose and the audience was packed. And everyone started laughing,” Brown said. “And then we started singing.”
The blend of voices the choir had been working on shone through. “And they were electrified by the sound,” Brown said. “They almost closed the curtain because people started jumping and clapping.”
As the years have gone by, the choir, which numbers in the dozens at any given point, has seen over 300 people come and go. “There are not a lot of interracial groups that have been together as long as we have,” Brown said. “Your place is always here,” she said she tells people who are moving away.
This will be the first time Brown has been involved in New Haven’s international arts festival. “I started asking back in 2010 for Arts and Ideas to do a gospel choir,” Brown said. She asked every year. “I got someone to listen to me,” she said.
But in hindsight, maybe the folks at A&I should have known Brown would eventually win them over. With a little prodding from Bonenberger, Brown related the story of her going to a movie theater as a child of 10 or 11, in segregated Raleigh, W.V.
“My dad always told us that we were as good as anyone else,” Brown said. But when she left the house, she got a different message, and she did not like it. So, going to the movies once, she looked to her left and saw the “cushiony, velvety seats” in the whites-only section. To the right, up a flight of stairs, were the seats meant for her, with battered cane seats.
“I don’t know why,” Brown said, “but I said, ‘I’m not going up there.’” She stayed there at the entrance to the whites-only section as everyone else took their seats. “I didn’t feel afraid or nothing,” she said. At last, a white man accosted her.
“Girl, you’re not supposed to be sitting here,” Brown recalled him saying. And she recalled her answer: “I’m not sitting. I’m standing.”
Voices Of God
Brown and Bonenberger aren’t worried about being able to connect with a secular audience at A&I. Brown hews close to the tradition of gospel as “message music.” But for both Brown and Bonenberger, people of any faith (or no faith) can receive it. “They will first hear the music, which is stirring, and then you see the joy on the faces of the people singing. It’s a message in itself,” Brown said.
“God speaks in many different ways,” Bonenberger added. She recalled a classroom exercise she saw in a Sunday school years ago in which children were asked to draw God. There were a couple old men with beards. But “some were very abstract. And they were all totally different. But I never looked at any of them and thought, ‘that’s not God.’”
That generous spirit infused the music on Tuesday night, before the altar at Church of the Redeemer. By the time the choir was halfway through “Better,” all the people in it were on their feet.
“Find the praise / within your heart. Hold it close / don’t ever depart,” they sang, loud enough now for their voices to bounce off the church’s ceiling. “It gets cold in the night / but you’ll be all right / It will get better / better / It will get better / God is in control.” They went around the phrase again, kicking it up a key, and another, until the music filled the space. They ended on a long, resonant chord, with Brown conducting.
“God is in control.”
“Have a seat and give yourself a hand,” Brown said, her voice full of joy. The choir members did just that. They were ready for Friday.
Gospel Fest: Made in New Haven happens on the New Haven Green at 6:30 p.m. on June 23. Admission is free. Click here for more information.
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