The Emancipation of a Music Department

We are told revolution is improbable. But that was not the case at Howard University in 1969. The university was a battleground. And there was no letting up inside nor beyond the university’s wrought iron gates. Miles Davis noticed and applauded. He was in turn invited to lead the music school. Speaking to Rolling Stone in December of that year he recalled his response, “Hell no! See, I don’t think like that man. I don’t like them bourgeois n----s. That’s why they’re rebelling at Howard. For a long time, they wouldn’t even have jazz concerts on the campus of Howard University.” This was all despite being the once home of Billy Eckstine, Shirley Horn, Roberta Flack, and Benny Golson, and writers and thinkers like Sterling Brown and his students Amiri Baraka and A.B. Spellman. But just like in Miles’s music, the late 60s saw a new and revolutionary momentum guiding Black folk, inviting us to turn both inward and outward in search of a sound and a way forward and beyond.

At least some of that newness was honed in the practice rooms of Lulu Vere Childers Hall, the home of the College of Fine Arts at Howard. While neither Miles nor his recommended choice for the post Dizzy Gillespie would come, there was another leading figure, the trumpeter Donald Byrd, who said yes, arriving in 1970 to establish a jazz program. Byrd would bring a conception of the music that was unconcerned with the boundaries and borders of so-called “mainstream jazz”—a journalistic designation with almost no meaning for musicians. This was the Donald Byrd of the Kofi and Ethiopian Knights years after all. His most famous Howard students became the Blackbyrds, inspired by his funky 1972 statement, Black Byrd. Adhering to genre convention would miss what another Howard alum Toni Morrison might call “the rootedness” of this sound, especially amid the struggles to formulate a Black aesthetic. So if you listen to what its chief theoretician Larry Neal was trying to say you could hear all of what Byrd was doing— an attempt to get at everything the Blues was gettin’ at. And this is one way of understanding how it was possible that Byrd could also be responsible for helping one of the greatest composers the next half century achieve recognition even though he never played “jazz.” This student was the leader of Howard’s first gospel ensemble called The Celestials, which Byrd often invited to open for Howard’s jazz band and then later to the pivotal 1973 Montreux Jazz Festival. His name was Richard Smallwood.  

“ This is a large quote. Hell no! See, I don’t think like that man. I don’t like them bourgeois n----s. That’s why they’re rebelling at Howard. For a long time, they wouldn’t even have jazz concerts on the campus of Howard University.”

Born in DC, Smallwood was part of a family with roots in Durham, North Carolina. His stepfather C.L. Smallwood, who played a gritty blues-gospel style on the piano, was a church planter, which led the family to many different sites across the Eastern seaboard and Midwest. Theirs was a tumultuous relationship to say the least, but it was his urging that led young Richard to develop his chops on the piano, learning the hymns in every key at a young age and eventually leading his own ensembles. After he turned ten, Smallwood’s mother Mabel, herself a gifted singer, put her foot down and all the moving stopped. Richard was able to establish roots in a DC where churches still opened services in common meter, lined-out hymns and where he was exposed to some of the greatest pedagogical talents in Black music.  

As a child, Smallwood’s earliest musical memory was Mabel’s radio playing the secular standard “Moonlight in Vermont” likely performed by the pop artist Jo Stafford. That moment and a growing affinity for women vocalists in the gospel tradition generated his love for music. Groups like The Davis Sisters, the Clara Ward Singers, and the Roberta Martin Singers—specifically their pianist Lucy Smith Collier—channeled that love into a definable style. Gifted with perfect pitch, it was not until going to Howard’s Junior Department as a high schooler that he would learn to read music. By then, Smallwood was becoming known in the gospel circuits of DC. But sacred music was not his only interest.  

One of Smallwood’s many music teachers in DC’s public schools was Roberta Flack, who had been trained at Howard in Western classical piano before she made other plans. Two other classical piano teachers were central to Smallwood’s evolution. He believed that he had duped Beatrice Gilkes into thinking that he could read music by first asking her to demonstrate the style and feeling of whatever piece he was learning, before perfectly mirroring what was played for him as if he had knowledge of what the musical notation signified. But when she recommended him to Howard, his new teacher Anne Burwell asked him to sight-read before doing anything else and the charade was over. Now, he would be forced to learn. From there, his interest in the classical idiom grew.  

DC’s Black community was no stranger to that style. Many of the larger Black churches held concerts and recitals at the turn of the century where young talents demonstrated their mastery of this form as almost a way to prove to the world that Black folk could. Classical music was akin to liberal education and for many teachers like Joseph Douglass (grandson of Frederick) and Mary Europe (sister of James Reese), this was a serious matter for the race’s uplift. This was true at Howard too. Led by Childers, the Department of Music was actually founded as a conservatory in 1913. When Warner Lawson arrived in 1942, the Negro college classical tradition, imbued with the academic approach to the spirituals, was the norm and standard. For what it was worth, Smallwood and others found ways to grow within that tradition and did not disparage what it could do. Learning from his piano and voice teachers and the rigor through which they projected that tradition shaped him greatly.  

But when he finished the requirements of his junior department program and received a scholarship to begin as an undergraduate degree in 1967, there was another sound brewing underneath this official sound. Some of his teachers like Anthony Kerr could cross the aisle. But others scoffed at the idea of gospel. And Lawson was famously known to inspect the practice rooms where students would sneak in to practice gospel and jazz changes. They even knew to look out for Lawson’s watchdog, Mr. Coleman, the building’s janitor, who was known to report them if he heard them playing anything but something classical sounding after hours.

This is a Heading 2 or 3

Many of Black music’s future legends were in these practice rooms during this era. There were the Mizell Brothers, producers of several Donald Byrd and The Blackbyrds projects. Larry Mizell’s compositions also appeared on albums by flutist Bobbi Humphrey and saxophonist Gary Bartz, which were produced through the brothers’ Sky High Productions. Trumpeter Fonce Mizell was also a member of Motown’s famed Corporation, which had laid down the signature popular sounds of that era. There was Donny Hathaway, who was already a star on campus when Smallwood arrived. While at Howard, he worked out the relationship between gospel, blues, and jazz and the common harmonic connections of these styles before becoming the Donny we all know. Arriving a few years later, was Smallwood’s friend Elbernita “Twinkie” Clark of the Clark Sisters—the definitive heirs of the early vocal ensembles that had inspired him. Then came Geri Allen at the end of the decade. During the late 60s and 70s, this space housed those experiments which would transform the music and the industry along with it.  

That was after all how they were able to move from playing in secret to the eventual establishment of the jazz studies major and with Smallwood’s direct help, the Howard Gospel Choir. During his freshman year, students occupied the administration building for five days. Later that fall, they called for a Black University. The Fine Arts students knew that a Black University would need its sound. So they also protested and the made the case for jazz. And when students convened a gospel concert at Howard’s Rankin Chapel on the heels of Dr. King’s assassination, it would set in motion the idea that Howard needed its own mass choir devoted to the kind of worship that could offer relief and healing. It was not that the classical training fell away or was abandoned. But it would now have to exist alongside rather than above the sounds Smallwood had made with his people.  

Founded along with Wesley Boyd and Edward Sully as the Celestials, Smallwood’s gospel group was the first of its kind on campus. Its name was later changed to Celestial Sound, almost to mirror the esoteric vernacular of Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane, and Sun Ra, which was as much a part of the Black Arts ethos as any. Smallwood was also leading the young adult choir at Union Temple Baptist Church in DC, the last church that his father helped establish. One of his last blessings upon Smallwood’s graduation from Howard was to give him permission to pursue music in the “worldly” arena.  

Like jazz, the soul/R&B sound was also undergoing a cosmic shift, which Hathaway as well as his Howard roommate and Curtis Mayfield collaborator Leroy Hutson represented. When Smallwood heard a young Ángela Winbush playing in one of the Childers Hall practice rooms a few months after his graduation, he was immediately struck and perplexed because she was an architecture major. Not long after, along with other Howard student vocalists Tawatha Agee and Elett Ricks, they founded the R&B group Hot Tea. It was a short-lived, but important marker in Smallwood’s journey.  

In the end, there was no more important influence than the approach to gospel of Edwin Hawkins, who released “Oh, Happy Day” while Smallwood was on campus. From then on, Edwin and his brother Walter as well as Walter’s wife Tramaine would become mainstays in Smallwood’s circle and in the history of gospel. Their brand of music was what Smallwood and the gospel choir performed on that revival night in Rankin Chapel. And with Winbush, Sully, Boyd, and others, the evolving and rotating cast of The Richard Smallwood Singers and the later group Vision, moved solidly into a style promoters branded “contemporary gospel.” Smallwood’s compositional language blended the traditional blues-gospel of his childhood with the classical training of his Howard years, delivered with an emotional vitality that took the faith to mean the thing you must turn to when you are in your darkest moments. Experiencing this sound live would simply wreck you.  

As Smallwood struggled with his own demons he created songs like “Center of My Joy” and “Total Praise,” with sonic registers of what it feels like to lean on help in the time of trouble. Depression and melancholy were life experiences that could be confronted and maybe even displaced through the healing attributes of gospel. Smallwood’s career spawned massive success in every way imaginable. But it was all grounded in the “aesthetic” material of Black music and how it was defined at Howard.  

While in Montreux with Celestial Sound, Donald Byrd, the Blackbyrds, and others from the Howard nexus, Smallwood met the Prince of Darkness himself. There were few words. They were all moved, of course, by Miles’s set. Maybe they mentioned they were from Howard. But as they heaped praise upon him, all Miles could offer to them was, “Yeah, I know.”  

When Richard Smallwood made his transition, all I could offer to those who felt that loss acutely was “Yeah, I know.” But less known is how Smallwood’s music has grounded generations of musicians who bring the sacred directly into their play. It transcends and breaks apart the notion of genre. Smallwood’s music was everything, because it emanated from a praise tradition that was everything Black at the same time it was everything else it was.    

Just days before the release of a project he titled Gospel Music, vibraphonist Joel Ross arranged a version of “Total Praise” to close the repertoire of music that they would play on the upcoming tour. All of the music on that album, spoke to something elemental, indeed, something total, was touched off by a Smallwood composition that was only possible with the revolutionary coming together of so many seemingly disparate forces in the history of both a university and a community. Yeah, I know.