ArtistInfo

Vinie Burrows
Walk Together Children

Album US on Spoken Arts label
Spoken Word and Soundtrack (Spoken Word, Poetry, Speech)

The lights go up, slowly. She's alone on the stage, a black young woman in a bright red dress. She looks svelte and slight. She doesn't seem fierce or imposing. Over the music of a lone guitar, she begins to sing softly: "There's somebody knockin' at your door..." Then she speaks, gently, inviting us to join with her in exploring the past and present of the black man in America. Can this sweet young lady compel our attention over a span of hours? Is she not too polite, too civil, too fragile for her subject? But suddenly the mobile features are transformed; the voice is harsh now, without pity. We are standing on the deck of a slave ship, listening to the captain and the mate as they hold the incredibly cruel colloquy that makes up the prologue of Stephen Vincent Benet's 'The Slaver', the prelude to his epic poem, John Brown's Body. As the evening goes on, Vinie Burrows turns her attention from one phase to another of "the black scene," moving us by turns to tears, to laughter, to horror, to anger. Now she is Sojourner Truth (the name assumed by the ex-slave abolitionist, Isabella Baumfree) speaking up at a convention of white women in the 19th century to explain the real difference between freedom and enslavement. Now she brings to life Robert Hayden's marrow-freezing 'Runagate, 'Runagate' to make us know what it felt like to be a passenger on the underground railroad, fleeing from bondage to liberation... Then suddenly - and once more by the magic of her voice alone - Vinie Burrows transforms the climate to laughter and sunlight as she releases the immense vitality of Paul Laurence Dunbar's hilarious tour de force, 'The Party'. But Miss Burrows is far from through with us. Next she summons to life a few more portraits from the Negro past - the cotton picker in George Houston Bass', 'Life Cycle in the Delta'; the long-standing argument between the advocates of political action and those who would accommodate to the white man's world world in Dudley Randall's 'W.E.B. To Booker T'; the absolute abomination of a lynching in Richard Wright's 'Between The World and Me'... Yet this performer, who up to now has not spared us, knows T.S. Eliot that "humankind cannot bear very much reality." And so she assumers the comic mask again for Langston Hughes' 'Alberta K. Johnson', whose troubles with her Harlem landlord are catalogued with deceptive good nature. A soft-spoken portrait of the great jazz saxaphonist Charlie Parker follows in Carl Wendell Hines' 'Jazz Poem'... And now - now we're transported abruptly to the "black scene" of the moment. A more militant note is sounded through the recent verses of poets like Charles Anderson, Bob Kaufman, Edward Reicher, Calvin Hernton and Mari Evans - poets who question the presence of black troops in Vietnam and who sing, not of cotton fields by moonlight, but of the blood-red rage of riots. ere too, Muss Burrows reproduces for us the unprettified "Conversation" of a Harlem woman who knows our world, but will not be broken by it. At the end - ironically and poignantly - Vinie Burrows offers an impressive reading of Langston Hughes' 'Let America Be America Again', and sings, wistfully - as the black man must in this white world - the hopeful words of "America". To bring 'Walk Together Children' to life on records, SPOKEN ARTS invited Miss Burrows to recreate her show in a roomy studio where stereo microphones were distributed in such a way that she was free to move, to act, to sing and to declaim without confinement or restriction. Here she is then - just as audiences and reviewers all over the country have seen her and thrilled to her - performing, in two volumes, the entire show that impelled 'New York Times' critic Clive Barnes to praise this remarkable woman as a "magnificent performer" whose "priceless gift of honesty" lights up every step of an unforgettable "journey of black despair and white shame from old-time slavery to new-time Harlem." - Paul Kresh

Musicians

	Vinie Burrows , read by, album by
	Jim Gold voc, g, *1947 US acoustic guitar

Producers

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Acknowledgements

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