Gullah Meditations

Photo by Julian “Camera Man” Dimock, courtesy of The Penn Center

Gullah Meditations returns to the source of the very lifeblood of African-American music. A musical revelation and a watershed historical event, this project represents the first significant new arrangements of "unknown" spirituals in 100 years.

While performing at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston in 2016, tenor and VHO Troupe member Victor Ryan Robertson was handed some out-of-print sheet music of 19th-century Gullah spirituals. The songs resonated with him deeply, and he created new arrangements with his longtime collaborator Adrianne Duncan expressing their backgrounds in jazz, opera & gospel.

African-American spirituals are a form of indigenous, religious folk song—but we don't often consider their specific geographic origins. St. Helena Island, SC, the heart of the Gullah community, is also the "field" source of America's first collection of spirituals, published in 1867.

Victor Robertson's words:

The Gullah-Geechee are a distinct people with their own language and culture, growing out of their enslavement in isolation on the barrier islands dotting the Southern Atlantic coasts. From their "praise houses" these spirituals emerged. They are likely Civil-War-era and passed down orally, transcribed in the 1920s, now fallen out of print.
Our intent is to stay true to the original compositions while setting them in a new harmonic framework. The result speaks to the inherent sophistication & profundity of these melodies; it is folk music that transcends genre. The lyrics that reflect the writers’ lived experience as enslaved people speak over the generations.