In Mendi + Keith’s original work, the melody from “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is played on piano and slowed down to form a drifting cloud of sound folding back on itself and stretching out over several minutes, underscoring a surreal text about the skies. Rosamond Johnson and James Weldon Johnson are reworked to make a new piece. The celestial references found in the melody and text composed by brothers J. In this work, Mendi + Keith were particularly inspired by the aerial images captured by pioneering African-American pilot Bessie Coleman (1892-1926) and the African-American engineer Shelby Jacobs’ camera system aboard Apollo 6 spacecraft in 1968. Lift is a meditation on both the history of aerial photography and the one-hundred-year-old song often called the Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing”.
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