You just haven’t lived until you’ve heard all of Dana Auditorium singing Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing.”
This was only one of many magic moments during the Musical Benefit Concert this Tuesday. The event, a celebration of Black History Month, was sponsored by the African American Studies Department and Karen Tinsley’s Psychology 250: Music and Black Culture class.
The concert was first conceived by Karen Tinsley, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Guilford, as a fundraiser for an African American Studies Scholarship and simultaneous celebration of Black History Month
The event, for Tinsley, was a way for “people to realize that, regardless of the racial thing we’re studying, we have something in common, and that’s music … and I wanted to show the variety, the various forms of music in black culture.”
The show was hosted by Busta Brown, a DJ at 102 Jamz, and featured a wide range of music and dance performances, as well as biographies of African American musicians and poets.
“It’s not just about the music itself, but about the people and their struggle to make it,” said junior Emmaleigh Petz-Ritter, who presented Ella Fitzgerald’s biography. “We’ve learned in our class that music has been a way of surviving forces like racism, oppression, living conditions, and institutionalized systems that limit the conditions of African Americans. Music has been a way to transcend those limitations, especially psychologically.”
Charles McLaughlin, a jazz-fusion guitarist, kicked off the evening with a solo performance. Then the night began, including such diverse performers as the contemporary Christian Luther Williams Ensemble, St. Paul Baptist’s For His Glory Dancers, Guilford Alum Connie Jeffries, and, of course, the students themselves.
The highlight of the show, however, came last, when the Allen Middle School Step Team took the stage.
Their performance rocked the house – literally. Their unique blend of dance, rhythm, and clapping transformed the 15 girls into a kind of human drumline that earned them a standing ovation.
By the concert’s end, however, more had been conveyed than just music. “Positive things you do in an environment help the environment,” eighth-grader Saneetra Carter said after her Step performance, and this is the point of such events, to improve the environment in which they are held.
And maybe it’s a solution for other environments.
“I think it’s good any time people can come together and we can share ideas instead of fighting,” McLaughlin said. “It’d be great if we could do the same thing with Iraq. They could bring their instruments and we could just have a battle of the bands.”