Recess! Media

That’s Medicine Man Ya-Ya reciting the last part of Maulana Karenga’s Libation Statement that opens the CD, “Teach The Children,” a collection of songs and prose poems, that celebrates famous African American figures in our history. There’s Harriet Tubman, the Mother of the Underground Railroad that helped people who had been enslaved find their way to the the north and freedom; George Washington Carver, the renowned biologist and agriculturalist who found a solution for the cotton-depleted soil of the South: sweet potatoes and peanuts:

And don’t forget Grandville T. Woods who, among his many inventions, developed the first electric rail to power trains — a technology that’s still in use in our subways today, and Mary McLeod Bethune, the famed educator, who founded a college with just one dollar and fifty cents, and Rosa Parks whose refusal to move to the back of the bus in 1955 began what we now refer to as the Civil Rights Movement.

These dynamic, musical history lessons are myth-making in the oldest, truest sense — they’re stories set to the heartbeat of memory and belief, stories to move your feet, your imagination, and your soul.