Crossing race and Africa, the Notre Dame Folk Choir learns music's power to advocate

The song “I Can’t Breathe” stretched the Notre Dame Folk Choir.

It’s unlike the other 10 songs on their new album, “Catch the Spirit,” which are all spiritual, all providing comfort and strength from African American and East African roots — two in African languages — with professional black artists doing many of the lead solos.

But it fits perfectly. The album started from an uneasy spot. Students in the mostly white Notre Dame Folk Choir were troubled, asking: “Are we allowed to sing this music? Is it appropriation?”

J.J. Wright, who became the choir’s director in 2017, launched the project with the aim of pushing the 40-year-old choir and himself out of their comfort zones toward the University of Notre Dame’s priority of “welcoming a diverse student body and creating an experience for the student body that represents diversity.”

You can now watch free videos of the songs performed live in Notre Dame’s Basilica of the Sacred Heart at www.folkchoir.com/home or find the album on streaming services. Released in April, it’s the 10th album in the choir’s history. The choir had booked a tour of concerts in nine West Coast cities starting in mid-May, but it was derailed by COVID-19.

Soprano Anna Staud was entering her freshman year at the university, coming from Granger and Saint Joseph High School, where the folk choir had long been in her sights and the kind of traditional church music that it so often sang. She’d always sung in school choirs, usually “from the European tradition.” Then as the school year began, an email shocked her: She and the choir were going to Africa.

The prep work, she recalls thankfully, meant: “We were free to have these vulnerable conversations about race.”

Before the trip, there were small-group discussions and a spring semester class that brought the choir together with guest speakers on race, culture and social justice, to feel through those difficult questions. They also worshiped with black gospel music at St. Benedict the African Catholic Church in Chicago, Wright says.

“It was important for me to challenge my expectation of what liturgical music is,” Staud recalls, realizing that some of the songs that Catholics sing frequently, in fact, are African American.

For example, the album begins with the familiar hymn “Lead Me, Guide Me,” calling on God to keep us from straying. Wright says it resonated with the group because they were indeed praying, “Please lead us; we don’t know where we’re going.”

Even Wright was surprised. In January 2019, he’d taken a 10-day trip to scout out the six Holy Cross Mission sites that the choir would visit in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. He asked the hosts that this be more than a one-way performance — that there be a real musical exchange “to tie us together.” But by the time he returned that May with 50 students on a 3-week musical pilgrimage, his African partners humbled the Notre Dame crew with generosity.

“When I saw how much effort and resources they put into it, it was mind-blowing,” he says. “They made us feel like the most honored guests. They went over the top.”

Videos at folkchoir.com/home show the two cultures singing and dancing together like family, from choir festivals to large church services.

“Everyone we met was so joyful,” Staud says, recalling how they came to a church next to a landfill in Dandora, a poor suburb of Nairobi, Kenya. “People greeted us with a beautiful rose and a beaded bracelet.”

She bought a dress in Nairobi that, ultimately, she’d wear in a performance at Notre Dame. She also picked up newfound friends that she still communicates with today, including a young student in Uganda with whom she spent a whole day who, like her, also attended a St. Joseph school.

A couple of other students ran into another choir in a Nairobi park and, in a serendipitous moment, sang with them.

By the time the Folk Choir sang in concert at Notre Dame’s basilica in October 2019, Staud says, African memories welled up and, she says, “Everyone’s faces showed how joyful we were.”

The choir had also absorbed rhythms from their singing partners in Africa that, Wright says, they could never have learned back in Indiana — that they would put into African songs on the album.

Of course, they used rehearsals at Notre Dame to learn the Swahili words in the up-tempo “Mimina Neema,” about God pouring out grace.

Zack Okello, who lives in South Bend and who did part of the trip, joined undergraduate student Maya Nyache, both Kenyans, as soloists in “Kuliko Jana,” a popular Kenyan song about God’s love that means “More Today Than Yesterday.”

The choir eventually donned authentic costumes and sang “Attenderezebwe” that appears only in a YouTube video because, Wright says, at nearly 9 minutes, it’s so heavy on percussion and light on vocals that it wouldn’t have played well on the album. The Rev. Linus Nviiri, a Holy Cross priest at Notre Dame from Uganda, coached the students on pronunciation and phrasing of his native Luganda language. A group of Ugandans living in Chicago came to coach the students using drums and dancing.

Staud was touched by the last piece on the album, “He’ll Be With You,” that gospel singer Emorja Roberson wrote just before the trip and that he sings on the album. Staud calls it an “emotional song that got us through times when we were missing home.”

New York City jazz musician Godwin Louis composed and performed the song “I Can’t Breathe,” dedicated to Eric Gardner, who died in 2014 after New York police put the unarmed man in a chokehold as he pleaded for his life. But those same words were heard again last week from a black man in Minneapolis, George Floyd, who died after police pinned him to the ground and placed a knee on his neck. The city’s mayor fired the four officers involved.

Louis plays the soprano saxophone while the choir repeats lines of “I Can’t Breathe, I need you, We need love, We need you.”

Although the song “stretched” the choir, Wright says about Louis, “He’s inviting us to be part of his work.”

“So many of us, there’s some shame about it,” Wright says about racial inequities. “We don’t even know the right words to talk about it. We don’t know what it’s like. But we do know we can learn about it and make use of the music to advocate for them.”

Staud, now entering her junior year, says she came to recognize her own privilege and “to see the injustice that is still present and that our faith calls us to encounter that.”

“This album should make you change,” she says. “It changed me.”