Jazz vocalist Ruth Naomi Floyd will sing the narratives of enslaved Americans in ‘Are We Yet Somehow Alive?’ this Thursday

Ruth Naomi Floyd grew up singing in the same church choir, in the same church, where Philadelphia’s internationally acclaimed contralto Marian Anderson learned to sing: Union Baptist Church in South Philadelphia.

Floyd was in the audience the day Union Baptist celebrated Anderson’s 90th birthday in 1987.

Marian Anderson was about to sing. But first, Anderson asked if there were any child soloists there who could sing with her. When there were none, a deacon, Floyd recalled, pointed out that she had been a child soloist. He asked her to sing with Anderson.

But Floyd was in awe and nervous as she sang next to the legendary singer. Anderson picked up on her hesitation. She knew Floyd was holding back.

“Quietly, without anyone noticing, and without embarrassing me, she kind of gave me that African-American mother’s ‘look’, ” Floyd said in an interview this week.

Anderson who lived in South Philadelphia was essentially telling Floyd she had better put her heart into it. So, she did.

“It was amazing. It was a pivotal point in my singing career,” Floyd said. “It felt like an anointing.”

After that, Floyd pursued her career as a jazz vocalist and composer with a passion.

As the daughter of a minister — her father was the late Rev. Melvin Floyd — and the wife of a minister, Floyd has also created a discography dedicated to a sacred jazz music. It incorporates the old Negro spirituals and gospel into the jazz lexicon.

In addition to her music career, Floyd is also a historian who has spent the last 30 years collecting narratives of formerly enslaved Black Americans.

At 7:30 p.m. Thursday, as part of a Penn Lives Arts event at the Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral, Floyd and her ensemble will perform music based on the narratives of enslaved people, in a program called Are We Yet Somehow Alive?

“I came up with compositions in which every lyric I sing are the actual words from the narratives,” Floyd said.

She has spent years combing through the “slave narratives” at the Library of Congress’ Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration set up by former President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935 to provide jobs in the aftermath of the Great Depression.

She also poured through books and magazines that told those stories.

During her interview with The Inquirer, she quoted John Little, who escaped to Canada in 1855: “T’isn’t he who has stood and looked on, that can tell you what slavery is — ’tis he who has endured.”

She said Little was talking about abolitionists who were trying to talk about what enslaved people had experienced. He was saying only people who had experienced enslavement could really tell you what it was like.

Most people know that enslaved people were forbidden to learn to read and write. But Floyd said she found a narrative from Peter Randolph, who said in 1893 that Black people could be whipped if they were “caught praying.”

She said she supposed the white slave owner was “afraid God would answer their prayers.”

Floyd is also one of two inaugural scholars working at Penn this academic year under its “Equity in Action Visiting Scholars” (EAV Scholars) program, sponsored by the Office of Social Equity & Community. The program “aims to strengthen the Penn community by hosting local scholars, activists and community organizers that use the arts, lecture, and dialogue to shine a light on issues of social justice,” according to the Penn announcement.

In her lectures, Floyd has talked about the “coded messages” contained in the lyrics of the old “Negro Spirituals.”

“Steal away, steal away, steal away to Jesus,” sometimes meant a Black enslaved person was simply tired of living, and was looking forward to resting in Heaven. But the same song, sung in an upbeat, faster tempo, could mean an alert to an uprising or escape, she said.

Other Black spirituals poked fun at the hypocrisy of white Christians who preached about following God’s word, but whose actions, were the opposite of what Jesus taught, for instance, to “love thy neighbor.”

“Everybody talking ‘bout heaven, ain’t going there,” was a line from a song that underscored that hypocrisy she said.

Floyd has not tracked down the source of the saying, “Are We Yet Somehow Alive?” But she says that is part of the mystery of capturing the words and phrases that came out of a people who were seized from Africa, survived the Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean and, cut off from their own languages and traditions, learned to be a new people in America.

Are We Yet Somehow Alive? is presented at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 25, at Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral, 19 South 38th St., Philadelphia. To purchase tickets for Floyd’s performance click here, or visit: https://pennlivearts.org/event/ruthnaomifloyd/