Felicia Miyakawa
Felicia Miyakawa
Tennessee State University
Felicia M. Miyakawa is an Associate Professor of Musicology and the Director of Graduate Studies at the Middle Tennessee State University School of Music, where she has taught courses in both art and popular music traditions since 2004. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Musicology from Indiana University and completed B.A. degrees in both music and French at Linfield College (McMinnville, Oregon). Miyakawa’s research areas include Hiphop music and culture, Black Nationalism, American Popular Music, African American music and literature, Spirituals & folk traditions, gender & pedagogy and queer studies. She has presented papers at regional and national meetings of the American Musicological Society and Society for Ethnomusicology among others and is currently working on her second book, a biography of the spiritual ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’.
Talk Title: A Spiritual for All People: Diasporic Appropriations of ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’
Late in life, composer Harry T. Burleigh expressed his conviction that spirituals were meant “not just for the colored people, but for all people.” This presentation explores how one spiritual, ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’, realizes Burleigh’s vision in a variety of diasporic contexts.
Two performances serve as case studies. The first is by Gaida – a German-born, Syrian raised, New York immigrant performer – who (with her ensemble of jazz combo plus oud) performed a maqam-inflected jazz version of Motherless Child at a World Music Celebration in September 2011 just months after Syria’s Civil War began. The second comes from Israeli artist Shlomo Gronich from an album he recorded in 1993 with the Sheba youth choir, comprised of Ethiopian Jewish youth. The performers in these examples lay claim to Motherless Child as an expression of the loss, freedom and struggle endemic to the diasporic condition.
