About the Film
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“…. tonight I viewed the extraordinary video "A Singing Stream: A Black Family Chronicle for the second time and like the first time, I reacted with joy and tears. What an extraordinary family-- and what extraordinary talent. While my background is completely different, it is exactly the same: we were a family of the church (my father was a Pentecostal minister); our parents were brought up working on a farm though by the time they married they had moved into the city; my parents were not university trained people and worked as domestics until my father went to school to become a barber, and my brother and I started singing in a family group organized by my mother.
I was particularly impressed with the shaped note segment with the mother -- I know that Black people participated in that tradition-- as they still do -- but I\'ve never seen anyone handle it with the ease of the mother. The story of the buying their home was especially moving, as was the mother raking the sand where grass would have been (how I remember doing that in my little sandy section of Winter Park, Florida; the matching of suits, shirts, ties and shoes takes me back twenty-five years to when the Boyer Brothers were doing the same thing, and finally it was great to hear the Echoes of Heaven from Akron, Ohio because so few people know that there was a very strong tradition of female a cappella quartets. Quite frankly you have produced an extraordinary film. -- Dr. Horace Boyer, editor "Lift Every Voice and Sing".
