Bernice Johnson Reagon, whose stirring gospel voice helped soundtrack the civil rights movement, became a cultural historian, curator at the Smithsonian Institution and founder of the all-female a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, died Tuesday in Washington. She was 81.
His death, which occurred in a hospital, was confirmed by his daughter, Toshi Reagon, who did not give a cause.
Bernice Reagon, the daughter of a Baptist minister in Albany, Georgia, grew up in a church without a piano, and the first music she absorbed, rooted in spirituals and hymns, was performed by human voices accompanied by hand clapping and foot-stomping.
She was a founding member in 1962 of the Freedom Singers, a vocal quartet that performed anthems of defiance for civil rights protesters preparing to confront police or being taken to jail. The Freedom Singers were associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which sent them throughout the South and to the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island in 1963.
Mrs. Reagon once wrote: “I have sung and listened to freedom songs and seen them bring together sections of the Negro community at times when other means of communication were ineffective.”
She went on to earn a doctorate in American history from Howard University in 1975 and head the Black American Culture Program at the Smithsonian. There, she assembled a collection of blues, gospel, and spiritual music and introduced that heritage to the public.
At a gospel show in the 1980s, Ms. Reagon encouraged the audience to hum and sing along with the performers. “And if you can’t, grunt or sigh a little,” she advised.
She founded Sweet Honey in the Rock in 1973, a group of African-American singers, all women, who blended black musical traditions of church and fields with original songs.
The name of the group, which began as a quartet and grew into a quintet and then a sextet, was inspired by a gospel song based on a Bible verse about the Lord’s promise of blessings to his disciples.
The group’s concerts, particularly at Carnegie Hall, could address contemporary issues such as disarmament, as well as race, feminist and sexual issues. The group released albums “that took blues- and folk-oriented a cappella singing to a new level of refinement,” Stephen Holden wrote in a 1982 New York Times review.
“The songs I write have the thick, dense harmonies of hymns and slow chants of the black church,” Ms. Reagon told The Times on the group’s 10th anniversary in 1983.
She has also served as a composer, consultant and performer on notable television and radio series, including the civil rights documentaries “Eyes on the Prize” (1987) and Ken Burns’ “The Civil War” (1990), for which she contributed the soundtrack “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder.”
She was producer and host of “Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions” (1994), a National Public Radio series on black church music that won a Peabody Award.
Ms. Reagon, who lived in Washington, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1989 and was a distinguished professor of history at American University from 1993 to 2003.
She collaborated with experimental director Robert Wilson in writing the music and libretto for the 2003 opera The Temptation of Saint Anthony, based on a novel by Gustave Flaubert. The opera’s American premiere (with costumes by Geoffrey Holder) took place at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Ms. Reagon “provided ethereal chorales and rousing tambourine-driven gospel tunes, declamatory spirituals and sensual soul,” wrote Times critic Jon Pareles.
Bernice Johnson was born on October 4, 1942, in Dougherty County, in southwest Georgia, near Albany. She was one of eight children of the Rev. Jesse Johnson, a Baptist minister, and Beatrice (Wise) Johnson.
In 1959, she entered Albany State College (now Albany State University), a historically black institution, where she participated in what became known as the Albany Movement, a series of protests against segregation and voting rights. She was imprisoned in 1962 when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Albany to lead protests. She was later expelled from the university for her activism.
After a march, a group of protesters had gathered at a church when a SNCC organizer said, “Bernice, sing a song.”
She launched into the gospel standard “Over My Head,” rewriting the line “I see trouble in the air” into a version that fit the moment: “Over my head, I see freedom in the air.”
“It was the first time I felt that these songs were mine and that I could use them however I needed to,” she said in an interview for “Eyes on the Prize.”
“Growing up in Albany,” she added, “I learned that if you bring black people together, you bring them together with a song.”
The idea for the Freedom Singers – two men and two women with lively voices – came from folk singer Pete Seeger, who was inspired by the Almanac Singers of the 1940s.
In 1963, she married Freedom Singers member Cordell Reagon. They had two children before their marriage ended in divorce in 1967.
Toshi Reagon became a noted musician and later collaborated with her mother; on one occasion, they jointly provided the music and libretto for Mr. Wilson’s 2013 opera, “Zinnias: The Life of Clementine Hunter.”
Besides her daughter, Ms. Reagon is survived by a son, Kwan, who is a chef; her life partner, Adisa Douglas, a retired philanthropist; siblings Jordan Warren Johnson, Deloris Johnson Spears, Adetokunbo Tosu Tosasolim and Mamie Johnson Rush; and a granddaughter.
After being expelled from Albany State College, Ms. Reagon graduated from Spelman College in 1970. She was a Ford Foundation Fellow at Howard University, where she earned her Ph.D.
At the Smithsonian, she produced a three-disc box set, “Voices of the Civil Rights Movement: Black American Freedom Songs 1960-66.” The recordings were made in churches, at protests and on picket lines.
In February 2010, Ms. Reagon performed with a trio of Freedom Singers gathered at the White House to celebrate the music of the civil rights era.
“The civil rights movement was a movement fueled by music,” President Barack Obama said in his opening remarks.
The Freedom Singers performed a rousing version of “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round,” with Ms. Reagon pausing to urge the audience to lean into the call and response.
“You really have to sing this song,” she said. “You never know when you’re going to need it.”