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A Timely Remix of ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ Out of a New York Prison
Listen if you like: Terence Blanchard, Kem, Keb’ Mo’
The pageantry of July 4th can make you cynical, as you look at America’s failures and cruelties and think, What, exactly, should I be celebrating here? Alfred Roberts was feeling a similar disillusionment at New York’s Sing Sing Correctional Facility on January 6, 2021, as he watched a mob storm the U.S. Capitol from a television in his cell.
He wondered aloud to his friends about how the mostly White rioters would have been treated had they been Black. “Your mind does go back to marches on Selma and the visuals of water hoses and dogs,” he told me recently.
He worked out his reaction to that moment by writing a song called “Victory.” He borrowed lyrics and melodic fragments from “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the James Weldon Johnson song written in 1900 that is now known as the Black national anthem.
“I wonder if there’s another fight in us,” Roberts sings. “‘Cause it’s hard to see the signs that we’re still marginalized.”
Roberts wrote the music with his friend Xiao Bao He, who goes by Yoshi. The two had developed their skills through Carnegie Hall’s Musical Connections program, which sends professional musicians to teach and collaborate with men in Sing Sing. The program has birthed more than 300 original songs over the last 15 years, some of which are captured in a recent series of videos on YouTube called “Sing Sing Voices.”
Roberts himself entered New York prisons in 1999 on a murder conviction. When he got to Sing Sing in 2013, he joined a band that covered songs by John Legend and Pharrell during prison college program graduations. Nearly a decade later, he got to sing “Victory” onstage at Sing Sing before his peers, and the rapper Common joined him with an impromptu verse.
Roberts told me some men inside had written off arts programs like this one as “corny” or “soft,” but as they watched other incarcerated men perform with stars, the culture shifted: “It went from guys being indifferent to saying ‘Wow, you really did your thing!’”
When Roberts left prison, in 2022, he applied for a job as a porter at Carnegie Hall. “I just wanted to be connected to the music community, because they’d invested in me,” he explained.
He didn’t get the job, but a few years later he was hired by Carnegie’s Social Impact Programs. Now he oversees the Future Music Project, which teaches music to teenagers incarcerated in New York City. “The thing that I took, a life, I could not give back,” he told me. “What I can do is live every day to honor that life by giving back.”
Roberts continues to compose and perform with other Sing Sing alumni in a band called The Freedom Trap. The band’s name nods to the fact that just getting out of prison can be the beginning of a long struggle to reintegrate into society.
I got to see Roberts sing “Victory” a couple of months ago at a concert in Brooklyn produced by another prison music program. He was surrounded by a full band and an adoring crowd. I got chills as he sang, “‘Yes we can’ sounds so paper thin,” nodding to Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign slogan. “...I wonder if there’s evidence from my heart?”
LINER NOTES
Song: “Victory (A Tribute to ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’)” | Lyrics: Alfred Roberts and James Weldon Johnson | Music: Alfred Roberts and Yoshi | Band: The Freedom Trap | Lead Singer: Alfred Roberts