Long Time Comin’: Scott Ainslie & Reggie Harris
Standing in concert, armed with a variety of acoustic instruments, stories, and songs, Scott Ainslie and Reggie Harris–passionate performers and friends–personalize America’s history and the shared struggle for equal social and civil rights. In their interactive concert program, Long Time Comin’, we are welcomed and wrapped up in that journey.
Tracing the role of music out of Africa, into the Black south and beyond–from work songs and slave songs to freedom songs–Harris and Ainslie attend to the many small and great sacrifices made by normal people in their effort to achieve what Lincoln called ‘a more perfect Union.’
As brothers and friends, these two gifted performers meet on the stage with illustrative stories and songs. Their performance pinpoints the lamentations and daily renewal required across the years in America’s struggle for a better future. The very sound of their voices and the content of the history they present, reaches across the boundaries of race and culture, and inspires us to join them in working toward America’s highest ideals.
With the quadricentennial of the first purchase of African slaves in Jamestown VA in 1619 upon us, this work is more important than ever.
In their songs and stories, Ainslie and Harris bring the legacy of the slave trade–and the struggle against it–into bold relief. They take us on a tour of the Twentieth Century–a century bathed in the blues, the struggle for civil rights, rhythm and blues, and soul music–and bring us forward into the Twenty-first.
Reggie Harris and Scott Ainslie’s concert program Long Time Comin’ takes its name from a line in Sam Cooke’s remarkable anthem, A Change Is Gonna Come. These two performers clearly believe that.
When you hear them sing together; you will believe it, too.
For tickets, contact the Ruth B. Shannon Center For The Performing Arts.
