It was, of all things, a class in the business of opera at the Boston Conservatory that left soprano DeAnna Tisdale Johnson with a key nugget about this business of life.
Her professor was also the director of all the operas they presented. He told them, “No matter what happens with your career in music, you should keep in mind what your true purpose is, and your true purpose doesn’t necessarily have to do with music.” He also said, “Having a true career in music is very difficult, but it’s not the be-all, end-all in life.” That sent the then-26-year-old, on a vocal performance path for years, into a “slight existential crisis,” she said, chuckling fondly at the memory.
“What is my purpose?” she wondered. She thought back, remembering how she had showed up for others, and how people complimented her. Having a voice and being a voice – that was her purpose. “I felt like, in anything that I do, there’s something to do with the voice there.”
Johnson, editor/publisher of the Jackson Advocate since 2021, keeps that voice primed for performance and for her community.
In Mississippi Symphony Orchestra’s “Resonant Song” matinee concert, 3 p.m. Oct. 26 at Cade Chapel Missionary Baptist Church, she’ll give voice to the rich words of Three Songs on Poems by Margaret Walker, set to music by MSO Conductor Crafton Beck. The songs are Southern Song, Ex-Slave, and My Truth and My Flame.
For Johnson, music exerted a pull from the start, reaching back to the songs of her student days at Adhiambo School in Jackson, and following through the APAC program at Murrah High, Tougaloo College, University of Southern Mississippi (Master of Music) and Boston Conservatory (Graduate Performance Diploma in Vocal Performance).
“The fact that I had grown to love music so much and love vocal music so much that I wanted to be a performer and be in operas and sing classical music – it was deeply embedded in my heart and soul to be a voice for myself and for others. So, I’ve always kept that in mind, and I guess my body just agrees with that.” So does her newspaper’s motto: “The Voice of Black Mississippians.”
Walker, founder of the Institute for the Study of the History, Life and Culture of Black People at Jackson State University (now the Margaret Walker Center) was among the many influential Jackson arts and civic figures in Johnson’s orbit growing up, when her parents ran the Jackson Advocate. Some of Walker’s poems premiered in their newspaper. “So, it feels like it was just meant to be,” she said of performing songs with MSO set on Walker’s words, “like a kismet moment because of this special connection.”
She sees a connecting thread through her own family legacy, and poems Walker wrote about the Black experience in Mississippi. ‘I can carry that legacy forward in some way, through her words and through the beautiful music that Maestro Beck has crafted.”
Johnson will perform the songs again Nov. 13 at the Rembrandt Society Dinner at the Mississippi Museum of Art, where Walker’s epic poem This is My Century: Black Synthesis of Time inspired the exhibition of the permanent collection, New Symphony of Time. “We get to do them more than once, and I’m really thrilled by that,” Beck said, “because DeAnna should be singing these songs.”
Each of the songs is different, she noted, sparking different emotions. “The Black experience is a myriad of things. I say this often with the Jackson Advocate.… It’s not just about our trials. It’s not just about educating the community about the issues of our community, but it’s also about the triumphs,” Johnson said. “The Advocate talks about all those issues – our joys and our sorrows. I hear that in this music and in these words.
“I really am excited to bring my own spin,” she said. Her primary objective is to convey and honor what Walker’s words and Beck’s music put into these songs, as well as share how the songs have touched her.
“I want the audience to come out of this with a sense of joy, that our little home, Jackson, Mississippi, has been a resilient bunch,” she said. “We have, through all that we have been through, still found the joy, still found the life to make everything okay in the end.
“These words, this music — it is timeless.” Relevant when Walker wrote them, relevant today and relevant in the future.
Her performance at Cade Chapel is the heart of a program rooted in the classics of Tchaikovsky’s Andante Cantabile and Scott Joplin’s The Ragtime Dance, but also brimming with exciting new music. The concert also includes Kinan Azmeh’s Ibn Arabi Postlude, Thomas Adés’ fresh, contemporary arrangements on Cardiac Arrest by Madness and Baroque composer Courperin’s Les Barricades Mystérieuses, Myroslav Skoryk’s Melody and Eddie James’ God featuring the Cade Chapel Choir.