Songs of Black Folk (Orange Grove Films, 100 Percent, Stay in the Music LLC, GBH, WNET, KQED, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, February 10) at 11 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a half-hour show on P.O.V. Shorts on PBS called Songs of Black Folk, about an intriguing event that took place on June 16, 2021 in either Seattle or Tacoma, Washington (the narration wasn’t clear about just where it took place) to commemorate former President Joe Biden signing a bill making “Juneteenth” – the day in 1865 when slaves in Texas learned a fact that had been carefully concealed from them: that the Civil War was over, the South lost, and they were legally free – a national holiday. The event was promoted by two members of the same family: Black church pastor Leslie Braxton and his nephew, Ramón Bryant Braxton. Ramón was raised by his grandmother because his father had spent most of Ramón’s childhood in prison for one offense or another (the show didn’t say just what he was in for, though it really didn’t matter). Ramón’s grandmother forbade him from playing football but encouraged him to study music, and after exploring other instruments Ramón settled on piano. He became good enough that in 2002 he gave a school recital as a classical pianist, which was rather shakily filmed by someone with a hand-held camera from the audience. When Biden signed the bill making Juneteenth a national holiday both Leslie and Ramón decided to promote a concert commemorating it and making people in the Pacific Northwest aware of the major musical heritage of African-Americans even though, as the narration noted, there are surprisingly few Black musicians of note from there. (The one real legend is Jimi Hendrix, who was part-Black, part-Native, and came from Seattle.) The two assembled an orchestra and choir and performed a rather sedate-sounding concert featuring Ramón’s arrangements of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and “We Shall Overcome.” What made the event especially poignant was that while preparations were underway Ramón’s grandmother was in a nursing home with dementia and was clearly on her last legs. Often Ramón had to tear himself away from rehearsals to go see the woman who’d raised him when he still could, and he expressed hope that she would last long enough for him to give the concert while she was still on this plane of existence. She died the day after the concert, on the actual June 17 Juneteenth holiday. Incidentally, it’s worth noting that under the command of our current President, Donald Trump, U.S. national parks no longer offer free admission on Juneteenth or on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday – but they do offer it on Donald Trump’s birthday, yet another example of the personality cult America’s Führer is building around himself.