© 2024 Ideastream Public Media

1375 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44115
(216) 916-6100 | (877) 399-3307

WKSU is a public media service licensed to Kent State University and operated by Ideastream Public Media.
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Some of These Days

image: laradownes.com

Some of These Days—Lara Downes, piano & Friends (Flipside Music)

“All of God's children gonna sit together, some of these days.” -From the African-American Spiritual Welcome Table. Lara Downes says, “The conviction in these words — the hope and faith in them — is why I’m even here at all. I was born because my parents believed these words.  They met at a sit-in, my mom and dad. San Francisco, in the late 1960’s. He was a Black man from Harlem and she was a Jewish girl from Akron. They fell in love and got married and had three golden-brown babies, all in the hope and faith that their daughters, and all the children, of all shades of black, brown and beige, would sit together in freedom and fairness — some of these days.”  We featured this disc two years ago, and revisiting it recalls the historic reckoning with race and equity that burst into the streets in 2020, helping ignite a long-overdue national conversation. This collection revisits freedom songs and Spirituals, historic expressions of hope and courage that remind us of our human capacity for optimism, activism, and unification in the face of crisis. “For me, the motivation in creating this record has always been the relevance and timelessness of these songs," says Downes. "There’s the pain, reaction to oppression, always hope, always a vision of a better time. All of those things are relevant and current today."