Soul Sanctuary

My first arrangements of spirituals were Steal Away and an early version of Glory, Glory Hallelujah, for my then-fiance Chris Corley’s Juilliard Masters recital in 1991. People seemed to like them, but I never assumed anyone else would sing them. As it turned out, Chris’s performances of Steal Away during his Ph.D. studies at Florida State University led to other performances, a recording — by soprano Randye Jones on her CD, Come Down, Angels — and my first paid commission, also from Randye, of I Want Jesus to Walk With Me. With my confidence boosted, I gave a copy of Steal Away to countertenor Darryl Taylor, founder of the African American Art Song Alliance. In 2011, he came across my handwritten score while collecting repertoire for a recording with pianist Brent McMunn of How Sweet the Sound: A Charm of Spirituals, and decided to include it in his release.

Despite this affirmation, I never imagined becoming a professional composer/arranger; my lane had always been piano, whether solo or collaborative. Yet, when close friends asked me to push outside my comfort zone and compose — most notably, Darryl and Kristin Sims, a Lancaster-based soprano — I took on the challenge anyway. Eventually, people like soprano diva Maria Clark, who knew me when I was a professor at Florida A&M and she was a student at FSU, came to embrace my music. It was her interest in performing my songs that led to this recording.

Clark wanted to include some improvisations on SOUL SANCTUARY; His Eye is on the Sparrow and Lord, I’ll Go were created during the recording session, and Hold On is my recreation of an improvisation I recorded on my phone in my living room. Plenty Good Room and Motherless Child/Swing Low, Sweet Chariot are adaptations of arrangements I made for the Tallahassee Boys Choir in the early 1990’s. No Hiding Place is a revision of a version written for bass Benjamin Polite, who was a student when I taught at FAMU. Darryl Taylor asked me to write down Lord, I Want to be a Christian after we used it as an improvised third encore; I’d long forgotten it, and came up with something else instead.

The last four pieces on SOUL SANCTUARY are particularly special to me. My mother, Eva Caisey Thompson, who often believes in me more than I believe in myself, asked me to arrange Unto the Hills for her to play at a funeral. A departure from the spirituals and gospel songs that make up the rest of this recording, it was a hymn she knew from her childhood in Bermuda, where she attended Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the 5 churches her grandfather founded on the island. Crossing Jordan, a trio of spirituals with cello, began with my daughter Kiana’s request that I arrange Deep River for her senior recital in 2019; the debut cellist was my dear friend and duo partner, Sara Male. Before its debut, however, my sister Alicia Thompson and her son Justin Griffin, a gifted teen trumpeter, adapted it for a church service by repeating a section. I liked the result, which led to the arrangement’s current form. I added His Name So Sweet and Wade in the Water with the thought that a future singer might be more interested in recruiting a cellist to perform Deep River if that person would have more than one piece to play. Quite the paradigm shift from my thoughts after writing Steal Away!

— Maria Thompson Corley