AGMA’s next Black History Month Spotlight features Makeda Hampton, AGMA Chorister, classical vocalist, and educator. She shares her rendition of “A Prayer” from African Romances, a groundbreaking collaboration between Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a Black British composer, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, a Black American poet. Published in 1897, African Romances is widely recognized as the earliest known art song cycle by a Black composer and a Black poet. Makeda offers “A Prayer” as a quiet testament to resilience and disciplined hope—an anchoring moment for artists navigating uncertainty and exhaustion.
Makeda Hampton on A Prayer of Disciplined Hope
In my work as a singer, educator, and scholar, I keep returning to a truth Black History Month makes impossible to ignore: Black artistry has always carried more than beauty. It carries memory. It carries witness. It carries a future. It is a call to name the Black artists whose talent, intellect, and endurance have shaped music.
My recent recording project, African Romances, centers on an extraordinary late–19th-century collaboration between two Black artists: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a Black British composer, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, a Black American poet. At a time when the promise of emancipation was routinely broken, and the full humanity of Black art, thought, and love was dismissed or caricatured, their partnership asserted something radical: high literary craft paired with high musical craft, created in a world determined to limit Black expression. African Romances is widely recognized as the earliest Black art song cycle to appear in print, published in 1897.
One song in particular, “A Prayer,” feels like a direct message to our current moment. Dunbar’s text doesn’t treat prayer as a spectacle or escapism. Instead, it reads like a discipline, insisting on steadiness amid a world loud with uncertainty. Coleridge-Taylor’s setting mirrors that resolve: the musical line asks for breath, grounding, and focus. “A Prayer” can feel too sacred to “perform” in the usual sense, yet it creates a moment of communal witnessing and hope.
I want to share my version of “A Prayer” with the AGMA community because artists are carrying a lot right now. Many of us are balancing demanding work, financial pressure, and the emotional weight of staying visible and excellent in spaces that do not always make room for us. This song offers a few minutes of clarity: a reminder that we can lean on each other for strength, maintain our dignity, and still move forward.
Black artists have always made work that does more than entertain. We have birthed culture, preserved memory, and created beauty that tells the truth. “A Prayer” is part of that lineage. It holds quiet resilience, disciplined hope, and the kind of courage that doesn’t need to shout to be real. May it invite us all to keep re-centering and re-membering the repertoire, the stories, and the people who have always been here, shaping the art form from the inside.
Link to “A Prayer” from African Romances to accompany this reflection: https://youtu.be/sw2Rs7YUIOk?si=oAJI5qJIfV1Wo9gR