'I Too, Sing America'
JOHNSON CITY (Feb. 14, 2018) – “I Too, Sing America: A Tribute to Black American Composers,” a performance of music, poetry and lecture, will be presented by Charles Edward Charlton at East Tennessee State University on Friday, Feb. 23, at 1 p.m.
“This song lecture is an opportunity to present – along with a few favorite jazz standards, musical theater numbers and popular tunes – a facet of American music that is not widely known, which is art songs by black composers,” said Charlton, a native of Johnson City. “All these pieces represent a tiny sample of the black contribution to American art and culture that has slowly but steadily eroded many old ideas and attitudes about black people, blackness itself and even about what ‘America’ as an idea or ideal means, or should mean. I am excited and honored to take this journey and to be the guide along the way.”
Charlton is a graduate of Science Hill High School, where he was active in choir and theater. He earned his bachelor’s degree in music at the Blair School of Music and his master of education degree at the Peabody College of Education, both at Vanderbilt University, where he received the Benjamin E. Mays Award for notable academic achievement by an African American student.
Charlton performs regularly with the Nashville Opera Ensemble and is active in Nashville church music as a freelance chorister/conductor. He premiered the baritone solos in Charles Heimermann’s “A Symphony of Psalms” in 2016 and appeared as a soloist with the Nashville-based chamber music ensemble chatterbird in April 2017 in Ted Hearne’s oratorio “Katrina Ballads.”
He has also performed with the Murfreesboro Symphony Orchestra, Nashville Community Choir and Music City Community Chorus, which he previously served as associate conductor. In addition, Charlton has taught private voice lessons and led workshops focused on developing young singers in the greater Nashville area.
The presentation, sponsored in conjunction with Black History Month by ETSU’s Africana Studies Program, will take place in room 271-J inside the Multicultural Center on the second level of the D.P. Culp University Center.
For more information, contact Dr. Dorothy Drinkard-Hawkshawe, ETSU professor of History and director of Africana Studies, at 423-439-6688 or drinkard@etsu.edu. For disability accommodations, call the ETSU Office of Disability Services at 423-439-8346.