The UCLA African American Music Ensemble will perform its winter concert of gospel, hymns, and spirituals on Sunday, March 2, at 3 p.m. at Olivet Lutheran Church, 2506 W. Imperial Hwy., in Hawthorne, CA 90250, directed by Diane White-Clayton, PhD, lecturer at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. Admission to this event is free.
White-Clayton, who is affectionately known as “Dr. Dee,” is a teaching artist with the Walt Disney Corporation and founding director of the BYTHAX Ensemble and her own enterprise, BYTHAX Records, Inc., encompassing her work across the globe as a vocalist, pianist, conductor, clinician, composer, and speaker.
Originally from Washington, DC, Dr. White-Clayton holds her PhD and MA in music composition from UC Santa Barbara and a BA in music from Washington University in St. Louis. She studied classical piano at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris as a Rotary Scholar and Ambassador of Goodwill.
Olivet Lutheran Church began to host performances by the UCLA AAME in 2024, through Dr. White-Clayton’s community connections. She says that bringing her students to perform in a Black church enhances their learning and appreciation of the music.
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“To be at an authentic gospel concert means you’re going to have an audience that participates with you on many levels,” she says.
“I’ve had students come up to me after our concert and say, ‘We’ve never sung where people are so encouraging and smiling. As soon as we clap, they’re standing up, clapping with us.’ We talk about … how gospel music, like its West African music great-grandparent, is a music that is communal.”
Dr. White-Clayton underscores the multi-faceted qualities of Black sacred music and its immeasurable influence on rock, popular, R&B, hip-hop, jazz, and country and Western.
“When you think about gospel music, where else in the world could this have happened?” she asks.
“A people who were literally ripped from the soil of their homeland, family after family ripped apart. Millions of people died in the slave trade, whether on the march from their villages to the coastline or on the middle passage on the ships with disease. Some… jumped overboard because they would rather die than face what they were facing.
“You got all of that … people from different tribes, even different countries, but have this commonality in terms of their outlook on life, on religion, on society, on familial connections, on music, on dance. You bring them together in this very hostile, strange, sick often, environment. And then, you have these revivals [and] a somewhat distorted Christianity was introduced to them and mandated.”
Dr. White-Clayton describes the “slave Bible” published for the enslaved converts, which omitted any mention of God’s love for humankind or the story of Moses freeing the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt. Fortunately, some slaves learned to read and when able to access a real Bible, found out the truth.
“In fact, Nat Turner, the famous revolt that he led, was inspired by his faith,” she says. “He felt like he heard from God and through the Bible, understood, ‘This is not who we’re supposed to be, this is not how it’s supposed to be.’ The goal to use this religion as a way of oppression that did work to a certain extent, backfired because that [message] became for many, the release. When you add to that the musical genius of this people, and you take European hymns that they were learning in churches that they were forced to go to, they changed those hymns and I say, added hot sauce to them.
“There’s a Bible verse that says, ‘God gives us beauty for ashes and the oil of joy for mourning,’” says Dr. White-Clayton. “The gift of gospel music has helped to transform the world … given to a people that were dispossessed, transplanted…raped and ripped apart, over and over again. It is infectious because it comes from a different place. The aesthetic is from the gut, from the heart.
“[Congressman] John Lewis said the Civil Rights Movement without music would be like a bird without wings. So, you took that music that was being sung in churches that was very familiar to many Black people. They shifted the words sometimes and instead of singing, ‘I woke up this morning with my mind stayed on Jesus,’ they’d sing, ‘I woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom.’ It is a powerful music.”
