– “Make A Joyful Noise!” By Kathryn Baker Kemp is available in print and e-book formats. –

Chicago, IL (February 20, 2012) — Kathryn Baker Kemp, a Chicago resident, is a retired music director, administrator and educator. She traces the journey of gospel music from its indigenous roots in Africa to the genres shaped by enslaved Africans and their descendants in America. Dr. Kemp, a licensed minister, has witnessed the power of gospel music and its message throughout her life.
Make a Joyful Noise!: A Brief History of Gospel Music Ministry in America tells the story of the resiliency of an African American people who worshipped their God with praise and thanksgiving – even in the midst of brutal oppression – through music. This book shows how music – gospel music in particular – has been a vehicle utilized over the years by people of African ancestry as a personal treasure, an expression of joy, a call for freedom, and a source of release despite oppression, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and racism.

The legacy of Dr. Thomas A. Dorsey and Rev. James Cleveland is honored through the gospel organizations they founded. The National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses, Inc., the first gospel organization, was founded by Professor Thomas A. Dorsey, and the Gospel Music Workshop of America, Inc., was founded by Rev. James Cleveland, a mentee of Dr. Thomas Dorsey.

Part One of the book concludes with discussions of the future of gospel music and references some major secular events that highlight its widespread appeal. Interviews with evangelists, composers, songwriters, musicians, gospel artists, ministers of music, and members of the Gospel Music Workshop of America, Inc. express the richness of this heritage in Part Two of this work.

Make A Joyful Noise! is a valuable resource that provides first-hand accounts of the impact and importance of gospel music to America.

For more details about the book, visit www.joyfulnoisepress.com
PRESS CONTACT:
Kathryn B. Kemp
joyfulnoise121@sbcglobal.net
773-741-5106

By Earnest McBride

JA Contributing Editor

Eminent scholar and historian Manning Marable’s spirit opted to depart the present world just one day before the author’s supposedly greatest work was announced for general release. He was 60.The New York Times reported that Marable had been hospitalized with pneumonia in March. Yet his long battle with sarcoidosis (a disease affecting lung, liver and lymph glands) had led him to get a double-lung transplant last July.Best known for his weekly news column, “Along the Color Line,” that appeared in more than 400 publications worldwide, Marable was about to introduce what his publisher’s touted as the “definitive” work on one of the nation’s most famous black leaders. “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention” is that final work and has whetted the interest of scholars around the world. The book was released for general sales three days after Marable’s death.The scholar known for his devotion to people’s causes as well as to the historical importance of the people he was studying embraced black history as a legitimate and necessary field of study. He spent 20 years researching and writing his Malcolm X book, his last, and perhaps greatest, work.Marable’s work places and scholarly fields of play included some of the nation’s most prestigious institutions. He began his professional career as a senior research associate in Africana Studies at Cornell University in 1980. Two years later, he began work as history and economics professor at Fisk University, where he also served as the director of the Race Relations Institute. At Colgate University in 1983, Marable founded and directed the Africana and Latin American Studies program, a job that presaged much of the work that he began 10 years later at Columbia University, where he became the founding director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies. He was at Columbia at the time of his death.Manning was frequently heard to say that he did not just make an effort to write history or have friends. He rather “cultivated” both, he said on the Tavis Smiley Show in February, 2006.“I’ve cultivated with Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of Medgar Evers,” he said. ‘Medgar had the toughest Civil Rights job in the United States, being the field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi for nearly a decade.”Manning co-authored with Myrlie Evers the best-selling “The Autobiography of Medgar Evers: A Hero’s Life and Legacy,” published in 2006. Manning viewed Medgar as one of the greatest men of his generation with an impact on the world no less impressive than the most eminent geniuses, scientists or change agents of his time.  “He (Medgar) was at the time of his death one of the three or four most influential figures on Earth. His speeches were read by millions, had been memorized by millions of people.”Manning’s genuine and deep admiration for Medgar led to his being selected as the first lecturer for the newly-developed Medgar Evers Institute in 1998. His speech was delivered at Millsaps College, one of the few white institutions that allowed its students to freely join in the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi without fear of recrimination.While the Institute faded into obscurity in subsequent years, Marable retained his “cultivated” relations with the Evers family and the civil rights cause.Of the 20 books that he published in a career spanning nearly 40 years, besides those cited earlier, the most well-received by the reading public were “Speaking Truth to Power,” “How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black  America (1983),” “Living Black History,” and “Black Liberation in Conservative America (1997).” Two friends from the contemporary world of “race” work are Benjamin Chavis, Jr., and Benjamin Todd Jealous, both having attained the most recognizable seat in civil rights activities, the presidency of the NAACP.“Manning,” said Chavis, National NAACP president for 1993-1994, “was not only a great analytical historian of the plight of African people all over the world, and in particular here in the United States, but also my long-time friend and comrade, who was a diligent, consistent, thought-provoking visionary and champion of the liberation of the oppressed.“It is interesting that today too many of us still get too nervous whenever we hear the word ‘race’ used. It is as if some of us are ashamed to admit that our struggle against racism and class discrimination still exists…. I have personally known Manning Marable for more than 30 years. He had a passion for the truth unabridged. Manning Marable was a freedom fighter who used his skill as a historian to present the truth to people who cried out for a better quality of life.”Marable made many lasting contributions to the NAACP efforts to desegregate American society, Jealous said. “Dr. Marable brought one of the keenest intellects of our age to the contemporary conversation on race in America,” Jealous said. “As an academic, he was never afraid to speak his mind, and as an activist, his words carried the gravitas of a published author. His life was dedicated to the struggle, and he will be sorely missed.”Marable was born May 13, 1950, in Dayton, Ohio. He died in New York City on April 1.Dr. Marable is survived by his wife of 15 years, Leith Mullings, three children and two stepchildren.

Michael Oher is the young man at the center of the true story depicted in The Blind Side movie (and book) that swept up awards and accolades. Though the odds were heavily stacked against him, Michael had a burning desire deep within his soul to break out of the Memphis inner-city ghetto and into a world of opportunity. While many people are now familiar with Oher’s amazing journey, this is the first time he shares his account of his story in his own words, revealing his thoughts and feelings with details that only he knows, and offering his point of view on how anyone can achieve a better life.

Looking back on how he went from being a homeless child in Memphis to playing in the NFL, Michael talks about the goals he had for himself in order to break out of the cycle of poverty, addiction, and hopelessness that trapped his family for so long. He recounts poignant stories growing up in the projects and running from child services and foster care over and over again in search of some familiarity. Eventually he grasped onto football as his ticket out of the madness and worked hard to make his dream into a reality. But Oher also knew he would not be successful alone. With his adoptive family, the Touhys, and other influential people in mind, he describes the absolute necessity of seeking out positive role models and good friends who share the same values to achieve one’s dreams.

Sharing untold stories of heartache, determination, courage, and love, I Beat the Odds is an incredibly rousing tale of one young man’s quest to achieve the American dream.

JANS – Nine years before the Senate campaign that made him one of the most influential and compelling voices in American politics, Barack Obama published this lyrical, unsentimental, and powerfully affecting memoir, which became a #1 New York Times bestseller when it was reissued in 2004. Dreams from My Father tells the story of Obama’s struggle to understand the forces that shaped him as the son of a black African father and white American mother –a struggle that takes him from the American heartland to the ancestral home of his great-aunt in the tiny African village of Alego.

Obama opens his story in New York, where he hears that his father – a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man – has died in a car accident. The news triggers a chain of memories as Barack retraces his family’s unusual history: the migration of his mother’s family from small-town Kansas to the Hawaiian islands; the love that develops between his mother and a promising young Kenyan student, a love nurtured by youthful innocence and the integrationist spirit of the early sixties; his father’s departure from Hawaii when Barack was two, as the realities of race and power reassert themselves; and Barack’s own awakening to the fears and doubts that exist not just between the larger black and white worlds but within himself.

Propelled by a desire to understand both the forces that shaped him and his father’s legacy, Barack moves to Chicago to work as a community organizer. There, against the backdrop of tumultuous political and racial conflict, he works to turn back the mounting despair of the inner city. His story becomes one with those of the people he works with as he learns about the value of community, the necessity of healing old wounds, and the possibility of faith in the midst of adversity.

Barack’s journey comes full circle in Kenya, where he finally meets the African side of his family and confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life. Traveling through a country racked by brutal poverty and tribal conflict, but whose people are sustained by a spirit of endurance and hope, Barack discovers that he is inescapably bound to brothers and sisters living an ocean away – and that by embracing their common struggles he can finally reconcile his divided inheritance.

A searching meditation on the meaning of identity in America, Dreams from My Father might be the most revealing portrait there is of a major American leader – a man who is playing, and will play, an increasingly prominent role in healing a fractious and fragmented nation.

Pictured in left-hand photograph on cover: Habiba Akumu Hussein and Barack Obama, Sr. (President Obama’s paternal grandmother and his father as a young boy). Pictured in right-hand photograph on cover: Stanley Dunham and Ann Dunham (President Obama’s maternal grandfather and his mother as a young girl).

JANS – From the author of the acclaimed Dinah Washington biography Queen comes this  account of the triumphs and difficulties of the brilliant and high-tempered Nina Simone. Her distinctive voice and music occupy a singular place in the canon of American song.

Tapping into newly unearthed material – including stories of family and career – Nadine Cohodas gives a luminous portrait of the singer who was born Eunice Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, in 1933, one of eight children in a proud black family.

We see her as a prodigiously talented child who is trained in classical piano through the charitable auspices of a local white woman. We witness her devastating disappointment when she is rejected by the Curtis Institute of Music – a dream deferred that would forever shape her self-image as well as her music.

As we watch Simone’s exciting rise to stardom, Cohodas weaves in the central factors of her life and career: her unique and provocative relationship with her audiences (she would “shush” them angrily; as a classically trained musician, she didn’t believe in cabaret chat); her involvement in and contributions to the civil rights movement; her two marriages, including one of brief family contentment with police detective Andy Stroud, with whom she had her daughter, Lisa; and  the alienation from the United States that drove her to live abroad. Alongside these threads runs a darker one: Nina’s increasing and sometimes baffling outbursts of rage and pain and her lifelong struggle to overcome a deep sense of personal injustice, which persisted even as she won international renown.

In Where Is Friendship Bear? by Romero Britto, world-famous pop artist Romero Britto brings his famous bears to life in this bold, interactive book that features lift-the-flaps and touch-and-feel elements! Vibrant colors create inviting patterns to touch and feel as readers lift the flaps in search of the one and only Friendship Bear.

In A Glorious Day by Amy Schwartz, Henry’s day is full. From breakfast to bedtime there is fun with his friends in their small red brick building. There are steps out front to count climbing up and to count coming down. On the street there’s the garbage man and a tow truck to watch. And just around the corner there’s a playground and even more friends. Fullness makes Henry’s day (and every day for Henry) simply GLORIOUS.

JANS – The new book by Wanda F. Jackson has already drawn praise from educators. School administrator Madeline P. Floyd notes: (It) is more than a description of life in the South. It is a window into an era where there is love, trust, and strong family values. People took time to enjoy, even in the midst of hard times and adversity, the simple and pure things of life.

As “the simple and pure things of life” become all the more important during our struggling economy and as America lumbers down a post-Civil Rights road, complete with an African American family in the White House, Memories of Mississippi: Growing Up in the South is as timely a book as ever.

Memories of Mississippi is the story of a young girl growing into womanhood. The innocence of Jackson’s prose lends to a breathtaking accuracy of not only one little girl’s world, but the world the entire country found itself in during that era.

Jackson takes readers down memory lane as she recounts growing up in the small town of Buena Vista, Mississippi. Told in charming vignettes which call to mind Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Jackson deftly navigates the memory, recalling everything from the excitement of her family gathering around a radio to listen to the Sonny Liston vs. Floyd Patterson fight or the heartbreak of watching her childhood best friend deal with a pre-teen pregnancy.

Wanda F. Jackson

Wanda Fay (Baskin) Jackson was born in Houston, Mississippi, September 29, 1955. She was the ninth child in a family of eleven. Her parents Paul Revere and the late Claudie Bell Baskin were farmers. She attended college at Mississippi Valley State University in Itta Bena, Mississippi, and graduated in 1978 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. Jackson has taught English in public schools for over 30 years. She has published two books of poetry, A Collection of Poetry (1989) and Exclamations of Joy (1996), both by Vantage Press. She also published the praise and worship manual Morning Song (2006). She is married to her college sweetheart, Charles, who is also an educator, coach and minister. They have three children Carlos, Yolanda and Gabriel.

By Alan M. Harrison

Jackson Advocate Contributing Editor

Eric Jerome Dickeys lastest opus Tempted by Trouble will most definitely please established fans and new readers alike. Set in the job opportunity void city of Detroit, Dickey explores the term “survival at any cost” with finesse and style. Readers will immediately recognize and sympathize with main character Dmytrk’s plight as he tries to hold to what he loves most. While the content might be too mature for young readers, I encourage adults to read this engaging tale of revenge and redemption. All that’s missing is a good drink.

What sets this and most of Dickey’s work apart from other books in the oversaturated urban market is his strict attention to detail and realism. The city of Detroit jumps out of the page to the point u can feel a chill down your spine. While each character will remind u of yourself or someone u know. This novel is at the very least a page turner, as Dickey completely submerges the reader into the Dmytrk’s plight. His internal and external struggle to stay alive and sane is captivating.

While the end is somewhat confusing at first, u begin to understand that the love of someone special is worth much more than material gain. Even though the reader might recognize this before Dmytrk , your are still satisfied not only with his epiphany. You also enjoy the pilgrimage it took for him to reach this state of mind