The Gift to Sing (James Weldon Johnson). SATB, piano, 4’30”. Commissioned by Dolce Canto, David Edmonds, Missoula, MT, for their 25th Anniversary. Premiered 25 Apr 2026, St. Ignatius Mission Church, and 26 Apr 2026, St. Francis Xavier Church, Missoula, MT.
The remarkable James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) was an international diplomat under President Theodore Roosevelt, a Broadway songwriter, a leader of the NAACP, an important Harlem Renaissance poet and writer, the editor of The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), and the creator of the famous song embraced not only by Black Americans but by hymnals across many denominations, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” In his 1917 Fifty Years & Other Poems we find “The Gift to Sing.”
The Gift to Sing
James Weldon Johnson
Sometimes the mist overhangs my path,
And blackening clouds about me cling;
But, oh, I have a magic way
To turn the gloom to cheerful day—
I softly sing.
And if the way grows darker still,
Shadowed by Sorrow’s somber wing,
With glad defiance in my throat,
I pierce the darkness with a note,
And sing, and sing.
I brood not over the broken past,
Nor dread whatever time may bring;
No nights are dark, no days are long,
While in my heart there swells a song,
And I can sing.
David Edmonds and I agreed that this poem was perfectly suited for Dolce Canto’s 25th anniversary, for which they named me their 2025/26 Commissioned Composer. We already knew each other because in 2022 I had set the Rabindranath Tagore poem Where the Mind Is Without Fear for David’s Concert Choir at the University of New Mexico.
“The Gift to Sing” is clear and forthright and needs no analysis, Johnson proclaiming that as long as he can sing, he can endure anything. The mode of G lydian forms the first two lines of each stanza, before swerving into C lydian for lines 3–5. Verse two becomes a bit more involved in the voice leading, as if we are picking our way through darker times. The final verse raises anticipation, but when we expect it to shift to C lydian as in the first two stanzas, it drops, at “No nights are dark,” into A major, which carries through to the end.
The lilting landscape of the piece belies the ever-shifting meters throughout, juggling 3/4, 3/8, and 4/4. I hadn’t planned to do that, but it’s how the rolling eighth notes of the introduction most naturally fell into place. It seemed an appropriate take on the poet’s confidence in singing to carry him through, however bumpy the path may be.