On Being Ramona Holland
An Encounter with a Remarkable Voice

Portico of a Houston church, before the performance.

by Angus Verspeeten, Music Editor

La voix humaine… One More Time

Picture this:
A large suburban Methodist church in Houston which when it was built maybe 20 years ago was near the edge of the city but which Is now, though many miles from downtown, deep enough within the urban sprawl that it almost qualifies as inner-city.

Jersey Village, as the burb is known, straddles a freeway and appears in the news every couple of years when the local gendarmes get it into their heads that they can more easily hit their ticket-writing quotas if they turn said freeway into a speed trap.

Otherwise you never hear much from or about Jersey Village. White, middle-class, homes from the 100s, driveways chockablock with SUVs: you get the picture.

One evening in early December I found myself sitting in said Methodist church, the occasion being the annual Christmas concert of the Houston Choral Society, a large, semi-professional group of no little ability whose home edifice is this particular church.

A family member being involved in the chorus, I attend most of their events. Though the programming tends toward the musically conservative (read: if it was composed before 1900, it’s good; after 1900, it’s not), the HCS at least generally avoids that too-cute tendency on the part of many large vocal ensembles that I think of as creeping Fred-Waringism (80 or so voices trying—sorry, there’s no other way to put this—to croon [pace, Sinatra]).

Over the years I’ve followed the HCS’s development with interest and admiration. While their performances have often delighted, entertained, and even now and then intrigued me, they’ve never come close to what I think of as a peak musical experience.

Till this Christmas program.

We—the lily-white audience—got through a nice assortment of serious and popular pieces and had even applauded the bits of classical and, yes, liturgical music that we’d never heard before but knew we were supposed to appreciate. Nothing really new here, just your standard well-performed choral recital.

Then, right at the end, Ramona Holland stood up and everything changed. Including the picture I asked you to imagine at the beginning.

Because now, please insert into that anglophile tableau a large, young African-American woman, dressed in a stunning two-piece beige silk suit, wearing low white heels.

She doesn’t just take the stage, she TAKES the stage, the way directors want lead actors to TAKE the stage.

She stands, utterly poised, benignly eyeing us white folk eyeing her.

The orchestra and organ strike up a tune. It is the hoariest of Christmas war-horse: "O Holy Night."

And Ramona Holland, one black face among a thousand white ones, proceeds in five fleeting minutes to teach us that we had never heard the piece before.

She sings the words and the music with such conviction that you think—no, you FEEL as if she’s making it up as she goes along and it’s coming straight from her heart through her remarkable soprano voice right into this room full of self-satisfied red-state ears.

She does four verses, starting slow and low, building, ending finally with her own crescendo of an obbligato over the obedient white choir that of course is singing the music note-perfect as written.

It turns out there is talk in those verses of slaves, and of us all being brothers, and of loving one another. But who ever hears it?

Listen to Ramona Holland and you hear it and you not only remember, you KNOW that Jesus, whoever he was, is NOT the Jesus of Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell.

To sing that, to SAY that in a room full of, shall we say, other-hued people, and to do it with utter conviction and powerful musicality… I cannot imagine what it must be like to be Ramona Holland and to have that power.

Oh. I forgot to mention the end. The piece finished and there was total silence for a moment in the church, total shocked silence that was instantly shattered by an unrestrained standing ovation filled with shouts of "Brava, brava!" that went on and on and on.

As you may know, in a Methodist church one doesn’t standingly ovate, nor does one shout, anything, much less "Brava, brava!" Such unseemly behavior is about as far from John Wesley as George Bush is from Jesus.

After the obligatory "Hallelujah Chorus" we all filed out, wondering what in the world had just happened. I could only think that we had been privileged a musical glimpse into what it’s like being Ramona Holland.

PTL.

END

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