By Regennia N. Williams PhD
Humanities Scholar and Life Member of the Oral History Association
From the late spring of 2016 through the early winter of 2018, I had the pleasure of interviewing 23 incredible jazz artists in the Metro DC Area. Many were members or friends of DC Legendary Musicians, Inc. (DCLM), and they ranged in age from under 15 to over 50.
Each informant gave generously of their time and abundant knowledge to support the research for Washington, DC, Jazz, a co-authored book by Dr. Regennia N. Williams and the Rev. Dr. Sandra Butler-Truesdale. (Forthcoming 2018, Arcadia Publishing)
For 23 days in July and August of 2018, I will share photographs of these artists and brief quotes from their interviews with my Facebook friends and the readers of the RASHAD Center’s blog. This is my way of thanking the artists publicly for their support and offering a preview of some of the information in the book.
Please follow me on Facebook, visit my blog site often, and learn more about what makes these musicians so amazing. Also, please continue to support the work of jazz artists in Washington, D.C. and throughout the global community.
*For more information on the research for the book and the ongoing work of DCLM, please see the special Black Music Month issue of DCLM’s newsletter at http://dclmusicians.org/.
About Dr. Regennia N. Williams, Founder, President, and Executive Director
Dr. Regennia N. Williams is the Founder and Executive Director of The RASHAD Center, Inc., a Maryland-based non-profit educational corporation.
Williams holds a PhD in Social History and Policy from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. A native Clevelander and a four-time alumna of Cleveland State University, information on RASHAD's “Praying Grounds, African American Faith Communities: A Documentary and Oral History” project is now available online at www.ClevelandMemory.org/pray/, a site that is maintained by CSU's Library Special Collections, home of the Praying Grounds manuscript collections. Praying Grounds was the primary inspiration for the launching of the Initiative for the Study of Religion and Spirituality in the History of Africa and the Diaspora (RASHAD) at CSU, and links to RASHAD's scholarly journal and newsletter are also available on the Praying Grounds site. On April 28, 2020, the RASHAD Center, Inc. became a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
In 2010, Dr. Williams was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at Nigeria’s Obafemi Awolowo University, where she taught history and directed a RASHAD-related oral history project that focused on the role of religion in recent Nigerian social history. Other research-related travels have taken her to Canada, China, France, South Africa, and Austria.
In 2013, she conceived and produced “Come Sunday @ 70: The Place of Duke Ellington’s Sacred Jazz in World History and Culture, c. 1943-2013,” a project that included scholarly presentations and performing arts activities. From September 1993 until May 2015, she was a faculty member in the Department of History at Cleveland State University. She served as a Fulbright Specialist at South Africa's University of the Free State in the summer of 2019, and completed a short-term faculty residency at Howard University in the fall of 2019. She is based in Cleveland, Ohio.
As a public scholar, her current research projects focus on African American history and culture, especially as it relates to music, religion, and spirituality. She is a member of the Oral History Association, the Western Reserve Historical Society, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
By Regennia N. Williams PhD
The RASHAD Center, Inc. 