Black interiors are the life worlds of black peoples often denied them in normative modes of cultural circulation. Spirit is black radical energy. In Lynne Sachs’s Sermons and Sacred Pictures we are introduced to the work of Reverend L. O. Taylor, who captured the essence of the black church in a series of recordings from the 1930s and ’40s. We meet Bessie Jones in Bess Lomax Hawes’s anthropological recording Georgia Sea Island Singers and again in the educational film Yonder Come Day as she corrals students at Yale and youth on St. Simons Island into a chorus of play guided by the games and songs of her ancestors.
—The Black Aesthetic