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    God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse
    Unavailable
    God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse
    Unavailable
    God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse
    Audiobook1 hour

    God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse

    Written by James Weldon Johnson

    4.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Introduced by Maya Angelou, the inspiring sermon-poems of James Weldon Johnson

    James Weldon Johnson was a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and one of the most revered African Americans of all time, whose life demonstrated the full spectrum of struggle and success. In God's Trombones, one of his most celebrated works, inspirational sermons of African American preachers are reimagined as poetry, reverberating with the musicality and splendid eloquence of the spirituals. This classic collection includes "Listen Lord (A Prayer)," "The Creation," "The Prodigal Son," "Go Down Death (A Funeral Sermon)," "Noah Built the Ark," "The Crucifixion," "Let My People Go," and "The Judgment Day."

    For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateSep 17, 2008
    ISBN9781598876864
    Unavailable
    God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse
    Author

    James Weldon Johnson

    James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville, 1871. He trained in music and in 1901 moved to New York with his brother John; together they wrote around two hundred songs for Broadway. His first book, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, published anonymously in 1912, was not a great success until he reissued it in his own name in 1927. In that time he established his reputation as a writer and became known in the Harlem Renaissance for his poems and for collating anthologies of poems by other black writers. Through his work as a civil rights activist he became the first executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as the first African American professor to be hired at New York University. He died in 1938.

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    Reviews for God's Trombones

    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      This is a very interesting work of seven black sermons done in verse.
    • 4/5
      My interest in this volume of poems comes from a very vivid childhood memory of watching a broadcast performance of the music-dance version of "The Creation" - a very powerful work that left a very favorable impression of the writer's work.
    • 5/5
      Excellent! This is a Penguin Classic, reprinted in 2008 from the original in 1927. It presents seven inspiring Negro sermons in verse.A thought-provoking statement comes from the Forward: “African Americans are the only people in the whole world and history who really practice Christianity.” No one else has ever found in their hearts the gift of forgiveness, the Forward claims. African Americans forgave the slave owners who worked them without payment for 240 years. This ability to forgive made many former slave owners uneasy, so incomprehensible was their forgiveness.These transplanted Africans accepted Jesus as their savior and laid all their worries on him. God’s trombones—the old time Negro preachers—were powerful, eloquent figures in their community. A community surviving on hope. When the lyricists wrote, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, coming for to carry me home,” neither the singer nor the audience had to tax their imagination to consider death a sweet chariot or to doubt that heaven was their destination. When the folk-sermon was in full swing, a rhythmic dance to the beat of powerful voice, an electric current passed through the congregation.You don’t want to miss these seven poetic sermons.