Pre-Concert Talk: Sweet Honey in the Rock

James Early

Cultural educator James Counts Early was born in Ocala, Florida, on January 12, 1947. Early studied Spanish at Morehouse College in Atlanta, earning his B.A. in 1969. He also spent a year studying in Panama at the Canal Zone College. After graduation, Early attended Howard University, where he received his M.A. degree in 1971, and then studied for his Ph.D. degree. While there, he also attended Georgetown University, where he studied Portuguese at the Advanced Portuguese Institute. 

During his years as a student, Early worked a number of jobs that helped to shape his career. At the Martin Luther King Center, he worked in the archives and then from 1970 to 1971 as an administrative and research assistant to the director of the Institute of the Black World. In 1973, he went to work at the Smithsonian Institute as a folklore consultant and researcher. He was promoted in 1974 to the acting administrator until 1976. That year, he became an associate professor at Antioch College in Washington, D.C., and worked in research at Howard University's Institute for the Arts and Humanities. In 1978, Early became the producer, writer and host of Ten Minutes Left, a weekly radio show on WHUR-FM. He hosted this program for five years while working at the National Endowment for the Humanities as the humanist administrator. He worked at NEH until 1984 when he returned to the Smithsonian Institute to work as the executive assistant to the assistant secretary for public service. Since then, he has held a variety of positions including working as the assistant provost for educational and cultural programs; director of cultural studies and communication at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Studies; and director of cultural heritage policy at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. 

Active in many organizations, Early served on the founding steering committee of the International Network for Cultural Diversity and was the humanities coordinator of the Trans-Africa Afro Americans and Cuba Cultural Conversation Project in 2000. He has served on the board of directors of the Children's Studio School since 1993, and since 1995 on the National Black Program Consortium, a program that funds independent black filmmakers. Early is a renaissance man. He writes on the politics of culture, lectures internationally and works with those in prison. Skilled with languages, Early is fluent in Spanish, can converse in Portuguese, reads French and has some knowledge of Mandarin Chinese. 

Amy Horowitz

Amy Horowitz is interested in the unlikely coalitions and inevitable contradictions in music cultures and everyday lives. She has over five decades of experience in the academic world and grassroots social justice arts networks - including in the music industry where she served as artist representative for Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon and Sweet Honey In The Rock for 17 years.

Horowitz hails from a family of working class Jewish community musicians who immigrated to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. As a teen, Horowitz was active in the anti-Vietnam War movement. Her growing commitment to political activism focused on racial justice, gay and women’s issues. In 1972, While at college in Oregon, she co-founded The Ashland Women’s Health Center. In the mid-1970s, she worked with protest singer Holly Near and the “Women’s Music Network,” a loose consortium of women artists, record and concert producers, and activists who built an alternative to the mainstream industry. In 1977, she co-founded Roadwork in Washington, D.C., a multiracial coalition that notably produced Sisterfire, an annual international women’s cultural festival, and worked with dozens of women’s performance groups, across race and class, to build social justice music careers. The Sisterfire Festival was revived under the curatorial direction of Toshi Reagon in 2018, and continues forward.

Horowitz’s activist work complements her academic background, which combines training in Middle East studies and ethnomusicology (MA, New York University, 1986) with folklore (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1994). Her book, Mediterranean Israeli Music and the Politics of the Aesthetic, received a 2010 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award and is currently being translated into Arabic and Hebrew. Horowitz worked as curator at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, and in 1997 she received a Grammy Award as co-producer for Anthology of American Folk Music while serving as acting director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. In 2003 she created and produced “Protest Music as Responsible Citizenship” featuring Pete Seeger, Harry Belafonte, Bernice Johnson Reagon, and Holly Near at The Ohio State University.

Horowitz believes in coalition across differences and has long fought against racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, and misogyny. She actively supports Palestinian self-determination and sovereignty and the end to the Israeli occupation. She is a senior fellow at Indiana University Center for the Study of the Middle East and co-director of GALACTIC (Global Arts Language Arts Cultural Traditions in Indigenous Communities), a collaboration of Indiana University and Navajo Technical University. Her primary research interests are Indigenous Global Studies, music in disputed territory, contemporary Jerusalem, Arab Jewish popular music, and protest music as responsible citizenship. Her most precious life’s blessing was becoming Ariel Horowitz’s mother. Learn more at: www.amyhorowitz.org.