Creativity Quote by Bernice Johnson Reagon

Reagon slips a whole career’s argument into a couple of plainspoken sentences: don’t mistake me for background music. Calling herself a historian first is a quiet power move, especially coming from a musician whose work people might lazily file under “folk” or “activist art.” She’s insisting that performance can be an archive and that the stage can function like a classroom, except the syllabus is carried in breath, harmony, and memory.

The tension she draws between “producer” and “research” matters. “Producer” reads as gatekeeping industry language: packaging, selling, polishing the surface. Reagon wants the opposite direction of travel. Research is slow, accountable work; it implies sources, community knowledge, and the humility to be corrected. When she says “presenting that research to a general public,” she’s laying claim to a civic mission: translation without dilution. Not dumbing down, not hoarding expertise, not letting institutions decide what counts as history.

The subtext is also about who gets to be seen as a credible historian. Reagon came up through movements where Black women’s knowledge was routinely treated as anecdote unless it passed through universities, museums, or mainstream media. By framing her musical labor as historical method, she reframes spirituals, freedom songs, and oral testimony as evidence - not just vibes. It’s a reminder that culture doesn’t merely reflect history; it stores it, transmits it, and, in the right hands, argues with it in public.