- [Narrator] Funding for this program was provided by: - [Narrator] Chattanooga Funeral Home, Crematory and Florist dedicated to helping you celebrate your life, or the life of a loved one for over 85 years.

Chattanooga Funeral Home believes that each funeral should be as unique and memorable as the life being honored.

- [Narrator] This program is also made possible by support from viewers like you.

Thank you.

- [Alison] This week I sit down with a man who has orchestrated a remarkable musical legacy.

- But I would go to church and then come back home.

At the age of four they would find me climbing up on the piano stool to try to play what I had heard in church.

So that's when finally around the age of five-and-a-half, I started piano lessons.

- Five-and-a-half?

- Yes.

- And you took to it immediately.

- Took to it, oh, it was part of me.

- [Alison] Join me as I talk with Dr. Roland Carter, coming up next on "The A List."

(upbeat music) If you live in Chattanooga, chances are you're familiar with Dr. Roland Carter.

In fact, if you find yourself on the UTC campus, you might even take a stroll down the street named in his honor.

He is a man with many talents and titles.

He's an internationally renowned composer, conductor, arranger and musician, but for Dr. Carter, the role he holds most sacred has always been educator.

He spent 23 years at UTC as a professor and administrator, where he chaired the music department, taught classes, conducted choirs, and made a tremendous impact on the students and faculty he met along the way.

I had a chance to talk with Dr. Carter at the historic First Baptist Church in downtown Chattanooga, a place where he feels right at home.

- So much fun.

- Dr. Carter, welcome to "The A List."

- Thank you, my honor indeed.

- Well, and I am thrilled that we are shooting this in this beautiful historic church, First Baptist, which actually was the church you went to as a young lad, I understand.

- Well, actually, there are a couple of churches I went to as a young lad in Chattanooga, but this was indeed one that I attended often, as many of my teachers were members of this church during my public school days here in Chattanooga.

- And I understand you also played the organ here at some point?

- I did.

I played here before as a young student in high school, and I played here when I returned to Chattanooga to teach at UTC.

- Well, I wanna get to the UTC teaching, and so many other accolades about your life, but let's start back on your upbringing in Chattanooga.

Tell me what your childhood was like here.

- It was really a delight growing up in Chattanooga.

I was born, actually, in a home on Greenwood Avenue, just off of Holtzclaw and East Third.

I was birthed by Dr. Emma Wheeler, who, by the way, founded the Walden Hospital right down the street from this church.

So that was important to me, but growing up had the tremendous support of parents here.

I was the last of five children.

My mother often said, it wasn't that she didn't want me, she just didn't need another child at that point, but she would always say I turned out to be one of her best.

My brothers and sisters used to call me the king whenever I'd come home.

- It took her five tries to get it right.

- To get it right, but really my upbringing was much, much, a real village upbringing.

It was the time when everybody was your parent.

I mean, if you did something wrong, you may get punished on your way home, and then get punished again after you got home, because people had that right as part of the community you were growing up.

The teachers were community people.

They lived in the community and they helped raise you, but most important, my first grade music teacher, which may be related, becomes a little later, was at Hampton University, or Hampton Institute graduate, (indistinct) and I studied piano.

I think everybody in Chattanooga perhaps studied piano with Alma Stovall.

Any Black kid who studied piano probably had that wonderful opportunity, but that was probably one of the most important parts of my growing up in Chattanooga because I had the opportunity many times.

Chattanooga was my stage.

The community was my stage.

The churches were part of my work at growing up as a musician.

- So how early on did your parents realize you had musical talent?

- Well, actually, as early as age four I would come home from church.

Church was an important part of my upbringing the whole time as a youngster, but I would go to church and then come back home.

At the age of four they would find me climbing up on the piano stool to try to play what I had heard in church.

So that's when finally around the age of five-and-a-half, I started piano lessons.

- Five-and-a-half?

- [Roland] Yes.

- And you took to it immediately.

- Took to it, oh, it was part of me.

You see, I had an aunt who had then, well, in the late '40s and early '50s had a gospel group which sang, a group of ladies traveling around the South singing gospel music.

So they would rehearse in my home on Greenwood Avenue every Monday night, so I had music all around me.

My mother's sister used to play carnivals in the teens in the 1900s in Winder, Georgia and ragtime.

And I would hear that and they would come.

So there was always a piano in my house.

My mother played a little.

She didn't play much but she would play occasionally.

It was a time when all of us, even my brothers and sisters, all of us had to take piano.

And that was in the 1940s and '50s you had to take piano.

Whether you kept doing it or not was not important, but you had to begin to learn.

- That early exposure to music uncovered an innate talent and allowed space for young Roland to flourish as a natural leader.

He started his first neighborhood choir at age 12, and was senior choir director of an adult choir at age 15, but as his musical talents were developing, so, too, were opportunities to lend his voice to the emerging civil rights movement.

Well, and as you're becoming this musical genius we'll say, you were also part of a very active movement in Chattanooga.

And I know you've talked about since there has not been an HBCU based in Chattanooga the Howard School really served as the catalyst.

- Yes.

- For a lot of the activism during the '50s and '60s and beyond.

- It was, and I must say that I had the opportunity to serve as the junior president of the NAACP Union group as a youngster when I was in high school.

And it was my senior year, I remember that the sit-ins were going rampant in colleges, the HBCUs around the South, and with the Howard students we marched downtown.

That was a challenge for me because my mom was insistent on my coming home after school and not getting involved because, of course, she was concerned and concerned about herself as she was a domestic engineer, so she wanted to be sure that I didn't do anything that would reflect badly on the family.

- Why was using your voice, though, for that movement so important to you?

- Well, I guess I have to explain that as part of my participation in Highlander Folk School which was on Lookout Mountain, Monteagle, sorry, and I was part of the civil rights training group there being with the NAACP and involved in that.

And, actually, I was encouraged by that.

And I must say growing up in Chattanooga was important, where if anybody knows the location of Third and Holtzclaw it's right there where Warner Park is.

And I could sit on my porch and watch baseball games at Warner Park where they used to have the field.

It's a parking lot now.

It's still Warner Park, but I could only go to Warner Park once a year.

And that was in the fall county fair.

That was one night for Blacks to go to Warner Park in the year, and usually it was sometime around September, I think, that was the county fair.

So that was kind of, and when I would go to school we would ride public buses.

So we had tokens to get to Howard on the south side of Chattanooga, but would have to ride past what is now Riverside, or what was then Chattanooga High School, to get to Howard and you ride by there.

There were just so many things that would occur.

And, of course, I wanted to be the student to integrate Chattanooga High School on East Third Street, but my mom insisted that I was not going to be that student to do that, but Highlander Folk School being the training ground for civil rights, I had the opportunity to be there in '57 and met several of the civil rights workers.

And that's where the song "We Shall Overcome" came from out of that movement.

And I was always told, I should never say I had been to Highlander because it was branded as a communist camp because of what they were doing there.

So I had to be very careful not to say that, at least I was told that, but I was proud of that.

I even met Eleanor Roosevelt there, so I had a tremendous time.

And, of course, that was also, I met many, many civil rights enthusiasts and participants because I remember the 11 students from Clinton, Tennessee.

Clinton, Tennessee had a really violent confrontation because of integration of their schools just above Knoxville.

And so I met many of them at the camp.

And so had that wonderful.

Met John Lewis as a youngster, but that was more after college.

- Having established himself as a leader at such a young age, Dr. Carter enrolled at Hampton University to continue his music education.

It was there he was encouraged to begin his career as a composer and arranger.

Since that time, he has devoted himself to the celebration and preservation of African American music, a passion that was borne out of the songs that shaped his upbringing.

How much confidence does it take, though, to actually compose and to not just compose music from scratch, but you have become really sort of this nationally if not internationally known composer for taking what have been true anthems, you know, like century old anthems and making them unique which to me feels almost impossible.

- Well, all of it is basically related to my love for having grown up with the spiritual, and the importance that the spiritual has become was as a source of music for African Americans and the church.

The unfortunate part about I became a preservationist so that's what I wanted to do, help preserve that music.

Wow.

- I mean, I'm thinking specifically about "Lift Every Voice and Sing."

- [Roland] Well, that was part of the social movement.

- I mean, from the 1900s to 2023 and beyond the Roland Carter version is sung and performed more than anyone.

- Well, not quite that long.

It's only 50 years old my original.

- Only.

- Yeah, but, you know, to have taken that, but that song was part of my growing up.

- Right.

- The regular song as you know it was called, and I don't think many people know why it was called the "Black National Anthem," but it was called the "Black National Anthem" because the composers were part of the NAACP.

So anybody who was a member of NAACP started singing the song.

We would sing it at every meeting.

We, in elementary school would sing it every morning along with "America the Beautiful," or "Star-Spangled Banner," but we would sing the verses of "Lift Every Voice" in elementary school every morning.

We were allowed to have devotions during that time going to school.

I don't think they do that anymore, so that's how the song grew up with me.

- Which makes it even more impressive.

So here you are, let's fast forward to barely 30-years-old if that, and you decide that you are going to basically recompose that national anthem.

- Well, not recompose it, but I wanted to actually- - Reinvent, right?

- And I'm so glad, thank you for mentioning, but I wanted the song to be embraced not just as the Negro national anthem, but the song is about a man's inhumanity to man.

- Right.

- And our growing up in a democracy.

And I wanted everybody to embrace that.

And, see, I got the song, wow, I get excited about this, because it was in 1970 that I decided, which is at the peak of the civil rights movement that I decided we needed to have a song that everybody could embrace.

- And also at the end of the Vietnam War.

- And that was part of it, too.

People were being inhumane to people all over the world.

And I thought that song could be appropriate for everyone.

And it was beginning to be printed in hymn books of all denominations.

I mean, it was amazing.

The United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church, all churches, the Presbyterian Church, all denominations started printing the song in their hymn books.

So I decided, and what was happening as a college choir director then we would always, probably in many choirs, even high school choirs, we would do the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" as the final song of our concerts, you know, but I wanted to do something else so I took, and my model was the "Battle Hymn" arrangement of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" by Wilhousky.

The three verses of "Lift Every Voice" happened to fit into the model that he had composed.

I borrowed the model, and not ashamed of it, but it worked.

In 1970, yeah, wow.

- Wow.

- And then it began to embrace, and I premiered it actually it was premiered in '72 with the Peninsula Symphony Orchestra because I was teaching at Hampton at the time.

After graduating from Hampton, I stayed there and started teaching in 1965.

I was very fortunate to become the choir director there at that time.

And so that was an important part of my repertoire.

- At Hampton University, Dr. Carter found his calling as an educator.

He spent more than 20 years there as chair of the music department and director of the choir, but in 1989, an unexpected offer drew him back to where it all began.

Tell me about the transition back to Chattanooga and your 23 year tenure at UTC in the music department.

- Well, again, this was all part of, I enjoy telling this story, having not been able to go had I wanted to attend school at Chattanooga what was it called?

Chattanooga University.

I'm not even sure what the original.

- I think it was University of Chattanooga.

- [Roland] University of Chattanooga.

- Something like that, before it became UTC.

- [Roland] It was something like that.

- Right.

- And I couldn't go there, but it's so glorious that 29 years later, I left Chattanooga in 1960, that 29 years later, a dean named Paul Gaston came to Hampton to recruit me for the head of the Department of Music at a school I couldn't go to.

- But what made you say yes after 29 years of being away and at a school that as you said, you couldn't attend if you had wanted to back in the '60s?

What made you say yes?

- Quite honestly, I wasn't really an activist as such.

I was, but in a subtle sort of way, so that wasn't a big.

It was time for a change for me.

Paul came to watch me and observe me on my own ground, which was I thought kind of unusual for an interview for a dean to come and watch you where you actually worked, and with the gall to come and steal me from an institution.

He and the president used to talk about that occasionally, the former president of Hampton, but it was time, it was time.

And, of course, there was family.

I have family here.

My mom and dad were still living.

So I came, wanted to come home, but having remembered the many encounterances we had had even with students during that time during the '50s.

I mean, there were just things that happened.

You know, you would be called names, but you would go and do that.

And even after coming back, there were still pockets of racism.

I mean, it hadn't disappeared just because I came back, or because I had become part of UT, University of Tennessee, but there were obvious things that would happen, but I knew how to play the game, and I had much support.

I have still great friends who were colleagues at UTC and gave me tremendous support, so it has been it's the highlight of my career.

- It's clear that the time he spent at UTC made a tremendous impact on Dr. Carter's life.

And that he in turn made an indelible impression on the campus community.

Though he retired from his role there in 2013, he is now a permanent fixture for students and faculty with a commemorative street named in his honor.

And in 2021, he donated a remarkable collection of his archives to the school's library, including sheet music, newspaper clippings, recordings and more, that he had been gathering for more than 50 years, ensuring that visitors can enjoy the efforts of his diligent work as a preservationist.

When you talk about really celebrating and preserving African American music, what does that mean, and especially, but especially.

- Good, and I wanted to talk about that.

- Okay, good.

- Thank you very much.

- But I also wanna put it in the context that if you talk to anybody in any musical capacity, they will admit that anything borne out of America comes from Black roots, right?

- [Roland] Absolutely.

- So everything feels like African American music in this country.

- African American music is the base music of America.

And I always refer to it as American music and that's to get people involved, but you see, the hybrid being part of the slave coming out of the history of slavery in the country it suffered.

African Americans quit singing the songs.

And that's why I say I'm, I mean, people were not singing.

And, of course, what happens with the trends in music, they changed the gospel music.

Black gospel music took over after "Oh Happy Day."

College choirs even began singing gospel music, which they couldn't do before then, but they substituted for spirituals.

And the spirituals suffered, I think in the late '60s, '70s and '80s, and continue even today, because now the praise song, and contemporary gospel music has overtaken what we used to do as hymns and spirituals, so that's why the preservation process is keeping it alive and keeping us ever aware, and not ashamed of it having been part of slavery.

And that's the problem, I suppose, a concern of the younger generation.

You got that vestige of slavery, the spiritual.

So that's not part of their upbringing in kind, but I think the songs have a much more universal appeal.

That's why I did the "Lift Every Voice and Sing" kind of thing.

- And what would be your hope for these future generations in terms of not just knowing that history, but embracing it, recognizing it, celebrating it, singing it?

- Well, the hope is that they will indeed do exactly that.

That they will not deny and overlook the fact, but celebrate the fact that the roots of American music is indeed the spiritual, but not to just ignore it, but to acknowledge from which it comes, and that's the important part.

- Well, for someone who is a self-proclaimed moderate activist, I would disagree with you only on that point in that you have absolutely activated, engaged, and inspired what I can see are generations of not only musicians, but leaders in this community outside, so thank you, Dr. Carter.

- Thank you, you're too kind, absolutely too kind.

My pleasure being- - I'm just honest, I'm just honest.

- Delighted to be here with you.

Thank you.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Watch even more of the shows you love anytime with WTCI Passport on the free PBS App.

Download it today.

- [Narrator] Funding for this program was provided by: - [Narrator] Chattanooga Funeral Home, Crematory and Florist dedicated to helping you celebrate your life, or the life of a loved one for over 85 years.

Chattanooga Funeral Home believes that each funeral should be as unique and memorable as the life being honored.

- [Narrator] This program is also made possible by support from viewers like you.

Thank you.