Deliverance Song: Becky Elzy & Alberta Bradford

Editor’s Note:
The providential intersect of our planning and God’s timing at The Mudroom is, for us, a never-ending source of awe. Stepping into February, we find ourselves here once again, as we simultaneously unveil our monthly theme (the virtue of stability) alongside a new series: Her Voice, Her Story: Beholding a History of Black Women in America.

The aim of this series is simple: to honor the unfiltered voices of Black women through their own words and work.

And so we witness God’s grafting together of two essential entities—both grounding us as Tammy Perlmutter (Founder and Curator) describes itby “putting down roots within a hyper-mobile culture.” We hope you’ll journey with us as we dig deeper!

To God be ever the glory,
-Nichole Woo, for The Mudroom

***

Just days before Juneteeth, in the summer of 1934, vocalists Alberta Bradford and Becky Elzy recorded this song—years after their enslavement on two Louisiana plantations—and years before Dr. Martin Luther King concluded his “I Have a Dream” speech with these same words.

Click this link to hear Bradford and Elzy’s liberation song: “Free at Last/Thank God Almighty”

For more information on Alberta Bradford and Becky Elzy, including their photographs, click here for the Library of Congress.

For more of Bradford and Elzy’s work, recorded by John and Alan Lomax, click here.

*Her Voice, Her Story image created for The Mudroom by Sakura.

Nichole Woo
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