SHOW DESCRIPTION

Sixty years after Margaret Walker's groundbreaking novel Jubilee changed American literature, her story is coming to the stage. In this Soul Sessions Extra, host Paul Wolf sits down with Patricia Syner, Communications Director at the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, to talk about Jubilee: A Folk Opera — a JSU-Yale collaboration bringing Walker's epic tale of slavery, survival, and Reconstruction to life through music. Patricia shares how the project came together, what the revival of the historic OPERA/SOUTH company means for HBCU students in the performing arts, and why this story — rooted in real oral history and three decades of Walker's research — still hits harder than anything Hollywood ever romanticized about the antebellum South. The concert production performs June 14th at JSU's F.D. Hall Music Center, free and open to the public.

TRANSCRIPT

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Intro

Margaret Walker wrote Jubilee in the margins of her life — raising four children, teaching full-time, chasing a doctoral degree — and it still took her thirty years to finish. When the novel finally came out in 1966, it didn't just find readers. It opened a door that American literature had kept shut for a century. Now, sixty years later, the story of Walker's own grandmother is becoming a folk opera — and this summer, it's coming home to Jackson.

Hey, it's Paul Wolf with the front row seat to conversations on culture from Jackson, Mississippi. We call our podcast Soul Sessions. It's the people, places, and events that make the city with soul shine. On today's Extra, we're talking about Jubilee: A Folk Opera — a collaboration between Jackson State University and Yale University debuting this summer, free and open to the public, right here in Jackson. I'm joined by Patricia Syner, Communications Director at the Margaret Walker Center. Patricia came to the Center in 2024 with a background in creative writing — she's a Millsaps grad who has done archival work on Eudora Welty, reported alongside Civil Rights journalists, and won awards for her own essays. She arrived, in other words, already fluent in the language of Mississippi's literary legacy.

The Project

Jubilee is a novel rooted in living memory. Margaret Walker based it on her own family's stories — the life of her great-grandmother Vyry, born into slavery in Georgia, who survived into Reconstruction. Walker called it a gift to her grandmother, who made her promise to write it. That promise took three decades to keep.

The folk opera picks up that thread. Composer Randy Klein — who has been attached to this project for years — and librettist Joan Ross Sorkin have shaped the novel into a staged work. Conductor and composer Julius P. Williams leads the symphonic interpretation. The production already had its work-in-progress concert reading at Yale. Now the full concert production comes home — June 14th, JSU's F.D. Hall Music Center, free and open to the public.

How Did Jubilee: A Folk Opera Come Together?

Paul
Patricia, for people who haven't followed this project from the beginning, how did Jubilee a folk opera come together? And what was the Margaret Walker Center's role in getting it off the ground?

Patricia
The Jubilee opera really started several years ago. There was an initiative to make Jubilee into an opera. There was music composed from Randy Klein, who is a fantastic composer and pianist in the opera industry. And there were songs ready. He also pulled in poems that Margaret Walker wrote as well to formulate some of the score.

But it didn't necessarily get off the ground into a full-blown production. Recently, with the revitalization of Opera South here at Jackson State, through the efforts of Dr. Phyllis Lewis Hale in the music department, we've partnered with Yale as well. And between these different organizations, we've really been able to dive into this project of making Jubilee into an opera, revitalizing that energy surrounding the project, bringing Randy back in for the score and the music, bringing Joan Ross Sorkin in for the libretto. And then through Yale and Yale faculty, partnering with their music department with Dr. Albert Lee, as well as some other greats in the opera world.

To get this project off the ground, to get students involved — that's been a major component that's allowed us to move forward with the project. Having that driving force of the students being interested in the project, wanting to get that professional experience, being able to tie rehearsals to workshops and to connecting with people in the opera industry. So it all kind of came together. And we've also gotten a lot of grant support as well. And that's a key factor, of course, when you're doing any kind of large-scale production — having that funding for student travel, for bringing in these opera professionals, for costuming and things like that further down the road

The Festival

Paul
The opera is the centerpiece of something bigger. Starting June 7th, Jackson State is hosting the inaugural OPERA/SOUTH HBCU Opera and Musical Theater Summer Festival — reviving a company that was once one of the most significant Black opera institutions in the country. Students from HBCUs across the country are in Jackson this week for masterclasses, workshop readings, and direct time with the creative team behind Jubilee, building toward the June 14th performance.

Reviving the OPERA/SOUTH Legacy

Paul
You mentioned Opera South Company and a lot of people may not know what that is. So what does it mean to revive that legacy right now? And what do you hope students take away from this production and this festival that's going on around it?

Patricia
So Opera South — a key component is making opera and the musical theater industry accessible for all students. Opera South really caters to HBCU students, providing them professional opportunities, performance opportunities, connecting them with people in the industry who are established and can kind of pave the way for a more equitable scene in opera.

That was what it was originally intended to do. It was also intended to bolster the opera and performing arts industry in Jackson. It kind of — I don't know if you could say fell by the wayside a little bit — but it has seen, through the efforts of Dr. Phyllis Lewis Hale, a real resurgence in recent years to have programming, to bring students back into it, and to tie in with projects like the Jubilee Opera.

So that students have a hands-on experience with the arts and can connect to professionals like Dr. Hale, like Randy Klein, Joan Ross Sorkin, Dr. Albert Lee from Yale. We really hope that they not only key into that love of the performing arts, but also into Margaret Walker and her legacy as a writer.

Why This Story

Paul
Patricia mentioned something worth sitting with: Margaret Walker was a supporter of Opera South from the very beginning. She loved music, loved the arts, and her journals are full of entries from concerts and performances she attended. She would recognize what's happening this summer. The question Patricia gets to answer is whether Walker would be surprised by it.

What Would Margaret Walker Think?

Paul
Yeah, you work in the space that Margaret Walker built. And so when you think about her and you look at everything that's happening this summer — the opera, the festival, Yale, the grants — what do you think she would make of all this?

Patricia
I think she would love it. She was definitely a supporter of Opera South at its inception. She loved music, she loved the arts in all of its forms. In her journals, you can find so many entries where she was visiting other authors or in the audience for musical performances. So I think she would be very pleased that A, Jackson State and the Margaret Walker Center are a huge part of this, and B, that her work is being interpreted by young audiences.

With the student involvement, I think that would be such a key component for her, since she did found us at Jackson State University. And so much of her work was meant to connect students with professionals — connecting the older generation to the younger generation. So I think she'd be thrilled.

Come for the Story, Stay for the Artistry

Paul
Yeah, for someone who has never been to an opera before, who says opera — that's just not for me — what would you say to get them through the door on June 14th?

Patricia
I would say come for the story, stay for the artistry. The story of Jubilee is so powerful. It was groundbreaking in 1966 when it was published. Jubilee really combats the romanticized view of the South and the antebellum period that works like Gone with the Wind kind of had cemented for a time, and it refocuses the story on — well, it's based on the real-life story of Margaret Walker's great-grandmother. So it pulls in oral history, pulls in three decades of research that Margaret Walker did, and takes you on a journey from this woman who was experiencing enslavement, through the Civil War period, then the Reconstruction period. And it's all about themes of self-empowerment, themes of freedom and justice.

It pulls in obviously a lot of historical components. So if you're at all interested in history, at all interested in literature, definitely take that into account. And then once you're there, I expect audiences to be really moved by the artistry of the production, by the power of the students being a part of the retelling of this story, and by the extremely professional level at which this opera is being carried out.

Outro

That is Patricia Syner, Communications Director at the Margaret Walker Center. She said it plainly: come for the story, stay for the artistry. That's as good an invitation as you'll find.

Jubilee: A Folk Opera performs June 14th at JSU's F.D. Hall Music Center, free and open to the public. For the latest information on the production, the OPERA/SOUTH festival, and everything happening at the Margaret Walker Center, visit jsums.edu/margaretwalkercenter. We'll have that link in our show notes at visitjackson.com/soulsessions.

This podcast is produced by Visit Jackson, the destination organization for Mississippi's capital city. Our executive producers are Jonathan Pettus and Dr. Ricky Thigpen, and I'm our managing editor. There's always something great going on in Jackson, and we keep up with it at visitjackson.com.

I'm Paul Wolf, and you've been listening to Soul Sessions.

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