On Friday, March 8, The World House Choir held its annual Bread and Roses concert in celebration of International Women’s Day at the Foundry Theater in Yellow Springs. The concert was co-presented by MUSE, Cincinnati's Women’s choir, and featured guest speakers and dancers.
Before the performance, Cathy Roma, founder and director of the Yellow Spring-based World House Choir and Omope Carter Daboiku, a member of World House Choir and MUSE and featured storyteller in Bread and Roses, joined WYSO Midday Music host Evan Miller to discuss the Women’s Day concert.
The World House Choir kicked off the concert with its titular song, “Bread and Roses.” Roma explained the significance of the piece, which is based on a suffragist slogan coined by Hellen Todd. “It’s a song that came out of the working movement of women in the textile strikes, around 1910. Women were saying ‘we want bread’–that’s money–and ‘we want roses’—we want beauty in our lives.”
The choir also performed Woody Guthrie’s “Union Maid,” another song associated with 20th century labor movements, and Pat Humphries’ “Keep on Moving Forward.” Roma said that “Keep on Moving Forward” expresses the ongoing need to fight for women’s rights. “We’re not going back,” she said. “Pat Humphries from Emma’s Revolution wrote this all the way back in the 1980’s, and we’re still singing the same thing. We have to keep on moving forward.”
Roma and Daboiku concluded by recounting MUSE’s first concert in Yellow Springs more than 30 years ago, and previewing the World House Choir's April 26 and 27 concert, which will feature the regional premier of Rollo Dilworth’s composition “Weather: Stand the Storm.”
More information about World House Choir and MUSE, including upcoming performance dates, is available on their websites, worldhousechoir.org and musechoir.org.
Text by Peter Day, adapted from an interview recorded by Evan Miller on March 4, 2024.
