Longmont MainStage Concert: Can't Take My Soul
jue 19 de nov
|Stewart Auditorium
An enslaved mother sold at auction. A composer minimized by misogyny. A genius told to stop writing, and writing anyway. A mercurial artist reveling in fleeting joy. Njioma Grevious weaves four acts of defiance into one program about people who insisted on a future.
Horario y ubicación
19 nov 2026, 7:00 p.m.
Stewart Auditorium, 400 Quail Rd, Longmont, CO 80501, USA
Acerca del evento
As Njioma dreamed of the program she wished to bring to the Cultural Caravan, she returned to a provocative musical seed: At the Purchaser’s Option, by Rhiannon Giddens. The piece is an instrumental variation based on a 19th-century advertisement for an enslaved black 22 year-old mother whose nine month-old baby was also for sale, but “at the purchaser’s option.” In other words, the mother-and-child relationship was incidental to the transaction.
In Rhiannon Giddens’ lyrics for the original composition, the mother laments the brutal exploitation of her labor and the pain of being torn from her child. In the recurring chorus, she refuses to let go of the only thing she still feels she can control: “You can take my blood but not my soul.”
Can’t Take My Soul is a tribute to people who used their music to hold fast to the identity and agency that others wished to take from…