When the 14 members of the Inner Strength Gospel Choir lift their voices in song on Saturday night for their final concert of the year, they’ll be marking two milestones: the 50th anniversary of the choir and the departure of their beloved director, Herbert Jones, who is stepping down after 20 years.

“I think it’s just time,” says Jones (MET’17), who works full-time as senior program manager of internships at the Museum of Fine Arts. “I just think that, given the changes that I’ve seen over the campus, it’s fitting to open the room for new leadership.

“I’ve been here 20 years,” he says. “I think they deserve someone that is probably a little bit more in touch with their own perspectives and day-to-day realities and their own understandings of things. History, faith, leadership, the whole nine yards.”

For the celebratory concert, the choir is planning to perform “All Hail the Pow’r”—credited as “Words by Herbert S. Jones and Dr. Mary Bennett, music & arrangement by Herbert S. Jones”—for its opening number. Jones is renowned for devoting many hours to arranging and even writing for the group as well as organizing its annual performances on and off campus. 

The choir and its regular Sunday night rehearsals have also become a touchstone of community for its members over the years, especially those of faith and those looking for fellowship on campus. 

“ISGC was home from the first rehearsal,” says alum Abena Kwakyi (CAS’12).

“Finding that group of people that made you feel at home, made you feel like you were not alone on campus or had similar values, was really nice,” says current choir E-board member Suwilanji Muwowo (CAS’23). 

But, above all, the choir has offered music as a sacrament and a balm to the BU community.

“On Sunday evenings over many years, if I needed a spiritual lift, I would go and sit in the back of Marsh Chapel, just to listen to Herb rehearsing with the choir,” says Robert Allen Hill, dean of Marsh Chapel. “He and his choir brought heaven closer, and made the maladies of the week shrink. I went home smiling. Herb has been a real true gift to Marsh Chapel and Boston University.”

Making a difference in students’ lives

“I’m just very honored that I was in a role to make a difference, to add something of value to people’s lives, and that for some of them who’ve been gone 10, 12, 15 years, something that they still hold a fondness for,” Jones says.

“A lot of times we get so caught up in other things,” says Muwowo. “He brings us back to where we need to be, and it reminds us that we need to be as passionate as he is in order to sound as good as we want and be up to the standard. Just reminding us why we joined the choir in the first place.”

The choir’s 50th Anniversary Weekend Events, which are open to the public and are expected to draw a number of choir alumni, include a rehearsal and reception Friday at the Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground, a brunch and discussion Saturday at 1 Silber Way, and the concert Saturday evening at Marsh Chapel. Tickets are available here.

Kwakyi, who has returned to BU as assistant director of Student Activities, sang with the choir for five years, including one as an alum working nearby. A Christian and a veteran of her high school choir, she had signed up for Inner Strength at Splash during her freshman year, hoping to find “friends and community on campus, and a chance to continue singing and just fellowshipping” with others.

“On Sundays, we would all walk over to Marsh Chapel and arrange ourselves on the little staircase facing the pew, and the doors would be wide open, and Herb would get behind the keyboard, and we would begin singing,” she says. “Just to get together, sounding good! I made a number of lifetime friends.”

Jones, she says, “is one of the most brilliant people I’ve met, for his energy, his enthusiasm, his passion for not just the choir but [also] for writing music, directing, making sure we enunciate correctly. You had to make sure you were enunciating so that the people that were either at the back of Marsh or on the upper level could hear your words and hear the message that you were singing.

“Really it was his passion for inspiring us, young people that come to Boston University to find our voice,” she says. “You would see him on campus, and he’d flash his huge smile, and it would make your day.”

The size and makeup of the choir have varied widely over the decades, from upwards of 90 members to the current 14, and from years when it was largely African American students of Pentecostal faith to including many white and Asian students of various backgrounds. That reflects changes in the University, as well.

“When I first came on board,” Jones says, “the gospel choir was one of the few places where Black students could gather. Now there are so many more opportunities for them.”

Kerena Belony (ENG’23) went to a Haitian church growing up in Georgia and grew to love singing via its youth choir. Inner Strength “is probably the first place where I really felt like I had a community here at BU since the beginning. Most of my friends that I’ve made in the choir are my friends now.”

“I did not have that kind of experience as an undergraduate,” says Jones. “I was fortunate to be on a campus—Northeastern—that wasn’t far from a number of churches, so that I was able to still carry out that part of my life, that expressive part of faith in music that I had brought with me to Boston. But I wished that there had been that type of community on campus when I was in college. And so the idea of being able to help facilitate that for students on campus was very influential in me taking the position in the first place.”

Reflecting on his two decades as director, Jones admits that it’s hard to pick out just one or two highlights from his tenure, but says the choir’s performance for the Campaign for BU kickoff at the Agganis Arena in 2012 was surely one: “Who doesn’t relish the chance to sing with the Boston Pops?”

Another was the 2017 visit from Randall Keith Horton, former composing and conducting assistant for Duke Ellington, who led the choir in a performance of music from Ellington’s Sacred Concerts, during the University’s annual observance of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s (GRS’55, Hon.59) birthday. They bonded immediately and still keep in touch, Jones says.

And Jones has fond memories of 2008, when the choir’s annual off-campus “tour” went beyond its usual New England destinations (Rhode Island this year), all the way to the San Francisco Bay Area.

“A gospel musician by the name of Walter Hawkins has been one of my icons and legends for most of my life, and we actually got to sing at his church,” Jones recalls. “That is a personal fulfillment of mine, that you know where this world-renowned recording artist and songwriter would allow us to come in and take over his morning service.”

A new face in the fall

The choir is a regular student organization with an E-board and a budget, but unusual in that the director is hired and paid by Marsh Chapel, under the auspices of Scott Allen Jarrett (CFA’99, ’08), the chapel’s music director. Jarrett says Jones is “a kindred spirit”—both men are from gospel-rich Virginia—who has become an important friend and colleague.

“Herb is a brilliant pianist, and he can play anything you want,” Jarrett says. “He has really taken it as his charge to teach the students a broad spectrum of what the African American musical experience is.

“He has taught them concert spirituals, for example, which are quite a bit different than the gospel music you would find in the Black church today,” Jarrett says. “And he’s taught them a little bit of the legacy of that material, which has its roots oftentimes in slave songs. And then they were downstairs at Marsh Chapel, singing for one of the regular weekly dinners, and they were singing James Taylor’s ‘You’ve Got a Friend.’ You wouldn’t typically find a gospel choir singing that.”

Jones believes that this music is everybody’s music, Jarrett says. “That’s a huge gift to the BU community and to these students, to engage them in the breadth and the depth of the repertoire, the value in the history of ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing.’”

As he prepares his last concert, Jones says he has already suggested a couple of candidates to take over the job. “I’ll have some conversations with those folks and hope to have them meet some students, and we’ll make a decision based on that,” Jarrett says.

As for the students’ reactions to his departure?

“They’ve been very expressive about their sadness,” Jones says. “Probably two-thirds of the choir is graduating, so they obviously won’t be as impacted. But I feel that those who are remaining are our solid core to keep the spirit of the choir going forward.”

He expects to devote more of his weekends to preparing for Monday mornings now, as his role at the MFA has expanded over the years. “Also I’m hoping to get back into writing again, writing music, and creating music, and really sort of formalizing a lot of the material that I’ve written or arranged for Inner Strength Gospel Choir. Maybe work on putting together a songbook or something like that, but just really focusing on my music for myself.”

The Inner Strength Gospel Choir’s 50th Anniversary Weekend Events include a rehearsal and reception Friday at 6:30 pm at the Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground, a brunch and discussion Saturday at 10 am in the Trustee Ballroom at 1 Silber Way, a concert Saturday at 7:30 pm at Marsh Chapel. Tickets are available at: https://isgc50thanniversaryweekend.eventbrite.com.