vanessa renee williams: ideas and images: December 2025

Tuesday, December 30, 2025

TUESDAY THOUGHTS : RICHARD

"There's something about Gospel music that transcends cultures; it transcends beliefs..."

"In the world that we live in, we need everything we can get our hands on to make a positive change in our lives."

"Songwriting and preaching is much more similar than people think...It's got to have form. It has to tell a story...It has to have a beginning, it has to have a middle; it has to have an end. We can't use our voices to do the inflections like when we're speaking, but we have to use dynamics and the phrasing for the music, so it conveys the same kind of message if you were preaching it, or speaking it..."

Final drawing.

In 1998, Bernice Johnson Reagon curated three Gospel music concerts, for the Smithsonian, at the Cité de la Musique in Paris. In her book, "If You Don't Go, Don't Hinder Me", she tells of Pearl Williams-Jones' recommendation to include Richard Smallwood "and his new configuration, a choir he calls Vision".

Ice cream at the Eiffel Tower.

“If you’re not sure of it; if it’s foreign to your spirit, don’t sing it…”

“…a lot of times in writing, sometimes it's a hard process, because sometimes you're not really satisfied with the melody, and you keep changing it. Sometimes, it takes a month, you know, or maybe a year sometimes before you're really satisfied with the song. This song (Center of My Joy) just flowed out. And we were just being, like, an electrical conduit or something, that we were just being - you know. It was that type of thing. And I remember after we wrote it, I remember tears just came to my eyes, 'cause I knew that the Lord had given us something special.