This week: Our first Lyric Theatre show of 2019! Tales of war and forgiveness with uplifting music from Abbeville's East St. Peter's Missionary Baptist Church Choir.
The guests: Authors Ayesha Harruna Attah (The Hundred Wells of Salaga) and Adam Makos (Spearhead – The World War II Odyssey of an American Tank Gunner) with The East St. Peter Adult Sanctuary Choir.
The time: Saturday, February 23, 7 p.m.
Your hosts: Jim Dees and house band the Yalobushwhackers
Click here for more information about Thacker Mountain Radio Hour—celebrating the music and stories of the emerging South.
Featuring
Ayesha Harruna Attah
Ayesha Harruna Attah is the author of The Hundred Wells of Salaga (Other Press) a novel based on true events that is a story of courage, forgiveness and freedom in precolonial Ghana, told through the eyes of two women born to vastly different fates.
Aminah lives an idyllic life until she is brutally separated from her home and forced on a journey that transforms her from a daydreamer into a resilient woman. Wurche, the willful daughter of a chief, is desperate to play an important role in her father’s court. These two women’s lives converge as infighting among Wurche’s people threatens the region, during the height of the slave trade at the end of the nineteenth century.
The Hundred Wells of Salaga offers a remarkable view of slavery and how the scramble for Africa affected the lives of everyday people.
Ayesha Harruna Attah grew up in Accra, Ghana and was educated in New York. She lives in Senegal.
Adam Makos
Adam Makos is the author of Spearhead – The World War II Odyssey of an American Tank Gunner (Ballantine Books), a true-life account of a World War II tank company fighting from Normandy to the heart of the Third Reich. The book follows Clarence Smoyer who is assigned to the gunner’s seat of his Sherman tank where he displays his talent as a natural-born shooter.
At first, Clarence and his fellow crews in the legendary 3rd Armored Division—“Spearhead”—thought their tanks were invincible. Then they met the German Panther, with a gun so murderous it could shoot through one Sherman and into the next. Soon a pattern emerged: The lead tank always gets hit.
Clarence and his crew are given a weapon to avenge their fallen brothers: the Pershing, a state-of-the-art “super tank,” one of twenty in the European theater. Now they will spearhead every attack. Thus, Clarence finds himself leading the U.S. Army into its largest urban battle of the European war, the fight for Cologne, the “Fortress City” of Germany.
Adam Makos is the author of the New York Times bestseller, A Higher Call and the critically acclaimed, Devotion. His work has secured his place “in the top ranks of military writers (LA Times). Makos lives in Denver.
The East St. Peter Adult Sanctuary Choir
The East St. Peter M. B. Church was organized in 1894 in the Bay Springs Community of Lafayette County. The church is now located on Woodson Ridge Road in Abbeville.
The East St. Peter Adult Sanctuary Choir was organized in 1971 by Sister Queenie Dixon, with only 10 members (all women). As the years passed, the choir continued to grow, adding male singers to its ranks. The choir is now under the direction of Damein Wash who has been with the East St. Peter Church family for 13 years.
