“I see that as such a powerful testimony, since you’re not just singing a song but also telling a story, and it’s your own story.”

Bennie Lucille Williams was born in Marshall, Texas—a city split not into two, she would argue, but into three. First, of course, there was racial segregation, but growing up with dark skin Bennie saw a second split within her own black community: a split between those who were lighter-skinned and those who looked like Bennie.

There, sitting at the feet of former slaves, Bennie learned the songs that would carry her through her life. “Dem songs,” is what the woman she knew as Aunt Clay called spirituals they sang to her, and those songs would first carry her into music and then into teaching. Bennie recalls working with black, white, and later desegregated church choirs, teaching school choirs with forced busing mandates, and directing public performances.

Woven into those stories are the loves and heartbreaks of a vivid and compassionate woman’s life—bittersweet at times, but never half-hearted. Bennie’s love for her music and for her students touched lives from Marshall to Dallas to Denver. Later, when she lay at home with a Do Not Resuscitate sign on her front door, she received calls from former students whose lives she had touched decades before, returning to her the love she had always given them.