No one feels early-in-the-calendar Holy Weeks more than church musicians – it seems like we’ve only started rehearsals when suddenly, here we are in the thick of it. And of course, this Palm Sunday is a doubly special one, starting with worship and concluding this afternoon with the second event in our Music at Trinity Concert Series. Mark and Maggie O’Connor perform what the New York Times calls “spectacular, and spellbinding” renditions of American folk music; if you heard them last Sunday helping to lead worship, you got a tiny sense of the beauty, honesty and expressiveness with which they play. I hope to see you later this afternoon. Tickets are available online or at the door.

This morning, however, a stirring spiritual in one of the great arrangements of all time, by Moses Hogan. “Ride On, King Jesus,” became widely known in the late nineteenth century when it frequently highlighted concerts by Fisk University’s renowned Fisk Jubilee Singers. Eileen Guenther at Wesley Theological Seminary writes that enslaved Americans who sang this song identified with Jesus’s suffering, and that their imagination was “powerfully captivated by the notion of having a King who was powerful enough that absolutely no one could ‘hinder’ him. If Jesus could not be hindered, then they had agency in terms of their own lives as well.” Before writing these Music Notes, and researching this spiritual, I hadn’t thought of it in these terms. The added undertones of enslaved people yearning to be free from earthly bondage and commiserating with the Passion of Christ make this thundering music all the more powerful.