Goin' Home (album) - Concept

Concept

Goin' Home is a reverent jazz and gospel album played with straightforward simplicity by Shepp and Parlan. They interpret nine traditional Negro spirituals, featuring African-American folk melodies that originated from the 1920s and before. Along with Trouble in Mind and Looking at Bird in 1980, Goin' Home is part of a series of albums delineated in Shepp's discography as "modular explorations of traditional musical styles", which is itself in Shepp's broader series of musical "portraits of the Diaspora". The album's title alludes to a return to African cultural roots.

Shepp viewed Goin' Home as his attempt to cross the span of time and history between modern African Americans and the black slaves symbolized by the spirituals. In an interview for Down Beat, Shepp said that it was the first time he had recorded spirituals or made "any kind of serious statement about them", and said that he started to cry when he started playing on the album due to "the strain, the spiritual weight of the moment". He recalled being momentarily afraid that he would not be able to go through with the album's recording because of his emotional state, which he explained:

I felt I represented everybody who'd ever sang those songs, and to make the meaning of those songs clear was up to me at that point. They should be truthful, they should have the same authenticity as when they were sung, because that's the nature of this type of folk song. They were created by people who were in deep sorrow; they're slave songs. And so it challenged my own ability as modern Negro black man to traverse that historical plain. Could I do that? And I felt I could, and the tears were proof of it - that perhaps my condition hadn't changed so completely that I can't still feel what they felt.