Amma D. McKen

Amma D. McKen began singing traditional Yoruba music when she was 14 while growing up in her native New York City. A fellow student told her about an African dance class on Saturday afternoons in their Brooklyn neighborhood. The instructor was Chief Hawthorne Bey, an original cast member of Porgy and Bess. Through the class, McKen was invited to a Bembe, a party for the Orishas, deities that represent elements of nature and serve as intermediaries between humans and Olodumare, the supreme being. McKen, who had been raised in a Catholic home, immediately felt at ease amid the drumming, dancing and call-and-response singing of the Bembe. “It was a feeling that came over me that said, ‘This is me. This is what I am,’ ” she recalled. “I have such a wonderful, wonderful light spiritual feeling about this. And this is something that I feel like I need to be a part of.”

McKen has devoted her life to preserving the traditions of the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria, who kept their religion alive in slavery, in part by identifying the Orishas with Christian saints. The music, she said, “has followed the slave trade and has ended up in Cuba, Brazil, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and gone to places like New Orleans and other places in the South. And it’s just a matter of drummers handing the music down, the lineage, to other musicians. And the musicians taking those same rhythms and elaborating on them and making different variations.” The drums are tuned to play the tones of the Yoruba language so that they speak directly to the Orishas and invite them to participate. During a Bembe, spirit possession may take place.

Recognized as a priestess of the goddess Yemonja and as an Akpon, or song leader, McKen has been called upon to officiate and lead the singing at Bembes throughout the United States and the Caribbean. She became the first African American Akpon to produce a recording of the traditional songs, Alaaka Oso: Owner of the Songs Is Eloquent. In 1998, she collaborated with the African American Dance Ensemble and the Carolina Dance Ensemble to stage "Cultural Journey: Back to the Roots." She co-founded and serves as director of the musical group Omi Yesa.

In teaching, McKen finds that she must use a different approach with adults than with children, who are generally more receptive to an oral tradition. But she feels that “if you are passionate enough about wanting something, regardless of what it is, you can get it. And I use myself as an example to tell other people. … ‘Go for it. Go for it. It’s there for you to receive; you can get it.’ ”