"I made it clear that I don't ever expect to be replaced, that my spirit will always be in Sweet Honey," Reagon said in a 2003 interview shortly before her last appearance in California.

Sweet Honey, which takes its name from a biblical passage, performs its first post-Reagon Bay Area show on Friday in a Cal Performances concert at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley. The group plays two concerts for Bay Area students at 10:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. March 2 at Zellerbach, then returns April 8 for a performance at the Marin Center in San Rafael.

Instead of trying to replace Reagon, the ensemble decided to recruit two new vocalists, expanding from a sextet of five singers and a sign language interpreter into a seven-person group. The additional voices have not only filled out Sweet Honey's already huge sound, but also have expanded the group's sweeping stylistic palette, which encompasses West African chants, blues, spirituals, gospel, protest songs, jazz, soul and hip-hop.

"There have been 22 women in the group over the years," says Ysaye M. Barnwell, who was a professor at Howard University's school of dentistry before she joined the group in 1979. "Every time a new woman comes in, something shifts musically because each person brings in her influences. We're all very open to how the group will change, and I think that's what we're going through right now. We want to continue to both preserve and extend the tradition out of which we come, and we want to explore as many different styles as possible."

Besides Barnwell, Sweet Honey features vocalists Aisha Kahlil, Nitanju Bolade Casel, and founding member Carol Maillard. Louise Robinson, another original member, returned to the group in 2004 after 26 years, many of which she spent leading her own vocal ensemble Street Sounds. Arnaé, who goes by one name, became a full-time member in 2004 after a decade as a Sweet Honey substitute singer. All the performers accompany their vocals with various percussion instruments, except for sign language interpreter Shirley Childress Saxton.

It was Barnwell who provided the impetus for Sweet Honey's trademark practice of making concerts accessible to the deaf. Interested in teaching and communicating with the deaf since she was a child, Barnwell was instead put on a musical path by her father, Irving Barnwell, a prominent violinist during the Harlem Renaissance.

Good enough to win the notice of Leopold Stokowski while playing in the New York City All-City High School Orchestra, she gave up a promising career as a violinist to study speech pathology. After earning a doctorate in craniofacial studies from the University of Pittsburgh, Barnwell joined the faculty at Howard, where she started a church choir for untrained singers. She first caught the attention of Reagon at a church service in 1979, when she sang a solo while signing the lyrics.

"She came up to me right afterward and said, 'We really want you to join the group,' and I thought, 'OK, I'll try it for a couple of years,' " Barnwell recalls. "That was exactly my attitude. I didn't see it as a new career. I saw it as an additional thing that I would add to what I did. It was one of those times in life when a door opens and another door closes, but you don't know it at the time."

Sweet Honey was founded as a vehicle to open doors. The group's roots go back to the mid-1960s, when Reagon's former husband, Cordell Hull Reagon, was a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She formed the SNCC Freedom Singers to raise awareness and money for the cause. But it was the women's movement that gave birth to Sweet Honey in the Rock, which emerged alongside writers such as June Jordan, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Toni Cade Bambara at a time when powerful female African American voices were coming to the foreground.

Over the past 33 years, Sweet Honey has kept African American vocal traditions in the spotlight through performances that are as theatrical as they are soulful. Decked out in colorful, flowing robes, the women weave interlocking vocal lines while creating intricate polyrhythms with foot stomps and hand percussion. The group recently released its 17th album, "Raise Your Voice" (EarthBeat), which is the soundtrack for a forthcoming "American Masters" presentation on PBS. Always mindful of the next generation, Sweet Honey is working on a fourth children's album.

"We're now singing to the grandchildren of our first audience," Reagon says. "When we do a children's concert, the kids might be brought by their grandparents who heard us in the mid-'70s."

By Andrew Gilbert
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/02/19/PKGGDH5PJ41.DTL