Terry Leonino & Greg Artzner

Harriet Was Here

BREAKING NEWS !!!

 

March, 2022 is Harriet Tubman's 200th Birthday,

and Magpie is now pulling together all the 16 songs that they wrote over the last 10 years with 4th & 5th grade students from all over New York and Maryland, and also St. Catharines, Ontario Canada, telling the life story of this incredible woman!

When completed, this project will contain a CD, Songbook, and Educational Study Guide.

This video contains the Grand Opening ceremony for the school in St. Catharines, Ontario that was named for Harriet Tubman.

 

To enjoy the song written by students with Magpie,

advance the video to 31:11.

This next link is of the ceremony in St. Catharines where the students dedicated a plaque for her at the stanchion of the first suspension bridge over Niagara Falls that she crossed with her freedom seekers bringing them from the US to Canada and St. Catharines her home there for 10 years.

 

June23, 2020

 

Hi everyone,

We thought you might like to see the video of our latest Harriet Tubman song, “We’ll Make a Way Out of No Way".

 

This is the 7th year in a row we have done a songwriting residency with 4th grade students at Genesee Elementary School in Auburn, NY, Harriet Tubman’s hometown.

 

In years past we have done the closing performance of the new song in two school concerts that were open to the public. Parents and community people always show up. Auburn has become another home-away-from-home for us.

This year the residency was conducted through ZOOM meetings, 2-each day, Monday through Friday, for two weeks.

For the final, this year we recorded the song on both video and audio. Each of the kids were recorded singing the song on their own along with the video/audio of us singing it, and our studio engineer wizard, Charlie Pilzer, worked long into the night editing their audio tracks with ours. NOTE: The videos of each student have yet to be edited, but we’re expecting that work to be done in the coming days.

 

Not waiting around for the final edited video, we wanted to officially present the song on Juneteenth, and so we did it in another Zoom session attended by parents, teachers, school board members, community leaders, organizers of the project, and our friend Kate Clifford Larsen, author of the excellent biography of Tubman, Bound for the Promised Land. The kids sang it beautifully, and we think it’s a fine song.

 

The students decided to dedicate the song this year to George Perry Floyd and to all the front-line healthcare workers. They wrote a letter to Perry Floyd’s family.

Hope you enjoy it, and feel free to share it with anyone.

 

with love,

Greg & Terry

 

"Let our motto still be action, action. For we have but one life to live." –John Brown

 

 

 

Here’s the link to the letter the students wrote:

 

 

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Terry Leonino & Greg Artzner
Terry Leonino & Greg Artzner
Terry Leonino & Greg Artzner