Stargazer: Eric Dozier
“I was surrounded by music,” says Eric Dozier of his early years. He started learning the piano at his dad’s side at age four. He sang and played the piano with his family at the local Baptist church in rural Tennessee, U.S. Singing was a way of life.
Eric grew passionate about how to create unified communities. He got a degree in public policy and a master’s degree in religion, then became a mentor for youth. He began to focus on the role of music in society. He worked with the World Famous Harlem Gospel Choir and cofounded One Human Family Music Workshops.
Today, Eric uses music to bring people together and teach them about the oneness of humanity. He travels the globe leading choirs and empowering creativity. He also helps to create a diverse culture at the Episcopal School of Nashville, while completing a doctorate degree in black gospel performance. He and his family live in Tennessee.
Q: What’s your favorite childhood memory?
Some of my earliest childhood memories are centered around music at the church and listening to all these records that my mom and dad had … We had a toy piano … and my dad would put this record on … called “Broadway Boogie,” and I would just bang on the piano … [Later] I remember my dad coming up the driveway with a real piano on the back of my grandfather’s truck and he … set it in our kitchen … He starts playing … and I was just amazed because I had never seen him play … so I sat up next to him and watched his hands, and that’s how I learned how to play the piano.
Q: What was your most challenging experience when you were a kid?
The only really challenging thing … would probably have to be related to my parents splitting up when I was about 12 … I think that that was tough for me, had a really big impact on my life. And it was … around the time that my little sister was born … I was also about to start a new school … I was … leaving my neighborhood for the first time to go to a private school down in Chattanooga … It was just a haven of privilege and wealth, and I was coming from this poor rural experience … so that was a big time of transition.
Q: What did you study in college, and how has it helped you in your career?
I have an undergraduate degree in public policy with a focus on youth, race, and education … a master’s of theological studies from divinity school, and I’m currently working on a doctorate out of … the University of Tasmania in Australia … What I’m studying there is … the impact of black gospel performance on cultures outside of the black church … Specifically, I’m … tracking the emergence of black gospel music in the Bahá’í Faith and looking at the impact that black gospel singing has had on the devotional practice of the Bahá’í community.
Eric Dozier uses music to help communities connect.
Q: What inspired you to become a music educator?
For me, you know, music has always been a means of maintaining and carrying forward community … It was never … just a performance practice. It was always for a greater purpose … [In my community], people sang all the time … when you cooked … when you worked … when you were at church. That was just the environment, and so … a music career didn’t really hold any kind of allure for me. I never aspired to be a professional musician … I’ve always kind of aspired that my music be useful because I was told that that’s what music was … Music and vision in that context are there to … help the community to grow and mature spiritually.
Q: What is one of your favorite experiences in your career so far?
I was working with the Children’s Theater Company in New York with Mehr Mansuri, and we were scheduled to perform at the UN for Nelson Mandela’s visit … I got a chance to compose a song … for that event and perform with the Venezuelan Children’s Orchestra and a 300-member children’s choir … from across New York City. And we did a song called “Color Me Human” that I wrote, and I was on stage with Nelson Mandela and Harry Belafonte at the same time. That was … one of the highlights of my musical life.
Q: What motivated you to become a Bahá’í?
I grew up learning about the oneness of humanity … The hope for the realization of the oneness of humanity is embedded in black culture … So I feel … that I was prepared to meet the Bahá’ís and the Bahá’í Faith by the vision that was planted inside of me because of my family … When I saw it, it was like, well, of course, this is what the world should be like.
Q: This issue of Brilliant Star is about building unified communities. What are three things kids can do to help?
I think that particularly they need to understand how their communities operate. When I was growing up in my church environment, you saw what the trustees did … what the ushers did … what the pastor did … what the choir director did … And we had a junior usher board. We had junior trustees. We had a junior choir … By the time you got to an age to where you became an administrator or whatever … it wasn’t a surprise as to how to run a choir … you already knew because you had been doing it with an adult.
The other thing I would say to young people [is] always be creative … use their imaginations, and don’t believe that just because they don’t see something in the world that it can’t be in the world. They … have great capacity to imagine a better world and they also possess the energy to bring it into existence … And third … really cultivate a thirst for learning … [and] realize that learning does not only come from books or computers, but … it has many avenues, so you don’t just learn with your mind … You know through your senses … through your intuition, you learn through meditating … gardening … singing … dancing—all of these different things.
Q: The prejudice and disunity in the world can be discouraging. How do you stay optimistic?
We have to search for signs of light … There is a lot of beauty in the world, and there are a lot of people—and a lot of young people specifically—that are doing great things in the world … You know, I recently ran across an Instagram profile of this young lady from Flint [Michigan, U.S.] that has dedicated her life to speaking about the Flint water crisis and resolving that herself … When you think about children like Malala [Yousafzai] and the education of girls on the planet … there are a lot of heroes … I recommend that … [kids] search out these young people and use them as role models. All of their role models don’t have to be adults. They can be young people … and they should be people that look like them.
Q: Part of ending prejudice is talking with others about race and justice. How can kids start those conversations and make them meaningful and positive?
I think kids are naturally open to the conversation, and … that’s why I’ve focused a lot of my time on creating a curriculum that assists children in opening up and having that conversation … They have the eye for justice … What they may not have is the vocabulary or the language to articulate what they are feeling, but [adults] can give them that. And so the way I give them that is through the music … We sing the songs, but the songs have a vocabulary in them, and so we dissect the vocabulary and we talk about these principles of justice. You know, what does it mean to be a light in the world? What does it mean to say “I’m going to let it shine” and exercise your own agency to bring that into the world? I think our hope lies in these young people … because they are fearless … And they are highly creative … They’ll figure out a way to resolve a water crisis … [or] … to feed hungry people. They’ll figure out a way to bring balance to the world if we kind of get out of their way and give them what they need.
Singing is a joy that Eric shares with his wife, Genevieve, and daughters Worthington (left) and Justice, at a 2017 Bahá’í School in Wisconsin.
Q: You use the power of music to promote healing, justice, and racial reconciliation. How can music help us in these areas?
I think that music has always had a power to raise awareness about particular societal issues in a highly effective way, probably more so than any other art form, really … If you think about … group singing, we all have to be kind of pointed in the same direction for it to work … There’s also … the lyrical content, particularly for singing about justice … healing … racial reconciliation—we know the power of words and the words seep into us … Also, recent scholarship has shown that when people sing together, their breathing starts to synchronize … their brain patterns start to synchronize as well, like they literally become one in that moment … When you’re in that space … your joy is expanded and we know as Bahá'ís that joy gives us wings . . . and it sharpens our intellectual capacity … We need our intellects to be keen as we’re navigating this treacherous terrain of racial injustice, of white supremacy, of racism.
Q: What’s your advice for kids who are shy about singing with others?
My recommendation is to find the biggest choir that you can find and hide in it … I try to create a particular level of anonymity for people in the choirs … so that they can hide in there and sing as loud or as soft as want. You know, a lot of the emphasis has been taken away from community singing, and we’ve created this cult of celebrity which I think is very, very toxic … I think that that is detrimental because it has made everybody judgmental of people who may have … a song in their heart that will never get released because they are afraid of judgment. So I try to create environments in my workshops where there is no judgment … where nonjudgment becomes a community value, so that we can all learn together … just be together … and … hear one another.
Q: If you had one wish for Brilliant Star’s readers, what would it be?
I will kind of take my experience with my 11-year-old … Justice, and … [my] six-year-old daughter, Worthington. And what I really want for my children is … to see the world as their family … and … their home. You know, I think so many times … because of race and cultural boundaries … we shut our kids off from people … I want them to see themselves as … friends and family to the whole human race … That’s my wish for … our young people, you know, because the world is theirs.
Family photo by Nancy Wong
Discover516 Stargazer27 Stargazers82 African American34 Music171 Musicians23 Choir4 Race Unity219 Race55 Racism104