Liz DeLillo
Staff Writer
Three-time Grammy-nominated African American vocal ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock will sing out Chautauqua’s 2025 Popular Entertainment Series at 8:15 p.m. Saturday in the Amphitheater.
Sweet Honey in the Rock was founded in Washington D.C. in 1973 with missions of empowerment, education and entertainment. An ambassadorial African American organization and a capella vocal ensemble, they have released over 20 albums, with their most recent studio album, #LoveInEvolution, released in 2016. In 2021, they co-wrote and performed When Day Comes, their first theatrical piece, in collaboration with Crossroads Theater founding director Ricardo Khan.
The ensemble marked their 50th anniversary in 2023, kicking off a three-year celebration both honoring its past and invigorating its future.
Currently, Sweet Honey in the Rock comprises vocalists Carol Maillard, Louise Robinson, Aisha Kahlil, Nitanju Bolade Casel and Rochelle Rice, with Romeir Mendez on upright acoustic/electric bass as well as American Sign Language interpreter Barbara Hunt.
In a 2023 interview with John Soltes in Hollywood Soapbox, Maillard shared how Sweet Honey in the Rock got started.
“When we first started out, we weren’t thinking we’re going to be a singing group forever,” Maillard told Soltes. “We all were doing our theater and acting careers, not trying to be a professional singing group. The singing group came out of the work that we were doing in our theatrical studies — music, dance, scene study, improvisation and stagecraft.”
Ensemble members take turns programming shows, Maillard said in her Hollywood Soapbox interview.
“Each person has their own style in how they want to engage the audience and tell Sweet Honey’s story and share the music and the messages,” she said then. “Everybody has their own way of doing it, so it’s always exciting.”
The original intention for Sweet Honey in the Rock was to perform in the D.C. area, Maillard said in the same interview. Over 50 years later, they are an internationally acclaimed vocal ensemble, sharing a capella as well as African American music and culture.
“The fact that we’ve been here for 50 years blows my mind, and that’s the best way I can say it,” Maillard said in Hollywood Soapbox. “It blows my mind because I can’t think of a female group singing the kind of music that we sing, traveling the way we do. We’re not commercial, so everything is very basic in terms of how we get around and the places where we perform.”
The ensemble has performed all over the world, from Carnegie Hall to the Sydney Opera House — and on every continent, save for Antarctica.
Maillard and Robinson made up half of the original ensemble in 1973, alongside Mie Fredericks and founder Bernice Johnson Reagon.
“I was there in the beginning, and now I’m here years later,” Maillard said in Hollywood Soapbox. “… I hope there’s always going to be Sweet Honey in the Rock in the world.”
