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Kenneth Spencer

September 2024

Hear Spencer perform the song “City Called Heaven” in 1946.

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I am a poor pilgrim of sorrow,
I’m tossed in this wide world alone,
No hope for today nor tomorrow,
I’ve started to make heaven my home.
Sometimes I am tossed and driven, Lord
Sometimes I don’t know where to roam,
I’ve heard of a city called heaven,
I’ve started to make it my home.
 
My mother has reached that pure glory,
My father’s still walkin’ in sin,
My sisters and brothers won’t own me,
Because I am tryin’ to get in.
Sometimes I am tossed and driven, Lord
Sometimes I don’t know where to roam,
I’ve heard of that city called heaven,
I’ve started to make it my home.

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Consuelo Kanaga, Kenneth Spencer, 1933; Brooklyn Museum, gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga; © Brooklyn Museum; photo: Brooklyn Museum

 
Kanaga photographed singer and actor Kenneth Spencer in 1933, at the very beginning of his career. The next year, he would begin studying at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, graduating in 1938. Spencer struggled to get concert bookings because of his race. In the film Cabin in the Sky (1943), with an all-Black cast, he appears alongside Lena Horne, Ethel Waters, and Louis Armstrong.