Classical guitarist from Cleveland bridges past and present with Negro spirituals

Damian Goggans' performances of "14 Etudes on The Music of Black Americans" connect audiences to the rich history of African-American musical traditions.

CLEVELAND, Ohio - The song, sung a capella by a young man is “Don’t Be Weary, Traveler,” and it is more than a century old. But the melody and most if not all of the words are familiar to many of the church-going folks in the audience at the historic Kress Buliding in Montgomery, Alabama.

But the young singer, a talented native Clevelander and senior at Oberlin Conservatory named Damian Goggans, who was invited to perform for the Civil-Rights-themed Clifford & Virginia Durr Lecture Weekend in Montgomery, Alabama, imbues the old-timey melodies with the pulpit-fueled fervor and gravitas the old Negro spiritual demands.

The song and Goggans’ gospel-infused delivery is familiar to many in the audience. But when he picks up his classical guitar and plays a stately near-baroque arrangement of the same spiritual followed by a “sermonette” offering context and his interpretation of the song, the audience is surprised and captivated.

The spiritual, its classical arrangement and the sermonette are all delivered by Goggans as part of “14 Etudes on The Music of Black Americans,” a project commissioned by the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society, featuring the young singer and guitarist performing arrangements of the spirituals by composer Thomas Flippin. The entire project is available to experience as a playlist on the CCGS YouTube page.

“I think this is probably true for most people, but when you think of a Black guitarist, you’re not thinking of a classical guitarist,” Goggans said from home the week after his Alabama performances.

“You’re thinking of blues guitar, electric guitar, something like that. When I walk in with red dreads, a tattoo, and a guitar, it doesn’t look like I should be there,” he said.

Goggans appearance and chosen instrument, he’s a Classical Guitar major with a minor in African American Music student, may be surprising for many. But it’s also a culmination of hard work on his instrument, his interest in his people’s history and the folks who encouraged and helped him along the way.

Erik Mann, executive director of the CCGS who has known Goggans “from the first semester that he picked up the guitar in eighth grade” said he was the only guitarist for the project.

“I’ve had Damian in mind for this project for years, and have been waiting for a moment when he had the time to focus on this project. This project was really built for him,” Mann wrote in an email.

“Damian is the perfect quadruple threat performer/scholar for this project: singing, playing guitar, speaking, and doing the research.”

After the performance in Montomery, his first trip to the city, though he has performed parts of the Etudes in Spain and New York with the US Guitar Orchestra, Goggans said the response was encouraging and heartfelt

“They were very excited. And I got a lot of people that came up to me after the concerts saying, the music really spoke to me,” Goggans said.

“There were a couple of audience members who actually came up to me crying and being like, your performance was extremely moving. And mentioned how it, speaks to what’s going on right now. And so I think they really liked it!,” he said.

Goggans, who also plays cello and composes music for string orchestra, plans to continue his studies in grad school in Florida. He said performing the etudes in Montgomery, the heart of the Civil Rights movement with his mother and grandmother there, also deepened his connection with the African American diaspora.

He says the audiences knew almost all of the songs performed and sang along. And he felt even more connected because of Montgomery’s historic role in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.

“Walking in those same spaces where all these things kind of happen. And then being able to perform these pieces was really transformative. I really appreciated it,” he said.

Goggans grew up in East Cleveland and the University Circle neighborhood/area knowing early in life that music, he played drums in his family’s church, and performing was his future. When CCGS started an afterschool program at his middle school, Citizens Leadership Academy, his art teacher deftly strong-armed him to trying it out.

“I had no intention of doing the guitar. And she was like, `well, you’re gonna try it or fail my class.’ So, I tried it very much willingly and kind of fell in love with it ever since,” he said with a chuckle.

Goggans, who at times lived with his grandmother, a fan of the blues, was familiar with the sounds of the electric guitar, but the then eighth grader was not a classical music fan. But after ensuring he wouldn’t fail his art class he felt a connection with the instrument.

“For me, it was an instrument that I was able to understand. And when I finally started to be able to play it well enough, It was almost like meditation for me,” he said, adding that he also appreciated the ability to make the classical guitar sound like “a full orchestra coming out of just one instrument.”

Now in love with the instrument and the style, Goggans wanted to continue his guitar studies and found the Musical Pathway Fellowship from the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he began studying with Mann and attending the Cleveland School of the Arts for his secondary schooling and further guitar study.

“14 Etudes on Black American Music” was first commissioned in 2021. After Flippin finished several pieces, CCGS held a performance by students and alumni of its Education Program with Flippin present when Goggans freestyled what would become a major addition to the project’s presentation.

“Thomas wrote these pieces with the intention of the performer speaking the lyrics of the spiritual or playing the melody on guitar before performing the etude, as a way of connecting to the source material,” Mann said.

“...Damian stunned everyone, including Thomas, by singing the original spirituals. In hindsight, it makes perfect sense, of course, and Thomas decided that he would perform them that way from then on as well,” he said. Mann, aware that Goggans was developing a database of Black composers as part of his minor in African-American Music at Oberlin, and that he was a theater kid, asked Goggans if he would write some words about the pieces. Those words became the “sermonettes” portion of the project

“I thought that he would have important things to say about the context of the music, and be able to deliver it powerfully,” Mann said.

Goggans’ delivers his sermonettes with the melodious, halting cadence an old-school preacher. It is an intentional attempt to connect with Civil Rights-era America, when many of these spirituals such as “Don’t Let Nobody Turn You ‘Round” and became protest anthems. But he also connects them to their African-American bondage origins, and from there even further back to the Griot tradition of storytellers and poets in West Africa.

Goggans’ research into little-known or nearly forgotten African American composers is more than just schoolwork or to satisfy his cultural curiosity.

Discovering composers and musicians like Justin Holland—a 19th-century Black classical guitarist, pianist, flutist, and composer who was one of the first Black students enrolled at Oberlin in 1835, a civil-rights activist who regularly mingled with famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass and helped direct slaves to the Underground Railroad—felt as if African American history itself was calling out to him. Now, he wants to make it easier for future students to uncover the rich legacy of Black orchestral composers.

“This article about him after he had passed away said it might be another hundred years before we get another guitarist like Justin Holland to come up in Cleveland. And it’s been about 200 years. It seems like I somehow magically fit right into the space. And I feel like it’s important that I’m kind of continuing this,” Goggans said.

“For me, part of the reason I’m doing this research is because I started asking myself, ’Okay, most of the music I’ve been playing hasn’t been by Black composers—where can I find that music?’ Most teachers aren’t even familiar with Justin Holland. But now, after doing the research, I’ve discovered more than 60 composers to choose from.

“And so I want to make it where other students, when they decide I want to play music by a person that looks like me, they don’t have to go and do all the research that I’m doing. They can just look online and be like, `Well, out of these hundreds, which piece do I want to play today?’ So that’s the goal.”