MC Singers Making South African Journey

The Mississippi College Singers will perform four concerts in South Africa during a ten-day trip in May.

Thirty-five students will join MC Department of Music Chairman James Meaders, professor Carol Joy Sparkman and others making the journey starting Tuesday.

Among the MC Singers' many stops in-between performances will be overnight stays with South African families, visits to orphanages, and a tour of the prison where Nelson Mandela was jailed for 27 years.

“This is a trip of a lifetime – I’m so blessed,” says 21-year-old MC Singer Jordan Langworthy of Clinton. Besides the concerts with the Chamber Choir of South Africa and other singing ensembles, she’s thrilled to be joining the safari trips, delivering Mississippi College gifts to host families and shooting pictures of Johannesburg, the City of Gold.

“This is my first trip out of the country,” says Langworthy, a 2008 Clinton High graduate and former member of the Arrow Singers.

Jordan has been a part of lengthy road trips before with the MC Singers. In March, the alto’s voice blended with the MC Singers for concerts at churches and schools in Tennessee, Virginia and Washington, D.C.

But this upcoming 18-hour plane ride to South Africa figures to be extra special for the MC Singers as they mark their third international tour since 2004. The award-winning MC Singers took 38 members of their group to Europe for a series of concerts in May 2008.

Other major events on their South African tour include performances with the Pro Cantu Youth Choir in Cape Town  and a joint concert with the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University Choir. They plan to visit the Apartheid  museum, and travel to Robben Island where Mandela was imprisoned from 1962 through 1990.

The president of South Africa from 1994 through 1999, Mandela led in the transition to a democratic non-racial government in the early 1990s and earned the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1993.

MC senior Kristopher Davis is also pumped about the journey that will take him thousands of miles away from Mississippi soil.

“This is the first time to get to do a trip like this and travel across the world,” says Davis, a 25-year-old vocal performance major from Jackson. “It is awesome.”

A 2004 Forest Hill High graduate and alumnus of Hinds Community College, Davis says he’s been researching  South Africa in recent days to get prepared. In recent weeks, members of the MC Singers directed by Meaders have stayed busy rehearsing on the Clinton campus. They will perform a number of spirituals as well as traditional South African tunes, among others.

Among the stops Davis is eagerly anticipating is an overnight stay with a Soweto family separated from other parts of South African society during Apartheid.

Meaders says he appreciates the gracious hospitality of the Chamber Choir of South Africa and other hosts associated with the overseas  tour. The Chamber Choir of South Africa is comprised of talented local musicians, ages 18-30, and members of the group are among those opening their homes to the MC Singers. “It is my sincere hope that we will be able to return the favor sometime in 2011 by having them here at MC,” Meaders said.

Mississippi College hosted a silent auction, a concert, banquet and other events to help pay for the trip that’s estimated to be $4,000 per student.