Dennis Hollingsworth

Gospel at Colonus

I just found this video of Bob Telson's personal performance of the Gospel at Colonus. Yes, fan boy stuff, but I was extremely fortunate to see this play in Los Angeles in 1985. I am especially grateful in Telson's June 2020 upload is that he tells the story of the making of the music along the way. The detail of the gospel church that he attended in Harlem, NYC at 124th and Lennox jumped out at me. I'll be looking for that church very soon. Morgan Freeman, Clarence Fountain and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama triple as Oedipus, accompanied by Jevetta Steele, The Soul Stirrers, Isabell O'Connor, Carl Lumbly and a deeper cast of amazing talent. The fusion of Sophocles and Gospel is brilliant in how it invigorated the coda of the third Theban play that had been overlooked for so long.

Comments are turned off in Telson's Youtube upload, so I'm generating this blogpost to tell him thank you and that his work has enriched my life.

You can find a DVD here, you won't be disappointed. In the meantime, you can enjoy it here:

"Numberless are the World's Wonders"
The Gospel at Colonus
Bob Telson, Music
Lee Breuer, Lyrics
2005, Nonesuch
Numberless are the world's wonders
But none more wonderful than man
The stormgray sea yields to his prows
Huge crests bear him high
Earth, holy and inexhaustible
Is graven where his plows have gone
Numberless are the world's wonders
But none more wonderful than man
The lightboned birds clinging to cover
Lithe fish darting away
All are taken, tamed in the net of his mind
The wild horse resigns to him
Numberless are the world's wonders
But none more wonderful than man
Words and thought rapid as air
He fashions for his use
And his the skill that deflects the arrows of snow
The spears of winter rain
From every wind he has made himself secure
From every wind he has made himself secure
From all but one ... all but one
In the late wind of death he cannot stand

(Source.)