NEW YORK, NY.- Bernice Johnson Reagon, whose stirring gospel voice helped provide the soundtrack of the civil rights movement, then went on to become a cultural historian, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution and the founder of the women’s a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, died Tuesday in Washington. She was 81.

Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her daughter, Toshi Reagon, who did not give a cause.

Bernice Reagon, the daughter of a Baptist preacher in Albany, Georgia, grew up in a church without a piano, and the first music she absorbed, rooted in spirituals and hymns, was performed by human voices to the accompaniment of clapping and foot stomping.

She was an original member in 1962 of the Freedom Singers, a vocal quartet that provided anthems of defiance for civil rights protesters preparing to confront the police or as they were hauled away to jail. The Freedom Singers were associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which sent them across the South as well as to the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island in 1963.

Reagon once wrote, “I sang and heard the freedom songs and saw them pull together sections of the Black community at times when other means of communication were ineffective.”

She went on to earn a doctorate in American history from Howard University in 1975 and to direct the Black American Culture Program at the Smithsonian. There, she amassed a collection of blues, gospel and spiritual music and presented that heritage to the public.

During one gospel music presentation, in the 1980s, Reagon encouraged the audience to hum and sing along with the performers. “And if you can’t do that, grunt or sigh a little,” she instructed.

She founded Sweet Honey in the Rock in 1973, its African American singers, all women, weaving together Black musical traditions from the church and the fields with original songs.

The name of the group, which began as a quartet and grew to a quintet and then a sextet, was inspired by a gospel song based on a Bible verse about the Lord’s promise of blessings to his followers.

The group’s concerts, including appearances at Carnegie Hall, might take aim at contemporary issues, like disarmament, as well as racial, feminist and sexual politics. It released albums “that carry blues and folk-oriented a cappella singing to a peak of refinement,” Stephen Holden wrote in a review in The New York Times in 1982.

“The songs I write have the thick, dense harmonies of hymns and slow songs out of the Black church,” Reagon told the Times on the group’s 10th anniversary in 1983.

She was also a composer, consultant and performer on notable television and radio series, including the documentaries “Eyes on the Prize” (1987), about the civil rights movement, and Ken Burns’ “The Civil War” (1990), to which she contributed “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder” to the soundtrack.

She was a producer and host of “Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions” (1994), a National Public Radio series on Black church music that won a Peabody Award.

Reagon, who lived in Washington, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1989 and was a distinguished professor of history at American University from 1993 to 2003.

She collaborated with experimental stage director Robert Wilson by writing music and the libretto for the 2003 opera “The Temptation of St. Anthony,” based on a Gustave Flaubert novel. It had its American premiere (with costumes by Geoffrey Holder) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Reagon “provided ethereal chorales and tambourine-shaking gospel tunes, declamatory spirituals and sultry soul,” Times reviewer Jon Pareles wrote.

Bernice Johnson was born Oct. 4, 1942, in Dougherty County, in southwest Georgia outside Albany. She was one of eight children of the Rev. Jesse Johnson, a Baptist minister, and Beatrice (Wise) Johnson.

In 1959, she entered Albany State College (now Albany State University), a historically Black institution, where she was engaged in what became known as the Albany Movement, a series of protests over segregation and voting rights. She was in jail in 1962 when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Albany to lead protests. She was later expelled from college for her activism.

After one march, a group of protesters were gathered in a church when a SNCC organizer said, “Bernice, sing a song.”

She launched into the gospel standard “Over My Head,” rewriting the line “I see trouble in the air” for a version appropriate to the moment: “Over my head, I see freedom in the air.”

“That was the first time I had the sort of awareness that these songs were mine, and I could use them for what I needed them to,” she said in an interview for “Eyes on the Prize.”

“Growing up in Albany,” she added, “I learned that if you bring Black people together, you bring them together with a song.”

The idea of the Freedom Singers — two men and two women with stirring voices — came from folk singer Pete Seeger, who was inspired by the Almanac Singers of the 1940s.

In 1963, she married Cordell Reagon, a fellow member of the Freedom Singers. They had two children before the marriage ended in divorce in 1967.

Toshi Reagon became a noted musician and later collaborated with her mother; in one instance they jointly provided the music and libretto for a 2013 opera by Wilson, “Zinnias: The Life of Clementine Hunter.”

In addition to her daughter, Reagon is survived by a son, Kwan, who is a chef; her life partner, Adisa Douglas, a retired philanthropist; her siblings Jordan Warren Johnson, Deloris Johnson Spears, Adetokunbo Tosu Tosasolim and Mamie Johnson Rush; and a granddaughter.

After she was expelled from Albany State College, Reagon went on to graduate from Spelman College in 1970. She was a Ford Foundation fellow at Howard University, where she earned her doctorate.

At the Smithsonian, she produced a three-record set, “Voices of the Civil Rights Movement: Black American Freedom Songs 1960-66.” The recordings were made in churches, at marches and on picket lines.

In February 2010, Reagon performed with a trio of reunited Freedom Singers at the White House in a celebration of music from the civil rights era.

“The civil rights movement was a movement sustained by music,” President Barack Obama said in opening remarks.

The Freedom Singers performed a rousing version of “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round,” with Reagon pausing to urge the audience to lean into the call-and-response.

“You have to actually sing this song,” she said. “You can never tell when you might need it.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.