During rehearsals for Mary D. Watkins’s opera Deep River in 2014, conductor Tianhui Ng and the musicians of the Mount Holyoke Symphony Orchestra couldn’t believe what they were hearing. The music, with its unique blend of popular styles with traditional operatic lyricism, seemed perfectly suited to the harrowing story of Civil Rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer. 

“It was one of the most moving moments of my life,” Ng said recently, adding that he and the musicians could do nothing but cry.

But Deep River was only then in the draft stages of Watkins’s ultimate vision. The opera had been workshopped with the Oakland Opera Company in 2009 and heard in a concert performance under Ng’s direction a decade ago. But this Friday, the White Snake Projects finally bring this timely work to Boston, fleshed out and with a new title, Is This America?

“White Snake is an activist company,” Ng said. And in a matter of life-imitating-art-imitating life, White Snakes is urging people to register to vote. Is This America?, then, appears to be bringing everything full circle, speaking with force and vigor in light of our painfully fractured politics. 

“We could not shy away from this,” Ng said. “This is about voting as a powerful and personal right.”

But it’s also about the intense struggles to get there. Hamer’s life, which seemed to move from hardship to tragedy with little reprieve, is an ideal vehicle for exploring her unyielding desire to register African Americans to vote in Mississippi during the 1960s.

In carrying out that work, Hamer endured arrests, threats, and beatings at the hands of the white establishment. She had even been victim of what she termed a “Mississippi appendectomy”—a  hysterectomy without consent to prevent her, a poor Southern black person, from bearing any children.

Yet she continued to galvanize efforts and teach fellow blacks about their rights. And the system continued to try to silence her. She was jailed and beaten in Winona, Mississippi on command of white enforcement officers that left her permanently disabled, damaging her eyes, legs, and kidneys. Prior to that, she had been evicted from the plantation where she worked as a sharecropper for registering to vote. During testimony, she recalled that the plantation owner told her, “We’re not ready for that in Mississippi.”

Hamer’s shining moment came at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, where she attempted to seat delegates from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. As Mississippi conducted whites-only primaries, she was arguing for the inclusion of black voices. The speech she gave, which ran on network TV, became a powerful statement of defiance during the Civil Rights era. 

“If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America,” she told the committee. “Is this America? This land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily? Because we want to live as decent human beings in America?”

Through her music, Watkins makes the emotions of these moments even more compelling, Ng said. 

“[Her] harmonies are so expressive,” Ng said. “There’s a pathos in the singing and a style of recitative unique to her. Not the usual V-I cadences, but uniquely beautiful and intriguing.” 

Short clips of the opera on Watkins’s website reveal a penchant for styles as wide reaching as Southern gospel, new jack swing, and straight-ahead jazz, all reflective of the composer’s wide-ranging musical roots. 

“There are sounds from the 70s, 80s, and 90s woven in a very beautiful way,” Ng said, referring to the blend as “a mix of Motown meets Verdi.”  

“But in bringing the piece off I always wanted to be true to Fannie Lou Hamer,” Ng added. “One of the things we were concerned about were the dramaturgical relationships. [In the new version] we really focused more on Hamer, the harm she endured, and the motivations behind the things she really did do.”

Is This America? contains two new arias. One of them expresses Hamer’s crippling anger and anxiety over being a victim of a forced hysterectomy. “In the original version, her feelings are not stated,” Ng said. “She’s passive. So, we transformed the action in this version into one of the most beautiful moments. Another was when Hamer was beaten until she suffered kidney and eye damage. We never heard how she responded to that. But now we do.”

Making the music come alive is no easy task, Ng admits. And he has had to widen his ears to styles more often heard outside of the traditional opera house. “There is a performance practice with the music of our time,” he said. “There aren’t treatises necessarily being written about how Beyoncé sings a melody. But I can see and hear things in this music that are not written down.”

“A lot of us can feel when the style is not quite right,” Ng said. “But my challenge as a conductor is to bring an element of meaning, an element of lived memory.”

And, considering Hamer’s troubled life, that memory invites as much conviction as reflection. “This opera is a story of triumph and of wrestling with a demon,” Ng says. “But we wanted to choose something hopeful.”

“In the end, it’s a story of hope over oppression, despondency, and nihilism,” Ng said.

Is This America? opens 8 p.m. Friday at the Strand Theater in Dorchester and runs through Sunday. Tickets HERE.

Aaron Keebaugh’s work has been featured in The Musical Times, Corymbus, The Classical Review, Early Music America, BBC Radio 3, and the Arts Fuse, for which he writes regularly about classical music. A musicologist, Aaron teaches at North Shore Community College in Danvers and Lynn.