Sharon Katz

Singer/songwriter Sharon Katz used her music as a tool for social change in South Africa, where she had spent most of her youth. With her band, the Peace Train, Katz emphasized intercultural harmony and spiritual uplift. Her series of large-scale concerts and train tours involving multiracial and multicultural performers promoted a color-blind national unity in South Africa, where her music helped lay the groundwork for the country's democratic uprising in 1994. In addition to her many performances, which continued in successive years and spanned the globe, Katz also released several albums beginning in 1995.

Katz grew up in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, a severely segregated city, to parents of Eastern European descent. From an early age, she despised apartheid and quickly took a liking to socially conscious singer/songwriter music; artists such as Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, and Peter, Paul & Mary, often thought of as protest music. At only age 11, she began playing guitar and began seriously devoting herself to music. Later, she participated in Port Elizabeth's underground protest plays before attending college in Cape Town, where she studied music and government. She graduated in 1976 and took an interest in the concept of music therapy, the use of using music to heal any sort of societal ills.

After traveling abroad and living for a short time in the mountains of Lesotho, Katz moved to Philadelphia, PA, in the early '80s, where she worked toward a master's degree in music therapy at Temple University. She subsequently moved to Brooklyn, NY, where she worked in the both the high school and prison systems. Following these experiences in the United States, she moved back to South Africa and began employing the knowledge she'd attained. Her first major accomplishment upon returning, When Voices Meet, brought together a 500-member multicultural youth choir for a series of three concerts in May 1993, one of which was broadcast on television and radio.

The success of When Voices Meet earned Katz much respect, including the praise of Nelson Mandela, and signaled the direction the ambitious singer/songwriter would then direct her career as a musician. She took the show on the road, paring down the choir to 150 members and traveling around Africa by train. The two-week train tour inspired her to name her band the Peace Train. The tour proved just as successful as When Voices Meet, and in April 1994, shortly before the presidential elections were held, the Independent Electoral Commission asked her to write songs in various South African languages that would teach people to vote. Her relationship with the Mandela-led government was from here on considerably faithful, and the government proved faithful to her as a result.

Thanks to sponsorship from the government and private sectors of South Africa and the United States, Katz took a 35-member version of the Peace Train to America in 1995, where she embarked on a five-week eight-city tour. Her performances were usually of large scale. For instance, she performed at Disney World's International Festival and also at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Upon her return, she took the Peace Train into the studio to record her debut album, The Peace Train: Making Tracks (1995). A year later, she recorded another, Crystal Journey, and embarked on the Cape to Cairo tour, which took her across the Africa continent. Following various projects in 1997 such as contributions to the multi-artist album Carnival! and a television event titled Crossing Rhythms, she spent most of 1998 in Ghana. There, she taught and performed, two activities she continued in later years, though her work knew no geographic boundaries, crisscrossing the Atlantic and spanning the world. In 2002, Katz and the Peace Train released their third album, and first to have international distribution, Imbizo.