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Books on the Spirituals
The Negro and His Music
(Locke) /
The
Spiritual and the Blues: An
Interpretation (Cone) /
Best Loved Spirituals (Mahalia)
The Book of the American negro Spirituals (Johnson) /
American Negro Songs: Folk Songs and Spirituals (Work)
Deep River and The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death
(Thurman)
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Negro Spirituals and American
Culture
By Regina Dolan
In the St. Augustine Seminary in Bay St. Louis,
Mississippi, future priests are encouraged to study and
interpret spirituals as part of the basic culture of their
people. The appeal, pathos, and harmony of these songs are
recognized by great musicians all over the world. They
constitute the chief treasury of folk-songs that are peculiarly
American in origin and character by reason of the Negro’s
historical place in our comparative brief existence as a nation.
Some consider the spirituals' melody vastly superior to its
verse. They reason that these songs were composed when the
Negro’s lack of education forced him to concentrate on rhythm
and harmony, the inherent parts of his native genius that needed
no formal schooling for expression. Slaves of the Southern
plantation relied on Bible text for verse themes. In the story
of the children of Israel in bondage in Egypt, they found a
striking symbol of their own status. The famous “Go Down,
Moses” is an excellent example of this analogy. “Swing Low,
Sweet Chariot” has a touch of the whimsy in the invitation to
the chariot of Elias to swing low, so that the soul may enjoy
its ride to heaven.
The supercilious may dub spirituals naïve and sentimental,
overlooking the fact that they took birth from the heart-break
of a race, helpless before self-appointed masters. Such songs as
“Is Massa Goin’ to Sell Us Tomorrow?” and “Farewell To
My Only Child” sprang from the slave’s dread of family
separation. It is interesting to note that in the Southern
South, e. g. Virginia, where there was more sense of permanence
on a family plantation, the spirituals were more buoyant and
joyful. On the other hand, in other sections where slaves were
more often abused, the spirituals were fraught with sorrow and
foreboding. “I Feel Like A Motherless Child” is not only a
reflection of this insecurity, but it embodies the emotion of
down-trodden people everywhere.
Although the Indian possessed a goodly store of folk songs,
he failed to become the fount of America’s folk music, because
the Negro’s greater rhythmic swing and melodic freedom
produced music with a more widespread appeal. Then, too, the
more varied emotional life of the Negro slave ranging from
light-hearted irresponsibility to gaunt tragedy motivated a
richer more diverse folk song.
Spirituals are a spontaneous outpouring in music of the Negro
slave’s deep religious faith. This devotedness did not blind
him to his wrongs, and many slave uprisings occurred in the two
decades preceding the Civil War. But the slave’s faith
clarified for him the paradox of “man’s inhumanity to man”
without lessening his confidence in God and ultimate justice.
Therefore, the Negro sang of a celestial home where at last he
would have his rightful place as a free being. He studded the
spirituals with poetical allusions whose simplicity and imagery
have made them classic gems. In the Psalms of Israel, you will
find the only counterpart of the spirituals, for the former were
also creations of a people with exalted belief in their
possession of great religious truth.
In 1856, Dwight’s Journal of Music printed the first
article in the United States of Negro spirituals. For the first
time in our history, the song-loving Negro was contrasted
favorably with the white citizens who performed his chores sans
melody and who sang self-consciously on prescribed occasions. A
Philadelphia woman, Lucy McKim, was the pioneer of spiritual
recording, when she took down “Poor Rosy” from the singing
of an old Negress in 1862. She found it impossible to get every
nuance of the melody into her composition. Five years later, she
collaborated with William Allen and Charles Ware in editing a
volume of spirituals. An enthusiastic assistant of the trio was
Colonel T. Higginson, an ex-Union Army Officer who had been so
thrilled during the Civil War when he first heard these songs
that he eagerly spread the news of his discovery among
music-loving friends. Another boost for spirituals came from Henry
Krehbiel, a music critic of note, when he gave them a serious
criticism in his “Afro-American Folk Songs”.
Until this time most of the slave owners had held spirituals
in contempt as a result of their white supremacy fixation.
Although in his ballads Stephen Foster sentimentalized the
spiritual, his work appealed distinctly to the average American
of his day and still appeals to a wide audience. Like James
Bland’s “Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny,” Foster’s “My
Ole Kentucky Home” has become part of the American musical
tradition. The pseudo-spirituals which sprang up in the 1870 to
1900 period were also a definite contribution to American music,
although they were not true songs of the people as sung by them.
These concerts and glee club renditions could not possibly
capture the unique character of a spiritual. For had it not been
composed by a congregation inspired by overpowering religious
emotion with choral improvisions on the theme, which were
familiar to all participants? Only a phonograph can faithfully
record the unique breaks and tricks of the true spiritual.
Dr. Alain Locke of Howard University defines spiritual as
“one of the great classic expressions of all time of religious
emotions and Christian moods and attitudes.” Fisk University
was fated to give America and Europe a wide and popular
introduction to these songs. In the fall of 1871, eleven
students left Fisk’s campus to help raise a twenty-thousand
dollar fund by singing the songs of their own race. Under the
name, “Jubilee Singers”, they traveled through Ohio, New
York, and New England until May, captivating audiences
everywhere. This was the first time that a large number of
Americans heard these moving songs. The following year, Theodore
Seward of New Jersey, made the spirituals accessible in
harmonized form when he published his volume of “Jubilee
Songs”.
Henry Ward Beecher urged the Jubilee Singers to come to
Brooklyn, and the engagement led to an invitation to participate
in the World’s Peace Jubilee. The second tour of the Fisk’s
students transported them to the British Isles, and from there
they extended their “singing Campaign” to Germany and
Holland. Spurred on by their success, the Hampton Institute
Singers trained by Thomas Fenner gave concerts in New England in
1874 for their building fund. Thus the American public made the
acquaintance of another group of spirituals. The publication of
“Cabin and Plantation Songs,” appeared at this time to
foster and maintain popular interest.
Many musical historians affirm that the most effective aid to
the international recognition of the spirituals came from a
Bohemian visitor to our shores. The keen ear of the composer,
Anton Drovak, caught a fresh tone and peculiarly American flavor
in the melodies. In his rapt appreciation, he pronounced them
“the most striking and appealing melodies that have ever been
found on this side of the Atlantic.” Why, he wondered in
astonishment, did Americans strive so hard to intimate European
music while they ignored this rich vein of song that was
distinctly their own?
Transforming an idea into an achievement, Anton Drovak
blended deftly into the theme of his symphony, “From the New
World”, the Negro spiritual “Goin’ Home Lord, Ah’m Goin’
Home” as the American background. In 1894, a spellbound
audience listened to his creation at Carnegie Hall and many
reappraised their concept of the Plantation Songs’ merits. It
was Harry Burleigh, while a student at the National
Conservatory, who revealed to Drovak the epic quality of the
spirituals by his vocal interpretations of them. Later this
young Negro was destined to bring the spirituals to the concert
stage and remind his conservatory-trained colleagues that the
folk song of their people deserved artistic treatment.
The next great figure to discover the spiritual was Samuel
Coleridge Taylor, an Anglo-Negro of London and the most renowned
musician of his race. In 1904, at the suggestion of the editor
of the Musicians’ Library, he transcribed sixteen American
Negro spirituals for the piano. In the work, the Negro melodies
were treated in an artistic form for the first time. A member of
the Jubilee Singers, Frederick Loudin, first taught Samuel to
appreciate Negro folk music. Until this period, spirituals had
been considered essentially for group singing. There was nothing
in the published versions of them then to qualify these songs
for solo singing with a piano accompaniment or to inspire
singers to make use of them. In fact, spirituals were
inaccurately termed Negro “gospel hymns” by most Americans.
Today, spirituals and even secular Negro folk melodies and
their harmonic style are regarded as the purest and most
valuable musical lore in America. The most common reaction of
musical authorities is that they are not sentimental or
theatrical, but epic, and full of simple dignity.
Dr. Alain Locke holds that spirituals are mainly choral in
character and are not at their best in solo voice or instrument.
He predicts that they will have their truest development in
symphonic choir, such as the great Russian composer have brought
to their folk music. He asserts at this stage, the spirituals
will reachieve their folk atmosphere and epic religious quality.
Dr. Locke in his book,
The Negro and His Music, deplores the preponderance of
pseudo-spirituals of today, and remarks that folk compositions
have often been given artificial composition and disguised with
musical frills in sentimental and concert versions. He regrets
that educated Negroes too often shun the spiritual because of
its unhappy connotation with slavery and illiteracy. However,
outstanding Negro artists and choral groups are breaking down
the antipathy by faithful and understanding renditions of these
beautiful melodies.
Typical of such musicians are the Eva Jessye Choir and the
Hall Johnson Singers, who have (in the opinion of Dr. Locke)
given the most accurate reproduction of genuine Negro singing.
They both have the actual mechanism of the improvised Negro
choral singing with its syllabic quavers, off tones and tone
glides, improvised interpolations and subtle rhythmic
variations. Some musical authorities complain that in most
conventional versions of spirituals, there is too much melody
and harmony. They assert that if you over-emphasize the melodic
elements of the spirituals, you produce a sentimental ballad of
the Stephen Foster type. If you stress harmony, you get
barber-shop choruses and if you concentrate on rhythmic idiom,
you secularize the product, and the result is only a syncopated
shout with the religious mood completely vanished. What then?
Only in the subtle fusing of these elements does the genuine
folk spiritual come forth.
Today the spirituals are caught between folklore and
art-form. Their ever-mounting popularity has brought a very
dangerous tendency to sophistication and over-elaboration. Even
Negro composers have been too strongly influenced by formal
European idioms and mannerisms in setting the spiritual.
It is essential to keep in mind that the folk songs has many
styles. The idiom of the spiritual calls for choral arrangement
according to some critics, who believe the vital, sustained
background of accompanying voices is most important. Such
celebrated Negro artists as Nathaniel Dett, William Dawson,
Ballanta Taylor, and Lawrence Brown have written effective solo
verses, but are turning with increasing interest to the choral
form. If it is developed along lines of its own originality, we
may expect an evolution of the Negro folk song, that may equal
or perhaps surpass the choral music of old Russia.
According to Olin Downes, the flower of Negro music blooms
forth in singing. Of course, de does not mean that the Negroes
were to restrict themselves solely to this form of musical
expression. He felt their peculiar genius was at its apex in
vocal presentation. Other modern musical scholars look to the
spiritual to supply great liturgical works of the future.
In Charleston, South Carolina, the Society for the
Preservation of the Spirituals was organized by a group of white
singers. Their ardent interest is a striking symbol of the
growing realization that it is the common duty of all Americans
to cherish and restore the spirituals as an intrinsic part of
our country’s musical lore. For these songs, from the bitter
wellspring of suffering and tribulation, represent the only
music America can claim as her own-all else had its origins in
the Old World. Source: Interracial Review (April 1958) * * * * *
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Hands on the Freedom Plow
Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC
By
Faith S. Holsaert, Martha Prescod Norman Noonan
Judy Richardson, Betty Garman
Robinson, et al.
The book opens
a window onto the organizing tradition of the
Southern civil rights movement. That tradition,
rooted in the courage and persistence of ordinary
people, has been obscured by the characterization of
the civil rights struggle as consisting primarily of
protest marches. In rural Dawson, Ga., Carolyn
Daniels housed SNCC workers organizing for voter
registration, and whites retaliated by bombing her
home. But at the end of a vivid depiction of this
and other anti-black terrorist acts, she writes, in
an apt summary of the grass-roots organizing that is
the real explanation for civil rights victories, "We
just kept going and going." |
Organizing involved the
kind of commitment and willingness to face risk that Penny Patch
conveys in only a few short sentences describing covert
nighttime meetings in plantation sharecropper shacks. Patch is
white. But that did not lessen the fear or reduce the danger of
remaining seated while poll watching in a country store as
whites came in and out, giving her and her black co-worker
menacing stares.
Full journalistic
disclosure requires me to say that many of these women are
friends and former comrades. But knowing the movement that we
were all a part of also demands that I share my observation:
While these pages look back, looking forward from them reveals
that there are many useful lessons for today in the strength of
these women.—Charles
E. Cobb Jr.
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” His father distrusted
the police, who had frequently called
him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr.
Kennedy’s father “relished Muhammad
Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never
called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places
his father, and Mr. Wright, in
sympathetic historical light. |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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updated 28 July 2008
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