Civil War Song in Black and White: Print and the Representation of the Spirituals
Abstract
:1. Introduction
Suggesting some of the “phenomenal complexities” Ronald Radano has identified as essential to the story of Black music in North America, Johnson’s dedication makes clear that those who first recorded the spirituals were more than incidental observers of the music (Radano 2003, p. 10). They were instead, alongside the “black and unknown bards” he celebrates in a prefatory poem, co-creators of one of the more significant developments in postbellum US culture. “Pioneers” who journeyed into alien spaces and discovered in unfamiliar sounds what one termed a sense of “strange fulfilment”, they became transcribers of songs without whose efforts the spirituals might have penetrated US culture differently and at a later date (Higginson 1867, p. 685).1 Johnson’s aligning himself more closely with the transcribers, all of them White, than with “the front ranks of the colored people” suggests further how the spirituals occasioned new and complex forms of cultural affiliation, new ways of imagining class, racial, regional, and even national community as Black southern folk music came to seem to some (and eventually to many) definitive of American music.[I]t was wholly within the possibilities for these songs to be virtually lost. The people who created them were not capable of recording them, and the conditions out of which this music sprang and by which it was nourished have almost passed away. Without the direct effort on the part of those to whom I offer this slight tribute, the Spirituals would probably have fallen into disuse and finally disappeared. This probability is increased by the fact that they passed through a period following Emancipation when the front ranks of the colored people themselves would have been willing and even glad to let them die. The first efforts towards the preservation of this music were made by the pioneer collectors who worked within the decade following the Civil War.
2. Rational Expressions, Barbarous Noise: Henry G. Spaulding and James M. McKim
So wrote Henry George Spaulding, the recent graduate of Harvard, in an essay published in the Continental Monthly in August 1863. His words are characteristically ambivalent. Describing shouts—ritual performances in which participants sang songs sometimes based on spirituals, created percussive accompaniments with their bodies, and moved in circles—Spaulding perceives elements that strike him as comic and inferior, including the songs themselves (“barbaric madrigals”, he calls them. He later proposes substituting “appropriate hymns” “for these crude productions”). Yet, he also “cannot help” acknowledging the ritual’s integrity, and however much he may have wanted to excise the spirituals from it, he wanted to see the songs preserved. His article contains transcriptions of several songs that would be reproduced in later collections, including “Hold Your Light”, “The Lonesome Valley”, and “Lord, Remember Me”. Conceding that “[t]he most striking of their barbaric airs...would be impossible to write out”, Spaulding nevertheless worked to record what he could (Spaulding 1863, pp. 197–200).There are many features of the negro shout which amuse us from their strangeness; so, also, that strike the observer as wholly absurd. Yet, viewed as a religious exercise...I cannot help regarding it, in spite of many of its characteristics, as both a natural and a rational expression of devotional feeling.
“Dey make em, sah”. “How do they make them?” After a pause, evidently casting about for an explanation, he said, “I’ll tell you; it’s dis way. My master call me up and order me a short peck of corn and a hundred lash. My friends see it and is very sorry for me. When dey come to de praise meeting dat night dey sing about it. Some’s very good singers and know how; and dey work it in, work it in, you know; till dey get it right; and dat’s de way”.(J. M. McKim 1862, pp. 148–49)4
3. Triumphal Anthems, Flowers of Poetry: Lucy McKim and Thomas W. Higginson
4. Rich Songs, Impoverished Speech: William F. Allen
The British war correspondent William Howard Russell had once described a spiritual as “a monotonous sort of chant something about the ‘River Jawdam’...” (Russell 1863, p. 126). Higginson, Spaulding, James Miller McKim, and especially Lucy McKim had encouraged a closer kind of listening, assuring their readers that, if they allowed themselves to become acclimated to the music, they would hear much more; they might even discover what Allen calls in another passage “the peculiar richness and originality of the music” (Allen 1867, p. xv). While Allen cannot quite accept the terms “base” and “basers” into his own lexicon—he cannot refrain from placing them in quotation marks, in effect resisting the possibility that African Americans might be theoreticians of their own music—he otherwise writes both technically and appreciatively of the music he has come to know. He does so knowing that Slave Songs’ notations of only melody will give no hints of each song’s “marvellous complication and variety” and that his own descriptions of polyphony will fall short: “I despair of conveying any notion of the effect of a number singing together, especially in a complicated shout, like ‘I can’t stay behind, my Lord’...or ‘Turn, sinner, turn O!’” (Allen 1867, p. v).There is no singing in parts, as we understand it, and yet no two appear to be singing the same thing—the leading singer starts the words of each verse, often improvising, and the others, who ‘base’ him, as it is called, strike in with the refrain, or even join in the solo, when the words are familiar. When the ‘base’ begins, the leader often stops, leaving the rest of his words to be guessed at, or it may be they are taken up by one of the other singers. And the ‘basers’ themselves seem to follow their own whims, beginning when they please and leaving off when they please, striking an octave above or below (in case they have pitched the tune too low or too high), or hitting some other note that chords, so as to produce the effect of a marvellous complication and variety, and yet with the most perfect time, and rarely with any discord.
No longer creative, improvisational, or in any way “musical”, the freedmen whose speech Allen describes are made to seem lacking. “Rhythmical modulations” now present a problem. “[S]trange words” give rise to a sense that their speakers do not belong. Dialect is said in a separate passage to be a sign of “debasement”—and this despite the fact that the transcriptions of the spirituals that compose the bulk of Slave Songs of the United States carefully preserve it (Allen 1867, p. ix). Even more paradoxical, Allen looks forward to the possibility that schooling might correct Black students’ defects in speech, yet he expressly fears that additional contact with Whites will compromise the genuineness of their songs.The strange words and pronunciations, and frequent abbreviations, disguise the familiar features of one’s native tongue, while the rhythmical modulations, so characteristic of certain European languages, give it an utterly un-English sound...With these people the process of ‘phonetic decay’ appears to have gone as far, perhaps, as is possible, and with it an extreme simplification of etymology and syntax...Corruptions are more abundant...There is probably no speech that has less inflection, or indeed less power of expressing grammatical relation in any way...An officer of a colored regiment standing by me...confessed that it was mere gibberish to him.
5. Conclusions: “Behold, There Was Folk-Music”
Radano has argued similarly that the project of recording the spirituals (“a mad gold rush of appropriative desire”) was motivated more by a yearning for “white self-completion” than an interest in otherness. The result was a decontextualization of the songs, a fetishization of their supposed “purity that distinguished song from the tragedy of enslavement” (Radano 2003, pp. 181–82). Allen’s introduction again provides a case in point. Although the longest and most detailed of the documents discussed here, it also has the least to say about slavery, certainly about slavery’s atrocities. The only problems Allen foresaw in Whites’ singing spirituals were technical, and he sought to address these in a section titled “Directions for Singing”: “As regards tempo, most of the tunes are in 2–4 time, and in most of these ♩ = 100...” (Allen 1867, p. xliv). The matter of what the songs were about barely registers in the introduction. The irony of someone such as himself singing (in dialect, no less) “Nobody knows de trouble I’ve had/Nobody knows but Jesus” registers not at all.Though rooted in a profound social critique, the cultural discovery of black music and the search for cultural authenticity soon began to pivot upon a particular cultural aestheticization of black practices that, in turn, highlighted black religious music over black political and literary voices. As black culture became aestheticized, a separation emerged between black political claims for a greater social and political inclusion within American civil society and a more acceptable spiritual (and eventually cultural) place for blacks in the hearts and minds of northerners who were championing the new mode of benevolent cultural reception.
Last, the discovery of the spirituals in print led decades later to the sounding of new modes of national belonging, sometimes with musical inflection. Writing in 1924, the year before Locke’s The New Negro and Johnson’s first Book of American Negro Spirituals, Langston Hughes adopted the voice of a Black folk subject sent “to eat in the kitchen/When company comes”, yet the speaker of Hughes’ poem refuses to be excluded from the national imaginary: “I, too, sing America” (Hughes 1994, p. 46). What the Civil War-era transcribers of the spirituals thought they were recording was the music of others. What it turned out they had discovered were sounds that would eventually transform American concepts of the self.Recall how suddenly the Negro spirituals revealed themselves; suppressed for generations under the stereotypes of Wesleyan hymn harmony, secretive, half-ashamed, until the courage of being natural brought them out—and behold, there was folk-music. Similarly the mind of the Negro seems suddenly to have slipped from under the tyranny of social intimidation and to be shaking off the psychology of imitation and implied inferiority...[W]e are achieving something like a spiritual emancipation.
Funding
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Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
1 | The Fisk Jubilee Singers would become popularizers of spirituals during the decade after their initial transcription, beginning with the Singers’ first tour in 1871–1872. Their repertoire would include some of the spirituals recorded during the 1860s, and spirituals would eventually become the form of music for which the group was best known. This was not immediately the case, however. One member observed that the group initially preferred “to sing the more difficult music” and “seemed almost to regard” spirituals “as signs of their former disgrace”, confirming what Johnson would write decades later. White audiences’ enthusiasm toward the spirituals led the Singers to showcase them, and according to one member of the group, by 1872 “a program of nineteen numbers, only two or three of which were slave songs, was inverted”. See Anderson, “Tell Them We Are Singing for Jesus” (Anderson 2010, pp. 39, 41). See also chapter 10 of Andrew Ward (2000)’s Dark Midnight When I Rise, which discusses the Singers’ adoption of the spirituals; and Sandra Jean Graham (2018)’s Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry, which glosses the texts discussed in this article before turning its attention to the Singers and their impact on U.S. culture. |
2 | An arrangement of the spiritual was included in The Book of American Negro Spirituals. The words of all of the spirituals in the volume are rendered in dialect, an editorial decision that Johnson likens to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s use of dialect in his poetry (Johnson 1925, p. 44). |
3 | Though it does not comment extensively on music, John Stauffer’s The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race does explore intersubjectivity and how particular white abolitionists had to “learn to view the world as if they were black” in order to become proponents of radical change (Stauffer 2002, p. 1). |
4 | Another northerner who joined the Port Royal Experiment in 1862 was Charlotte Forten (1864), an African American teacher who published records of some of her experiences in the Atlantic Monthly in 1864. Forten’s commentary on the music she heard was not quite as extensive as that of other writers, yet she did make note of a “sweet, strange, and solemn” song sung by boatmen upon her arrival, and she set down the words of versions of “Go Down in de Lonesome Valley”, “Roll, Jordan, Roll”, “Blow, Gabriel”, and other songs, making her among the original transcribers of the music. |
5 | “Leaves from an Officer’s Journal” and “Negro Spirituals” would be collected along with several of Higginson’s other Civil War-era writings and published as Army Life in a Black Regiment in 1869. |
6 | As Samuel Charters discusses in Songs of Sorrow: Lucy McKim Garrison and Slave Songs of the United States, the initial print run of Slave Songs may or may not have sold out. In a review in The Freedman’s Record, Charlotte Forten (1864), indicated it had; she further said she had been informed that a second edition was on its way. But the collection’s publisher, A. Simpson & Co., was known for medical publications, not music books, and the company’s merger with another publishing house seems to have scuttled follow-up editions and limited the volume’s cultural impact (Charters 2015, pp. 221–22). Several of its songs would nevertheless circulate, and a 1929 facsimile reprint would enhance the reputation of Slave Songs considerably. |
7 | Johnson had made a similar statement in his introduction to The Book of American Negro Poetry, published three years earlier: “In the ‘spirituals,’ or slave songs, the Negro has given America not only its only folksongs, but a mass of noble music”. While the introduction largely discounts the idea of slave songs as verse (“it must be admitted that the lines themselves are often very trite”), it does recognize “flash[es] of real, primitive poetry”. Meanwhile the collection includes such poems as Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “A Death Song” and Waverley Turner Carmichael’s “Keep Me, Jesus, Keep Me”, both of which are evocative of the spiritual form and affirm Johnson’s conviction that “Negro folksongs are a vast mine of material” for future poetic exploration (Johnson 1922, pp. xv, xvii–xviii). |
8 | Additional important collections include the multiple versions of Cabin and Plantation Songs as Sung by Hampton Students first collected and published by Thomas Fenner (1877) in 1874 and expanded in later editions. Nathaniel Dett (1927)’s Religious Folk-Songs of the Negro, as Sung at Hampton Institute (1909) grew out of Fenner’s collection; subsequent versions of it added to the store of available spirituals. Also important were the different versions of The Story of the Jubilee Singers; With Their Songs compiled and published by Gustavus D. Pike, J.B.T. Marsh (1897), and (later) Frederick J. Loudin between 1875 and the early twentieth century. |
9 | Here I am grateful to the anonymous peer reviewer who directed me toward Albert Murray’s The Omni-Americans (1970) and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s foreword to the fiftieth anniversary edition of the book. Murray wrote primarily about the blues, but as Gates notes in his foreword, Murray’s concept of the music rested on simultaneity: “Murray argued that ‘American’ and ‘black American’ culture were mutually constitutive. There was no so-called American culture without the Negro American formal element and content in its marvelous blend, and no black American culture without its white American influences and forms” (Gates [1970] 2020, p. xiv). |
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Wells, J.D. Civil War Song in Black and White: Print and the Representation of the Spirituals. Humanities 2022, 11, 142. https://doi.org/10.3390/h11060142
Wells JD. Civil War Song in Black and White: Print and the Representation of the Spirituals. Humanities. 2022; 11(6):142. https://doi.org/10.3390/h11060142
Chicago/Turabian StyleWells, Jeremy Dwight. 2022. "Civil War Song in Black and White: Print and the Representation of the Spirituals" Humanities 11, no. 6: 142. https://doi.org/10.3390/h11060142