Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran Pastor and theologian who was executed in 1945 was executed by Nazis in 1945 for his involvement with a plot to kill Hitler. In 1930, Bonhoeffer came to America to pursue a fellowship at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Bonhoeffer was introduced to the Abyssinian Baptist Church by a fellow seminarian. Bonhoeffer served in the ministry there while he was in the U.S. and formed a love and affinity for the Black Church.
Theologians love to draw the connection between Bonhoeffer’s encounter with the Black Church and his resistance work back in Germany. For a detailed treatment of this subject see Reggie L. Williams’s excellent book Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus.
Bonhoeffer was apparently quite moved by Black Spirituals during his time in America, and even recorded them (Williams 80-1). He said that spirituals were “some of the greatest artistic achievements in America” and described them as having a “strange mixture of reserved melancholy and eruptive joy” (Williams 80). He would later, according to one his biographers, play these Spirituals for his students in his underground seminary back in Germany. His friend and biographer Eberhard Bethage wrote “We hummed ‘Swing low, sweet chariot’ twenty years before the radio and concert halls made it familiar here.” (Bethage, quoted in John W. Doberstien’s introduction to Bonhoeffer’s Life Together 9).
The affinity between Bonhoeffer and the Spiritual tradition isn’t surprising. Both share theological roots in resistance to oppression. The original religious context of Spirituals was in clandestine meetings where enslaved people would sing and worship together. Bonhoeffer’s resistance seminary was also underground. It’s hard not to see the resonance with the early church as well. The type of Christianity these three movements express is an imminent and liberation focused Christianity, which requires “Costly Grace,” an idea developed by Bonhoeffer.
“Costly grace confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: ‘My yoke is easy and my burden is light’” (Witness to Jesus Christ “The Cost of Discipleship” 158).
Such grace exists perhaps especially in the midst of oppression. Grace, christian or otherwise, does not release us from our ethical duties to each other, but instead strengthens them.
Ethel Cain is the pseudonym of Hayden Silas Anhedönia, a singer song-writer with a cult following of mostly young liberal arts students. Her most famous project is her 2022 concept album “Preacher’s Daughter,” which as my friend Kaya said is “not really the right thing to listen to on a roadtrip at night.” The concept album ends with Ethel Cain being cannibalized by a lover. Throughout, it deals with themes of abuse, family secrets, religion, and the American landscape. Sonically, “Preacher’s Daughter” is a combination of ambient music, folk, and rock. The album can be seen as a consideration of the Southern Gothic Genre, with its themes of despair, depravity, and the haunting of the present by the past. It’s genuinely so beautiful— my favorite tracks are “American Teenager,” “Sun Bleached Flies,” and “Strangers.”
The theological dimension of this work is also fascinating to me. The oft quoted line “God loves you, but not enough to save you,” well, I think that it’s very honest, especially in a case like Ethel Cain’s. She spends a portion of the album on the road with the man who will eventually murder her. She must have seen a hundred billboards with JESUS SAVES plastered on them. But Jesus doesn’t save Ethel from her horrific fate. How can the good God of American Evangelical Christianity, who offers peace, salvation, and is often said by televangelists to offer earthly prosperity etc. allow this horror? Cain’s suffering is often compared explicitly to Christ’s throughout the album.
An analysis that would do theodicy and christology in “Preacher’s Daughter” justice is beyond the scope of this blogpost— however, I would like to examine the song “American Teenager.” It is the most typical pop song on the album— it feels like it could have been written in 80s or 90s, with a catchy chorus, some sparkly synth, and an electric guitar part that sounds quite like Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” (at about 3:43-4:00 in American Teenager, at about 1:00-1:06 in Don’t Stop Believin’). I’ve never been on a highway and not had “Don’t Stop Believin’” come on the radio. Both songs evoke a peculiar feeling— the same feeling I get driving along the endless highways of the U.S. at once home and homesick: complete isolation, the particular derelict buildings outside my window are alien to me; but also a sense of comfortable familiarity, I’m sure I’ve seen them before. This paradox— total alienation as well as total identification is what allows “Preacher’s Daughter” to work.
Cain said in a statement to Pitchfork that the track is deals with her frustration with the American Dream. Particularly interesting is this: “What they don’t tell you is that you need your neighbor more than your country needs you.” Which, of course is the opposite of what her character expresses in this song: “I don’t need anything from anyone/It’s just not my year/But I’m all good out here.” Still, the isolation isn’t complete:
And I feel it there
In the middle of the night
When the lights go out
And I’m all alone again
[Or the second time through]
When the lights go out
But I’m still standing here.
There is both a conspicuous presence of something (I feel it there), but also absence of everything besides this, and Cain herself. The track features a lot of reverb, especially on the vocals, and I cannot help but think this is intentional: Cain is unable to fully break through her isolation. She is her own constant companion, and whatever other presence is there remains somewhat remote to her. In the chorus, she sings: “Say what you want, but say it like you mean it/With your fists for once.” She is seeking sincerity, but there is the troubling implication that the only way it could truly be expressed to her would be through violence. This is perhaps mirrored in the theology of the album: In “American Teenager,” she somewhat ironically prays “Jesus, if you’re listening let me handle my liquor/And Jesus, if You’re there/Why do I feel alone in this room with You?” But in the track “Ptolomea,” when Ethel Cain is murdered, we hear this blessing: “Blessed be the children/Each and every one come to know their god through some senseless act of violence.” I could start writing about the place of violence in Christian theology and what all this means… and I would like to. But I think for the sake of this blog post, I will have to leave my inquiry here (for now), with an anecdote. This fall, I attended a dance at my college and for some reason one of the DJs chose “American Teenager.” It struck me as strange, to pick a song from the concept album about cannibalism to get a room full of college students to dance, but there I was dancing. It was too loud for me, but I took out my earplugs anyway. By the end my cheeks were wet, and my mouth was open in a silent smiling scream with the lyrics. I had encountered something. Preacher’s Daughter is a sublime work—whatever presence Ethel Cain is feeling in the absence around her, I feel too and it is overwhelming.
In January I applied only slightly more than a whim for a CURI proect researching John Brown. I did not know who he was at all before reading the description, apparently he was a militant abolitionist who perhaps most notably tried to incite a slave revolt in Harper’s Ferry Virginia in 1859. Previously, he had been involved in Bleeding Kansas, leading the Pottawatomie Massacre. He was disastrously unsuccessful at Harper’s Ferry, but became a martyr for the abolitionist cause, and many scholars argue that Brown’s actions and subsequent execution sparked the Civil War.
When I told people my summer plans, most of them either asked me “who is that?” or, they started singing “John Brown’s Body,” at me.
The song, which later became the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” when Julia Ward Howe used the melody to set a text that tied the Union’s fight in the Civil War to God’s Judgment. The song retains the martial themes of the original marching song, but also, I think, retains the image of John Brown, especially in the lines “as he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.” It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who most explicitly made the comparison between Brown and Christ, saying in a speech on November 8th that Brown’s execution would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” (“Emerson on Courage” The Liberator. November 18th, 1859).
John Brown’s Body, or the Battle Hymn is a catchy piece, (and often people sing verses from both together). It has been the accompaniment for many of my walks around campus since starting my research this summer. I often sing it without really thinking about its edgier theological (at least for our time) and political content. The melody is invigorating, an ascending line, an answering descending line, an ascending line, and a shorter fourth line that brings each statement to a certain conclusion. There are also some lines that are extremely satisfying to sing. “He has loosed the fateful lighting of his terrible swift sword,” is my particular favorite. The refrain of “Glory, Glory Hallelujah” demands to be sung with gusto, and perhaps with righteous anger.
But Lucia, why are you invoking John Brown now, and why with a martial hymn about the wrath of God?
This is a fair question. John Brown is remembered with discomfort. He sought justice with violence. Whether people blanche because of the the violence itself, its extra-judicial nature, or it’s relationship to Brown’s deep Calvinism, the reactions to Brown tell us about our current intuitions about the question “when, and how is violence justified?” The John Brown wrote on a note before his execution saying that he was “quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land; will never be purged away but with Blood,”
Last note written by John Brown before his hanging; Charlestown (Charleston), Virginia; December 2, 1859. Chicago Historical Museum, digital collection.
However, my research this summer took me beyond these questions, and beyond the apocalyptic vision I have presented so far in Brown’s last note, and the Battle Hymn of the Republic. I feel that there is another song, and another and another apocalyptic vision, which I feel is more representative of the totality of Brown’s life. Brown’s favorite hymn was “Blow ye the trumpet blow.” The text references Leviticus 25, which describes a Jubilee year in which debts would be forgiven, Israelite slaves at least, would be released, among other things. This ritual of atonement is tied in with Christ’s atonement– the real year of Jubilee is Christ’s return for Judgement. But the focus of the hymn is not on God’s wrath, but on the promise of forgiveness and grace.
If we remember John Brown at all, I think most forget this John Brown. His prevailing vision of divine justice was atonement, and redemption. Brown lived the whole of his life according to this hope. The things that aren’t as often discussed with Brown are how in every one of the many places he lived, he was a pillar of the community. He taught Sunday school, as well as just regular school out of his home for his and his neighbors’ children. He made sure his workers could eat and took care of their families. When the Fugitive Slave Law was passed in, he organized and armed a black self defense league, The League of Gileadites. He was active in the underground railroad. These are only a few of his actions. Brown lived out continual atonement and compassion through his whole life. Unlike almost all other white abolitionists it seems he saw black people not as worthy of pity and in need of his righteous intervention, but instead as his companions and compatriots in battle. He better than anyone “remembered those in bonds as bound with them.” (citation) It seems like Brown could see a more just world super-imposed on the unjust one of his times. And this kind of clear-eyed hope unflinching obligation to the just and right whenever it is possible I think is the demand of our times as well.
Brown was, of course, a man with many failings both personal and political (and gramatical, his semicolon usage is truly mystifying). He had a very difficult life. Our society has changed in huge and important ways since his death, but justice still eludes us. Still, spending so much time with John Brown over the past few months has instilled in me an active commitment to hope for atonement and redemption. In a letter he wrote from prison to his family, Brown wrote:
P. S. I cannot remember a night so dark as to have hindered the coming day: nor a storm so furious or dreadful as to prevent the return of warm sunshine and a cloudless sky.
Further Reading:
Fire From the Midst of You: a Religious Life of John Brown, Louis A. DeCaro Jr.
DeCaro also has a wonderful and extensive blog about John Brown, his life, and those who have interpreted it. Seriously, this blog is a treasure!
John Brown Abolitionist: the Man who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights, David S. Reynolds
I was very fortunate to have a friend who had opening night tickets to a world premiere of an opera. I didn’t ask him what the opera was, and didn’t remember the answer, so imagine my surprise when I looked at the program to discover it was about the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who I had been learning about recently in this class. The opera followed the group’s inception, their efforts to raise funds for Fisk College, and their international tour. It was an ensemble piece, with most of the music being spirituals, arranged for the chorus. There were occasional solos and monologues, and the piece resembled an Oratorio, though without much recitative. I left with “didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel” stuck in my head for the next several days, and a feeling that the opera wasn’t quite finished.
The Opera is an ensemble piece, and it thematizes the individual vs. the collective in music making right away, but before we have really gotten to know any character as an individual, which makes the thematization less effective. This didn’t quite work. We are introduced to most of the characters fairly late in the second act, where they give short monologues about who they are, their experiences and connections to the music, etc. This was effective when it happened, but the whole opera would benefit from beginning with some sense of the individual characters. There is a difficulty in adapting historical material: lives unfold in a way that isn’t necessarily dramatically satisfying. Jubilee is also attempting, I think, to let the music speak for itself, not to give us in depth biographical information on the singers, a performance history of the group, nor to adapt their lives into a tightly dramatic work. Jubilee instead aims to illuminate the nature of the spiritual genre anew for the opera stage.
Iconic American poet Walt Whitman embraces the “varied carols” of human life with the rapture of a rhapsode. His poetry is often characterized as democratic, composed in free verse. It shows an expansive all-embracing consciousness that loves everything in its multitudes.
I am sure I have some explaining to do here: a recent meme that has sprung up is kitschy images of dolphins on technicolor backgrounds, featuring incongruous text, and the catchy 2017 pop song “Symphony,” which was dredged up out of obscurity into this unlikely rebirth. The chorus goes “I just want to be part of your symphony,” in an ascending line that is intoxicating to sing. A “barbaric yawp” that I have certainly been sounding “over the rooftops of the world” lately.
But what ON EARTH could this incomprehensible meme have to do with Walt Whitman?
Whitman, as I recently found out, was an avid fan of the opera. His favorites included Gounod’s “Faust,” Meyerbeer’s “L’etoile du Nord,” Donetzeti’s “Lucia di Lamermoor,” and Bellini’s “La Sonnambula,” a mix of familiar and obscure works, and all quite kitschy. We must remember that Opera in the 19th century was pop culture, not high culture.
Whitman ends his poem with an image of waking up and discovering a rhythmus for his own poetry. (Proud Music of the Storm 15.20) This calls back earlier to a description of the final aria from “La Sonnambula,” a truly bizarre romantic comedy following a beautiful sleepwalker, Amina, through her romantic entanglements.
Awaking from her woes at last, retriev’d Amina sings;
Copious as stars, and glad as morning light, the torrents of her joy.
(Proud Music of the Storm 8.21-21)
The aria Whitman sings through poetry might sound something like this aria. I was amused by a detail reported by scholar Louise Pound: that Whitman didn’t really take to Wagner.
Whitman’s friends sometimes tried to interest him in Wagner, he tells us, thinking that the new music should be fundamentally congenial to him. “But I was fed and bred under the Italian dispensation,” he comments. “I absorbed it and probably show it
(Pound 61).
Wagner, with his insistence on dominating the audience with his works, was likely perhaps not democratic enough for Whitman.
In a 1924 paper about Whitman, Pound argues that opera is the artform that most profoundly influenced Whitman’s poetry. She says:
His thought and his technique sprang from attitudes of mind quite different from the customary. He was more than ordinarily self-made. He deliberately sought to free himself from older models and from accepted media of expression… Neverthelessless, any source that may throw light upon his poetical development, or upon the shaping of his individual poetical style, deserves taking into account—especially since, in these days, many are convinced that he looms largest of all our native poets
(Pound 58).
One of the central tenants of the Whitman mythos is his seemingly shocking originality. His poetry is a cry of freedom from the European poetic tradition, and the old fashioned New England elitism. Whitman is a man of the people, and of nature. He is quintessentially American. So what can we make of the influence of Opera, a European import, on his writing?
The answer seems to lie in one of his most extensive poems about music: “Proud Music of the Storm.” Whitman describes in dizzying succession images of the music of nature and man, referencing musical traditions from all over the world (Proud Music of the Storm 10). His approach is characteristically cosmopolitan. In an apostrophe he says:
Mighty maestros!
And you, sweet singers of old lands—Soprani! Tenori!
To you a new bard, carolling free in the west,
Obeisant, sends his love.
Such led me thee, O Soul!
(Proud Music of the Storm 13.5)
We see, through the close pairing of free and obeisant, that Whitman does not see himself as a break from tradition: rather, he is a new melodic line in a piece of music that encompasses the whole world, and the songs of its people.
If it is true that Whitman “looms the largest of our native poets,” the America he envisions in his poetry is the America he loved: it is essentially cosmopolitan, and its lines are not drawn on a map, but instead from one soul to another, like the filaments of a spider web (A Noiseless Patient Spider). It encompasses but does not subsume the various multitudes of human beings that make it up.
Written in 1998 by Native American playwright Marcie Rendon, SongCatcher follows two young Native American protagonists who are visited by the spirits of their ancestors, as well as that of Frances Densmore, infamous in the field musicology for her recordings of Native American songs, including those of the Ojibwe and Sioux, among others.
The protagonists of the play, Jack and Chris are foils. Jack tries to get back in touch with tradition through reading Densmore’s work and playing her transcriptions on a keyboard. Chris, on the other hand, participates in more traditional ways of gaining knowledge. She learns from elders.
The pair are visited by spirits in their dreams. The spirit of Frances Densmore initially visits Chris. The audience might see similarities between the two; both young women who are sure of themselves. In the initial dream, Rendon even imagines them smoking together (31). Their exchange, though, quickly turns a bit hostile:
FRANCES DENSMORE This is the one habit I’ve acquired while in the company of your people. I find it most relaxing. I might even venture to say that tobacco might be Native people’s greatest contribution to modern civilization. CHRIS Well that contribution you’re sitting there smoking was given to us by the Creator to pray with. FRANCES DENSMORE I’m well aware of the spiritual significance your people place on this plant. If I daresay, given the extent of my research, there are a few things I could possibly even teach you. CHRIS Oh, really? (31-2)
Densmore is a kind of Faustian anti-villain in the piece. The scenes we do see her in show her dubious ethics, but many of the dream scenes center on her personal life, her relationship with her best friend and her sister. Her obsession with her work consumes her over the course of the play, culminating in the final scene where she burns her personal papers:
FRANCES DENSMORE … I don’t want people rifling through the attachments of my heart once I am gone. OLD MAN SPIRIT I cry for your spirit. The songs you recorded were always The People’s. The work you clung to was never yours. Once you’ve burned the stirrings of your heart, you will be no more. (80)
Densmore, by erasing her letters, is erasing herself. She hopes to be remembered through her work. In a similar way, she erased the people who gave her the songs in trying to preserve them. They are missing the living knowledge essential to them.
This highlights an essential difference in Densmore’s view of knowledge, and an Indigenous view represented by Chris and the spirits of this play: To Densmore, knowledge is information. It is the notes of the page, the words in the songs, etc. To Chris, knowledge is a gift from previous generations to the next, and most importantly, it is lived (“being Indian is something you live. It’s inside you. You can’t learn it from a tape.” (12) )
In her Author’s note, Rendon says that the conversation around Densmore does us a disservice by implying that “the real songs are locked up in Washington, D˙C˙, instead of in the hearts and spirits of Native people themselves. It is a systematic erosion of a people’s belief in themselves, their own history, and their very existence as a living, breathing, modern people.” (4-5)
The play handles the life of Frances Densmore with a focus on her heart and spirit, extending to her what she did not extend to her subjects.
