Tag Archives: Ring Shouts

Motown, and the Impact of The Jackson 5

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The Jackson 5 were a staple of the Motown era, and brought with them performance and musical styles from black spirituals and popular music to propel them into the spotlight. Time magazine describes the Motown Sound as containing “great melodies, lots of tambourines and hand clapping, blaring horns, interplay between the lead singer and his or her backup vocalists, driving bass lines and foot-slapping drum parts”. The parallels between these musical sounds and black spirituals and ring shouts are quite evident. The “interplay between the lead singer and his or her backup vocalists” is representative of the interaction seen in many ring shouts. “Foot-slapping drum parts”were played on percussive instruments, but emulate the liveliness and excitement of pattin’ juba.

The Jackson 5 experienced incredible success, and one article published in the Chicago Defender reports on the group’s wildly popular performance in Chicago in 1971. “[T]he teenage idols of the entertainment world took their places on stage beneath roving spotlights while the frantic screams of young girls, waving and stomping their feet at the mere sight of the Jackson 5, spill; lit the air with feignish delight.”

The Jackson 5 in a scene from their TV special “Goin’ Back to Indiana”

Performance had certainly come a long way since the singing of songs in slave fields. I also would argue that Motown musicians, and The Jackson 5 in particular, broke past performance practices of viewing black performers as “exotic” or “other”. Indeed, the article in the Chicago Defender comments on their performance ability rather than their racial identity. “The young entertainers swept through the evening ordeal with tremendous poise and with the assurance of old-timers. Their performance was [characterized] with a crisp sense and refreshing sense of buoyancy.”

One of the songs performed that night in Chicago was their number one hit single “I Want You Back”. This song showcases many of the Motown characteristics. Listen to the “driving bass line” in the opening of the song, and the “interplay between the lead singer and his or her backup vocalists” throughout the song.

As you’ve heard, The Jackson 5’s music is infectious, and it is no surprise that they reached international success. One critic writes on the successful aging of The Jackson 5 in the music -focused newspaper Zoo World. “Each new album releases keeps getting better and better…The musicianship is of course of the highest quality”. 

Again, commentary is focused on the music of the group. This represents a huge shift in cultural perception. While Motown groups contained predominately black musicians, it was the music that sold and topped popular music charts of the day. Musical elements dominated the conversation surrounding Motown and The Jackson 5, and such discussions highlight the past musical influences of spirituals and ring shouts on the Motown sound.

Works Cited:

Calloway, Earl. “Jackson 5 Thrills Fans, Set for TV show.” Chicago Daily Defender (Chicago IL) , Sep. 9, 1971. https://search.proquest.com/docview/494356816?accountid=351.

Cruz, Gilbert. “Motown.” Time, Jan. 12, 2009. http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1870975,00.html

Stein, Dave. “Skywriter.” Zoo World, May 24, 1973. http://www.rockandroll.amdigital.co.uk/Contents/ImageViewer.aspx?imageid=990610&searchmode=true&hit=first&pi=1&vpath=searchresults&prevPos=905648

Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen: Marian Anderson and Spiritual Transmission

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Marian Anderson in 1951

Marian Anderson occupies a unique position in history. Born in 1897, the contralto represents the culmination of hundreds of years of musical transmission and development along with the continuously evolving nature of American Culture.

Her recording of Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen made in December of 1924,specifically, illustrates the complex history of spiritual transmission. First described as part of an 1866 description of a shout held in an old cotton gin house by an author named only M.R.S., and later transcribed in the 1867 collection Slave Songs of the United States, this shout, like many, has a rich transmission history. Since its initial transciption, the shout has been taken on tour by the Fisk Jubilee Singers and performed by a number of artist from Louis Armstrong to Mahalia Jackson (here’s a playlist of different versions of the Nobody Know’s the Trouble I’ve Seen).  Below is the 1924 recording (remastered and brought to you courtesy of Spotify) of Anderson’s. Take a listen to the recording while you read the rest of this post.

So why this recording?

Anderson would debut in Europe at Wigmore hall in London in 1930, and later, would famously perform for a crowd of 75 000 at the Lincoln Memorial after she had been denied a performing space at Constitution Hall on racial grounds. Before all that, however, she made these recordings of spirituals, shouts, and work songs. What is striking about this recording of Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen is Anderson’s vocal technique and how that reflects contemporaneous American cultural ideologies.

The technique used on the recording echoes the sound Anderson uses in the works she most frequently performs; the Lied of Schubert. Her use of classical technique to cover a song that had once been a ring shout is telling of the way Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen has changed over time. While some may argue that her technique is simply a result of her classical training, I would posit a more insidious explanation. As the Fisk Jubilee Singers demonstrated through their early performances of traditional spirituals, often times the vocal technique used when singing spirituals had to be altered so that the original spiritual could be safe for white consumption. The emphasis on western tonality as the only acceptable and marketable base for music contributes to the erasure of diversity in the “American” musical canon.  Zora Neale Hurston in her work Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals goes so far as to argue,

There never has been a presentation of genuine Negro spirituals to any audience anywhere. What is being sung by the concert artists and glee clubs are the works of Negro composers or adaptors based on the spirituals.

While this recording shows Marian Andersons’ devotion to performing spirituals, it also demonstrates how capitalist necessity and white supremacy absorb and appropriate any culture deemed to be “the other” and, in doing so, prohibit any genuine presentation of a spiritual.

Transcription of Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Had from Slave Songs of the United States (1867)

At the start of a career, it is incredibly important to build an audience, and if the majority people who were paying for her recordings wanted to hear an “idealized” spiritual, an “idealized” spiritual is what they would get. Classical technique and pure westernized vowels would reign supreme over the original spiritual singing technique which placed greater emphasis on expression of lyrics and rhythm.  The influence of white audiences on the sound of spirituals like the one exhibited here can be seen as symptomatic of a larger societal problem wherein white tastes and experiences are centered over those of people of color. Marian Anderson’s recording of Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen represents another chapter in spiritual transmission and simultaneously serves as an example of the ways music reflects and influences dominant culture ideologies.

 

Just a Note: The articles on Marian Anderson from the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and African American Music Reference  focus heavily on her amazing performance at the Lincoln Memorial. Take a break from scholarly journals and learn more about it from this NPR article. Also, if you want to learn more about Anderson, check out this other playlist of her performing spirituals and pieces from the Western Classical canon.

 

Photographs From Marian Anderson’s Website

Works Cited

“Anderson, Marian, 1897-1993, by AMG, All Music Guide.” In All Music Guide: The Definitive Guide to Popular Music, 1. San Francisco, CA: Backbeat Books, 2001. Accessed October 3, 2017. http://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cbiography%7C438020.

Epstein, Dena J. Sinful tunes and spirituals: Black folk music to the Civil War. Urbana Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977.

Max de Schauensee and Alan Blyth. “Anderson, Marian.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed October 2, 2017, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/00865.

Tick, Judith, and Beaudoin, Paul, eds. 2008. Music in the USA : A Documentary Companion. Cary: Oxford University Press, USA. Accessed October 2, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Williamson, Etta L. The Journal of Negro Education 26, no. 1 (1957): 38-40. doi:10.2307/2293324.

http://www.npr.org/2014/04/09/298760473/denied-a-stage-she-sang-for-a-nation

Slave Songs of the United States 1867