Tag Archives: White Spirituals

Black AND White Spirituals

Posted on by
Reply

We all know what a spiritual is, or at least have heard a spiritual being sung. That is because spirituals are identified in many different contexts; religious songs, folk songs, traditional songs, to name a few. When reading George Cullen Jackson’s article titled “White and Negro Spirituals (1943),”1 I was amazed to discover that “the white people once sang spirituals, and still sing them-some of the very same songs as those sung by the black folk (page 1)” at nearly the same time as each other. 

“Traced the white man’s tunes back to a still more remote emergence, in the British Isles where possible and in a secular song environment. For I have felt sure that singers in the Old World would be fairly free, in those early times, from the suspicion of having been influenced by the singing of American slaves (page 265).”2

These “Old World” tunes, as he calls them, were transferred from the British Isles to America. However, many of these tunes also transformed into new spirituals with different meanings as before.

“Swing low, sweet chariot” Spiritual. This composition was arranged by H.T. Burleigh3

Take “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”3 for example. Jackson’s studies discover that the ‘Bailiff’s Daughter” pattern linked from the British Isle can be heard in this Black American spiritual. Now this doesn’t mean that anyone is at fault for “copying” the work’s of other races with context to this scenario. I state this because even though these two tunes have similar structures and characteristics, they also have completely different sounds and meanings.

After listening to the recording of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,”4 the first thing I realized is how different this sounds compared to a European religious spiritual. Where a catholic spiritual would likely be arranged in SATB singing structured chords resulting in a timed cadence, this recording not only consists of a male vocal group, but also elongates each chord as long as they felt was needed. The harmonies blend well into each other, and create a sort of African smoothness from their style. There seems to be no western classical notation instructed, because this spiritual wasn’t meant to be strict in the harmony or structure of religion in European context – regardless of the many different interpretations of the origins of this composition, all fall into the central theme of slaves being hopeful for days of freedom, whether that be freedom from slavery, or freedom into heaven.5

Over the centuries that this American tune has been circulating, many arrangements have been presented, like this video of The Tabernacle Choir singing the same spiritual.6 Over the centuries that this American tune has been circulating, many arrangements have been presented, like this video of The Tabernacle Choir. Notice how it is sung in a completely different style. This alteration gives light to different experiences of the vocalists, those who simply did not sing this spiritual out of hope for better days. This does not discredit any performance of this piece, but rather circles back to the original point being made that different races and backgrounds have and continue to sing the spirituals of other races and backgrounds to this day. Think of this as sampling: artists take old songs and material to shed new light on it, and create a whole new perspective. We can apply the same ideas to that of spirituals, instead of playing a constant “this versus that” when it comes to the music we listen to and perform.

Questions of Originality and “The Genesis of the Negro Spiritual”

Posted on by
1

When the Fisk Jubilee Singers began to perform “slave songs” on their tours, this style exploded in popularity and was hailed as a rejuvenating form of American song. Additionally, these songs were accepted as a legitimate contribution to American music by African Americans and weren’t subject to the sort of derision that other forms of African art had been in the recent past. Unsurprisingly, many people had problems with the notion that these slave songs were the slaves own work, and numerous music critics and commentators voiced concerns that this music comprised of unoriginal rehashes of white, European descended hymnody.

Perhaps the champion of this ‘white defense’ was George Pullen Jackson (1874-1953), American folksong scholar who specialized in southern shape note singing. His belief in the need for white reclamation of spirituals coalesced most famously in his 1933 book White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands, but the most upsetting and clearly politicized version of his argument came a year earlier in the article “The Genesis of the Negro Spiritual”, published in the controversial and irreverent magazine The American Mercury.

Screen Shot 2015-02-22 at 9.19.43 PMScreen Shot 2015-02-22 at 9.23.15 PM

Left: The opening of Jackson’s article. Right: Comparisons of colonial song tunes and camp meeting variations.

Frustrated by what he perceives as an unfair appropriation of camp revivalist songs, Jackson offers textual and musical examples that are meant to show how spirituals were updated by upland revivalist preachers and singers with “simplicity and swing”. It wasn’t until the early 1800s and the involvement of Africans in these same meetings that Jackson claims the same revivalist musical tendencies and crowd emotionalism “infected the blacks.” He also belatedly accuses plantation owners and urban Southerners “who have always been eager to forget and disown the camp-meeting songs” of obscuring the truth in an attempt to disparage poor, rural whites.

Arguably the most upsetting part of the article addresses “the chief remaining argument of the die-hards for the Negro source of the Negro spirituals – the artistic merit of these songs.” Claiming that these rural whites were as musical and as “oppressed” as their Afro-American counterparts, he effectively reduces the body of Black music he is discussing to cheap parodies of purer, more original white music. Yet despite his apparent certainty in tracing the misunderstood development of the spiritual, he concedes the vast chasm of knowledge that existed between his time and the musical era he was studying, though he seems to suggest that this chasm only manifests for those seeking to promote the “superiority” of Black music.

George-Pullen-Jackson-leads-a-sing

Jackson leads a group of singers in sacred harp songs in Tennessee, 1941

Jackson made a career out of the white reclamation of spirituals. Mentioned earlier was his White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands, though the misleadingly titled White and Negro Spirituals: their Life Span and Kinship (1943) is notable for its treatment of Negro music only as “variants” on white originals. Additionally, Jackson collaborated with Alan Lomax to record performances of large southern singing groups such as the Sacred Harp Singers, presumably as a more authentic representation of the southern spirituals.

While it may be infuriating to reflect upon the writings of Jackson and other anti-Black critics, it is an important part of American musical culture that should not be ignored. By critically analyzing these sources we can gain a clearer picture of how politics and cultural aggressions infiltrated American music from an early stage.

Note: For the purposes of the assignment “The Genesis of the Negro Spiritual” was discovered via the Readers’ Guide Retrospective. However, the full PDF was unavailable and was instead found at the following link: http://www.unz.org/Pub/AmMercury-1932jun-00243.

SOURCES

Jackson, George Pullen. “The Genesis of the Negro Spiritual.” The American Mercury (June 1932): pp. 243-249.

Jackson, George Pullen. White and Negro Spirituals: their Life Span and Kinship.

Jackson, Richard. “George Pullen Jackson.” Grove Music Online. http: www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed February 22, 2015).