Seeger Lecture, Society for Ethnomusicology Virtual Meeting 2021

Abstract

Throughout my career, scholarship on African American religious music has described and critiqued both the tradition of spirituals as well as gospel music, the two indigenous forms that have served as the public face of African American religious identity throughout history. These two expansive genres, which over time produced multiple subgenres, have historically generated oppositional responses from both within and outside its cultural milieu. These were musics that prompted both pride and pain among African Americans themselves.These genres, the first a late eighteenth-century development and the latter a product of the early twentieth century, also generated international and cross-cultural interest, prompting imitation and veneration, while concomitantly suffering the burden of invisibility, misinterpretation, degradation, consumption, misuse, and, too frequently, downright abuse.My objective today is to explore how African American religious musics have been characterized in various accounts of their earliest manifestation during the period of slavery to the present day. My discussion will assess the underlying motivation for the pursuit of these seminal encounters and the resultant historical and contemporary implications of their multiple perspectives and conclusions. I begin by sharing fragments of my own personal narrative that shaped my interest in studying African American religious musics and fueled my desire to develop a more nuanced understanding of what defined these genres as distinct and significant for African American communities.Growing up in the Black church—Southern, rural, Methodist—represented the gateway to my intellectual engagement with these traditions as an ethnomusicologist. But my musical encounters at my parents’ alma mater, the historically Black college or university (HBCU) Prairie View A&M College, represented another dimension of exposure to how musics could be transformed and re-created in an altogether different environment; the spiritual tradition sung in this setting was a far cry from the musics of my home church. Although I did not realize it at the time, my Southern rural heritage would eventually mesh with my ever-expanding musical soundscape, little by little whetting my appetite to learn how it all came into being and what it all meant, not just for me, but for others who shared similar experiences and histories.Although I grew up as a local music resource in the African American community of Teague, Texas, with its population of 2,728, mine was a segregated world, with all-Black schools and all-Black churches. Yet, I questioned why, when we opened our assigned textbooks at the beginning of the school year to add our names to the list of those who had gone on before, there were no vacant lines remaining to be filled. It was decades later that I realized that the up-to-date, most recent editions of texts had been assigned to white students in all-white schools. Although the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas Supreme Court decision rescinded the forty-two-year-old 1896 Plessey v. Ferguson decision that mandated the doctrine of separate-but-equal public facilities, the schools in my hometown of Teague did not initiate integration until 1966, a full twelve years after Brown.After high school graduation, I entered the prestigious School of Music at what was then called North Texas State University, with its eight hundred majors, to pursue an undergraduate degree in music education. I soon became a perfect example of W. E. B. DuBoisian double consciousness, simultaneously a part of and apart from the larger American society. Each weekday I virtually lived in the music school, practicing three to four hours daily as advised. There were few students in my classes who looked like me. Yet, on Sundays, I was picked up at my dorm by the Black minister who drove from Ft. Worth to a small Baptist church he led in Pilot Point, some thirty miles away, where I served as pianist.Although I had grown up Methodist, our rural congregation only gathered once a month (see Figure 1), making it possible for me to serve in music leadership in two Missionary Baptist churches on other Sundays. Music repertoire was shared among these denominations, for when one church was not holding services, members of that congregation faithfully supported other fellowships with their attendance. It was commonplace for choir members of one denomination to also hold membership in a choir of a different denomination. Distinctions among denominational practice were doctrinal rather than cultural; the actual style or character of worship differed little from one denomination to another. The people lived in community that transcended denomination and positively reinforced racial and cultural identity; we were all in this together. In my unique religious musical world growing up, I experienced shared repertoire, behaviors, traditions, and values.This collective experience was not perfunctory; neither was it exotic or reactionary. In these spaces, African Americans joined together to define themselves and experience themselves in ways unencumbered by the quizzical or judgmental gaze of the “other,” prone to critique the suitability of the vocal timbre, the unexpected body movement, or the heightened decibel level as acceptable articulation of Christian worship. We lived what gospel artist Hezekiah Walker sings—“I need you, you need me; we're all a part of God's body”—codified as it became a standard in African American churches across denominational lines (Hezekiah Walker and the Love Fellowship Choir 2002, 2015).My first job after graduation was in DeLay Middle School in Lewisville, Texas, in 1971, where I was one of only two African American teachers in the entire school district. My assignment was to lead three seventh and eighth grade choirs, not one of which had a single male child enrolled. My responsibilities also included team-teaching three sixth grade general music classes with enrollments of 80, 95, and 115 students respectively, housed in an auditorium with locked-down seats. There were no music textbooks, nor was there equipment available for playing recordings; you can imagine why the school had hosted seven music teachers during the five years prior to my arrival.To say that my work in this setting was challenging is an understatement. My efforts to engage students—few of whom were Black, most of whom self-identified as “hippies” or “cowboys”—in the study of Western classical music literature was met largely with disinterest. Almost as an act of desperation, I chose to introduce my general music classes to the pioneering gospel music icon Mahalia Jackson, the first million-selling recording artist for the genre, who appeared regularly on national TV when I was growing up.1 Much to my chagrin, my white students responded to Mahalia with laughter; upon class dismissal, my handful of African American students discreetly whispered to me as they left the room, “Ms. Burnim, please do not play that type of music again.” It was acutely obvious that the public denigration of music that I knew held tremendously positive meaning for these African American students in their primary cultural environments was so sufficiently painful that they sought to avoid a repeat experience.This powerful yet extremely disquieting encounter prompted my eventual pursuit of ethnomusicology as a field of study. During the two years I spent as a public school teacher, I came to realize that the systematic and rigorous preparatory training that I had received from one of the most respected music schools in the country was highly selective in scope; in effect, my course of study had strategically, however subtly, reified concepts of musical hierarchy; by implication, it also reinforced notions of Western European cultural supremacy.At the time of my disquieting teaching encounter, the field of ethnomusicology was not on my radar. It had not been a part of the undergrad offerings at North Texas. Although the university itself had presented a steady stream of opportunities to experience a variety of traditions beyond the Western canon—West African music and dance and Caribbean steel band, for example—that piqued my interests and showcased a sonic world that was equal parts alien and appealing, opportunities to expand my musical palette were fleeting, at best. Simply, the challenge I had faced in attempting to expand the musical horizons of my students as a public school music teacher was not an undertaking I had been prepared to pursue.Having met my colleague, Portia Maultsby, when I was a North Texas senior and she was in pursuit of a PhD in ethnomusicology with a specialization in African American music at the University of Wisconsin, I took advantage of our second encounter one year later to explore her novel academic route further. I could hardly imagine getting a degree in musics I had been steeped in from birth as she was doing. In the fall of 1973, after having completed two years of teaching, I entered the ethnomusicology program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with the aim of pursuing a specialization in African musics, the area of expertise held by Dr. Lois Anderson, the lone ethnomusicologist on the faculty, who had served as Dr. Maultsby's advisor. The decision to pursue African musics was by no means a rejection of my own cultural traditions; it was simply a reflection of my desire to understand the how, why, and when of the musics that had so profoundly shaped my unique musical identity as an African American who had grown up in the rural South.My MA study with Dr. Anderson opened the door to deepening my understanding of the historical legacies that informed my musical being. At the University of Wisconsin, fellow ethnomusicology student Albert Tcholu of Ghana began teaching a course in Kete drumming, through which I was introduced to concepts of polyrhythm; the significance of timbre and pitch in a percussion ensemble; the vital importance of seemingly small, insignificant parts to the integrated musical whole; and the interrelation between song and dance, all of which I later learned were critical concepts in African American performance traditions (see Figure 2).During my time at Wisconsin, Dr. Anderson also began offering instruction in the Kiganda xylophone tradition of the Buganda people of Uganda in East Africa, where three performers played interlocking patterns on a single instrument (see Figure 3). Although I had developed, in church, considerable facility in playing piano “by ear” as we called it, that is, without reference to a printed musical score, this xylophone tradition, whose third part derived from the combination of select pitches from the other two parts, posed a completely different kind of aural challenge. To my untutored ears, the origin of the third part, which my teacher consistently played with great precision, was a complete mystery. I could not hear the part; therefore, I could not play the part, a frustration I experienced for weeks.The pieces of the musical puzzle began to take shape after my transfer from Wisconsin to Indiana University, where I was introduced to my first course in African American music via a historical survey taught by Dr. Maultsby. I was deeply struck by the range of genres she introduced from the religious music tradition, some of which were familiar, others which were not. The lined hymn, or psalmody examples she played were virtual replicas of the devotional period in my rural Texas church, where Pullman car porters, Mr. Will Collins and his brother Sterling, would offer up a quasi-spoken, quasi-sung line of text, to be joined by the congregation in highly melismatic, nonmetrical passages that seemed to our teenage ears to painfully trod along forever. But another genre from Maultsby's class grabbed my attention—it was highly rhythmic, sung in call-response, and included handclapping but no instruments; as it progressed, rhythmic foot patterns were added as another expressive layer. I had never heard anything like it. I was mesmerized.2Who were these performers and what was this striking music? Gullah of the Georgia/South Carolina Sea Islands? A group of enslaved people who, by virtue of their geographical isolation, were able to maintain vestiges of their African language traditions, foodways, and musical practices that distinguished them profoundly from comparable groups in the American colonies.As I pursued further study, I soon learned that musics sung by members of the Gullah community articulated distinct performance patterns that had been documented in the United States from the early decades of the nineteenth century. The following reference, from an 1819 publication by John Watson entitled Methodist Error or Friendly Christian Advice to Those Methodists Who Indulge in Extravagant Religious Emotions and Bodily Exercises, is one such example.Musicologist Eileen Southern speculates that Watson, a leading figure in Methodism in Philadelphia, was referencing music practice associated with Bethel African Methodist Episcopal, founded by Richard Allen in 1787, whom she identified as the “dominant Black Methodists in the Philadelphia conference at the time” (1983:62). The outraged Watson contends that John Wesley, Methodist church founder, was profoundly displeased with those who chose to reject the standard Methodist hymnal for such questionable substitutes, noting that Wesley was so sufficiently alarmed with such practice that he actually expelled three ministers for “singing ‘poor, bald, flat, disjointed hymns’ and . . . singing the same verse over and over again with all their might 30 or 40 times, ‘to the utter discredit of all sober christianity [sic]’” ([1819] 1983:63).It is imminently clear that Watson's displeasure resulted in part from the fact that (1) Blacks were not singing the standard repertoire espoused by white Methodist leadership and (2) the performance practices represented an egregious departure from standard Methodist practice. The seemingly incessant repetition was particularly offensive, and it was evident that the absence of well-developed, extended melodic lines was viewed as a major structural flaw as well. Watson's critique clearly casts this willful departure from the norm as a woefully misguided, inept attempt to replicate the hymn form.Watson did not allow for even the possibility of an existing cultural memory among these Black Methodists that could fuel musical expression that was radically different from the established Methodist model. In 1819, two hundred years after the institution of slavery had begun in North America, Methodist church leadership was guided largely by a desire to reshape or remold the African enslaved population in its own image, a goal that Blacks themselves defiantly resisted. This 1819 account has been described as the first written reference to a distinct form of musical expression among Blacks in the United States. What these Blacks sang was of their own composing, as Watson acknowledged; it was what scholars today reference as the ring shout—a specific type of folk spiritual that included stylized dance as a defining component.Although Watson was an American, the accounts of Swedish traveler Frederika Bremmer during the 1850s document the fact that denigrating views of African Americans and their expression of religious song in the nineteenth century extended beyond the American imagination. Bremmer visited Black worship sites in Ohio, Georgia, and South Carolina, including AME (African Methodist) and Baptist services, as well as camp meetings where Blacks outnumbered whites. Bremmer's letters and diary entries documented her captivation with the distinctions between the worship styles of Blacks and whites in these settings. She even noted how Blacks sometimes chose to worship surreptitiously, allowing them to define both the content and character of the worship, which included deliberate violations of prohibitions regarding dance, a defining feature of the aforementioned ring shout (Bremmer [1853] 1983:106).Although Bremmer's commentary poses a largely affirmative view of African American musical expression, it is instructive that her accounts are unapologetically filtered exclusively through her own personal analytical lens. During one observation of Blacks worshiping in their segregated spaces, she notes graphically, “Men roar and bawl out; women screech like pigs about to be killed; many, having fallen into convulsions, leap and strike about them, so that they are obliged to be held down” (Bremmer [1853] 1983:105). As did Watson, she typically references the music she hears as hymns—a questionable designation. She cites only partial transcriptions of a few song texts, with little indication of how the music was actually performed, other than such vague descriptions as “loud and beautiful” (105). It is quite plausible that in the segregated spaces Bremmer described, the distinctive songs she heard were representative of the genre of folk spirituals.With the publication of his autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855, a timeframe paralleling that of Bremmer's work, Frederick Douglass, who had escaped from the vile institution of slavery, invested the music of his fellow bondsmen and women with much more than the entertainment value that so strongly characterized Bremmer's account. Douglass ([1855] 1983) saw every tone of music as “a testimony against slavery and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.” He specifically referenced “the dehumanizing characteristic of slavery” (84), decrying in particular how whites “separated religion and life” (86). Douglass laments: The religion [of whites] “was a thing altogether apart from his worldly concerns. He knew nothing of it as a holy principle directing and controlling his daily life, making the latter conform to the requirements of the gospel” (86).Fueling Douglass's critique was the fact that during his enslavement, he was frequently required to “raise the hymn” during worship, a task which he hated, in large part because Covey, the man who claimed ownership of him, routinely beat him. As a Christian, Douglass ([1855] 1983:86) was unable to reconcile Covey's treatment with the fundamental tenets of the Christian faith. Bremmer's naïve account of religious activity among the enslaved seemed to discount the possibility of a dissenting voice such as Douglass's. For whom did Bremmer speak?Douglass's litany of horrors embedded in the institution of slavery are echoed in the accounts of slave narratives collected during the 1930s as a part of the Works Progress Administration of the Federal Writers Project. Lucretia Alexander, for example, attests to the fact that the enslaved were not only acutely aware of whites’ efforts to indoctrinate them religiously, but they collectively and consciously devised strategies to counter such efforts (Raboteau 1980:214). Secret services in their own dwellings, replete with muffled exchanges to protect their autonomy and well-being, represented one such example. The bondsmen and bondswomen were neither naïve, nor passive, regarding the injustice that claimed their very being, for they were willing to risk life and limb to express themselves in a way that reflected how they defined themselves, irrespective of who or what they were expected to be. Note this telling account: The preacher came. . . . He'd just say, “Serve your masters. Don't steal your master's turkey. Don't steal your master's hawgs. Don't steal your master's meat. Do whatsomever your master tells you to do.” Same old thing all the time. My father would have church in dwelling houses, and they had to whisper. . . . Sometimes they would have church at his house. That would be when they would want a real meetin’ with some real preachin’. . . . They used to sing their songs in a whisper and pray in a whisper. That was a prayer-meeting from house to house once or twice—once or twice a week. (Lucretia Alexander, quoted in in Raboteau 1980:214)The power of this testimony speaks to the critical assessment men and women applied to their experience of bondage. White inconsistencies in teaching and preaching did not prompt wholesale rejection of the Christian promise; instead, Blacks developed their own views of what the Bible offered. The failure was not in God, they contended, but in those who projected an inaccurate representation of who God was and who God loved. The oppressor and the oppressed were not of the same mind. To embrace the God of the oppressor was to succumb to death—to living hell. The promise of life rested in the belief that the true message of God was worthy of embrace in the here and now, despite an oft-preached word to the contrary.In the aftermath of the Civil War, a new form of the spiritual emerged, in a context far removed from the informal, culturally isolated settings where the original genre had sprung to life. Fisk Normal School in Nashville, Tennessee, was founded in 1866 on the site of what had been a Union Army barracks (see Figure 4). George L. White (see Figure 5), a former Union soldier, became Fisk's treasurer and music instructor. His prayerful embrace of the idea of forming a choir that would perform publicly to raise money became seminal for the school's survival.The Jubilee Singers (see Figure 6) became known for singing repertoire from the Western European tradition, but they also presented new versions of the spirituals whose performance style closely aligned with Western European musical values. They sang from stages, performing repertoire they had rehearsed repeatedly. While the call-response form was retained, the spontaneity that so strongly defined the earlier folk style was eliminated. Heterophonic vocal textures became homophonic, and the element of dance was eliminated altogether. George White's leadership was of consequence in this transformation.3After only three months, the group had raised $20,000—more than three times their initial goal. Their success later led to a partnership with the famed evangelical duo Dwight L. Moody and Ira D. Sankey, where they sang before enraptured crowds of thousands. Their mission eventually extended beyond the United States to include such international sites as Great Britain, Germany, and Ireland as well as Australia and New Zealand (Marsh 1876).But their success was not without cost. The original group of eleven singers, the youngest one of whom was only fourteen years old, faced various forms of ostracism from white publics in the United States. In one Ohio city, the singers were refused admittance to a major hotel because of their skin color. In Louisville, Kentucky, they were informed that “niggers” were not allowed in the first-class waiting room, even though the group had already purchased first-class tickets for their journey. A policeman subsequently ejected them with “angry profanity” . . . “amid the applause of a cursing mob of one or two thousand people” (Marsh 1876:40–41). In Elmira, there were members of First Presbyterian Church who chose to spell “negro with two g's, and stayed away from the service” (31).When invited to sing at the National Teachers’ Association of the United States in Nashville, some teachers were indignant that “the—niggers could not be kept in their own places” (Marsh 1876:15). Race trumped education and religion. The institution of slavery had been outlawed, but the social mores that had fueled and sustained it for some 250 years were yet alive and quite well. The most captivating of music was absolutely no match for the groundswell of racial animus that governed the fabric of America. To embrace the music was one thing; to embrace those who produced the music was quite another.The most recent genre of Black religious music, the gospel tradition, emerged in the aftermath of the Great Migrations of Blacks from the South to urban areas in the North and South surrounding World War I (1914–1918) and World War II (1939–1945). In 1910, the Black population of Chicago was 44,103. By 1920, that population had almost tripled to 109,584 (Ricks 1960:91). In 1945, as a part of the Works Progress Administration, Black sociologists St. Claire Drake and Horace Cayton produced the seminal text Black Metropolis, documenting Bronzeville, or Black Chicago, as it was during and at the end of the Great Depression. Their research methods combined “history and social statistics with first-hand observation and systematic interviewing” (Drake and Cayton [1945] 1962:xxxv).Their treatise documented more than five hundred Black churches in Bronzeville. The vast majority of Black Christians affiliated with small storefront churches—vacant stores, houses, abandoned theaters, remodeled garages, and halls (Drake and Cayton [1945] 1962:632)—largely Holiness and Baptist with memberships small enough for everybody to know everybody in the congregation and a worship style that was unrestrictive and demonstrative (636).Elder Lucy Smith of the Church of All Nations, a prominent Bronzeville Spiritualist church, provides a rationale for the character of her Sunday morning worship experience, noting, in particular, the seminal role of music: The members of my church are troubled and need something to make them happy. My preaching is not about sad things, but always about being saved. The singing in my church has “swing” to it because I want my people to swing of themselves all the mis'ry and troubles that is heavy on their hearts (quoted in Drake and Cayton [1945] 1962:644).Dance had been a part of autonomous African American worship from its advent during slavery. In this new twentieth century urban context, expressive body movement was sustained, although now through organized choirs accompanied by musical instruments.4 Elder Smith cautions us to consider, however, that the dance served a role historically suited to African American Christian populations. The power of dance was its function as spiritual catharsis; in the self-defined, autonomous context of worship, congregants were free to express themselves in ways reflective of their unique cultural history and suited to their particular social needs.Smith's commentary ably outlines with precision the motivation and character of her unique worship experience. As was the case during the antebellum period, neither the service nor its music was driven by the norms associated with the worship styles of whites. Both content and character were driven by the need to confront and assuage the various forms of threat as well as personal and collective trauma Blacks faced daily in this segregated urban context. Church was not a place to repress, cover up, or deny the existence or impact of continuous, unrelenting racial assault; in the segregated worship space, Blacks were free to behave however they chose, for as long as they chose, unencumbered by norms and expectations externally imposed by others. As Bernice Reagon eloquently expressed: As [Black people] tried to work out a way to survive in the new city, one thing they searched for was a way to keep the old songs and singing alive. At this point we are not talking about songs as music. We are also going beyond songs as singing. We are talking about what people believed you needed in order to be a whole human being. (2001:66)The first dissertation produced on African American gospel music postdated the work of Drake and Cayton by fifteen years. In 1960, at Northwestern University, George Robinson Ricks, an African American, completed Some Aspects of the Religious Music of the United States Negro: An Ethnomusicological Study with Special Emphasis on the Gospel Tradition. His advisor was cultural anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Alan Merriam; his topic, suggested by Melville Herskovits, employed a research design that was both historical and ethnographic.Ricks's research population extended well beyond that of Drake and Cayton to include study in seven states in the Deep South during the 1940s. He employed intensive field research, including recording and interviewing in Chicago and the recording of church services, rehearsals, and special programs in the Midwest, Deep South, and West and East Coasts. He also conducted interviews with such pioneering gospel icons as Mahalia Jackson, the very same artist my white Texas middle school students had laughed at when I began teaching, and Thomas Dorsey, father of gospel music (Ricks 1960:v).As an African American engaging other African Americans in their own autonomous church settings, Ricks avoids the sensationalism and voyeurism that had so often characterized the perspectives of whites, such as Frederika Bremmer, who were encountering Blacks for the first time. Ricks, as did Drake and Cayton, meticulously documents African American perspectives regarding how and where gospel musics emerged, allowing its progenitors—its early practitioners—to speak unfettered.Unfortunately, Ricks's impressive model of analytical objectivity and scholarly documentation did not become a standard bearer for treatises that followed. In 1971, Anthony Heilbut, Harvard PhD and Hunter College English professor, published The Gospel Sound. The book provides a wealth of descriptive data on gospel performers and performances from the Dorsey era through the late sixties. Many high-profile artists welcomed him into their inner circles, allowing him access to personal exchanges and commentary typically reserved for seasoned initiates.Heilbut rewards this generous spirit of welcome with scathing critique, as he often chose to focus on what he perceived as aberrant or questionable behavior among those he studied. In one instance he might comment on an artist's behavior that he found intriguing or amusing. In another encounter, he would call into question verbal exchanges he overheard that he viewed as contrary to the Christian ideals and beliefs that th