Voices of Black Folk: The Sermons of Rev. A. W. Nix, by Terri Brinegar

Abstract

In Voices of Black Folk, Terri Brinegar provides a careful analysis of the Reverend A. W. Nix’s phonograph recordings. As cutting-edge recorded sound from a prominent and influential minister during the 1920s and 1930s, Reverend Nix’s recorded sermons provide precious, primary-source data concerning the relationship between the efficacy of Black vocal aesthetics and the tectonic shifts occurring within Black communities owing to mass migration. Brinegar argues that the popularity of recorded sermons with “vocal aesthetics of the folk,” or vocal characteristics most associated with poor and working-class southern Black cultures, amplifies critical questions surrounding discourses of racial uplift and complicates more simplistic accounts of their rejection by middle- and upper-class African Americans. Voices of Black Folk is richly interdisciplinary as it conjoins the interests of African American religious studies, sound studies, and rhetorical studies while illuminating the life of an important transitional figure within African American history. According to Brinegar, Nix stood at the intersection of two major cultural and generational transformations. The first was the emergence of the “New Negro,” who was “self-respecting, fearless, and determined in the assertion of his rights.” The second was the dynamic class and cultural stratification occurring in Black communities owing to new employment and educational opportunities (23). As a college-educated pastor, Nix effectively straddled the lines between the working-class vernacular expressions commonly associated with “sanctified” storefront churches and the assimilationist impulses condemning all behaviors considered beneath the “respectable classes” (30).Brinegar provides a rigorous review of the historical and contextual information necessary to gauge the degree, scale, and impact of Nix’s influence and contributions while sounding out the nuances involved in his style of vocal performance. Voices of Black Folk is also greatly enhanced by the interviews Brinegar was able to conduct with Nix’s two surviving children, Genester Nix and Elwood Nix, as well as Genester’s son, Dr. John Wilson. They provide impressive firsthand accounts of their father’s/grandfather’s life and career as well as crucial cultural and historical information that would otherwise be difficult to validate. The first chapter provides important biographical information on Nix and his family in addition to a detailed account of the interaction between Nix and the influential musician, composer, and evangelist Thomas Dorsey. (Dorsey is a major figure in African American history and is widely considered to be one of the most important architects of blues and gospel music.) It also includes an analysis of the cultural impact of Hallelujah (1929), the first all-Black Hollywood film, for its incorporation of Nix’s sermon “Black Diamond Express to Hell.” It concludes with a complete discography of Nix’s recordings. Brinegar then focuses the second chapter on defining Black folk traditions (African American vocal practices that emerged during slavery) and clearly delineating the link between vocal traditions, African American faith traditions, and cultural identity (65). She offers an account of the rhetorical landscape for religious conversion during the era of slavery that accounts for the centrality of the voice and oral culture. For enslaved African Americans, “the voice itself became the means by which to achieve salvation, not just in death, as had been sung in many of the spirituals and preached by slave preachers” (66). Therefore, congregations were moved by deep emotional feelings carried through the voice in a tradition that began with chanted sermons fusing European and African influences. These sounds evolved into a complex homiletic style in which African American ministers could switch “from conversational prose to rhythmic and tonal chanting” to signal “the connection with spirit” (68). Brinegar then expounds on the stigma of slavery that became attached to Black folk expressions, detailing how such expressions became markers of class divisions. Such class divisions were quite evident in Black church communities, and Brinegar carefully applies these distinctions to the churches in Chicago during the 1920s. However, she stresses that these categories were not as rigid as some scholarship implies and that “no singular mode of expression existed for all working-class African Americans with an opposing mode for those in the middle class” (74). Some churches in Chicago, such as Nix’s, were hybrid and embraced both the expressions associated with working-class, “sanctified” Holiness and Pentecostal churches (shouts, jerks, dances, and speaking in tongues) and the respectability politics typically associated with middle- and upper-class churches.Brinegar offers two classifications of sonic modernity for African Americans. First, the section “Creating Modern Black Voices” mirrors the efforts of the protagonist in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) to view African American sonic traditions as source material ripe for “modernization” (Westernization). This idea encompasses groups such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers, whose performances emphasized vocal sophistication and assimilation. The second classification is outlined in the section “Modernized Tradition,” which examines the commercial recordings of African American vernacular and musical performances of folk traditions. This framework helps solidify the location of sonic material within a matrix of cultural crosscurrents surrounding matters of identity, authenticity, and communal status. The recordings of Nix’s sermons fall into the latter category. Brinegar conceptualizes the recorded sermon as “a planned and rehearsed performance outside of its original context” that was transformed into a “modern, hybrid form that combined traditional elements with new technology and reflected the voices of the past in a commercially viable product that was planned, marketed, and sold to consumers” (100). Such recordings “blurred the lines between the demarcation zones of race, class, and geography” and “brought the vocal traditions associated with southern Black Baptist ministers such as Nix into the public sphere” (102).The third chapter of the book presents an analysis of the fifty-four sermons Nix recorded between 1927 and 1931 in Chicago on the Vocalion label. Brinegar also includes an analysis of the minister and social activist Sutton E. Griggs’s recordings as a way of highlighting the divergence between the two men’s vocal performances and thematic approaches. Griggs, a prominent Black minister and orator best known for his novel Imperium in Imperio (1899), embraced Victorian vocal aesthetics, standardized English, and accommodationist solutions to the problem of racial oppression. In contrast, Nix favored pragmatic solutions and African American Vernacular English and used his “booming voice” to perform the musical and improvisational traits of the Black folk vocal tradition (104). Brinegar includes transcriptions of each sermon, a feature that allows the book to pair well with scholarship on African American folklore and culture such as Dance (2002). Nix’s sermons explored a variety of themes, including traditional patriarchal family values, chastity, financial responsibility, education, and Christian morals.The fourth and final chapter presents an in-depth analysis of African American vocalisms and is the crown jewel of the book. In addition to traditional music transcription, Brinegar includes images of the spectrogram, harmonics, frequencies, amplitude, dynamics, and time points in order to capture the rich texture of these vocalizations. Instead of the more uniform approach of European vocal aesthetics, African American vocal aesthetics features a wide range of sounds, including “shouts, moans, calls, cries, whoops, hollers, singing of folk spirituals, use of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), improvisation, call-and-response, use of the pentatonic or ‘gapped’ scale, bent notes, ‘blue’ notes, slides, melismas, loud vocal volume, vocal percussiveness, heterophonic textures, use of repetition, use of the entire gamut of the voice, gravelly, raspy, shrill, hard, strained, ‘dirty’ or ‘throaty’ vocal timbre, nasal vocal timbre, use of falsetto, and speech-song, also known as chanting or intoning” (190).Brinegar reviews each of these traditions, employing detailed historical data, contextualization, and transcription that allow her to drill down into a wide range of distinctions, such as the differences between shouts and secular moans or the chanted sermon versus the blues. This chapter also incorporates summaries of the historical origins of particular folk spirituals that Nix included in his recorded sermons. Brinegar’s technical prowess at the nuances of music description allows for a formidable contribution to scholarship on Black expressive culture in the fields of musicology and African American rhetorical traditions.Brinegar’s analysis of Nix’s sermons frames him as a master performer, style shifter, and communicator while securing his place in the rich legacy of Black preachers who were “the catalysts for progress in both the spiritual realm and the material world” (103). It is also a fitting response to the vibrant scholarly discourse on contemporary Black church cultures, such as Jones (2020). Voices of Black Folk makes an obvious contribution to African American religious history, but those with scholarly interests in other major figures, such as Booker T. Washington, Sutton E. Griggs, and Thomas A. Dorsey, will also find it to be an indispensable resource. It could also be read in conversation with a diverse array of texts addressing African American culture and sound, such as Eidsheim (2019) or Weheliye (2005). More importantly, the value of Brinegar’s work extends beyond African American rhetoric and should be regarded as a valuable contribution to the wider field of sound studies focusing on the voice, such as McCracken (2015). Voices of Black Folk valiantly foregrounds an overlooked chapter of African American modernity and, through the figure of the Reverend A. W. Nix, places the Black preacher at the zenith of a sonic, technological revolution.