babylon revisited

Black Music Research Journal Vol. 32, No. 1, Spring 2012 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Babylon Revisited: Psalm 137 as American Protest Song

David W. Stowe

The 1973 release of The Harder They Come (dir. Perry Henzell) announced a new era in the transatlantic flow of African music of the Americas. The Jamaican film quickly became a campus cult classic, bringing its heady mix of reggae music, ganja, and gunslinging urban rudeboy style to an enthusiastic youth audience in North America and Europe. The films soundtrack, featuring songs by Toots and the Maytals, Jimmy Cliff, and Desmond Dekker, became a phenomenon in its own right, helping pave the way for the global success of Bob Marley. For many outside Jamaica, it was an enticing introduction to reggae music. In addition to launching the international career of the films star, Jimmy Cliff, the soundtrack was a boon to a Jamaican group called the Melodians. Heard twice in the film, their song Rivers of Babylon reworked Psalm 137 over a jaunty bass line. With its message of defiance amid social dislocation, the song offers a subtle commentary on an important relationship early in the film: the conflict between Ivan, a young man recently arrived in Kingston from country and the autocratic Christian preacher for whom Ivan briefly works and aggressively challenges before beginning his short career as a songwriter and ganja trader. No song text has exerted a more sustained pull on the political imagina-tion of Americans than Psalm 137. Contained in the Hebrew Bible, the psalm figured in the worship of the English Puritans who settled New England. It appeared in the first English-language book published in North America.

David W. Stowe teaches English and religious studies at Michigan State University. He is the author of Swing Changes: Big Band Jazz in New Deal America (Harvard University Press, 1994); How Sweet the Sound: Music in the Spiritual Lives of Americans (Harvard University Press, 2004); and No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

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Almost a century and a half later, it served as the basis for a patriotic song of national independence by early Americas first significant composer, William Billings. The psalm was the centerpiece of Frederick Douglasss great abolitionist oration, What to a Slave is the Fourth of July. More than a century later, it reappeared in a completely new musical guise, the pro-toreggae version first recorded in 1969 by the Melodians. Since then, Psalm 137 has been covered numerous times by groups representing a variety of musical styles: gospel, disco, country rock, alternative, hip hop. Why such longevity? Like many stories and passages from the Hebrew Bible, Psalm 137 is highly adaptable, open to a variety of interpretations. Its central questionHow shall we sing the Lords song in a strange land?has been central to the peopling of the Americas. The psalm deals with cultural dispossession and exile, pervasive experiences for large numbers of people over the course of American history. It offers a memorable image of uprooted people languishing beside a river, called to make music but unsure how to proceed. Its Babylon can stand for any oppressive power or force of injustice, whether political, cultural, or spiritual. While these meanings were resonant for early Anglo-Americans, who often perceived themselves as a persecuted people for religious or political reasons, Psalm 137s more recent history positions it in antiracist and anticolonial move-ments of African Americans in the circum-Caribbean region. Charting the evolution of the psalm from restrictive Puritan worship prac-tices to a popular dance-hall hit underscores the challenges African Americans have spearheaded to boundaries erected by traditional European binaries: between sacred and secular, spiritual and political, mind and body, high and low culture. In the case of Psalm 137, this challenge to compartmentalization has come about through creative readings of the psalms political meanings. Beginning with the American Revolution but accelerating in movements against slavery and white domination of black Americans in the circum-Caribbean, the struggle against colonial oppression has worked as a solvent to dissolve the conventional binaries of European Christianity.

I

The biblical psalm contains just nine verses, which fall into three sections of four, two, and three verses, respectively. The opening section is best known and most widely used in subsequent musical versions:

1 By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.2 We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

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3 For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.4 How shall we sing the LORDs song in a strange land?

An exiled people, weeping, remembering the homeland and the temple in Jerusalem, destroyed by Babylonians in 587/6 B.C.E. They have put aside their musical instrumentsno use for them under the circumstancesand refuse to perform musical entertainment for their captors, whose motivation is, after all, to humiliate. Finally, there is the question of cultural survival: how to sing the Lords song in a foreign place. This opening voicefirst-person pluralis solidly communal. The psalms second section shifts to a first-person singular, addressing Jerusa-lem as a kind of jealous lover:

5 If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.6 If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.

The psalmist seems to be offering a challenge to himself: remember Je-rusalem, the chosen people of the covenant, or lose valuable abilities to manipulate and to speak. The danger of forgetting Jerusalem seems to be real; otherwise, why the threat of harsh sanctions? The psalms final section also threatens physical harm, not to the psalmist but to Jerusalems betrayers and destroyers: the Babylonians and Edomites who sacked Jerusalem. The focus shifts away from the community and the individual to those who destroyed it:

7 Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.8 O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.9 Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

The spirit of revenge is overpowering, especially in the chilling final verse, with its images of innocent babies having their brains smashed out on rocks. Daughter Babylon personifies the empire whose humiliation of Israel calls forth the violent language. Indeed, the psalms most striking aspect is the intense contrast between the reverent spirit of the first six verses and the unbridled malice of the last three. It is the first section of the psalm,

Stowe Babylon Revisited 97

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verses 14, that have inspired the most interest among its American musi-cal adapters. The first version of Psalm 137 sung in North America was carried by the Pilgrims to Plymouth aboard the Mayflower. English Protestants had first encountered psalm singing in Switzerland, where they fled after the middle of the sixteenth century to avoid persecution under the Catholic Queen Mary. For these dissenting Protestants, congregational psalm sing-ing became the sole legitimate form of church music. The millennium-long tradition of Roman Catholic hymn singing was abruptly abandoned. With the emigration of English Puritans to North America in the seventeenth century, metrical psalm singing became the foundation of American sacred song. Because it laid out the standard and metrical version of the psalms side by side in parallel columns, Henry Ainsworths 1612 psalter provides a good introduction to the technique of metrical psalms. On the left column appear the first three verses of Ainsworths translation of the Hebrew psalm into English prose; on the right is the rhymed, metrical version created for congregational singing:

1 By the rivers of Babel, there By Babels rivers, there sate wee,we sate, yea we wept: when yea wept: when wee did mind, Sion.remembred, Sion. The willowes that amidds it bee: 2 Upon the willowes in the our harps, we hanged, them upon.mids thereof: we hanged, our harps. For songs of us, there ask did they 3 For there, they that led us that had us captive led-along,captive asked of us, the words of and mirth, they that us heaps did laya song: and they that threw us on Sing unto us some Sions song.heaps, mirth: sing unto us, of thesong of Sion.

The musical setting Ainsworth provides is known as long meter double; the tune is divided into three eight-line stanzas, each line having eight syl-lables. The tune recommended by Ainsworth is a stately triple meter in D minor (Inserra and Hitchcock, 1981, 6465). Because Ainsworth was willing to subject the poetic flow of his trans-lation to strain now and then rather than to violate the meaning of his original text, the phrasing is ungainly. The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay who arrived in Boston in 1630 took an even stricter line toward adapting psalms for worship. Their psalm collection, known as the Bay Psalm Book and published by newly founded Harvard College in 1640, contains a thirteen-page preface laying out an elaborate rationale and criteria for creating metrical psalms. Comparing the opening stanzas of the 1640 version with an earlier version shows the awkward phrasing accepted by Puritans as the cost of their adher-

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ence to literal translation of the Hebrew Bible (English Metrical Psalmody 2001):

Sternhold and Hopkins (1562) Bay Psalm Book (1640)

When we did sit in Babylon, The rivers on of Babilonthe rivers round about, there when wee did sit downe:There in remembrance of Sion, yea even then wee mourned, whenthe tears for grief burst out. we remembered Sion.

We hanged our harps and instruments Our Harps wee did hang it amid,the willow trees upon, upon the willow tree.For in that place men for their use Because there they that us awayhad planted many one. led in captivitee,

Then they to whom we prisners were Requird of us a song, & thussaid to us tauntingly, askt mirth: us waste who laid,Now let us hear your Hebrew songs sing us among a Sions song,and pleasant melody. unto us then they said.

(English metrical psalmody 2001; Bay Psalm Book 1956)

New Englands homegrown psalmists were content to twist syntax and let verses flow across stanzas. Despite this, the 1640 version dominated Sunday worship in the New England colonies for generations. It was republished twenty-six times during the century following its appearance. Oddly, Isaac Watts, the mostly artful of all creators of metrical psalms, ex-cluded Psalm 137 from his influential 1719 collection. Wattss great contribu-tion to Protestant sacred song was his willingness to go beyond the bound-aries specified by the New England Puritans, updating Hebrew psalms for current conditions (Benson [1915] 1962, 109). Watts also nationalized the texts, recasting them with England in the role of Israel (Stackhouse 1997, 36). Although Watts himself failed to put his mark on Psalm 137, regarding it as insufficiently infused with Christian virtue, others did. Connecticut poet and clergyman Joel Barlow, whose 1785 Psalms became influential in the young republic, composed a version of Psalm 137 generally set to the tune Bondage by Timothy Swan, a prolific Massachusetts hymnwriter (and still performed by shape-note singers): Along the banks where Babels current flows, / Our captive band in deep despondence strayed, / While Zions fall in sad remembrance rose,/her friends mingled with the dead. . . . But how in heathen chains and lands unknown / Shall Israels sons a song of Zion raise? / O, hapless Salem, Gods terrestrial throne, / Thou land of glory sacred mount of praise (Gordon and Barrand 1998, 1819). Wattss and Barlows nationalizing projects were continued by Americas first significant homegrown composer, William Billings (McKay and Craw-ford 1975). A self-taught musician who wrote music on the side of his main


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work as tanner, Billings was an untiring self-promoter deeply shaped by the culture of masculine self-fashioning and republican virtue current among politically active Bostonians (Crist 2003). He was also a die-hard patriot who counted Samuel Adams and Paul Revere among his friends. Several of his finest and best-remembered hymns, anthems, and set pieces were inspired by the American struggle for independence (Stowe 2004, 5061). His anthem, Lamentation Over Boston, gives Psalm 137 the most topi-cal treatment it ever received. The first section relocates Babylon to Boston, as though its colonial citizens are in exile, and makes a number of other innovations to the biblical text. Rather than merely requiring a song of humiliation, the unnamed Babylonian oppressor (read Britain) forces Bos-tonians to take up arms against one another. Billings introduces the graphic imagery of Babylon thirsting both for milk (Bostonian Breasts) and for American blood:

By the Rivers of Watertown we sat down & wept when we rememberd thee O Boston.As for our Friends Lord God of Heaven preserve them, defend them, deliver and restore them unto us again;For they that held them in BondageRequird of them to take up Arms Against their Brethren. Forbid it Lord God that those who have sucked Bostonian Breasts should thirst for American Blood.

Here Billings intersperses a trope from the Christian Bible, Matthew 2:18, where Rachel weeps for her children, slain by King Herod:

A voice was heard in Roxbury which echod thro the Continent, weeping for Boston because of their Danger. . . .

Finally, in adapting verses 56, in which the psalmist calls forth punish-ment if he forgets Jerusalem, Billings asks that affliction be visited on his musical powers:

If I forget thee [Boston], if I forget thee, yea, if I do let my numbers cease to flow, Then be my muse unkind,Then let my Tongue forget to move and ever be confind;Let horrid Jargon split the Air and rive my nerves asunder,Let hateful discord greet my ear as terrible as Thunder.(Billings 1977, 136147)

The punishment seems deeply personalized, conceived specifically for a musician like Billings; who but a composer would identify these as the most fearsome imagined curses?

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By asserting a symbolic equivalence between Britain and Babylon, Bill-ings is politicizing Psalm 137 in a new way that would define its meaning from the nineteenth century to the present. After all, even if Bostonians wept in Watertown and Roxbury, they hadnt exactly been exiled or held in captivity in a strange land. Rather, Boston was occupied and besieged during much of the 1770s. Though the rhetoric of slavery certainly played a part in mobilizing English Americans in the struggle for independence, it would find a much surer resonance among African Americans, who had been kidnapped and exiled to a strange land. This is the direction Psalm 137 would take. First, though, we must attend to further complexities regarding the Babylonian exile.

II

Despite the significant historical and political distance separating the He-brew Exodus and Babylonian Exile, the two experiences are frequently conflated among modern movements that seek a usable past in the Hebrew Bible. No movement has been more inclined to mingle the two narratives than Rastafari. Were leaving Babylon goes a line in Bob Marleys song Exodus, for example. The Exodus model of liberation and mass move-ment is certainly more dramatic a model than the gradual and partial return from Babylon, Jonathan Boyarin (1992) points out. Yet the Rastafarians focus on Babylon as a model of captivity, partly because of its reputation for corruption and partly because it is more explicitly depicted as a place of Exile, such as in Psalm 137 (By the rivers of Babylon) (553n60). For his own part, Marley imagined himself not in the role of Moses but as his predecessor Joseph, the dreaming son of Jacob, who was sold by his broth-ers into slavery in Egypt, rose to become chief adviser to Pharaoh, and eventually rescued his large family from starvation in their famine-struck homeland of Canaan (Steffens 1998, 259). Although Psalm 137 presents the Babylonian exile as unmitigated disloca-tion, many communities for whom the text has power are aware of another perspective on the exile. Rather than the desperate clinging to memory advocated by the psalmist, the prophet Jeremiah in chapter 29 advocates peaceful coexistence, even assimilation, with Babylon:

4 Thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, unto all that are carried away captives, whom I have caused to be carried away from Jerusalem unto Babylon; 5 Build ye houses, and dwell in them; and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them; 6 Take ye wives, and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons,


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and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; that ye may be increased there, and not diminished. 7 And see the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the LORD for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace.

On the surface, this seems not to have been an option for the Israelites held captive in Egypt, for whom Exodus was the only avenue to liberation. This difference reveals an important distinction in the notion of biblical Israel as a template for communities seeking liberation in the Americas. As Ed-ward Said (2001) points out, the Hebrews seem to have entered Egypt at the invitation of the Pharaoh, and to have achieved a degree of power and wealth due to Josephs elite court connections. Only later did the Hebrews become scapegoats for the declining fortunes of the Egyptian state. Abject as they may have been at the time of the Exodus, they had experienced better times in their adopted land (165). Jeremiahs passage has the effect of deterritorializing Israel; Zion can be remembered and honored even in conditions not of its peoples choos-ing. And this inflection has enhanced the cultural adaptability of the Exile story. Miguel A. De La Torre (1998) has probed the uncanny relevance of the Babylonian captivity narrative to contemporary Cubans. Both Cuba and Judea were vassals of a more powerful Northern neighbor, he writes. Their strategic importance, Judah as a buffer zone between the powers of the north and south, and Cuba as a key to the entire hemisphere, made them desirable prizes. Whereas Judahs exile was triggered by the physical invasion of Babylon, Cubas revolution was a backlash to the U.S. hege-mony. Like Exilic Jews following Jeremiahs advice, many Cuban exiles have carved out comfortable lives for themselves in the United States. But what of enslaved Africans, held in bondage and exile from homeland? Was Jeremiahs exhortation truly an option for persons regarded as less than human and traded as commodities? In fact, Newport Gardner provides an uncanny historical analogue to Billings. Born in Africa in 1746, the same year as Billings, Occramer Marycoo was sold to a Newport, Rhode Island, sea captain named Gardner. A prodigy, the teenager taught himself to read and compose music. Gardner helped form the African Union Society in 1780 and served as sexton in a white church before helping establish Newports first African American church. He also helped found and served as head teacher at a school for black children. Meanwhile, he obtained freedom for himself and his family from Gardner. He had retained a lifelong urge to return to Africa, and late in 1825 he helped establish a new church in Boston with the express purpose of emigrating to Liberia. The commissioning ser-vice closed with an anthem composed by Gardner for the occasion, which

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stitches together passages from Jeremiah 30 and the gospels of Matthew and Mark:

For lo! the days come, saith the Lord, that I will bring again the captivity of my people Israel and Judah, saith the Lord; and I will cause them to return to the land that I gave to their fathers, and they shall possess it. . . . Hear the words of the Lord, O ye African race, hear the words of promise. . . . O African, trust in the Lord. Amen. Hallelujah. Praise the Lord.

Five days later, the ship sailed for Monrovia, the eighty-year-old Gardner serving as deacon. It arrived a month later. Reportedly, Gardners anthem was still being performed at a Newport church as late as 1940 (Newport Gardner 1976). Though Gardners achievements as a composer of sacred music were unique, there is ample evidence of enslaved Africans singing psalms and hymns. Little evidence exists of exactly which psalms were favored, though the texts of Isaac Watts were particularly admired (Dargan 2006). The fact that Watts chose to exclude Psalm 137 from his psalmbook suggests that African Americans would rarely have sung the text (Polman 2006). It is ironic that the poet so beloved among black Christians that Anglo-Protes-tant hymns were referred to simply as Dr. Watts would have effectively erased so useful a psalm from the canon of the black church. That Frederick Douglass, who was among the first to draw substantial attention to the symbolism and social uses of the spiritual songs of African slaves, chose Psalm 137 as the organizing frame for his most famous oration is therefore both surprising and significant. In an uncanny stroke, Douglass created the psalms modern political valence, whose resonance continues to this day. At Rochester in 1852, Douglass (1993) asked, What to the slave is the Fourth of July? The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me, he said, addressing his white audience. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. Why would an escaped slave celebrate the birthday of such a nation? Douglass turns to the Hebrew psalms to complete his analogy, comparing the United States to another nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! Introducing it as the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people, he cites verbatim the first six verses of Psalm 137. Verse 3 would have been especially poignant: a people being carried away captive and required by captors to provide amusement in the form of musicSing us one of the songs of Zion (142). Requiring enslaved Africans to perform songs had been a notable feature


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of life under slavery. Many observers were struck by the fact that as slaves departed for the South they were often singing, writes Walter Johnson (1999), sometimes because slave traders used whips to make them sing. According to a narrative published in 1867, these songs were coerced to prevent among the crowd of Negroes who usually gather on such occa-sions, any expression of sorrow for those who are being torn away from them (6869) Exile is doubled here: exile from the homeland and from a familiar community to an unknown southern destination. When Tom begins the final trudge to his Deep South plantation in Uncle Toms Cabin, Simon Legree orders his newly acquired slaves, Strike up a song, boys,come! When Tom launches into a Protestant hymn, he explodes:

Shut up, you black cuss! roared Legree; did ye think I wanted any oyer infernal old Methodism? I say, tune up, now, something real rowdy,quick! One of the other men struck up one of those unmeaning songs, common among the slaves. Masr seed me cotch a coon, High boys, high! . . . It was sung very boisterously, and with a forced attempt at merriment; but no wail of despair, no words of impassioned prayer, could have had such a depth of woe in them as the wild notes of the chorus. . . . There was a prayer in it, which Simon could not hear. He only heard the boys singing noisily, and was well pleased; he was making them keep up their spirits. (Stowe [1852] 1994, 297)

Such performances foreshadow blackface minstrelsy, which began its cultural ascent in the 1830s and was well established by the time of Dou-glasss speech in 1852. Slaves performances were admittedly coerced, writes Ronald Radano (2003), frequently through degradation, whether by tossing coins to prompt dancers or when whiskey was handed out by the overseers, and the slaves becoming very merry, began to caper and sing more noisily than before. But the slaves also profited from them, not only monetarily but also in accessing a form of cultural power (152153). It is to this commodified logic of slave folk performances that Eric Lott (1993, 43) traces the blackface minstrel show. There is a further ambiguity at the heart of Douglasss address. Who, or what, is Babylon? By comparing the United States to a nation of towering crimes that was ultimately thrown down and buried in irrecoverable ruin by the Almighty, is he comparing the nation to Babylon, that signi-fier of oppressive evil? Or is Douglass drawing an analogy between white Americans and the pre-Exilic Jews whose sin brought on the destruction of Jerusalem? His analogy seems to place African Americans in the role of the exiled Israelites; but the United States could also be understood as

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a chosen people sinning against God through its stubborn attachment to chattel slavery. Unlike the Babylonian Exile, the Exodus narrative, with its language of bondage rather than exile, admits no such ambiguity. Like the Hebrews led by Moses, African Americans were held in bondage; and like the Jews of Psalm 137, they were exiled to a strange land. But as just observed, the post-Exilic Jews were not enslaved; indeed, they were treated fairly well and had the opportunity to establish themselves in their new location. Their key challenge was to remember Jerusalem, remain mindful of the homeland and covenant it implied, and withstand the sarcasm of the captors that would erase the communitys all-important bond of solidarity with God. Douglasss complex evocation of Psalm 137 did not exhaust the political significance of the psalm to the African American freedom movement. For writers of the New Negro Renaissance, Ben Glaser (2011) has shown, the psalm served as a focal point for highlighting ironies of African American vernacular culture. In his preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), James Weldon Johnson contrasts the execrable versified version of the Psalms made by the New England divinesas evidence he adduces the opening stanza of Psalm 137 from the Bay Psalm Bookwith the unheralded genius of Phillis Wheatley. The third verse of Johnsons own Lift Every Voice and Singsometimes dubbed the Negro National Anthemechoes the psalm:

Keep us forever in the path, we pray.Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee.

A 1925 essay by Sterling Brown explores the irony of white audiences reaction to opera singer Roland Hayess wild summoning of beautiful distress in performing the psalm:

The Negroes brood; are stirred by something deep within, something as far away as all antiquity, as old as human wrong, as tragical as loss of worlds. What does he meanand why are we so stirred . . . required of us a song And they that wasted us Required of us mirthAnd a thousand of our girls prostitute their voices singing jazz for a decadent white and black craving. (Glaser 2011, 3)

These ambivalent critical responses, mixing pride in the black vernacular with wariness about racial condescension and commodification, must have shaped the attitude toward Psalm 137 of another celebrated orator: Rev.


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C. L. Franklin. Raised in Mississippi, Franklin eventually made his way to Detroit, where he became pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church. Begin-ning in the 1950s, Franklins charismatic preaching style became nationally known through radio broadcasts and recordings for Chess. A confidant of Martin Luther King Jr. (and father of Aretha), Franklin played a major role in the civil rights movement in Detroit. Preaching exactly one century after Douglass, with the civil rights movement beginning to gain traction in the South, Franklin delivered Without a Song, a sermon on the first four verses of Psalm 137. The Babylonians asked the Hebrews to sing, Franklins explains, because their music was something unique; the conquerors had no need of scholars, scientists, philosophers, or politicians. Thinking the request a bit disorderly and out of place, the Hebrews refused. But they were wrong, according to Franklin (1989):

I take the position that they should have sung. Yes, they were in a strange land; yes, they were among so-called heathens; yes, the situation in which they found themselves was an unfamiliar situation and possibly was not conducive to inspire them into spiritual expression. But even under adverse circumstances, you ought to sing sometimes. And not only sing, sing some of Zions songs. (90)

The preacher goes on to cite singers whose public performances had his-torical consequences: opera singer Roland Hayes, who quieted an abusive audience in Nazi Germany; a slave woman who confronted Charles Wes-ley in Georgia when she was not admitted to church; anonymous slaves who sang black spirituals across the American South. As Franklin launches into the half-sung, half-chanted climax of his sermon, he offers singing as a metaphor of Christian testimony. It is through song that believers cross boundaries of social segregation and reach people in all their mortal imper-fection by coming close to them. Singing the songs of Zion is Franklins metaphor for commitment to public witness for the gospel:

I said everywhere Ohh! Yes. Maybe you dont know what Im talking about Im going to keep on singing,Yes I am. Ohh! I said everywhere I go, Im going to hold on to my song And keep on singing it.(97)

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III

There is a substantial gap in the musical development of Psalm 137, as American Protestants of all races turned from singing eighteenth-century psalms and hymns to the new evangelical gospel songs that flourished after the Civil War. It would take a number of social, political, and musi-cal transformations to bring the psalm back into popular consciousness. In 1964, the American Lutheran Church published a version of Psalm 137, By the Babylonian Rivers, that made its way into a number of Protestant hymnals over the succeeding decades; it was set to the Latvian folk tune Kas Dziedaja, known in English as Captivity. A decade later, the text reached a mass audience through the 1971 musical (1973 film) Godspell, one of the few lyrics not drawn directly from the gospel of Matthew. The psalm is heard while Jesus blesses the disciples after the Last Supper just before slipping off to pray in the Garden of Gethsemane. But the modern musical history of Psalm 137 begins not in North America but in the Caribbean. The sources of the Jamaican musical mix that came to be called reggae were multiple. The rhythmic underpinnings were laid by the practitioners of Burru and Kumina drumming, an African-trans-planted form based on the cross-rhythms created by a regular beat and a higher-pitched repeater drum. Reggae also drew on traditions of Jamai-can popular music, which developed from mento of the 1930s and 1940s (influenced by American big-band jazz), ska of the 1950s and early 1960s (shaped by American R&B), so-called blue beat, and rock steady of the late 1960s. Finally, lyrics and tunes were borrowed from gospel hymns origi-nating mainly in North America. But beginning in 1962, with the cultural revival led by record producer and eventual prime minister Edward Seaga, Jamaican musicians began to turn away from North American black music and create in a more intentionally nationalist vein (Reckord 1998, 231265). By the early 1970s, the music of Bob Marley and The Harder They Come was giving both Rastafari religious ideas and Jamaican music global exposure. The Melodians Rivers of Babylon made a number of significant changes. Unlike the triple-rhythm Puritan psalm tune recommended by Ainsworth, Rivers of Babylon is set in 4/4, propelled by a seven-note reggae G major bass line. The hook features two identical rising phrases followed by two parallel falling phrases. Like the biblical psalm, Rivers of Babylon is loosely divided into three sections. But these divisions are signaled as much by the music as by the text. The songs first two stanzas condense a stylized version of the first four verses of Psalm 137. But the first eight lines are divided into two four-bar stanzas, each of which is re-peated once. The image of harps hung from willows is dropped. The more


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pointed term the wicked replaces the neutral they of Psalm 137. More importantly, the Rastafarian version replaces the Lords song with King Alphas song, a reference to Ras Tafari, Haile Selasie I, the Rasta messiah and resurrected Jesus Christ who was crowned emperor of Ethiopia in 1930: By the rivers of Babylon / Where we sat down / And there we wept / When we remembered Zion / Cause the wicked carried us away in captiv-ity / Required from us a song / How can we sing King Alphas song / In a strange land? With that final question the Melodians version departs from the Bible altogether. Instead of the calls for remembrance (If I forget thee, O Jeru-salem. . . . If I do not remember thee. . . .) that characterize the middle section of Psalm 137, Rivers of Babylon offers an exhortation to struggle and protest through music. Again, like Billings but unlike earlier metrical psalms, there is significant repetition of text; within the short six-bar stanza, both the second and third lines are repeated. As Nathaniel Samuel Murrell shows, the Rasta version replaces the spirit of resignation and self-pity of the Exilic Jews with militant defiance. If the psalmists exiles are silenced by their dislocation and uncertainty, the Rasta community of Rivers gives voice to its anger and determination through shouts and songs: in Chant-ing down Babylon, Babylon signifies unjust power, whether colonial domination, racial subjugation, or economic exploitation (Murrell, 1998; Murrell and Taylor 1998, 390411; Murrell and Williams 1998, 326348). Musically, the lyrics are shouted in an exhortatory fashion above the familiar seven-note bass melody that we first hear in the phrase, By the rivers of Babylon. . . .:

Sing it out loudSing a song of freedom, sisterSing a song of freedom, brotherWe gotta sing and shout itWe gotta talk and shout itShout the song of freedom now

Shortly before his death in 2006, Brent Dowe, the lead singer of the Melo-dians, told Kenneth Bilby that he had adapted Psalm 137 to the new reggae style because he wanted to increase the publics consciousness of the grow-ing Rastafarian movement and its calls for black liberation and social justice. Like the Afro-Protestant Revival services, traditional Rastafarian worship often included psalm singing and hymn singing, and Rastas typically modi-fied the words to fit their own spiritual conceptions; Psalm 137 was among their sacred chants. When Rivers of Babylon first hit the airwaves, accord-ing to Dowe, it was quickly banned by the Jamaican government because its overt Rastafarian references (King Alpha and O FarI) were considered

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subversive and potentially inflammatory. The records producer, Leslie Kong, responded by publicly criticizing the government, pointing out that the song came from the Bible and had been sung by Jamaican Christians since time immemorial. The government then lifted the ban. Dowe recalled that, once it started being played on radio again, it took the record a mere three weeks to jump to number one on the local charts (Bilby 2006). The songs final stanza, repeated once, invokes the historic connection be-tween Rasta and Christianity. Rastafarianism developed in a colonial society shaped by the ideas and practices of English Christianity, both Anglican and Baptist, and indigenous African Jamaican forms like Revival (Besson 2002, 239275). As the Rastafari movement began without a distinctive music of its own, its early practitioners borrowed Baptist church songs as well as gospel songs known as Sankeys in reference to Ira Sankey (18401908), the musical sidekick of U.S. evangelist Dwight Moody and prolific composer of white gospel song in the late nineteenth century (Reckord 1998, 238, 243244; Stowe 2004, 97105). The phrase Let the words of our mouth / And the meditation of our heart / Be acceptable in Thy sight is a famil-iar benediction among European American Protestants. (The Melodians version adds just the tag O FarI to that traditional benediction.) These evangelical revival accents are especially pronounced in a version of Riv-ers of Babylon by the Skatalites (2006), a prolific Jamaican band that first played together in 1964 and defined the ska sound. Rhythmically, the 4/4 meter is goosed by the rhythm sections emphasis of offbeat eighth notes, a technique that stems from mento. The Skatalites Rivers is the first section of a four-part medley that segues into three traditional Christian spirituals: If I had the wings of a dove / I would fly, fly away, fly away and be at rest; A little more oil in my lamp, keep it burning / Keep it burning til the break of day; and A-amenA-amenA-amen Amen Amen. The uncoupling of Psalm 137 from a conventional sacred performance context culminated in the disco version recorded by Boney M in 1978. The group comprised four West Indian singers, three of them women and two from Jamaica, assembled by a German record producer in the 1970s. Their cover version, with voices soaring over a buoyant disco backbeat, made two significant changes in the Melodians text. First, it reverted to the King James language, replacing How can we sing King Alphas song in a strange land? with How shall we sing the Lords song in a strange land? Second, it dropped the second section of the songthe part most clearly marked by a Rasta political sensibility, the call to Sing a song of freedomand collectively shout down Babylon. The cover did extremely well in Europe, becoming the second biggest selling single in U.K. chart history, and was Boney Ms only song to make the Top 40 in the United States (Erlewine n.d.).


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Rivers of Babylon has been covered regularly in the years since Boney M, with little deviation from the Melodians original. More than forty different artists have recorded it, ranging from Steve Earle and Linda Ronstadt to the Neville Brothers, Vulture Culture, and Sublime. A ver-sion by Sweet Honey in the Rock links most directly to the songs politi-cal heritage. Taking its name from Psalm 82 (with honey out of the rock should I have satisfied thee), the group was founded in 1973 by Bernice Johnson Reagon, who first became known nationally through the Albany Freedom Singers, which helped recruit participants and raise funds for the Freedom Summer voter-registration drive of 1964. Steve Earles version of-fers another intriguing crossing of genres. Earle, a hard-living Texan with outspoken leftist politics, is best known for the controversy over his song John Walkers Blues (2002), which presented a sympathetic account of the young American caught with the Taliban after 9/11. Great-grandson of a Methodist preacher who built a church in Texas that still stands, Earle recorded Rivers of Babylon for 1995 album Train a Comin. At the risk of an anachronism, Psalm 137 has become Americas longest-running political protest song. The psalm clearly fit Puritan assumptions about their own special covenant with God, their status as political exiles, and their need to remember Jerusalem. Like the psalmist, they could wish for divine punishment if they strayed. This investment and identification with ancient Israel has been one of the constants of American history, never less so than in the last fifty years (McAlister 2002). The psalm was power-fully adapted to the struggle for the abolition of slavery and subjugation of African Americans, who likened themselves to the children of Israel, exiled to a strange land. Its text has had strong resonance for the Rasta lib-eration movement and various politically charged musics since the 1960s. Throughout this long development, we see African Americans pressing the political possibilities of the psalm and, in doing so, undermining a series of conventions about of the proper domains of musical and religious practice. The Melodians Rivers of Babylon sounds twice in The Harder They Come. The first comes in the scene where Ivan, just arrived from country, tracks down his mother and delivers the news that her own mother has died. As the song plays in the background, he explains that the family home has been sold off, the money spent on an elaborate funeral for the matriarch; Ivan is now an exile in the strange land of Kingston. He does manage to sing his song (not King Alphas song) for a commercial recording but is exploited by the music industry and turns to the ganja trade. Rivers of Babylon sounds for a second time toward the films end, when the injured Ivan eludes a police manhunt by escaping to Cuba on board a ship. Ulti-mately, he fails to board the ship and is killed shortly after in a gunfight with police. Twice exiled, Ivan dies on the coast of Babylon.

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references

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