recently visited fisk university with a college chamber choir with

Choral Journal Vol. 44 Issue 1 9

Many of the musicalexamples for this article canbe viewed on our Web siteat <www.acdaonline.org/cj/interactive/aug2004>.

I

This article is based in part on the experience of collaborative perfor-mances by the Chamber Singers of Haverford and Bryn Mawr Col-leges, directed by the author, with the Fisk Jubilee Singers under thedirection of Paul Kwami and the Howard University Choir under thedirection of J. Weldon Norris.

Irecently visited Fisk University with a college chamberchoir with the intent of making a pilgrimage to the

birthplace of the concert performance of the African-American spiritual. While there, we were fortunate to share aconcert with the current generation of the Fisk Jubilee Sing-ers®, directed by Professor Paul T. Kwami. This landmarkcampus on a hill looking over Nashville possesses a sense ofhistory that permeates not only the buildings and grounds,but also the imaginations of the current students as well, whoproudly carry on an important legacy of African-Americaneducation and empowerment. The most prominent buildingon campus still is Jubilee Hall, built with funds raised by thefirst two Jubilee Singers tours under the direction of GeorgeL. White and the inspired leadership of Fisk student andformer slave, Ella Sheppard. Within Jubilee Hall hangs the

famous portrait of the second group of Jubilee Singerspainted by the English portraitist Edmund Havell at

the time of the Singers’ historic visit with QueenVictoria.

The most surprising revelationcame the next day at the begin-

ning of our concert in FiskMemorial Chapel. Eleven

of the sixteen currentmembers of the Jubi-lee Singers come out

10 Choral Journal Vol. 44 Issue 1

on stage in Victorian costumes (on a swel-teringly hot day) and moved into theexact same configuration as the elevensingers in the famous portrait in JubileeHall. They presented a medley of spiritu-als called A Portrait Comes to Life.The spirituals were sung using mostlysimple four-part call-and-response har-monizations (as shown in Example1<www.acdaonline.org/cj/interactive/aug2004>). Some of these arrangements arefrom the collection published by formerJubilee Singers director John W. WorkIII1 and are very close in style to thoserecorded by his father with the Fisk Jubi-lee Quartet in the early decades of the

twentieth century.2

The young performers sought to emu-late their predecessors by singing withdirectness, simplicity, restraint, and reso-lute dignity. In between selections, theystepped out from the “portrait” one byone to introduce their historic charactersusing more relaxed inflections suggestiveof the conversational rural dialect of theslaves. They would then step back intothe ensemble to sing another spiritual withtightly unified diction and unmistakableconviction. Hearing the spirituals sungby a small ensemble without a conductorinstilled a desire to explore further theevolution of the spiritual from its origins

in the antebellum slave communities ofthe South to the imaginative choral ar-rangements of the outstanding compos-ers still building on this tradition today.3

As the result of recent research and reis-sues of historic recordings, it is possible toget closer to the heart of the spiritual, notin order to argue for the authenticity ofone particular interpretation over another,but to see how the biblically-based folksongs of the slaves have managed to main-tain their essential integrity in spite ofbeing subjected to a daunting range oftransformations, accommodations, andappropriations.4

The Sound of the Spiritualsin Their Original ContextThe first known recording of black

spirituals is a Columbia cylinder of theStandard Quartette singing Keep Movin’,recorded in 1894 in Washington, D.C.(see Example 2 <www.acdaonline.org/cj/interactive/aug2004>). This track and thefirst disc recordings of the spiritual, whichinclude five Victor tracks of the DinwiddieColored Quartet made in New York in1902, are among a large number of digi-tally restored historic recordings nowavailable on the Document Records la-bel.5 Unfortunately, the invention ofEdison’s tin-foil cylinder phonograph in1877 and Berliner’s gramophone disc re-corder in 1887 came too late to recordthe spirituals as they were sung by theoriginal Fisk Jubilee Singers, not to men-tion the slaves who first sang these songsat camp-meeting revivals, while workingin the fields, or at clandestine churchmeetings.6

However, the slave communities of therelatively remote Sea Islands chain of is-lands lining the east coast from Marylandto Florida have used their relative isola-tion to sustain older traditions that arethought to retain clear elements of nine-teenth-century slave culture from its Afri-can roots. Folklorists Alan Lomax, ZoraNeale Hurston, and Mary ElizabethBarnicle recorded these traditions begin-ning in 1935, including spirituals and“ring shouts” (a tradition with strong Af-rican roots, where dancers would move ina circle while singers surrounded themwith song, often accompanied byrhythmic clapping)7 Example 3<www.acdaonline.org/cj/interactive/aug2004>. These ring shout sessions that

The Jubilee Singers in Victorian costumes


would often take place after late nightworship services, could carry on for hours,late into the night, with some songs start-ing slowly, and then gradually increasingin tempo until the gathering was rousedinto a frenzy.8 Other kinds of spiritualscould be sung slowly, and drawn out withgreat feeling. One of the early accounts ofspirituals sung in their original contextcomes from the abolitionist leaderFrederick Douglass, recalling his days as aslave child on the plantation:

[The spirituals] told a tale of woewhich was then altogether beyondmy feeble comprehension; theywere tones loud, long, and deep,they breathed the prayer andcomplaint of souls boiling over withthe bitterest anguish. Every tonewas testimony against slavery, anda prayer to God for deliverancefrom chains. . . . [I] did not, whena slave, understand the deepmeaning of those rude andapparently incoherent songs.9

From these and other contemporarysources, several elements of the originalperformance style of the spirituals can bededuced:

• Everyone who gathered together par-ticipated in the singing, sometimes at post-worship meetingswith hundreds at a time—therewas no passive audience;

• The singing was improvisatory innature, with words and musicpassed on and embellishedthrough an oral tradition; thismethod was often facilitated bythe “call” of a strong lead singerand the “response” of thosegathered;

• The singing was vigorous. It “wouldmake the dense old woods, formiles around, reverberate withtheir wild songs” with a rangeof vocal color from “speech-like sounds”to“screaming andyelling;”10

• The musical texture can best bedescribed as heterophony,i.e.; rarely were the songs sungpurely in unison or with theindependence of individualpolyphonic voices, but therewas also no clear harmonic orrhythmic uniformity: The leadvoice carried the melody whileother voices harmonized more

or less freely underneath, withintraditional patterns.11

The First Tours of theFisk Jubilee Singers

In 1867, a white, former Union armysergeant named George L. White(1838-95), became the treasurer and oneof the first teachers at the Fisk Free Col-ored School, funded by the American Mis-sionary Association, an abolitionistorganization. After a time, White begangathering a group of students together forinformal singing in his home, in part tokeep his and their spirits from flagging inthe midst of struggles to keep the newschool from going under. He was inspiredby their voices and the dire financial straitsof the college, so he began arranging oc-casional fund-raising concerts for thechoir. The repertoire was drawn from thepopular songs of the day, abolitionisthymns, Scottish folks songs, and eventu-ally complete cantatas.12

The second president of the newschool, Adam Knight Spence, wrote in


usei f

w e w e r espeaking to the audience.’ He hada horror of harsh tones: everythingwas softened; in fact, esses [sic] werenot just softened but sometimesomitted. They were to sing withtheir mouths open wide enough tofit a finger between their teeth. Thesingers had to blend with each

1871 of an incident: “[O]ne day therecame into my room a few students withsome air of mystery. The door was shutand locked, the window curtains weredrawn, and, as if a thing they wereashamed of, they sang some of theold-time religious slave songs nowlong since known as Jubileesongs.”13 Ella Sheppard, theleader of this group of students,who would become lead so-prano, pianist, and onstage di-rector of the Jubilee Singers,wrote of this experience:“[S]itting upon the floor (therewere but few chairs) [we sang]softly, learning from each otherthe songs of our fathers. Wedid not dream of ever usingthem in public.”14

George White began to workclosely with the students, transcrib-ing some of the songs into musicalnotation and encouraging Ella Sheppardand the other students to work out ar-rangements of the songs that they couldperform in public. White then organizedthe group into a resolutely disciplinedensemble. Andrew Ward outlines someof the written accounts from the firststudent singers concerning GeorgeWhite’s approach to singing in this way:

‘He insisted we use the samenaturalness of expression we would

other, listen to the entire ensemble;no voice except a soloist’s was to beheard above another.

Because they were reluctant toexpose their songs to white ears, andbecause they would so often haveto rehearse their pieces in hotelrooms, their pianissimi [sic] wouldbecome a kind of signature of theJubilee sound. White used to ‘tellthe singers to put into the tone theintensity that they would give tothe most forcible one that theycould sing, and yet to make it assoft as they possibly could.’ [T]heysang with ‘so much feeling in everysyllable’ because ‘Mr. Whitedrilled that into us.’15

The style of singing described hereseems to be a far cry from the free,

robust communal singing in the fields ofante-bellum plantations. It would also behard to dismiss the view of some in theblack community at the time that per-forming the spirituals in concert in thisway represented a humiliating accommo-dation to white audiences. They saw it asan inappropriate sharing of a part of theircultural heritage that was painful and bet-ter to be kept within the collectivememory of the people who suffered un-der slavery. By the turn of the century,there were even a few open rebellions inblack colleges such as Fisk and Howard,and in some prominent black churchesagainst the idea of performing spiritu-als.16 As time passes, the achievements ofthe Fisk Jubilee Singers continue to beappreciated as more courageous and far-reaching in influence than may have beenrealized at the time.

Countering the Images ofBlack-faced Minstrelsy

The final abolition of slavery by thepassage of the thirteenth amendment tothe Constitution in 1865 initiated one ofthe most dramatic social transformationsin history, as four million newly freedslaves began to recreate themselves afterthree centuries of servitude, arbitrary sev-erance of family ties, and prohibitionsagainst education. Entire communitiesand an educational and economic systemhad to be created from scratch. Even inthe northern states to which many of the


newly freed slaves fled, the predominantcultural and purely musical images of Af-rican-Americans were derived from black-faced minstrelsy.

Although this movement is sometimesviewed today as a quaint, racist relic onthe fringe of American culture, it was, infact, the dominant form of entertainmentfor the entire last half of the nineteenthcentury. Offshoots continued into thenext century, in radio and television showssuch as Amos ‘n Andy, which remainedhugely popular into the 1960s. What wasthen also known as “Ethiopian minstrelsy”involved the appropriation of black folksongs by professional white performerswhose faces were blackened by cork. Theysuccessfully sought to draw laughter atthe expense of the black characters theymimed, in particular the slickly urban“Zip Coon” and the laggardly plantationhand “Jim Crow.” (The latter’s name waslater given to the whole era of racial segre-gation in the South).17 Following eman-cipation, black performers also began toform their own minstrel groups, re-claim-ing the material in their own fashion, inorder to take advantage of the only av-enue to the theater and concert stage avail-able to them at the time.18

Many of the songs that came out ofthis era are still with us today, such asPolly-wolly-doodle, Buffalo Gals, ArkansasTraveler, Turkey in the Straw (which is thename of the instrumental version of Ol’Zip Coon), among many others, becausetheir melodies, originating in black folkculture, are great tunes that easily and

pleasantly stay in the memory. Unlike thespirituals, however, the words did notoriginate with the tunes, and often stillreflect, in subtle or not so subtle ways, the

ridicule intended by black-face perform-ers. These songs have become so much apart of our cultural “wallpaper” at thispoint that the words or their original con-text are rarely considered.19 Eileen South-ern summarizes the contradictions of thismusical genre in this way:

The practices of ‘Ethiopian’minstrels in the nineteenth centuryestablished unfortunate stereotypeso f b l ack men—as sh i f t l e s s ,irresponsible, thieving, happy-go-lucky ‘plantation darkies’—that

persisted into the twentieth centuryon the vaudeville stage, in musicalcomedy, on the movie screen, radio,and television. And yet, blackfaceminstrelsy was a tribute to the blackman’s music and dance, in that theleading figures of the entertainmentworld spent the better part of thenineteenth century imitating hisstyle.20

Assessing the Achievementsof the Fisk Jubilee Singers

Seen in this context, it was quitestartling for white audiences to see onstage a group of nine former slaves,dressed not in the tatters of Jim Crowor the slick-city outfits of Zip Coon,but in simple, dignified suits andgowns, performing the spiritual songsof the slaves with a restraint, control,and expressive intensity that would takethe audience’s breath away. One lis-tener closely affiliated with the singers,

Mary Spence, observed:

[The opening pianissimo was so]exquisite in quality, full of thedeepest feeling, so exceedingly softthat it could hardly be heard, yetbecause of its absolute puritycarrying to the farthest part of anylarge hall, it commanded theattention of every audience. As thetone floated out a little louder,clearer, rose to the tremendouscrescendo of My Lord Calls Me, and

y the turn of the century, there

were even a few open rebellions in

black colleges such as Fisk and

Howard, and in some prominent

black churches against the idea of

performing spirituals.16

B


diminished again into exquisitepianissimo sweetness, the mostcritical enemy was conquered.21

In four tours between 1871 and 1882,the vocal ensemble of between nine andeleven singers succeeded beyond anyone’swildest expectations. They achieved theirinitial goal of raising a huge sum ofmoney ($150,000) for the survival ofFisk University that would go on to edu-cate a range of important leaders, fromearly literary figures such as W.E.B.DuBois and James Weldon Johnson, topolitical leaders such as John Lewis andAlcee Hastings. The Jubilees introducedthe spiritual songs of the slaves to mil-lions of listeners across the northeasternUnited States and Europe. In so doing,they served to preserve a cornerstone ofAfrican-American culture for their ownpeople and to bequeath to the world oneof its most life-affirming cultural lega-cies.

Even in the early days of the first tourwhen they needed every cent of ticketrevenue just to keep going, the Jubilees

were also pioneers in the dawning strugglefor civil rights by refusing to perform inauditoriums or churches that prohibitedattendance by blacks. They confrontedthe harsh segregation of public accom-modations in the supposedly more hospi-table North, often by reminding hotelmanagers and restaurateurs how differ-ently they had been treated in Europe.They had some success in breaking a num-ber of racial barriers along the way, suchas the segregation of Pullman rail cars in1880.22

Andrew Ward has aptly summarizedthe lasting impact of the music they per-formed and the way they performed it.

What the Jubilees accomplished forthemselves and the nation wasto demonstrate the dignity ,intelligence, and educability ofblack Americans. In the circles ofthe wealthy, a man might once havegotten away with casually remarkingthat higher education was wasted onblacks. But without abandoningtheir own culture and traditions, theJubi lees provided v iv id andconvincing proof to the contrary.Their music demonstrated to theworld that there was something oflasting value in African-Americanculture.23

Word of the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ suc-cess spread quickly among the other newlyemerging colleges such as the HamptonInstitute in Virginia and the Fairfield Nor-mal Institute in South Carolina.24 How-ever, this increased touring activity dilutedcritical financial support for touring en-sembles from church foundations. By thetime of the fourth tour of the Fisk JubileeSingers (1879-82), decreased fundingfrom the American Missionary Associa-tion forced them to operate independentlyof the university.

The Fisk Singers had adopted the name“Jubilee” (associated with the biblical “yearof Jubilee” when all slaves were to befreed) to differentiate themselves fromminstrel groups and their repertory.25

However, their popular success had suchan effect that minstrel groups began tocall themselves “Jubilees,” as they tookthe new sacred songs and added them toportions of their shows, mocking the reli-gious gatherings of the slaves.26

he Jubilees introduced the spiri-tual songs of the slaves to millions oflisteners across the northeasternUnited States and Europe.

T


By the end of the fourth tour, thedeclining health of George White andexhaustion of Ella Sheppard led to twoseparate Fisk Jubilee Singer groups beingformed by two of their singers, FrederickLoudin and Maggie Porter. Both groupstoured the world, including East Asia,until the turn of the century. But by then,the Jubilees were all but lost in the crowdof imitators and minstrel troupes.27 W. E.B. DuBois observed: “Since their day theyhave been imitated—sometimes well, bythe singers of Hampton and Atlanta,sometimes ill, by straggling quartets. Cari-cature has sought again to spoil the quaintbeauty of the music, and has filled the airwith many debased melodies which vul-gar ears scarce know from the real.”28

The Popularity ofEarly Recordings of the

Fisk Jubilee QuartetHowever, the next generation of Fisk

Jubilee Singers created one more majorresurgence of the spiritual into main-stream American popular culture. In1899, John W. Work II (1871-1925), ayoung member of the Fisk faculty, set outto reclaim the integrity of the spiritual byforming a touring male quartet, of whichhe was first tenor.29 Reasons for forminga male quartet to carry on the traditionare open to speculation, but the barber-shop quartet movement had begun toflourish around 1895,30 and the voicingof the Fisk Quartet arrangements hadsome similarities with the sartorial genre,having the top voice float freely in har-mony above the lead melody in the sec-ond tenor.

The development of a Fisk Jubilee malequartet may have been beneficial whenten years later John Work negotiated asignificant contract with the Victor Talk-ing Machine Company for a series of com-mercial recording sessions. Acousticrecording at the time required perform-ing into a large horn (similar to theVictrola horn seen on Victor’s famous “hismaster’s voice” emblem). This reduced thenumber of performers who could be ef-fectively recorded. Recording engineerstended to favor strong, focused malevoices over larger ensembles with a higheror more diffuse sound.31 John Work andhis early collaborators (who includedJames Myers, tenor, Alfred King or LeonO’Hara baritone, and Noah Ryder, bass)

certainly met those requirements. Theirvoices were resonant, vibrant, beautifullycentered, and deftly tuned. The four-voiced harmonies were perfectly balancedand rhythmically unified. These impres-sive performances were all done in one orat most two complete recordings.

In the early years of an industry thathad thus far recorded exclusively whiteartists, Victor was taking something of arisk by recording the Fisk Quartet.Although the company’s advertising copydescribed the spiritual’s religious content

as “quaint conceptions” that “sometimesexcite to laughter,” it nevertheless labeledthem “folk songs” rather than “coonsongs,” the only category reserved forBlack music of any kind. Victor also tookthe unusual step of listing the names ofthe quartet on the label as a means ofassuring the audience of the authenticityof the Fisk connection.32 Their coverphoto was in concert dress, white tie, andtails.33 The page opposite Victor’s an-nouncement of the first Fisk recordingpromoted a new release of Down Where


the Big Bananas Grow by black-face co-medians Collins and Harlan—“anotherof those real darky shouts by the everwelcome ‘Kings of Comedy.’”34 However,Victor’s investment in the Fisks paid off,as recordings of the Jubilee Quartet re-leased between 1910 and the early 1920s,primarily by Victor, but also by Colum-bia, have been estimated at over two mil-lion copies sold.35

The exigencies of the recording indus-try had contributed to having the spiri-

tual presented to the world in what wasprobably an even more intimate and re-fined style than that of the first Fisk en-sembles. Again, this would seem to befairly distant from the communal styleand social context of the oppressive plan-tation conditions under which the spiri-tuals were first sung. However, insofar asthe quartet arrangements still reflect therelatively straightforward choral harmo-nizations worked out by Ella Sheppardand her fellow Jubilees, the melodic and

harmonic language can be heard as re-maining connected to the music of theplantation fields. These arrangementsshare several elements that point to theoriginal musical textures of the slave sing-ers discussed earlier: the call-and-responseform with a song leader and harmonizers,the lead singer taking creative libertieswith the melody or its upper harmoniza-tion, and the lower parts moving withcharacteristic harmonic progressions, al-beit ones that have been decided upon inadvance.35

Performance Characteristicsof Early Recordings

For example, in the 1909 recording ofI Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray,36 JohnWork’s voice soars above the melody quitefreely and expressively, revealing an im-provisatory artistry associated with thespiritual far beyond the vocal conventionsof other quartet genres such as barber-shop. (Example 4 <www.acdaonline.org/cj/interactive/aug 2004>.) Another cutfrom a Victor recording session two yearslater, Po’ Mourner’s Got a Home at Last,38

is remarkable for its divergence from tra-ditional harmonization. (Example 5<www.acdaonline.org/cj/interactive/aug2004>.) Until the final cadence, there isno four-part harmony at all, but ratherunisons, solos, and duets with the hightenor and low bass in octaves on the word-less, free vocalizations of the refrain. Up-tempo spirituals such as O Mary Don’tYou Weep Don’t You Mourn (recorded forColumbia in 191539) swing with an in-fectious rhythmic buoyancy and a pulsethat never wavers. (Example 6<www.acdaonline.org/cj/interactive/aug2004>.)

One track from these early recordings,Old Black Joe, bears mentioning in lightof the earlier discussion of the minstrelmovement. The 1909 Victor recording ofthe Fisk Quartet singing Old Black Joe byStephen Foster (1826-64)40 is remarkablefor a most unusual, haunting arrange-ment. John Work’s tenor is heard floatingway above Noah Ryder’s bass on themelody, a spacious, almost symphonic useof solo voices. The text, depicting thenostalgia of an old male slave for timesgone by, speaks of “the days when myheart was young and gay” and “Whereare the hearts once so happy and free?”(Example 7 <www.acdaonline.org/cj/interactive/aug 2004>.)


Foster’s songs were a regular and popu-lar part of the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ non-spiritual repertoire. America’s most famoussongwriter of the era, Foster aspired toreform the demeaning aspects of the min-strel repertoire with carefully crafted melo-dies consciously written in emulation(some would later say appropriation) ofthe black spirituals. His songs romanti-cized the plantation life of the slaves whileglossing over the harsh realities of thatlife, making them easier for white audi-ences to hear. Foster’s songs were peren-nial favorites of black minstrel groups aswell as the Jubilee Singers, were lookedupon favorably by no less a black leaderof the time than W.E.B Du Bois, andwere performed by prominent black re-citalists in the twentieth century such asHarry T. Burleigh and Paul Robeson.During the civil rights movement of the1960s, there was a reaction against thelegacy of minstrelsy and Foster’s proxim-ity to the genre, but later scholarship sawhis contribution in a more positive lightfor its perceived role in promoting racialreconciliation. 41

At the end of 1916, John Work retiredfrom the quartet and handed over theleadership to the second tenor, ReverendJames Myers, whose wife Henrietta (al-ways listed as “Mrs. James A. Myers”)also became involved. Though generallyunheard while doubling one of the middleparts, she eventually took over leadershipof the Fisk Jubilees upon her husband’sdeath in 1928.42 Recording sessions con-tinued, with Columbia and smaller la-bels,43 but these never sold nearly as wellas the earlier Victor recordings (whichremained in the catalog until 192844).The performances never quite ascendto the level of the sessions led by Work.A comparison between the 1909 (Victor)and 1920 (Columbia) takes of Roll, Jor-dan, Roll shows the earlier recording to bemuch more vibrant and expressively ener-gized with Work’s soaring tenor on top.45

(Examples 8 and 9 <www.acdaonline.org/cj/interactive/aug 2004>.) Interestingly,the later recording also raises the famouslowered seventh of the refrain, contraryto the earlier recording and the versionlater notated by Work’s son.46 A dramaticdifference in dynamic shading occurs withthe wider frequency range of the first elec-tronic recordings of the Fisks by Colum-bia in 1926, here with a quintet led byReverend and Mrs. Myers.47 (Example 10<www.acdaonline.org/cj/interactive/aug

2004>.)The music of the spirituals had again

reached an international mass audience,this time through the medium of a newtechnology that would revolutionize the

world of music. The spirituals were nowpresented by four men singing alone in aroom, one-on-a-part, through a mega-phone. The resulting record albums, withtheir formal photograph in white tie andtails on the cover, would reach millions.As different as this was from the pictureof a large community of people in bond-

age singing for their collective survival,the essential musical form of the spiritu-als remained intact: unaccompanied sing-ing, a lead voice carrying the melody withan improvisatory feeling, and characteris-

tic harmonization underneath, albeit withconcert hall clarity. The religious and po-litical implications of the texts were prob-ably missed by most of an audience stillenthralled by minstrel tunes. However, aswas the case in a different mode of per-formance for the original Fisk JubileeSingers, the dignity and emotional direct-

oster’s songs were a regular and

popular part of the Fisk Jubilee Sing-

ers’ non-spiritual repertoire.

F


ness with which the songs were performedcoaxed a wide range of listeners to re-spond to this music seriously and on itsown expressive terms.

Musical and Social Upheavalin the Jazz Age

The social and musical upheaval ofthe 1920s provided the greatest challengethe spiritual would yet faced in main-taining its integrity while avoiding ex-tinction. By the end of this period, itwould find itself no longer sharing mar-ket space with the icons of American popculture, but in exchange would reach saferand more permanent places to grow, inthe concert hall and in the repertory ofprofessional, school, church, and com-munity choirs all over the world.

In the wake of the first World War, inwhich over 200,000 black men foughtand served (including those in a numberof outstanding service bands), the secularside of black folk music began to breakthe shackles of minstrelsy and strike outwith an independence of its own. Blackartists developed their folk music tradi-

tions in a way that caught the attention ofthe tunesmiths of Tin Pan Alley and theleading modernist composers of Europe.What became known as “jazz” grew outof the emergence of ragtime, brass bandmusic, syncopated dance music, and theblues.48 Well suited to the energies of theage, this music was aggressive, sensuous,and the instruments of the band claimedcenter stage. The influence of the spiri-tual was not completely obscured by allthis high energy,49 but it was increasinglyviewed by a younger generation as a mu-sical relic of the past.

In the black churches, the spiritual hadbeen almost completely replaced in wor-ship by charismatic gospel music, whichhad come into its own by adapting theharmonies, rhythms, and instrumentalaccompaniments of the blues and jazz tothe congregational lining-out of hymnsthat had continued since the Great Re-vival.50 As demonstrated in recording ses-sions continuing into the 1920s, the Fiskgroups firmly held the line against anyencroachment by the newly popular styles,maintaining an unaccompanied vocal tex-ture with subtly inflected melodies and

straightforward harmonies.51 However,Tim Brooks noted that even the leadingblack journals of the day (which usuallymade a point of celebrating black artisticaccomplishment) such as The Freeman,the New York Age, and The Crisis (thejournal of the NAACP) made little refer-ence to the Fisk recordings, even in theyears of their peak popularity.52 By theend of the “roaring 20s,” the male quartethad moved on from the spiritual to gos-pel, with groups such as the Dixie Hum-mingbirds, the Soul Stirrers, and SwanSilvertones.53

Harry T. Burleigh andthe Solo Spiritual

The next form in which the spiritualcaptured the imagination of the concert-going and record-collecting public wasthe solo song accompanied by piano. Thisform was given birth by Harry T. Burleigh(1866-1949), a successful baritone recit-alist and composer. As a student at theNational Conservatory in New York,Burleigh worked closely with the esteemedAntonin Dvorák (1841-1904). Respond-ˇ


a purely instrumental inflection. (Ex-amples 11, 12 <www.acdaonline.org/cj/interactive/aug 2004>.)

Hall Johnson and theEmergence of Larger Mixed

Professional Vocal EnsemblesMeanwhile, new professional vocal en-

sembles devoted to the spiritual with largernumbers of women’s and men’s voices be-gan to emerge, bringing a more vigoroussound and musicality to the genre.Violinist, violist, and composer HallJohnson (1888-1970) formed an en-semble of eight singers in 1925 that grewto twenty by the time the choir made itsNew York City concert and Victor re-cording debuts in 1928.57 (Example 13<www.acdaonline.org/cj/interactive/aug2004>.) Johnson was looking for a differ-ent kind of compositional style to evokethe sound he heard from the former slavesof his Georgia childhood. In an interviewwith Eileen Southern, he said that hesought to preserve “[T]he conscious andintentional alterations of pitch oftenmade. . . . The unconscious, but amazingand bewildering counterpoint produced

by so many voices in individual improvi-sation. . . . The absolute insistence uponthe pulsing, overall rhythm, combiningmany varying subordinate rhythms.”58

Johnson sought to bring the palpablesound of the community singing of theslave songs on the plantations to the con-cert hall by involving a larger number ofvoices in more complex counterpoint.Ironically, this led to a more highly-evolved compositional style, where thehand of the composer came to the foremore than in the earlier arrangements,where for one or two voices on a part,improvisation did not need to be writtenout. (Figure 1)

Johnson’s choir and his fresh arrange-ments were so well received, he was soonengaged for a Broadway musical, TheGreen Pastures (1930), which thenbrought him to Hollywood for the movieversion in 1936.58 This hugely successfullandmark production offered Johnson theopportunity to reach a large audiencewith his new choral arrangements, whichare heard almost continuously through-out the show. Opinion among black crit-ics at the time was divided. Some critics,such as Langston Hughes, decried the

BT

E li jah, rock!

Figure 1. Hall Johnson, Elijah Rock, mm. 74 - 80.

Shout, shout! E li jah, rock! Com in’ up, Lord.

AS

Rock, E li jah! Shout, shout! Rock, E li jah! Com in’ up, Lord.

Sop.Ob.

Ah! Com in’ up, Lord.

BT

Oh, E li jah, rock! Shout, shout! E li jah, rock! Com in’ up, Lord, Oh,

AS

(73)

Rock, E li jah! Shout, shout! Rock, E li jah! Com in’ up, Lord y!

ˇ

ˇ

ˇ

ˇ

ing to his teacher’s interest in the spiri-tual, he sang the songs for him for hourson end, inspiring Dvorák to challengeAmerican composers to develop a nationalstyle of their own with the spiritual as afoundation.54 One biographer reported astory that Dvorák changed the famousspiritual-like solo in the slow movementof his New World Symphony to be playedby English horn instead of clarinet, inorder to match the color of Burleigh’svoice.55 His 1916 publication of the Jubi-lee Songs of the United States of Americawas the first published collection of spiri-tual arrangements for solo voice and pi-ano. By the mid-1920s, outstanding blackconcert singers such as Roland Hayes(1887-1976), Paul Robeson (1898-1976),and Marian Anderson (1902-93) beganto make recordings of the song arrange-ments of Burleigh and others that metwith significant popular success. (Hayescan be heard with the Fisk Jubilee Quar-tet on second tenor in five tracks recordedby Edison on cylinder in 1911.56) Theauthoritative voices of these great singersgave a much more intensely personal ex-pression to the now familiar spirituals,with the piano giving the harmonization

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Pulitzer Prize winning play for its rein-forcement of many of the typical stereo-types of black religiosity and socialcustoms. Others, most notably JamesWeldon Johnson, were so moved by theopportunity it created for black actors todisplay the highest level of artistry, theywere willing to overlook limitations theyfelt the actors transcended.59 As such, theBroadway show, movie, and subsequenttouring shows (many of which were closedto black audiences) represented a returnof the kind of broad exposure the spiritualreceived through the tours of the earlyFisk Jubilee Singers and the recordings ofthe Fisk Quartet.

Another important professional choirto emerge in the late 1920s was conductedby Eva Jessye (1895-1992), who becamethe first black woman to be internation-ally recognized as a professional choralconductor.61 She gained further promi-nence through her work as chorus direc-tor for the operatic premiers of VirgilThomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts andGeorge Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.62 Manyof the leading black concert artists of the

day passed through Eva Jessye’s choirs.Professional black choirs continue to playan important role in the preservation andadvancement of the spiritual, rangingfrom longstanding groups such as theAlbert McNeil Jubilee Singers in Los An-geles (beginning in 1968) and the BrazealDennard Chorale in Detroit (from 1972)to newer groups such as the Moses HoganChorale in New Orleans and the recentlyformed Nathaniel Dett Chorale in Tor-onto.

William L. Dawson and theEmergence of Large Mixed

Choirs in the HistoricalBlack Colleges

During this same pre-war period, theprofessional touring ensembles from theHistorical Black Colleges faced more of astruggle, affected not only by changingmusical fashions, but also by drastic bud-get retrenchment in their institutionsbrought on by the Depression. Fisk Uni-versity decided to disband the Jubilee

Singers in 1932 until their director,Henrietta (Mrs. James) Myers, formed asuccessful octet touring group and per-suaded the university to stay the course.63

Recordings of the octet under Mrs.Myers’s direction64 show the arrangementsmoving in a more choral direction. Mean-while, the college began to develop a largerall-student mixed choir, as was the case atmany other schools, such as the Hamp-ton Institute under the Canadian-borncomposer R. Nathaniel Dett.

A major step forward in the perfor-mance of the spirituals by larger collegechoirs came with the leadership of Will-iam L. Dawson (1899-1990), who di-rected the Tuskegee Institute Choir inAlabama from 1931-55. Dawson beganhis tenure at Tuskegee by bringing a 100-voice college choir to perform for an en-tire week at the opening of Radio CityMusic Hall in New York City in 1932.Dawson’s arrangements and the sound ofhis choirs introduced a more vigorous styleof singing the spirituals. In arrangementssuch as his Ezekiel saw de wheel, Ev’ryTime I Feel the Spirit, and Ain’-a ThatGood News! the rhythmic momentum ofthe song brings to mind the contempo-rary accounts of the slaves singing in aring shout, where they “would make thedense old woods, for miles around, rever-berate with their wild songs.”65 His trade-mark closing phrases are full of richlyvoiced extended harmonies that bring theaccumulated rhythmic energy to anecstatic conclusion. (Example 14<www.acdaonline.org/cj/interactive/aug2004>.) Some of his arrangements of the


slower songs, especially Steal Away ex-plore unexpected harmonic regions andtake on the character of an extended tonepoem, looking at the same material fromdifferent points of view (Figure 2). Inthis, he was not unlike his contemporar-ies Hall Johnson and R. Nathaniel Dett,who were unafraid to let their musicaltraining and imagination build highlyoriginal arrangements that went well be-yond the simple harmonization of thefolk melodies. An unusually large num-ber of Dawson’s arrangements are stillamong the most performed of any com-poser in the choral repertoire, and remainmodels for many composers who havefollowed in the tradition.

The Spiritualas Freedom Song

Looking back, we can see how each ofthe dramatically different manifestationsof the concert spiritual managed to pre-serve some but not all elements of what

we think of as how the spirituals origi-nally sounded. The first touring groupsof the Fisk Jubilee Singers established theessential dignity of the songs, allowingthem to speak to new audiences with sim-plicity and directness. The male quartetsshowed how vocal refinement could re-veal an intimacy and pure songfulness inthe spirituals that might otherwise havebeen missed. The great soloists displayedthe artistry of subtly improvised inflec-tion, in the way that a slave song leader

might have put his personal stamp on asong. The extended arrangements forlarge professional and college choirs re-vived a sense of the collective power ofcommunal singing. But while all this cre-ativity preserved and re-invigorated themusic of the spiritual, it was still a strugglefor the spiritual to penetrate the mindsof its listeners with the meaning the songshad in the hearts of those who performedthem, who were the descendents of theslaves.

steal a way,

Figure 2. William L. Dawson, Steal Away, Ending, mm. 68 - 80.

steal a way, a way home.(hum)

8I ain’t got long to stay here, steal a way, steal

Soli for 3 Tenors

a way, steal a way.

steal a way, steal a way home.(hum)

74

steal a way home.(hum)

B

Steal

a tempo

a way, steal a way,

T

8Steal

a tempo

a way, steal a way, steal a way,

A

Steal

a tempo

a way, steal a way, steal a way, steal a way,

S

68

Steal

a tempo

a way, steal a way, steal a way, steal

espr.

a way home,

awson’s arrangements and the

sound of his choirs introduced a more

vigorous style of singing the spiritu-

als.

D


Certainly, once the music had survivedthe popular exposure of triumphant worldtours, hit recordings of quartets or re-nowned soloists, and the Hollywood fan-fare of the movies, there would be morespace to present the music for its ownsake. In the concert hall, academy, orchurch, spirituals could be performedalongside affectionate commentary ontheir origins and meaning. However, itwas perhaps only with the recruitment ofthe spiritual to the service of the CivilRights Movement in the 1960s that thesongs came into their own as music thattold a story and inspired action. Moreoften than not, the original words werechanged to make the already multi-lay-ered symbolic meanings of the spiritualsexplicit to the modern ear. However, itwas not a far stretch to modify the text ofthe spiritual Hold On! from “Keep onclimbin’, and don’t you tire,/ Ev’ry runggoes high’r and high’r,” to “We’re gonnaride for civil rights,/ we’re gonna ride bothblack and white.”66 The revival of thespiritual as freedom song, sung by whole

rooms or streets full of people whose onlyaudience was a transfixed world lookingon, was not just a by-product of the move-ment, but an essential expression ofits heart and soul. (Example 15<www.acdaonline.org/cj/interactive/aug2004>.) With a new awareness of theunfinished business of the EmancipationProclamation, the spiritual was under-stood again as a powerful vehicle for theexpression of human sorrow, active resis-tance to injustice, and confidence in ajust future.

Performing the SpiritualsToday

The challenge of building racial justiceand understanding in American society isstill very much an unfinished businesstoday. Though there were many whitecollege students joining their black broth-ers and sisters in singing freedom songs inthe 1960s, as a white director of pre-dominantly white choirs, I am frequentlyapproached by my white students with a

confession that they don’t feel right aboutsinging the spirituals. On one level thisexpression of unformed white guiltreflects an admirable recognition that thismusic grows out of the suffering of apeople who were enslaved by the societyof their ancestors.

And yet, to assume that people whoare not African-American are categoricallyunable to connect as performers with theunderlying meaning of the spiritual riskstaking us back to the very basis of racism:the denial of another people’s commonhumanity because of racial distinctions.Most great works of art have attaineduniversal status because they are able toarticulate ideas and emotions coming outof a very particular time and place in away that other people can readily under-stand, even in vastly different cultural andhistoric situations.

Certainly the origins of the African-American spiritual in the enslavement ofone group of people by another make itsignificant. It is a measure of the achieve-ment of the people who first sang thesemelodies that their songs not only servedto sustain a sense of hope for the slavecommunity through great adversity, butalso have gone on to speak powerfully ofthe desire for hope in the face of despairfor people all over the world as America’smost recognizable form of vocal music.

As in the performance of any musicnot composed in our own contemporarycommunity, interpretation requires ameeting of two different cultures. Wemust first seek to understand the originsof the spiritual—such things as its reli-gious and political meaning for the slavecommunity who first sang them, its lay-ers of symbolic subtext related to seekingescape from slavery, and the nature of thechoir for which the arranger wrote for,even the sound of that choir if recordingsare available. All this is in an effort to seekto understand the music on its own terms,as close to the full context of its origins aswe can. However, the next step is not totry to imitate one of the great HallJohnson or Tuskegee Institute choirs, butto look honestly at our own choir, ourown experience, our own world perspec-tive, and try to find lines of connection.Our goal, as with any music, should be tosing the music honoring the integrity ofthe song and its creators and the innatecharacter and identity of our particularensemble.


NOTES1 John W. Work (III), American Negro Songs

and Spirituals (New York: BonanzaBooks, 1940).

2 Fisk Jubilee Singers Volumes 1 (1909-1911)and 2 (1915-1920). Document Records,DOCD-5533,5534; for recent recordingsof the current Fisk Jubilee Singers underPaul Kwami, see the college Web site at<www.fisk.eduindex.asp?cat=16&pid=166>.

3 This experience at Fisk also brought to mindthat I could not remember having heardone of the many still thriving HistoricalBlack College choirs at an ACDAconvention in recent years. If my memoryis not mistaken, the wider choralcommunity is missing out on theopportunity to remain connected to themost essential living link to the historyof America’s important contribution tochoral repertoire.

4 For a thorough recent discussion of issues ofauthenticity related to the understandingof the spiritual (well beyond stylisticperformance issues), see Jon Cruz,Culture on the Margins—The BlackSpiritual and the Rise of American CulturalInterpretation. (Princeton: Princeton U.Press, 1999). Cruz credits educators inthe new black colleges for preserving acultural tradition that was otherwise indanger of being lost (the freed slaves oftenshowed little interest in preserving thesongs because they reminded them oftheir oppression, while white societytreated black musical sources withridicule and appropriation). But at thesame time, he feels this wider exposureled to a romanticized approach bynorthern white liberal abolitionists and adetached scientific approach by emergingacademic folklorists, both of which servedto distance the observers from the peoplewho originally sang the spirituals andtheir predicament, and by extension, thepredicament they faced in the rapidlyindustrializing and segregated Northalongside the failure of Reconstructionin the South.

5 The Earliest Negro Vocal Quartets—1894-1928. Document Records: DOCD-5061.For a complete catalogue listing ofDocument’s historic re-issues, see< w w w . d o c u m e n t - r e c o r d s . c o m >(recordings of spirituals are found in the5000 series).

6 Eileen Southern notes that while the slaveswere often forbidden from gathering

independently for church services out offear of fomenting rebellions, their mastersusually preferred to hear them singing inthe fields as a way to know that theywere working, and to track how far alongthey had progressed. (The Music of BlackAmericans—A History, Third Edition.(New York: W.W.Norton, 1997) 161).She also remarks that many whites choseto interpret the singing of the slaves as asign of contentment with their condition(Ibid., 177).

7 Among the numerous recordings of Sea Islandsinging are Southern Journey, Vol. 12 —Georgia Sea Islands—Biblical Songs andSpirituals (Rounder, CD 1712), TheMcIntosh County Shouters—Slave ShoutSongs f rom the Coas t o f Georg ia(Smithsonian/Folkways, CD FE 4344),Been So Long in the Storm—Spirituals,Folk Tales and Children’s Games fromJ o h n ’ s I s l a n d , S o u t h C a r o l i n a(Smithsonian/Folkways SF 40031). Morerecently, Bernice Johnson Reagon hasrecorded the congregational singing ofcurrent churches who still remain tied tothese earlier ways of singing: Wade in theWater, Volume II, African-AmericanCongregational Singing (Smithsonian/Folkways, CD SF40073).

8 Southern, 181-2.9 Frederick F. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of

Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,Written by Himself (1845; reprint, NewYork: Penguin Books, 1982), 58 (quotedby Cruz, Culture, 23). For a detailedstudy of the ante-bellum origins of theblack spiritual, see Dena J. Epstein, SinfulTunes and Spirituals—Black Folk Musicto the Civil War (Urbana: University ofIllinois Press, 1977).

10 Southern, 201-3.11 Southern, 198.12 Andrew Ward, Dark Midnight When I Rise

(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,2000) 83, 90. Ward’s book contains athorough and detailed account of theorigins and first tours of the Fisk JubileeSingers, and was accompanied by a videodocumentary produced by WGBH andNashville Public Television for the PBSAmerican Experience series: LlewellynSmith and Andrew Ward, Jubilee Singers:Sacrifice and Glory (60”) availablethrough <www.shop.pbs.org>.

13 Adam Knight Spence, undated lecture, MaryElizabeth Spence Collection, Notebooks;quoted in Ward 110.

14 Ella Sheppard Moore, “Historical Sketch of

the Jubilee Singers,” quoted in Ward 110.15 Ward, 114-115.16 John Lovell, Jr., Black Song: The Forge and

the Flame (New York: Paragon House,1972) 416; Ward 399-400.

17 For an introduction to black-face minstrelsy,see Southern The Music, 89-96, andBean, Hatch, McNamara ed., Inside theMinstrel Mask—Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy (Hanover,NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996).For a thorough discussion of the broadercultural ramifications and complexities ofthe minstrel period, see Eric Lott, Loveand Theft—Blackface Minstrelsy and theAmerican Working Class. Lott’s thesis isthat the minstrelsy movement representeda complex love/hate relationship betweenwhite society and black culture, a way inwhich whites deal with their fascinationwith this culture and their repressed needto overcome racial segregation, notbecause of the injustice it brought toblacks, but because of the void it left inwhite culture.

18 Southern, 237.19 It doesn’t take much to see the offence

intended in some of the texts, like “Ol’Dan Tucker,” who “washed his face witha fryin’ pan, combed his hair with awagon wheel,” etc., but with other songswhose words on the surface seem morebenign (i.e., “Turkey in the Straw”), thefact that their crude texts were applied toblack folk music by white entertainerssolely for the purpose of enhancing theridicule intended by their farcicallycostumed and choreographed danceperformances should at least give onepause before singing them.

20 Southern, 96.21 Mary Spence, “A Character Sketch of George

L. White,” Fisk University News, Oct.1911 (Fisk University Collection),quoted by Ward 153-4.

22 Joe M. Richardson, History of Fisk University1865-1946 (University of Alabama:1980) 49 (cited in Ward 383).

23 Ward, 394-5.24 Southern, 229.25 Ward, 139.26 Lott, 235-6.27 Ward, 373-93.28 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

(1903; reprint ed., New York: SignetClassic 1995), 267, quoted in TimBrooks, ‘“Might Take One Disc of ThisTrash as a Novelty” : Early Recordingsby the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the


Popularization of “Negro Folk Music,”’American Music 18:3 [Fall 2000] 282 (thephrase at the beginning of the title ofBrooks’s article refers to a remark madeby Thomas Edison before deciding notto issue three test cylinder recordings ofthe Fisk Jubilee Quartet [Brooks 295]).

29 Brooks (283) suggests that the quartet thatmade the first Victor recordings wasdrawn from a larger Fisk chorus, butwithout citing a reference. Ward (404)says that there was a period from 1916to 1925 where Fisk supported aprofessional quartet and a student choirfor fund-raising performances, citingRichardson 81.

29 V. Hicks, ‘Barbershop’, The New GroveDictionary of Music Online ed L. Macy( A c c e s s e d 8 / 1 5 / 0 3 ) , < h t t p : / /www.grovemusic.com>.

31 Brooks, 284.32 Brooks, 283-286.33 Document-Records DOCD-5533 cover.34 Brooks, 289.35 Brooks, 297-8.36 The harmonizations on the early recordings

are fairly close to those preserved in JohnW. Work III’s later collection AmericanNegro Songs and Spirituals (New York:Bonanza Books, 1940). John Work IIand his folklorist brother Frederickpublished several collections and historiesof the spiritual, most notably Folk Songof the American Negro (New York: NegroUniversities Press, 1915).

37 Document-Records DOCD-5533 track 2(1909).




41 Deane L. Root: ‘Foster, Stephen Collins’, Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy

(Accessed 30 April, 2004), http://www.grovemusic.com. For a provocativerecent biography of the composer withan overview of the place of Foster’s songsin American culture, see Ken Emerson’sDoo-dah!: Stephen Foster and the Rise ofAmerican Popular Culture (NY: Simon& Schuster, 1997). For a detailed studyof the sources and interpretations ofFoster’s song texts, see William W.Austin’s Susanna, Jeanie, and the OldFolks at Home: The Songs of Stephen C.Foster from His Time to Ours, 2nd edition(Urbana and Chicago: University of

Illinois Press, 1987).42 Brooks, 300, 306.43 Document-Records DOCD-5534, tracks

13–24 and DOCD-5535 (Fisk UniversitySingers , Vol. 3) . Edison cylinderrecordings from 1911, 1916, and 1920can be found on DOCD-5613 (TheEarliest Negro Vocal Groups, Vol. 5).

44 Brooks, 296.45 Document-Records DOCD-5533 track 5

(1909), DOCD-5534 track 17 (1920).46 Work, American Negro Songs 199.47 Document-Records DOCD-5535 tracks

3-8 (1926).48 Southern, 365ff.49 See James H. Cone’s penetrating look at the

connections between spirituals and theblues, in The Spirituals and the Blues: AnInterpretation (New York: Seabury Press,1972).

50 For a probing discussion of the relationshipbetween the spiritual and gospel music,see Marvin V. Curtis, “African-AmericanSpirituals and Gospel Music: HistoricalSimilarities and Differences” in theChoral Journal 41:8, March 2001, 9-21.One important instance where the blackchurch did not abandon the spiritual wasin the “Wings Over Jordan” choir,founded by pastor Glenn T. Settle ofGethsemane Church in Cleveland, whichbroadcast a popular weekly radio showto the nation on CBS between 1939 and1949, with breaks during the war toperform for the troops in Europe(Southern 423).

51 Some purists of the style are concerned eventoday by some of the extended jazzharmonies such as those found in LarryFarrow’s arrangements and some of thegospel-inflected spirituals such as thoseof the late Moses Hogan, though othersrejoice what they consider to be therenewing variety these and other recentcomposers have brought to the tradition.

52 Brooks, 299.53 Southern, 483.54 Southern, 267-8.55 H.C. Colles, “Antonin Dvorák in the New

World” in The Musical Times, vol. 82,no. 1180 (1941), referenced by JohnClapham in Antonin Dvorák: Musicianand Craftsman (New York: St. Martin’sPress, 1966), p. 90.

56 Document-Records DOCD-5613, tracks1-5.

57 For re-issued recordings of the Hall JohnsonChoir, see Document-Records DOCD-

5566, Negro Choirs – 1926-1931 (tracks1 9 - 2 4 r e c o r d e d 1 9 3 0 - 3 1 ) a n dDocument-Records DOCD-5608, 1940sVocal Groups Vol. 2 - 1940 – 1945 (tracks5-15 recorded 1940-41).

58 Hall Johnson, “Notes on the NegroSpiritual,” in Readings in Black AmericanMusic, rev. edition ed. Eileen Southern(New York: W.W. Norton, 1983).

59 The movie version of The Green Pastures(1936) ha s been t r an s f e r r ed tovideocassette – MGM/UA Home Video,ISBN: 079281794X.

60 Allen Woll, Black Musical Theater – From“Coontown” to “Dreamgirls,” (BatonRouge; LSU Press, 1989), pp. 137-141.

61 Southern, 422.62 The 1940 original cast recording of Porgy

and Bess was re-issued in 1992 by MCAClassics – MCAD 10520.

63 Doug Seroff, “Mrs. James A. Myers, 1989Gospel Arts Day Honoree: A Life devotedto the Spiritual,” in Gospel Arts Day-Nashville, June 18, 1989, cited by Brooks307.

64 Document-Records DOCD-5535 tracks9-29 (1935-1940).

65 See note 10 above. Dawson can be heardconducting the Tuskegee Institute Choiron the album Spirituals originally releasedon Westminster Gold/MCA. A CD canbe obtained from Neil Kjos MusicCompany.

66 For printed versions of spirituals that wereadapted as freedom songs, see Sing forFreedom: The Story of the Civil RightsMovement Through Its Songs/ compiledand edited by Guy and Candie Carawan.(Bethelehem, Pa.: Sing Out Corp.,c 1990); includes songs originallypublished in: We Shall Overcome (1963)and Freedom is a Constant Struggle (1968),by Oak Publications. For recordings ofthese songs from the period, seeSmithsonian Folkways CD(2) SF 40084,Voices of the Civil Rights Movement—Black American Freedom Songs, 1960-1966 (re-issued 1997).

—CJ—

recently visited fisk university with a college chamber choir with

Documents