Topic: Kumbaya 1955-1961
Thora Dudley knew “Come by Here” in 1956. Where she learned it is unknown. While her classmates who attended a meeting in Davidson, North Carolina, recognized it, the fact they directed Larry Eisenberg to her suggests they had learned it from her. [1]
As noted in the post for 23 October 22, Dudley had spent much of her life in Talladega, Alabama, where she attended the school for the blind, before enrolling in the college. If she didn’t learn “Come by Here” there, then she may have learned it from her mother or other members of her family.
All we know about her early years are that she was born in Ainsley and her father is buried in Rutledge. [2] Both settlements are in the wiregrass region of Alabama that stretches along the coastal plain from Macon Georgia to Montgomery, Alabama. [3] The light, sandy soils were covered by longleaf pines with an understory of the eponymous grass when settlers first entered the area. [4]
Fourteen of 2,520 farmers owned land worth more than $5,000 in 1859, [8] and just one could be called a large planter. Solomon Siler held acreage in the southwestern part of the county around Henderson and Palmyra on a tributary of the Pea River that ultimately flowed into the Gulf of Mexico through Florida’s Choctawhatchee river. [9] He built his mansion in Orion, the county’s antebellum cultural center. When he died in 1854, he owned nearly 10% of the county’s slaves. [10]
The Civil War drew men to battle, but otherwise did not much affect Pike County. [11] Little violence is recorded from Reconstruction, although a school was burned in neighboring Crenshaw County [12] Hostility to education took a different form. Baptists in Orion told a speaker in 1865 that, if he thought local women should teach freedmen, then use his own daughters. [13] In 1874, the Democratic Party made it an official policy for citizens to shun anyone who cooperated with the Federal government or Republicans. [14]
Reconstruction eliminated farmers’ dependence on creeks as routes for marketing cotton. The Mobile and Girard Railroad, which was built in 1870, crossed the county from northeast (Saco) to Goshen in the southwest. [15] Planters learned they could keep the soil productive if they added fertilizer every year. By 1914, Pike County ranked third in number of bales of cotton ginned in Alabama. [16]
Fertilizer was sold on credit by furnishing agents. In 1877, Alabama passed a law that gave creditors more rights over crops than the growers. Many small farmers, if they still had some resources, left the state. [17] The remaining white farmers, along with the freedman who hadn’t left for Montgomery after emancipation, [18] were reduced to sharecropping. [19]
The county had had few places like Siler’s where a slave-controlled community could develop like those on rice plantations. Most slaves worked for small farmers. After the war, and especially after the consolidation of land holdings precipitated by the Crop Lien law, few would have had places they could call home.
Immediately after the war, white Baptists instructed freedmen in Troy, then told them to establish their own church in 1872. [20] People came from as far as Crenshaw County to attend. [21] A second Baptist church was organized in Troy in 1878. [22] If congregations existed in outlaying areas, they were not visible to whites. Two churches were burned in 1904 by White Cappers. [23]
Railroads introduced another change in the 1880s. In 1886, the Montgomery and Florida Railroad built a line through Crenshaw County to reach timber [24] around places like Rutledge. The Alabama Midland was chartered in 1887, [25] going from southeast through Bundridge and Troy to northwest Pike County. Ainsley had a station in 1889. [26]
Ainsley seems to be on a watershed between two creeks that would have reverted to woodland, if the land had ever been cleared for farming. The village soon had “a cotton gin, saw mill, planing mill, dry kiln, lathing mill and shingle mill.” [27]
Lumber jobs last as long as the trees, then companies move their equipment to new areas. The boll weevil appeared in Pike County in 1918. The decline was temporary. By 1930, the county again was producing more cotton with more fertilizer. [28] Then came the Depression.
What little is known about Dudley’s father comes from his gravestone in a Baptist cemetery in Rutland. He died in 1934. A woman, who may have been his wife, was born in 1904, and would have been thirty years old when she became a widow. This implies he was a young man.
One interpretation is that his family was from Rutledge and he had been working in Ainsley in the middle-1920s when Thora was born. The problem is the only tombstones with the Dudley name belong to Henry, Thora, and Willie. If Rutledge were a family center, one would expect to see more.
A second possibility is that Henry was from Pike County and was a sharecropper who moved every few years in hopes of finding a better contract. That might explain why Thora later claimed she was from Montgomery, rather than Ainsley. It may have been the first place where she remained for more than a few seasons.
A third possibility is that Henry, or his father, moved to Pike County with the railroad or with a logging company. The workers were probably a mix of skilled laborers brought by the companies and local sharecroppers who spent the winters in the woods. Wikipedia says, in Crenshaw County, the “timber camps were rough work areas where racial tensions sometimes flared.” [29]
The movement of “Come by Here” into Pike or Crenshaw County may have been independent of the migrations of African Americans. Lumber camps and railroads were not the only institutions that introduced new ideas into the area. Margaret Farmer notes Troy, the administrative center of Pike County, had an opera house through at least 1912. [30] Then tent shows brought in outside entertainers until at least 1924. [31] The popular entertainment probably did not include religious music and Blacks would have had restricted access, but musical exchanges often occur outside scheduled events.
Revivals are a more likely possibility. Pentecostalism arrived by 1921 when evangelists from the Alabama-Florida border held tent meetings. No formal Assembly of God congregation developed until after Dudley died. [32]
Possibly more important were tent meetings held in 1923 and 1924 by William Tipton Grider. [33] He was part of the Church of Christ, and from Covington County, south of Pike. [34] The Church of Christ was descended from the Disciples of Christ, mentioned in the post for 8 November 2020, and still did not accept musical instruments in services. [35]
Neither denomination was particularly open to African Americans. The Assembly was founded as a white alternative to the mixed-race meetings associated with early Pentecostalism. [36] The Disciples kept Blacks in separate congregations, but did not expel them during Reconstruction as the Baptists had done. [37] What is important is the two revivals indicate a steady movement of religious ideas, and possibly with it songs, along the old lines of river communication from Florida into Pike County.
A less likely source for “Come by Here” are the all-day sings held in the county before World War I. The area around Good Hope, southeast of Ainsley, was one center. William Marion Cooper, editor of The Sacred Harp, [38] often went there to lead sings. William Brantley remembers “singing schools teachers, who traveled around the country like revival preachers, would come and give courses to all ages and classes from beginners to finished singers.” [39] The result was a high level of musicianship in the county. Brantley noted many did not have melodious voices, but had perfect pitch. [40]
Cooper was from Dothan, in Dale County, to the east. A Black sacred harp tradition developed there and in the contiguous counties. [41] African Americans probably were not allowed to join the singing in Pike County, but since some of the attendees were middle class, [42] they may have been present as cooks, servants, or men handling the horses. All Dudley told her sorority sisters was she “had an ear for music and was able to hum tunes that she heard throughout the house.” [43]
Graphics
Base map: DemocraticLuntz. “Location of Troy in Pike County, Alabama.” Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons on 27 October 2017.
End Notes
1. The meeting at Davidson College and Larry Eisenberg’s role in contacting Dudley are discussed in the post for 23 October 2022.
2. Dudley’s life is described in the post for 23 October 2022.
3. “Wiregrass (Region).” Wikipedia website.
4. Mark V. Wetherington. “Wiregrass Georgia.” New Georgia Encyclopedia website, last updated 28 September 2020. Wiregrass is Aristida stricta.
5. Margaret Pace Farmer. One Hundred Fifty Years in Pike County Alabama 1821 – 1971. Anniston, Alabama: Higginbotham, Inc., 1973. 76-77.
6. Donna J. Siebenthaler. “Pike County.” The Encyclopedia of Alabama website, 18 September 2007; last updated 7 December 2020.
7. Farmer. 77.
8. Farmer. 77.
9. Silers Mill Creek flows into Whitewater Creek, which joins the Middle Pea in Coffee County. [44] The Pea becomes part of the Choctawhatchee at Geneva, Alabama. [45] That continues to Choctawhatchee Bay on the Gulf of Mexico. [46]
10. Siler’s estate sold 97 slaves in 1854; the final settlement in 1862 listed 259. [47] That implies he owned more than 300 when he died. In 1850, the county had 3,818 slaves. [48]
11. Farmer. 53.
12. Walter L. Fleming. Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905. 629.
13. Jefferson Falkner. Testimony, Montgomery, Alabama, 20 October 1871. United States Congress. Joint Select Committee. The Condition of Affairs in Late Insurrectionary States. Alabama. Volume II. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872. 1123. Fleming reports Jefferson Falkner heard the challenge at a Baptist Association meeting. [49]
14. Fleming. 781.
15. Farmer. 67.
16. Farmer. 81. Dallas County, with Selma, was first, and Montgomery County directly north of Pike was second.
17. Farmer. 79.
18. One assumes the more enterprising, ambitious, or discontented African Americans left the area as soon as they could. This exodus is not mentioned by historians. Farmer notes the percentage of Blacks to whites in Pike County increased from 24% in 1850 to 27% in 1870, with 807 more freedmen, and 5,321 more whites. The increase may only mean more whites left than Blacks. Numbers are hard to compare because parts of Pike County were removed to create new, predominantly white counties, like Crenshaw, during Reconstruction. [50] The subsequent reductions in the tax base to support the government was another reason whites moved elsewhere. [51]
19. Farmer. 79.
20. Farmer. 298. The Black church was the First Missionary Baptist Church in Troy. The parent white church was the First Baptist Church in Troy.
21. Farmer. 299.
22. Farmer. 301. The church was Bethel Baptist Church in Troy.
23. Farmer. 235.
24. “Crenshaw County, Alabama.” Wikipedia website.
25. Farmer. 70.
26. Farmer. 402.
27. Farmer. 402.
28. Farmer. 83.
29. Wikipedia, Crenshaw.
30. Farmer. 188-189.
31. Farmer. 189-190.
32. Farmer. 296-297. S. W. Notes was from Solcomb in Geneva, County, Alabama, and C. L. Duck was from DeFuniack Springs in neighboring Walton County, Florida.
33. Farmer. 293-294.
34. Hugh Fulford. “William T. ‘Tip’ Grider.” The Restoration Movement website. Covington County abuts Geneva County on the east and Walton County on the south.
35. Sydney E. Ahlstrom. A Religious History of the American People. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972. 822-823.
36. Vinson Synan. The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1997 edition. 154-155. This is mentioned in the post for 7 December 2017.
37. Bobby Ross Jr. and Hamil R. Harris. “Fifty Years after Historic Meeting, Race Still Divides Churches of Christ.” The Christian Chronicle website. 2018.
38. W. M. Cooper. The B. F. White Sacred Harp: Revised and Improved. Dothan, Alabama: 1902.
39. William H. Brantley, Jr. Letter to Margaret Pace Farmer, 13 August 1962. Quoted by Farmer. 194.
40. Brantley. Quoted by Farmer. 195.
41. H. J. Jackson. “History of the Colored Sacred Harp.” In J. Jackson. The Colored Sacred Harp. Ozark, Alabama: 1934; reprinted by Paragon Press of Montgomery, Alabama, in 1973. Judge Jackson, the founder of the Black sacred harp tradition in Alabama, was born eight miles west of Orion, and went to school in Ainsley. When he was an adolescent, he left for Ozark, near Dothan, where he discovered the fasola singing tradition. Men who helped put together his first edition were from Dothan’s Dale County, and the neighboring Houston, Henry, and Coffee Counties.
42. Ora Lee Park, a descendant of Siler’s wife family, played piano for the sings. [52] The first Baptist church established in Troy, the Beulah Primitive Baptist, held all day sings with dinners on the grounds. Brantley remembered the church overflowed, and people took turns going inside. Theologically, he described it as the “Hard-Shell Baptist Church.” [53]
43. “Our Charter Members.” Alpha Kappa Alpha, Eta Omega Omega chapter website.
44. “Choctawhatchee, Pea, and Yellow Rivers Watershed Management Plan.” Alabama Department of Environmental Management website. 65, 71-72.
45. “Pea River.” Wikipedia website.
46. “Choctawhatchee River.” Wikipedia website.
47. Farmer. 358.
48. Farmer. 78.
49. Fleming. 625.
50. Farmer. 78.
51. Farmer. 56, 58.
52. Farmer. 433.
53. Brantley. Quoted by Farmer. 195.
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