Topic: Movement - Origins
Hypothesizing African origins for the movements used with "Come by Here" is easier than finding evidence. Alan Lomax’s cross-cultural research team suggested the trait that separated Africans from Europeans was the use of the torso. The group observed whites treated the trunk as a single unit, while Africans divided it at the waist. [1] Peggy Harper noted:
"There are three characteristic dance postures. An upright posture with a straight back is used as an expression of authority in the dance of chiefs and priests. In the second posture the dancer inclines forward from the hips, moving his attention and gestures toward the ground. In the third posture the dancer holds the torso nearly parallel to the ground, taking the body weight onto the balls of the feet." [2]
Both Lomax and Harper attributed the differences in placement to economics. Lomax thought mobility at the waist resulted from the twisting movements used in planting millet. [3] The cultural divergence in the use of the spine may have followed the adoption of the plow and domestication of draft animals elsewhere that allowed farmers to plant and cultivate standing erect. In parts of Africa where crops like rice were grown, farmers needed to work low to transplant and harvest.
Harper paid more attention to the ways Africans used their feet and suggested they were related to the terrain: people who lived in savannah grasslands "place their feet firmly on the sunbaked earth"; the Ijo, who lived in mangrove swamps, "use a precision of light, rapid foot beats, moving their weight from heel to toe to side of foot in a variety of rhythmic patterns, as though balancing on an unsteady canoe or picking their way through the swamp"; and the Yoruba altered their foot patterns in ways that suggested the need to find "a way through forest undergrowth, which necessitates reactions ever alert to the unexpected." [4]
The human body has at least 320 pairs of muscles [5] that are developed through use rather than deliberate exercises by children copying the adults around them, and by adults as they walk and work. The resulting musculature reflects cultural values and necessities. In this country, football players strengthen their leg muscles, while ballet dancers stretch the very same ones to maintain flexibility and long extended lines. Once trained, neither can do the routine actions of the other without some soreness. [6]
During the years of slavery, some Africans were shipped to familiar climatic zones in the American South to do analogous work. The ones taken from the upper Niger river to South Carolina rice plantations were the most obvious example. Others, especially those purchased for cotton plantations, encountered different work environments and the appropriate muscles were strengthened. These changes occurred without altering what parents perceived to be the proper posture to be learned by their infants and toddlers.
The remigration of African Americans to urban areas further altered kinesic habits without completely obliterating certain ways of using the feet and torso that had survived from Africa. Thus, Jerome and Fred Williams of the Evereadys bent their torsos forward or arched back from the hips in Detroit and Jerome executed rapid combinations with his feet. [7] Similarly, the man at the far end of the line of men in Skylar Patterson’s backup group sometimes bent forward but treated his feet as rigid units in Alabama. [8]
Some of the patterns mentioned by Lomax and Harper, and exhibited by the Williams brothers and Predestined, were clear in a video made the Voices of Zimbabwe. The students at the girls’ private boarding school were barefoot when they performed a variant of the Soweto Gospel Choir’s arrangement [9] of "Kumbaya" on the parquette floor [10] of an English church in 2011. Even though they had the potential to arch or flex their feet, they keep them flat in the same way Bessie Jones had learned in Georgia. [11]
The group retained Lucas Deon Bok’s tripartite division of "Kumbaya," but changed each section. The Soweto choir stood still during the first part. The Arundel girls began with their heads bent down and their hands in the conventional western prayer position for the opening verse, "somebody’s crying/praying." When they reached the phrase "Oh Lord, hear my prayer" they raised their heads, and lowered the hands, keeping them in the prayer position until their arms were down. Then, they fell to their sides. They stayed in that position for the remainder of the first section, standing still and facing straight ahead.
In Bok’s second section, the Soweto choir began turning to the right and left and clapping when they reached the forty-five-degree diagonals. One Zimbabwe group sang "Oh Lord" while the other repeated a native phrase. They stepped to thirty-degree diagonals, but kept their heads facing front, so their torsos were divided into two parts at the neck.
Soweto’s third part included a Zulu phrase. Voices of Zimbabwe changed to "Zita Rake Guru Ndiye Mutsvene," a traditional hymn. A young woman began playing a four-foot-high, cylindrical, floor drum. One group sang hosanna against a Shona phrase. The girls bent their knees in unison; their shoulders rose and fell slightly.
The lyrics changed to all Shona ones, and the girl sometimes stopped playing the drum with her hands. The chorus members moved their shoulders and feet to the diagonals, but kept their waists facing front. Most bent at the waist, and their arms were bent at the elbows with their forearms in front of their bodies.
Toward the finale they stood facing front and raised their bent arms upward, with their fingers extended together and introduced a different musical phrase. They brought their arms down into the prayer position, then dropped their arms with their palms facing outward. They repeated this pattern, then resumed the second native melody and movement pattern without the drum. They ended by sustaining a tone and raising their arms again.
While the girls’ movements varied by melodic section, the director’s were tied only to the rhythm. Her role was essentially a western one that had been Africanized. She used her arms, often in rolling sorts of motions, to signal the different groups, but she maintained the beat by stepping. Thus, even when the girls were standing still, she was stepping the rhythm for them. Her footwork became progressively more pronounced as the chorus moved from the partly Christianized beginning to the completely native text.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: looked like eight women in the first row and five in the second
Vocal Group Director: woman
Instrumental Accompaniment: none
Rhythm Accompaniment: cylindrical floor drum
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English and Shona
Pronunciation: coom BY yah with long "ba"; this differed from Soweto who made each syllable longer than the previous one
Verses: crying/praying, in despair, local ones
Bok verses
Vocabulary:
Pronoun: somebody
Term for Deity: Lord
Format: Lucas Deon Bok
Verse Repetition Pattern: AABCBC
Zita Rake Guru Ndiye Mutsvene
Vocabulary: the hymn means "his greatest name is holy" according to YouTube notes.
Repetition: phrases repeated
Notes on Music
Singing Style: one syllable to one note with little ornamentation. The variations came from two or more groups singing different parts.
Notes on Performance
Occasion: the school was named for Arundel Farm, which was purchased in 1954 for the school’s Harare campus. [12] In 2011, the chorus was in England and visited the town of Arundel in West Sussex on 12 February. The relationship between the Simpsons, who owned the farm, and Arundel was not mentioned.
Location: Saint Nicholas Church was built in 1380. [13] The acoustics of the stone building reinforced the group’s harmony.
Microphones: none
Clothing: ankle-length brown print skirts with turquoise trim; turquoise bodices or corsets over brown tops. Their hair was pulled back and their feet were bare.
Notes on Movement
Some girls moved their torsos more than others. The one second from the left was the most flexible.
The motions using the gesture for praying were inspired by the word, but not directly tied to it as they were in the Wyandot County 4-H version mentioned in the post for 25 October 2017. The girls changed their positions when verses changed; the smallest unit of text associated with a movement was a phrase.
The director did not stay in one place, but stood directly in front of and close to the group that began the first verse. She then moved to a central location from which she rotated or moved toward groups when they had key parts. It was possible to see her step down like Bessie Jones without shifting her weight.
Notes on Performers
Arundel School opened in 1956 for girls 12 to 18 years of age. One alumna wrote in 2012:
"Deportment – a term most teenagers go through high school not knowing how to spell, let alone use – was the mark of a true Arundel girl. It symbolised a manner of personal conduct synonymous with Austenesque behaviour: ladylike, well-groomed and intelligent." [14]
Most of the boarding houses were named after English female authors, including Jane Austen. [15]
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by KiasuKiasuKiasuKiasu on 16 February 2011.
End Notes
1. Alan Lomax, Irmagard Bartenieff, and Forrestine Paulay. "Dance Style and Culture." 222-247 in Folk Song Style and Culture. Edited by Alan Lomax. Washington: American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, 1968. 237.
2. Peggy Harper. "African Dance." Encyclopædia Britannica. 18 January 2002; last updated 26 July 2017.
3. Lomax. 237.
4. Harper.
5. Wikipedia. "List of Skeletal Muscles of the Human Body."
6. In 1972 I took a beginner’s ballet class at a small college in Ohio. Some professional football team apparently had brought in a dance specialist to help its players with flexibility, and so some of the school’s players decided to take this class. They came back surprised at how many of their muscles had ached from what seemed so simple. And, the class really was basic, what I remember doing when I was in elementary school. They simply had never used those muscles in those ways.
7. The Evereadys’ live performance was described in the post for 3 August 2017.
8. Skylar Patterson was discussed in the post for 27 October 2017.
9. The Soweto Gospel Choir performance was described in the posts for 28 August 2017 and 29 August 2017.
10. Wooden floors laid on wooden beams have some give and are easier on dancers’ ankles, calves, and knees that solid concrete or stone ones. They might be softer than bare dirt, but have a different feel: at a minimum they are level. If the women in Voices of Zimbabwe wanted to flex or arch their feet, nothing inhibited them.
11. Bessie Jones was discussed in the post for 27 October 2017.
12. "History" tab on school website.
13. "Welcome to St Nicholas’ Church Arundel." Church’s website.
14. Fadzayi Mahere. "Does the Colour Pink Imprison Women? The Case of Arundel School." Her website. 15 August 2012. She was a lawyer and running for the parliamentary seat that included the school in the 2018 elections.
15. Wikipedia. "Arundel School."
Tuesday, October 31, 2017
Sunday, October 29, 2017
Uppsala Musikklasser - Kombaya
Topic: Movement - Origins
The origins of hand-gesture songs are obscure. When I was researching Camp Songs, Folk Songs, [1] the earliest ones I found in print were published by Asa Fitz. Movements in his 1846 The Primary School Song Book either were in the spirit of singing games ("This is the way we wash our face") or had literal pedagogic lyrics. One round began "horizontal, horizontal / perpendicular, perpendicular." [2]
He represented a beginning point in the evolution of the genre, because the songs were perceived to be physical exercises, rather than games. As such, they probably were influenced by the gymnasium in Germany. Rousseau’s Émile [3] inspired the movement to integrate physical education into the humanities curriculum. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi encouraged it. In 1856, Fitz published The Exercise Song Book that included "Here We Go ’round the Mulberry Bush." [4] He elaborated in 1865 with the Gymnastic Song Book. [5]
Within the dominant American culture represented by public-school texts, Fitz was an evolutionary tangent. Lowell Mason [6] elaborated Pestalozzi’s suggestion individuals should first learn the rudiments of music, but he did not accept movement. Gesture songs did not appear in public-school collections for another half century. When they did, they were very much like those used by Fitz.
The only song with motions in the popular Golden Book of Favorite Songs, "Smile Awhile," was called "A Gymnastic Relief." [7] The only gesture song in Henry Romaine Pattengill’s 1899 and 1905 Michigan rural-school collections was a "Hand Exercise Song." [8, 9]
Exercise songs did not die with Fitz, but continued evolving in a different environment. The Forest Choir of 1867 was the first song book I saw that anticipated the modern genre. Many of the "exercise songs" George Frederick Root included in his secular singing-school text used either rhythmic or arm motions. [10]
The idea of including gesture songs in singing-school books did not become widespread. Phoebe Palmer Knapp was the only person I found who used gesture songs immediately after Root. The Methodist hymn-writer included one as an "infant class exercise" in Notes of Joy, published two years later in 1869. [11]
The idea must have survived at the folk level in singing schools. Fully developed "motion songs" surfaced in William Howard Doane’s Sunny-side Songs in 1893 [12] and Edmund Simon Lorenz’s Temple Echoes in 1896. [13] Doane was raised a Congregationalist in Connecticut where his father ran a textile mill. He became a Baptist, then moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1861. He managed a machine-tool manufacturing company, wrote hymns, and supervised the Mount Auburn Baptist church Sunday school.
Lorenz’s parents were Adventists who left the Volga community of Messer as part of the German exodus that began in 1871 when Alexander II began revoking draft exemptions [14] that had been granted to Anabaptists by Catherine II. She had encouraged immigration in 1762 and 1763. [15] The Lorenzes settled in Dayton, Ohio, where their son became a Brethren pastor, and religious music publisher.
The only video I saw on YouTube that used gestures with "Kumbaya" was in the spirit of the gymnasium songs. The students in the Uppsala Musikklasser began their concert performance by jumping then sitting in groups. The ripple effect was accompanied by the noise of their landing feet. They then knelt low, again in groups from left to right, before a young girl came out to sing the "kumbaya" verse with a piano accompaniment.
When she finished, the girl walked off stage and a woman took over the director’s podium from the man who had been there. The podium was in the center in front of the youngsters on stage, with the grand piano to the left from the audience’s view.
The young children in the first rows stood to repeat the "kumbaya" verse in unison. Then, the students in the middle rows stood to sing "Someone needs you Lord." The youth in back rose last to sing "Someone’s crying."
The pianist left the stage when the drums took over the accompaniment. Some girls walked to the front and began tossing their heads and raising their arms in a modern dance routine. They left the stage, and the students in the audience began standing in sections. They raised their right arms and moved their heads like pigeons.
The audience then began clapping and the students started walking from row to row in alternating directions with their arms moving up and down like they were marching. Meanwhile, on stage the youth in the back rows were raising one arm, then the other, then both.
The man returned to the piano while the children in the front rows repeated the raised arm pattern. Next they bobbled their heads to different compass points from right to left, paused, and repeated the gesture from left to right to return to their original positions facing front. Most raised their arms, while the group at the right bent down.
The Swedish music students crossed their arms over their chests with their hands on their elbows, bent down, then slowly rose before dropping their arms. The woman returned to the podium, and the older students with higher voices sang "someone’s singing" while the rest on stage and the students in the audience hummed in harmony. The piano played softly and the drums changed to a soft cadence.
The drums and piano grew louder as the group repeated "kumbaya" with more harmony, especially at the ends of the lines. They finished by repeating "Oh Lord" three times, then bent down. The drums got even louder as their raised their arms and sustained the last tone. They finished by crossing their arms over their heads.
The audience gave them a standing ovation. One girl later recalled on YouTube, "That was so fun to sing Kombaya." [16] A year later a boy added: "I was singing! it was so much fun!!!!!" [17]
Performers
Vocal Solo: young girl
Vocal Group: girls and boys. Three age groups each sang a verse with increasing musical complexity. This allowed everyone to participate, even those in the audience, without the limitations of the youngest or least musical constraining the others. It also allowed those not ready to sing harmony to participate, and thus absorb the aesthetic preferences needed to perpetuate harmony as a cultural musical form.
Vocal Group Director: woman
Instrumental Accompaniment: grand piano played by man
Rhythm Accompaniment: two conga and three snare drums played by four boys
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: very short "kum," long "ba"
Verses: kumbaya, needs you, crying, singing
Vocabulary:
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Format: variable verse-burden
Verse Repetition Pattern: AAxxAxA
Line Length: 8 syllables
Ending: repeated "Oh Lord" three times
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: this was the only group I saw of YouTube that used drums in an African manner. They treated the drum music as a separate genre from the vocal, and did not mix them. Most videos of "Kumbaya" on YouTube that used drums used them to accompany singing. This group did that as well, but they played standard cadences when the supported the singers, and multiple rhythms when they were by themselves.
They managed this African effect while playing the instruments in a western manner, with sticks. Instead of African-style drums, the boys used what looked like conga drums that had been popularized in this country in the1930s by Cuban musicians. Desi Arnaz made them more famous in the 1950s when he played the form used in Santiago de Cuba on I Love Lucy. [18]
Notes on Performance
Occasion: spring concert, 2015
Location: University Hall, Uppsala University. The Grand Auditorium had a high arched ceiling and a stage at one end.
Microphones: none
Clothing: girls wore white dresses or skirts with white tops; boys wore slacks, some bright colored, and white shirts. The female conductor was wearing a black-and-white print dress with a fitted top and flared skirt. The male pianist wore a black suit.
Notes on Movement
The director stood on the podium with her feet widely spaced. She used her right hand to maintain the beat, and her left for other purposes. Her gestures stayed about six-inches from her torso, neither in front of her body nor wide-ranging.
The drummers stood at attention with their sticks cradled in their arms when they were not playing. They remained erect when they played and looked straight ahead. I never saw them eye one another or the conductor on stage. There may have been a director in front, below the stage.
Notes on Performers
Uppsala has been the center of religious life in Sweden from the earliest written records. [19] Roman Catholics built a church of the pagan site north of the current city in the early 1100s, and construction of the current cathedral was begun in the modern city in the 1270s. [20] Control was transferred to the Lutherans during the Reformation in 1531. [21]
The music school held singing and orchestra classes for students in the third through ninth grades, with classes limited to 30 students. It was founded in 1982 and supported by a foundation, the Stiftelsen Uppsala Musikklasser. [22]
Availability
Two versions were uploaded to YouTube on 9 May 2015. One, from abijomha, was shot from the back of the auditorium and showed the entire stage from the beginning of the performance. A second, recorded by Tomas Brundin, focused on the drummers and did not begin until their solo. Brundin occasionally moved his camera to show the audience’s movements. The first lasted 7.20 minutes; the other was 4.23 minutes long.
End Notes
1. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 521-526.
2. Asa Fitz. The Primary School Song Book. Boston: W B Foyle and N Capen, 1846.
3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Émile. Paris: J. Néaulme [Nicolas-Bonaventure Duchesne], 1762.
4. Asa Fitz. The Exercise Song Book. Boston: Higgins and Bradley, 1856.
5. Asa Fitz. Gymnastic Song Book. Boston: Taggard and Thompson, 1865.
6. Lowell Mason’s first publication, a collection for the Handel and Haydn Society, introduced German musical ideas into U. S. church music. He next organized private singing schools to train teachers in the new style, then created the first school music program for Boston in 1838. At each step, he published songbooks to promote his ideas.
7. John W. Beattie, et alia. The Golden Book of Favorite Songs. Chicago: Hall, and McCreary Company, 1923 edition. My sixth-grade teacher used this as a supplement in the 1955-56 school year in Albion, Michigan.
8. Henry R. Pattengill. School Song Knapsack. Lansing: H. R. Pattengill, 1899.
9. Henry R. Pattengill. Pat’s Pick. Lansing: R. Smith Printing Company, 1905. One of my Camp Fire leaders said they used this book when she was in school in rural Michigan.
10. George Frederick Root. Forest Choir. Chicago: Root and Cady,1867. Some of the directions for "The Launch" were "describe circles above head" and "extended arms with waving motion or undulations."
11. Phoebe Palmer Knapp. Notes of Joy. New York: W. C. Palmer, 1869.
12. William Howard Doane. Sunny-side Songs. New York: Biglow and Main, 1893.
13. Edmund Simon Lorenz. Temple Echoes. Dayton: Lorenz and Company, 1896.
14. Andrii Makuch. "Mennonites." In Encyclopedia of Ukraine. Edited by Danylo Husar Struk. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, volume 3, 1993. Adventists were not Mennonites, but did tend to be pacifists like them.
15. Wikipedia. "Volga Germans." She invited Germans on any religious persuasion except Jews. Many who came were Reformed or Lutheran.
16. Anna-Maria Bjerneroth Lindström. Comment on YouTube, long version. 2015.
17. Herbert Sjödin. Comment on YouTube, long version. 2016.
18. Wikipedia "Conga." I Love Lucy was a CBS television program aired between 1951 and 1957 that starred Arnaz and his wife, Lucille Ball. His drum was called a bokú.
19. Wikipedia. "Uppsala."
20. Wikipedia. "Uppsala Cathedral."
21. Wikipedia. "Archbishop of Uppsala."
22. "Välkommen till Uppsala Musikklasser." School website.
The origins of hand-gesture songs are obscure. When I was researching Camp Songs, Folk Songs, [1] the earliest ones I found in print were published by Asa Fitz. Movements in his 1846 The Primary School Song Book either were in the spirit of singing games ("This is the way we wash our face") or had literal pedagogic lyrics. One round began "horizontal, horizontal / perpendicular, perpendicular." [2]
He represented a beginning point in the evolution of the genre, because the songs were perceived to be physical exercises, rather than games. As such, they probably were influenced by the gymnasium in Germany. Rousseau’s Émile [3] inspired the movement to integrate physical education into the humanities curriculum. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi encouraged it. In 1856, Fitz published The Exercise Song Book that included "Here We Go ’round the Mulberry Bush." [4] He elaborated in 1865 with the Gymnastic Song Book. [5]
Within the dominant American culture represented by public-school texts, Fitz was an evolutionary tangent. Lowell Mason [6] elaborated Pestalozzi’s suggestion individuals should first learn the rudiments of music, but he did not accept movement. Gesture songs did not appear in public-school collections for another half century. When they did, they were very much like those used by Fitz.
The only song with motions in the popular Golden Book of Favorite Songs, "Smile Awhile," was called "A Gymnastic Relief." [7] The only gesture song in Henry Romaine Pattengill’s 1899 and 1905 Michigan rural-school collections was a "Hand Exercise Song." [8, 9]
Exercise songs did not die with Fitz, but continued evolving in a different environment. The Forest Choir of 1867 was the first song book I saw that anticipated the modern genre. Many of the "exercise songs" George Frederick Root included in his secular singing-school text used either rhythmic or arm motions. [10]
The idea of including gesture songs in singing-school books did not become widespread. Phoebe Palmer Knapp was the only person I found who used gesture songs immediately after Root. The Methodist hymn-writer included one as an "infant class exercise" in Notes of Joy, published two years later in 1869. [11]
The idea must have survived at the folk level in singing schools. Fully developed "motion songs" surfaced in William Howard Doane’s Sunny-side Songs in 1893 [12] and Edmund Simon Lorenz’s Temple Echoes in 1896. [13] Doane was raised a Congregationalist in Connecticut where his father ran a textile mill. He became a Baptist, then moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1861. He managed a machine-tool manufacturing company, wrote hymns, and supervised the Mount Auburn Baptist church Sunday school.
Lorenz’s parents were Adventists who left the Volga community of Messer as part of the German exodus that began in 1871 when Alexander II began revoking draft exemptions [14] that had been granted to Anabaptists by Catherine II. She had encouraged immigration in 1762 and 1763. [15] The Lorenzes settled in Dayton, Ohio, where their son became a Brethren pastor, and religious music publisher.
The only video I saw on YouTube that used gestures with "Kumbaya" was in the spirit of the gymnasium songs. The students in the Uppsala Musikklasser began their concert performance by jumping then sitting in groups. The ripple effect was accompanied by the noise of their landing feet. They then knelt low, again in groups from left to right, before a young girl came out to sing the "kumbaya" verse with a piano accompaniment.
When she finished, the girl walked off stage and a woman took over the director’s podium from the man who had been there. The podium was in the center in front of the youngsters on stage, with the grand piano to the left from the audience’s view.
The young children in the first rows stood to repeat the "kumbaya" verse in unison. Then, the students in the middle rows stood to sing "Someone needs you Lord." The youth in back rose last to sing "Someone’s crying."
The pianist left the stage when the drums took over the accompaniment. Some girls walked to the front and began tossing their heads and raising their arms in a modern dance routine. They left the stage, and the students in the audience began standing in sections. They raised their right arms and moved their heads like pigeons.
The audience then began clapping and the students started walking from row to row in alternating directions with their arms moving up and down like they were marching. Meanwhile, on stage the youth in the back rows were raising one arm, then the other, then both.
The man returned to the piano while the children in the front rows repeated the raised arm pattern. Next they bobbled their heads to different compass points from right to left, paused, and repeated the gesture from left to right to return to their original positions facing front. Most raised their arms, while the group at the right bent down.
The Swedish music students crossed their arms over their chests with their hands on their elbows, bent down, then slowly rose before dropping their arms. The woman returned to the podium, and the older students with higher voices sang "someone’s singing" while the rest on stage and the students in the audience hummed in harmony. The piano played softly and the drums changed to a soft cadence.
The drums and piano grew louder as the group repeated "kumbaya" with more harmony, especially at the ends of the lines. They finished by repeating "Oh Lord" three times, then bent down. The drums got even louder as their raised their arms and sustained the last tone. They finished by crossing their arms over their heads.
The audience gave them a standing ovation. One girl later recalled on YouTube, "That was so fun to sing Kombaya." [16] A year later a boy added: "I was singing! it was so much fun!!!!!" [17]
Performers
Vocal Solo: young girl
Vocal Group: girls and boys. Three age groups each sang a verse with increasing musical complexity. This allowed everyone to participate, even those in the audience, without the limitations of the youngest or least musical constraining the others. It also allowed those not ready to sing harmony to participate, and thus absorb the aesthetic preferences needed to perpetuate harmony as a cultural musical form.
Vocal Group Director: woman
Instrumental Accompaniment: grand piano played by man
Rhythm Accompaniment: two conga and three snare drums played by four boys
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: very short "kum," long "ba"
Verses: kumbaya, needs you, crying, singing
Vocabulary:
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Format: variable verse-burden
Verse Repetition Pattern: AAxxAxA
Line Length: 8 syllables
Ending: repeated "Oh Lord" three times
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: this was the only group I saw of YouTube that used drums in an African manner. They treated the drum music as a separate genre from the vocal, and did not mix them. Most videos of "Kumbaya" on YouTube that used drums used them to accompany singing. This group did that as well, but they played standard cadences when the supported the singers, and multiple rhythms when they were by themselves.
They managed this African effect while playing the instruments in a western manner, with sticks. Instead of African-style drums, the boys used what looked like conga drums that had been popularized in this country in the1930s by Cuban musicians. Desi Arnaz made them more famous in the 1950s when he played the form used in Santiago de Cuba on I Love Lucy. [18]
Notes on Performance
Occasion: spring concert, 2015
Location: University Hall, Uppsala University. The Grand Auditorium had a high arched ceiling and a stage at one end.
Microphones: none
Clothing: girls wore white dresses or skirts with white tops; boys wore slacks, some bright colored, and white shirts. The female conductor was wearing a black-and-white print dress with a fitted top and flared skirt. The male pianist wore a black suit.
Notes on Movement
The director stood on the podium with her feet widely spaced. She used her right hand to maintain the beat, and her left for other purposes. Her gestures stayed about six-inches from her torso, neither in front of her body nor wide-ranging.
The drummers stood at attention with their sticks cradled in their arms when they were not playing. They remained erect when they played and looked straight ahead. I never saw them eye one another or the conductor on stage. There may have been a director in front, below the stage.
Notes on Performers
Uppsala has been the center of religious life in Sweden from the earliest written records. [19] Roman Catholics built a church of the pagan site north of the current city in the early 1100s, and construction of the current cathedral was begun in the modern city in the 1270s. [20] Control was transferred to the Lutherans during the Reformation in 1531. [21]
The music school held singing and orchestra classes for students in the third through ninth grades, with classes limited to 30 students. It was founded in 1982 and supported by a foundation, the Stiftelsen Uppsala Musikklasser. [22]
Availability
Two versions were uploaded to YouTube on 9 May 2015. One, from abijomha, was shot from the back of the auditorium and showed the entire stage from the beginning of the performance. A second, recorded by Tomas Brundin, focused on the drummers and did not begin until their solo. Brundin occasionally moved his camera to show the audience’s movements. The first lasted 7.20 minutes; the other was 4.23 minutes long.
End Notes
1. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 521-526.
2. Asa Fitz. The Primary School Song Book. Boston: W B Foyle and N Capen, 1846.
3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Émile. Paris: J. Néaulme [Nicolas-Bonaventure Duchesne], 1762.
4. Asa Fitz. The Exercise Song Book. Boston: Higgins and Bradley, 1856.
5. Asa Fitz. Gymnastic Song Book. Boston: Taggard and Thompson, 1865.
6. Lowell Mason’s first publication, a collection for the Handel and Haydn Society, introduced German musical ideas into U. S. church music. He next organized private singing schools to train teachers in the new style, then created the first school music program for Boston in 1838. At each step, he published songbooks to promote his ideas.
7. John W. Beattie, et alia. The Golden Book of Favorite Songs. Chicago: Hall, and McCreary Company, 1923 edition. My sixth-grade teacher used this as a supplement in the 1955-56 school year in Albion, Michigan.
8. Henry R. Pattengill. School Song Knapsack. Lansing: H. R. Pattengill, 1899.
9. Henry R. Pattengill. Pat’s Pick. Lansing: R. Smith Printing Company, 1905. One of my Camp Fire leaders said they used this book when she was in school in rural Michigan.
10. George Frederick Root. Forest Choir. Chicago: Root and Cady,1867. Some of the directions for "The Launch" were "describe circles above head" and "extended arms with waving motion or undulations."
11. Phoebe Palmer Knapp. Notes of Joy. New York: W. C. Palmer, 1869.
12. William Howard Doane. Sunny-side Songs. New York: Biglow and Main, 1893.
13. Edmund Simon Lorenz. Temple Echoes. Dayton: Lorenz and Company, 1896.
14. Andrii Makuch. "Mennonites." In Encyclopedia of Ukraine. Edited by Danylo Husar Struk. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, volume 3, 1993. Adventists were not Mennonites, but did tend to be pacifists like them.
15. Wikipedia. "Volga Germans." She invited Germans on any religious persuasion except Jews. Many who came were Reformed or Lutheran.
16. Anna-Maria Bjerneroth Lindström. Comment on YouTube, long version. 2015.
17. Herbert Sjödin. Comment on YouTube, long version. 2016.
18. Wikipedia "Conga." I Love Lucy was a CBS television program aired between 1951 and 1957 that starred Arnaz and his wife, Lucille Ball. His drum was called a bokú.
19. Wikipedia. "Uppsala."
20. Wikipedia. "Uppsala Cathedral."
21. Wikipedia. "Archbishop of Uppsala."
22. "Välkommen till Uppsala Musikklasser." School website.
Friday, October 27, 2017
Skylar Patterson - Come by Here
Topic: Movement - Rhythm
Most of the movements accompanying the videos of "Come by Here," which so far have been discussed, used forms of stepping. Bess Lomax Hawes described the technique used by Bessie Jones.
"she would step on her right foot, bring her left foot close to her right, and "step it down" without a weight change, repeating the pattern to the left. Though each movement was done flat-footed, as though stamping, she normally kept her footfalls quiet, except when she wanted an extra drumming effect.
"As I watched, it seemed to me that this was basically a dance movement. Though restrained, it is strong; the body swings slightly with it. The movements are on the first and third beats of the measure, at the points where the dancer would probably take his strong steps." [1]
At one time regional variations no doubt existed, but mobility since World War I led to marriages and church congregations that diminished the effects of geographical barriers. Jones was born in 1902 in a southwestern Georgia county next to that of Beatrice Johnson Reagon, [2] but lived on Saint Simon in the Georgia Sea Islands when she was interviewed by Hawes in the 1960s. In between she had lived in Florida, probably Alachua County during the Depression or World War II when it had a tung-oil processing plant. [3]
Individual styles now exist, some arising from the idiosyncratic developments of bodies and some from the adoption of coordinated choreography. The women in Evelyn Turrentine-Agee’s Detroit backup group wore stable heels that still limited their movement. Their feet were spaced in what dancers called a parallel second position. They shifted their weight from side to side, but did not move their feet. Occasionally the woman on the left in the video lifted her left foot an inch, but rarely moved her right one; toward the end she began to lift the left foot higher. [4]
The backup group for the Evereadys in Detroit came closest to following the pattern described by Jones, but the two soloists walked about, lifting their feet from the knees. [5] The Bolton Brothers from southern Mississippi also used their knees: they kept their feet close together in a dancers’ parallel first position and bent both knees together rather than stepping. [6]
Hawes described a more complex foot pattern called chugging:
"The nonreligious shout step appears in several traditional children’s plays as follows: with weight on the active foot, give a little shove backward as though hopping without the foot leaving the floor; dancers sometimes call this movement a ‘chug.’ While ‘chugging’ back on the right foot, swing the left foot forward. Step on the left foot and ‘chug’ it backward while swinging the right foot forward. This is done to a count of two: step, chug. The ultimate result, by the way, is that you stay in the same place." [7]
The backup group for Skylar Patterson used a variant of this in a video posted in late August of this year, 2017. The men had their feet slightly apart, and at least the one on the right had them slightly turned out. While Patterson was talking, the four men in Predestined flexed their knees in unison, one knee at a time. When they sang, they kicked one foot out in a arc keeping the heel on the floor, brought it back, and kicked out the other. They, or at least the most visible man on the right of the screen, wore boots that constrained the feet so they remained flat while the boot tips pointed up.
Patterson was described as a pastor, probably in the Union Baptist church in Columbiana, Mississippi, [8] just south of Birmingham. Most of the performance was directed at the audience, asking if they needed the Holy Ghost to appear and asking It to do so. Verses were sung only at the beginning and end.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Skylar Patterson
Vocal Accompaniment: four men
Instrumental Accompaniment: keyboard; two strummed instruments, probably an electric guitar and electric bass; one instrument resembling a steel guitar without the pedals
Rhythm Accompaniment: drum set
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Verses: down here praying, needs you
Theme: supplication to the Holy Ghost
Vocabulary:
Pronoun: somebody
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: down here praying
Format: recitative
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Line Meter: dactyl
Line Length: 9 syllables
Ending: none
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: Patterson sang most of it on one note
Time Signature: strong Xx
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: soloist supported by group. Patterson sang the statements in the verses and Predestined sang the refrains. When Patterson was speaking, they repeated "Oh Lord."
Singing Style:
Solo: Patterson sustained the first syllables of the Xxx dactylic feet, which aligned them with the contrasting Xx beat.
Group: chordal harmony
Notes on Performance
Occasion: no details provided
Location: stage, possibly in a high school, church hall, or gymnasium
Microphones: each had a wireless handheld mike; amplifiers or speakers were placed at the front of the stage
Clothing: the singers were wearing brown boots, black slacks, light-yellow sports jackets with black boutonnieres, white shirts, and no ties. The band members wore white shirts and light-colored tan slacks.
Notes on Movement
The men in Predestined stood still while Patterson was speaking in the beginning. As soon as the instruments began playing, they began bending their knees together. The man at the far left end sometimes bent his body forward as he moved.
Predestined members bent their arms that were not holding microphones at the elbows with their forearms extended. Their hands moved from left to right in no particular pattern.
Notes on Audience
One woman in the front row stood throughout. The rest were below the view of the camera; its microphones did not pick up any audience response.
When Patterson was introducing "Come by Here," he referred to the previous number before he started the group singing "we’re down here praying." He then said, "you remember that kind of church, don’t you?" He pointed at the standing woman and said, "You like that kinda church? I like you already." The group resumed singing, and the rest of his comments were directed to the audience in general.
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by Aj Jordan on 28 August 2017.
End Notes
1. Bessie Jones and Bess Lomax Hawes. Step it Down: Games, Plays, Songs, and Stories from the Afro-American Heritage. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987 edition. 20.
2. Reagon was discussed in the post for 14 October 2016.
3. Wikipedia. "Bessie Jones." She once told an interviewer she was born in Alachua, Florida, but that may have resulted from a misunderstanding. According to G. H. Blackmon, the first tung-oil processing plant was built in Alachua in 1928, and commercial interest began developing after 1930. It became a critical crop in 1938 when supplies from China were cut by war. ("Tung Oil Production in Florida." Florida State Horticultural Society. Proceedings 58:136-143:1945.)
4. Turrentine-Agee was discussed in the post for 6 August 2017. The shoes’ heels looked to be an inch thick at the floor and no more than two-inches high. The differences in how the one woman treated her left and right feet were typical for individuals who were not trained in dance classes to overcome the body’s natural inclination to favor one side.
5. The Evereadys’ live video was discussed in the post for 3 August 2017.
6. The Bolton Brothers were discussed in the post for 12 August 2017.
7. Jones. 46.
8. The obituary for Thelma Marie Lamb said her funeral service was held at Union Baptist Church in Columbiana and that Patterson presided at the burial service. (Tributes website). On Facebook, Patterson said he came from Columbiana.
Most of the movements accompanying the videos of "Come by Here," which so far have been discussed, used forms of stepping. Bess Lomax Hawes described the technique used by Bessie Jones.
"she would step on her right foot, bring her left foot close to her right, and "step it down" without a weight change, repeating the pattern to the left. Though each movement was done flat-footed, as though stamping, she normally kept her footfalls quiet, except when she wanted an extra drumming effect.
"As I watched, it seemed to me that this was basically a dance movement. Though restrained, it is strong; the body swings slightly with it. The movements are on the first and third beats of the measure, at the points where the dancer would probably take his strong steps." [1]
At one time regional variations no doubt existed, but mobility since World War I led to marriages and church congregations that diminished the effects of geographical barriers. Jones was born in 1902 in a southwestern Georgia county next to that of Beatrice Johnson Reagon, [2] but lived on Saint Simon in the Georgia Sea Islands when she was interviewed by Hawes in the 1960s. In between she had lived in Florida, probably Alachua County during the Depression or World War II when it had a tung-oil processing plant. [3]
Individual styles now exist, some arising from the idiosyncratic developments of bodies and some from the adoption of coordinated choreography. The women in Evelyn Turrentine-Agee’s Detroit backup group wore stable heels that still limited their movement. Their feet were spaced in what dancers called a parallel second position. They shifted their weight from side to side, but did not move their feet. Occasionally the woman on the left in the video lifted her left foot an inch, but rarely moved her right one; toward the end she began to lift the left foot higher. [4]
The backup group for the Evereadys in Detroit came closest to following the pattern described by Jones, but the two soloists walked about, lifting their feet from the knees. [5] The Bolton Brothers from southern Mississippi also used their knees: they kept their feet close together in a dancers’ parallel first position and bent both knees together rather than stepping. [6]
Hawes described a more complex foot pattern called chugging:
"The nonreligious shout step appears in several traditional children’s plays as follows: with weight on the active foot, give a little shove backward as though hopping without the foot leaving the floor; dancers sometimes call this movement a ‘chug.’ While ‘chugging’ back on the right foot, swing the left foot forward. Step on the left foot and ‘chug’ it backward while swinging the right foot forward. This is done to a count of two: step, chug. The ultimate result, by the way, is that you stay in the same place." [7]
The backup group for Skylar Patterson used a variant of this in a video posted in late August of this year, 2017. The men had their feet slightly apart, and at least the one on the right had them slightly turned out. While Patterson was talking, the four men in Predestined flexed their knees in unison, one knee at a time. When they sang, they kicked one foot out in a arc keeping the heel on the floor, brought it back, and kicked out the other. They, or at least the most visible man on the right of the screen, wore boots that constrained the feet so they remained flat while the boot tips pointed up.
Patterson was described as a pastor, probably in the Union Baptist church in Columbiana, Mississippi, [8] just south of Birmingham. Most of the performance was directed at the audience, asking if they needed the Holy Ghost to appear and asking It to do so. Verses were sung only at the beginning and end.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Skylar Patterson
Vocal Accompaniment: four men
Instrumental Accompaniment: keyboard; two strummed instruments, probably an electric guitar and electric bass; one instrument resembling a steel guitar without the pedals
Rhythm Accompaniment: drum set
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Verses: down here praying, needs you
Theme: supplication to the Holy Ghost
Vocabulary:
Pronoun: somebody
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: down here praying
Format: recitative
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Line Meter: dactyl
Line Length: 9 syllables
Ending: none
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: Patterson sang most of it on one note
Time Signature: strong Xx
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: soloist supported by group. Patterson sang the statements in the verses and Predestined sang the refrains. When Patterson was speaking, they repeated "Oh Lord."
Singing Style:
Solo: Patterson sustained the first syllables of the Xxx dactylic feet, which aligned them with the contrasting Xx beat.
Group: chordal harmony
Notes on Performance
Occasion: no details provided
Location: stage, possibly in a high school, church hall, or gymnasium
Microphones: each had a wireless handheld mike; amplifiers or speakers were placed at the front of the stage
Clothing: the singers were wearing brown boots, black slacks, light-yellow sports jackets with black boutonnieres, white shirts, and no ties. The band members wore white shirts and light-colored tan slacks.
Notes on Movement
The men in Predestined stood still while Patterson was speaking in the beginning. As soon as the instruments began playing, they began bending their knees together. The man at the far left end sometimes bent his body forward as he moved.
Predestined members bent their arms that were not holding microphones at the elbows with their forearms extended. Their hands moved from left to right in no particular pattern.
Notes on Audience
One woman in the front row stood throughout. The rest were below the view of the camera; its microphones did not pick up any audience response.
When Patterson was introducing "Come by Here," he referred to the previous number before he started the group singing "we’re down here praying." He then said, "you remember that kind of church, don’t you?" He pointed at the standing woman and said, "You like that kinda church? I like you already." The group resumed singing, and the rest of his comments were directed to the audience in general.
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by Aj Jordan on 28 August 2017.
End Notes
1. Bessie Jones and Bess Lomax Hawes. Step it Down: Games, Plays, Songs, and Stories from the Afro-American Heritage. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987 edition. 20.
2. Reagon was discussed in the post for 14 October 2016.
3. Wikipedia. "Bessie Jones." She once told an interviewer she was born in Alachua, Florida, but that may have resulted from a misunderstanding. According to G. H. Blackmon, the first tung-oil processing plant was built in Alachua in 1928, and commercial interest began developing after 1930. It became a critical crop in 1938 when supplies from China were cut by war. ("Tung Oil Production in Florida." Florida State Horticultural Society. Proceedings 58:136-143:1945.)
4. Turrentine-Agee was discussed in the post for 6 August 2017. The shoes’ heels looked to be an inch thick at the floor and no more than two-inches high. The differences in how the one woman treated her left and right feet were typical for individuals who were not trained in dance classes to overcome the body’s natural inclination to favor one side.
5. The Evereadys’ live video was discussed in the post for 3 August 2017.
6. The Bolton Brothers were discussed in the post for 12 August 2017.
7. Jones. 46.
8. The obituary for Thelma Marie Lamb said her funeral service was held at Union Baptist Church in Columbiana and that Patterson presided at the burial service. (Tributes website). On Facebook, Patterson said he came from Columbiana.
Wednesday, October 25, 2017
Wyandot County 4-H Day Camp - Kumbaya
Topic: Movement - Lexical
I first saw hand gestures used with "Kumbaya" in Wyandot County, Ohio, in 1974 at a 4-H day camp for girls between the ages of ten and twelve. They were keyed to words in the text and repeated whenever the words were sung.
Only one was conventional, the one for "praying." The motion for crying took a little thought to create: one finger traced a tear down one cheek, either on the left or right side. No common kinesic vocabulary existed for "singing." The girls placed one of their hands near their mouths and moved them away to indicate the trajectory of sound.
The origins of the rest of the motions were not obvious. "My Lord" was denoted by diagonally moving a hand from one shoulder to the opposite wrist, while "someone" was represented by pointing at the sky. This confused the usual meaning of "someone" as an unnamed human being with other phrases like "someone up there likes me" that refer to God. [1]
The most interesting gestures were the ones for "kumbaya." Girls rolled their hands outward around each other on "kum ba" and spread them open, palms up on "ya." Since the motions had no inherent meaning, they implied the girls imputed no meaning to the phrase, and were treating it as so many sung syllables.
Such vocables [2] were common in the European songs that appeared in camp songbooks published by Cooperative Recreation Service in Delaware, Ohio. The best known to outsiders was "The Happy Wanderer" with its "val di re, val di ra" chorus [3]. The most common one in the song sheet collection of the Wyandot County 4-H agent [4] was "Vive l’Amour," [5] but he also had learned the "oh lay ha ki ki" in "Cuckoo" [6] and "yo ho ho tra la la la" in "Vrenalie" [7] from CRS.
These syllables that carried the melody without any lexical meaning were popular in the Camp Fire Girls’ camps I attended in Michigan in the 1950s, [8] but had faded from the camp repertoire in the late 1960s when girls began singing material from the commercial folk music revival associated with Peter, Paul and Mary.
Before their demise, such passages in camp songs, or similar ones in church services like "alleluia," eroded cultural barriers against the extrarational in the 1950s. As a result of the permission granted older children to utter meaningless sounds, no fear inhibited memorizing a novel word like "kumbaya" when it appeared late in the decade. It could be accepted without an explanation.
One former Girl Scout from the Detroit area simply said she did not know its meaning, when asked by a friend. [9] Another in Ohio wrote, "I was told it means ‘Come by here’ in some long-forgotten language (but I never really believed that)." [10]
When I mailed a questionnaire asking about popular camp songs in 1976, I asked if people had sung "Kumbaya" with gestures. More than 60% of the 154 who responded said they had. [11] I did not ask for details, because of the difficulty describing movements.
However, when I had the opportunity to speak with individuals I did ask if they knew the origins of the movements. One woman told me they were Indian sign language. [12] Another was told, they were either deaf language, or Indian, or African. [13] A third resolved the conflicting stories. Following one pattern of variation in folklore, she found minute differences that could be rationalized. According to her, if one rolled one’s hands outward on "kumbaya," it was Indian. If the hands were rolled inward, it was deaf sign language. [14]
All these women were associated with Camp Fire Girls’ camps. [15] The organization was founded in 1910 by Luther Halsey Gulick as the parallel organization to the Boy Scouts. His wife, Charlotte Vetter Gulick, developed much of the program at their family camp in Maine. The Indian content was suggested by Ernest Thompson Seton a decade before his ideas were adopted by the American Camping Association. [16]
Indian imagery remained important in the CFG program in the middle-1950s when first-year members created Indian names and second-year ones turned the names in symbolgrams using dictionaries published by the organization. [17] Council fires were held every week in summer resident camps. Any song that made a reference to Native Americans was cherished.
Most of this lore was superficial. [18] Sign language was not part of the CFG program in the 1950s; any ideas about its form came from films and television programs. The interest usually was sincere even when the sources were bogus and it created a readiness to accept activities if they could be attributed to Native Americans. In 1976, 65% of the girls in the responding Camp Fire camps knew the gestures for "Kumbaya." [19]
Performers
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: girls aged ten to twelve
Instrumental Accompaniment: none
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: not noted at the time
Verses: kumbaya, praying, crying, singing
Vocabulary:
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Format: 4 verse song
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Line Length: 8 syllables
Ending: none
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
I made a cassette tape in 1974, and transcribed the words without comments on the music. I still have the tape, but have not tried to play it, because I do not how well it has aged. I would have made a note if the singing style differed from the song I knew. Based on that, the tune was the standard 1-3-5. Since the emphasis was on the gestures, the girls probably sang in unison. It was sung after lunch and, at that time, would not have had a slow tempo.
Notes on Performance
Occasion: Wyandot County, Ohio, 4-H day camp after-lunch sing, 12 July 1974
Location: Camp Trinity, Upper Sandusky, Ohio
Microphones: none
Notes on Movement
Kumba: roll hands around each other in outward direction
Ya: hands out flat, palms facing up
Lord: cross self diagonally, with hand, from one shoulder to opposite wrist
Oh: make circle with thumb and forefinger
Someone: point to sky
Praying: hands in prayer
Crying: trace tear down cheek with finger
Singing: move hand outward from mouth following a tune
Notes on Performers
The Wyandot county seat of Upper Sandusky first was settled by Northerners: Presbyterians and Methodists formed congregations in 1845. Then came families from Pennsylvania, followed by those from German-speaking states. The English-speaking Evangelical Lutheran Church organized in 1849; the Church of God in 1851; Trinity Reformed Church of the Synod of the Reformed Church, which offered German and English Sabbath schools in 1852; the Roman Catholics, with a few Irish among the Germans in 1857; the United Brethren Church in 1858; Trinity Church of the Evangelical Association, with German and English Sunday schools in 1860; the German-speaking Evangelical Lutheran Church in 1868, and the Universalist Church in 1870. [20]
United Brethren were heirs to the Moravians who had contact with John Wesley and George Whitefield. Church of God was the formal name taken by followers of John Winebrenner, who broke with the German Reformed church in 1823. They had fled wars in the Palatinate in the 1730s. [21] One of his disciples, Jeremiah Tabler, led revivals in Upper in its early years. [22]
A constant influx of German-speaking immigrants meant new music traditions were mixed with existing ones. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi had encouraged the development of male singing groups to nurture the national spirit. [23] These liedertafel were suppressed after the 1848 revolution. Group singing turned to folk music in sängerbunds that implicitly denied any support for a supra-state identity. Würzburg organized the first festival in 1845. [24]
In 1849, male choruses from Louisville, Kentucky, and Madison, Indiana, both located on the Ohio river, joined in Cincinnati for a sängerfest. [25] Upper organized its first sängerbund in 1858 and began going to sängerfests in 1860. [26]
When I lived in Wyandot County between 1973 and 1975, many of the oldest buildings along the road I drove to Upper were Pennsylvania German-style banked barns. Evangelical United Brethren had merged with the Methodist Church in 1968, but none of the small rural churches had changed their signs. [27]
Camp Trinity was built by Upper’s Trinity Evangelical and Reformed Church. The original Trinity Reformed had become the Evangelical Assembly, and, in 1934, been subsumed into the E and R. It had been assimilated in the United Church of Christ by the Congregational Church in 1957, [28] but had not changed it name.
I did not interview any campers in 1974: I was trying to record their singing traditions without being intrusive. I did not learn their names or addresses, so do not know which parts of the county population were reached by the 4-H camping program.
Availability
My version is not available and I have not yet found any similar video on YouTube.
End Notes
1. The use of someone to refer to God appeared in the 1956 film "Someone Up There likes Me." The theme song used somebody, and was sung by Perry Como. I don’t know how popular a film about boxer Rocky Graziano was with children attending camps, but the record reached spot 18 on the Billboard chart that year. (Wikipedia. "Perry Como discography.")
2. Wikipedia said "the term is currently used for utterances which are not considered words." In a more specific sense, it said
"Such non-lexical vocables are often used in music, for example la la la or dum dee dum [. . .] Many Native American songs consist entirely of vocables." ("Vocable.")
3. Obernkirchen Children’s Choir performed the song in England in 1953, and recorded it on a British label. The original lyrics were by Florenz Siegesmund, and were adapted by Edith Möller to music by her brother, Friedrich Wilhelm Möller. The common English translation was made by Antonia Ridge. (Wikipedia. "The Happy Wanderer.")
4. The 4-H agent had accumulated a collection of song sheets dating back at least 30 years.
5. Lauritz Melchoir, a Wagnerian tenor, popularized "Vive l’Amour" in 1944; he often had his audiences sing along. I remember this was used by a Calhoun County, Michigan, 4-H song leader at an awards program in 1956; people had to shake the hand of the person on their right and left.
6. "Cuckoo - (Kuckuck)." Austria. English by K. F. R. [Katharine Ferris Rohrbough]. Copyright 1953, Cooperative Recreation Service, Inc., Delaware, Ohio. The original was "ho li rah hi hi ha," but camps converted it into a consonant rhyme with "oh lay ah cuckoo."
7. "Vrenalie." Swiss. Translation by V. M. S. [Violet Synge]. In Janet Tobitt. The Ditty Bag. Published by Tobitt, 1946. Republished in CRS songbooks.
8. Both were sung at Kitanniwa, the Battle Creek, Michigan, CFG camp. They changed the "yo ho ho" chorus of "Vrenalie" into a call-response section and used patterned gestures for "Cuckoo." (Camp Songs. 309, 178, 185.)
9. William D. Doebler. Tape of camp songs. Wayne State University folklore archives. 1965. The archives no longer exist.
10. A woman who attended Camp o’ the Hills, sponsored by the Irish Hills Girl Scout Council in Jackson, Michigan, from 1963 to 1970. Email to author, 12 April 2016.
11. I mailed the questionnaire to camps of all sorts during the summer season in 1976. Since I already had heard from a number of CFG camps, I include as many boys’ camps and camps with different sponsors in different part of the company as possible. I believe I sent out some 400 letters to camps listed in the then current directory of the American Camping Association.
While the sample was designed to be representative, the responses were not. Perhaps because a number of the songs came from the CFG repertoire, many of the answers came from people who shared the Midwestern girls’ traditions.
12. Camp Songs. 68.
13. Camp Songs. 68.
14. Camp Songs. 68-69.
15. One woman was at Kitanniwa (see #8), a second was a CFG leader in Maryland, and the third was the music counselor at Aloha Hive. Technically, the last was a private camp. However, it was founded by Edward Leeds Gulick. He was the brother of the organizer of the Camp Fire Girls. In the early years they shared program ideas.
16. Camp Songs. On the founding of CFG, 12; Seton was discussed throughout the book. He changed his name from Ernest Evan Thompson, and also was known as Ernest Seton Thompson.
17. The requirements for ranks were specified in The Book of the Camp Fire Girls. (New York: Camp Fire Girls, Inc., 1953. 88, 92. The source for symbolgrams was Francis Loomis Wallace and Earlleen Kirby. Your Symbol Book. (New York: Camp Fire Girls, Inc., 1951). My mother apparently did not have a copy of the name dictionary, but several were recommended based on one compiled by Charlotte V. Gulick. A List of Indian Words. (New York: The Camp Fire Outfitting Company, 1915.)
18. Indian lore often degenerated when it was used in camps that did not provide an institutional framework like that in CFG camps. I remember only one song that was filled with negative stereotypes, "We Are the Redmen." In the 1970s, when camps were purging their repertoires, this was the hardest to remove from CFG repertoires. I think it was because girls learned it so young they had no idea what the words meant, and built up associations with it, Native Americans, and camp or Camp Fire that were positive.
19. As suggested in #11, the total sample of responses did not represent the variety of summer camps in 1976. However, I had no reason to think any serious biases colored the subsets of responses. The one factor that may have skewed the results was the order of questions. The first asked it they had sung "Kumbaya" with motions, and the second was had they sung it without. Many may simply have seen the song title in the first line, checked it, and gone on without reading the detail.
In descending order, 89% of the Girl Scout camps who answered by questionnaire knew gestures for "Kumbaya," followed by 66% of CFG camps, 61% of religious camps, 44% of general public camps, 29% of private camps, and 20% of Boy Scout camps.
20. The History of Wyandot County Ohio. Chicago: Leggett, Conaway and Company, 1884. 537-543.
21. Sydney E. Ahlstrom. A Religious History of the American People. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972. 616.
22. Wyandot County, history. 503-505.
23. Pestalozzi lived in a Swiss community twice occupied by Napoléon’s troops. (Wikipedia. "Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi.")
24. Camp Songs. 482.
25. Charles Frederic Goss. Cincinnati, the Queen City, 1788-1912. Cincinnati: The S. J. Clark Publishing Company, 1912. 2:466-467.
26. Wyandot County, history. 548. It originally was called a männerchor and was still active in 1884, but was having problems attracting the American-born sons of its first members (p 551).
27. Wikipedia. "Evangelical United Brethren Church."
28. Wikipedia. "Evangelical and Reformed Church."
I first saw hand gestures used with "Kumbaya" in Wyandot County, Ohio, in 1974 at a 4-H day camp for girls between the ages of ten and twelve. They were keyed to words in the text and repeated whenever the words were sung.
Only one was conventional, the one for "praying." The motion for crying took a little thought to create: one finger traced a tear down one cheek, either on the left or right side. No common kinesic vocabulary existed for "singing." The girls placed one of their hands near their mouths and moved them away to indicate the trajectory of sound.
The origins of the rest of the motions were not obvious. "My Lord" was denoted by diagonally moving a hand from one shoulder to the opposite wrist, while "someone" was represented by pointing at the sky. This confused the usual meaning of "someone" as an unnamed human being with other phrases like "someone up there likes me" that refer to God. [1]
The most interesting gestures were the ones for "kumbaya." Girls rolled their hands outward around each other on "kum ba" and spread them open, palms up on "ya." Since the motions had no inherent meaning, they implied the girls imputed no meaning to the phrase, and were treating it as so many sung syllables.
Such vocables [2] were common in the European songs that appeared in camp songbooks published by Cooperative Recreation Service in Delaware, Ohio. The best known to outsiders was "The Happy Wanderer" with its "val di re, val di ra" chorus [3]. The most common one in the song sheet collection of the Wyandot County 4-H agent [4] was "Vive l’Amour," [5] but he also had learned the "oh lay ha ki ki" in "Cuckoo" [6] and "yo ho ho tra la la la" in "Vrenalie" [7] from CRS.
These syllables that carried the melody without any lexical meaning were popular in the Camp Fire Girls’ camps I attended in Michigan in the 1950s, [8] but had faded from the camp repertoire in the late 1960s when girls began singing material from the commercial folk music revival associated with Peter, Paul and Mary.
Before their demise, such passages in camp songs, or similar ones in church services like "alleluia," eroded cultural barriers against the extrarational in the 1950s. As a result of the permission granted older children to utter meaningless sounds, no fear inhibited memorizing a novel word like "kumbaya" when it appeared late in the decade. It could be accepted without an explanation.
One former Girl Scout from the Detroit area simply said she did not know its meaning, when asked by a friend. [9] Another in Ohio wrote, "I was told it means ‘Come by here’ in some long-forgotten language (but I never really believed that)." [10]
When I mailed a questionnaire asking about popular camp songs in 1976, I asked if people had sung "Kumbaya" with gestures. More than 60% of the 154 who responded said they had. [11] I did not ask for details, because of the difficulty describing movements.
However, when I had the opportunity to speak with individuals I did ask if they knew the origins of the movements. One woman told me they were Indian sign language. [12] Another was told, they were either deaf language, or Indian, or African. [13] A third resolved the conflicting stories. Following one pattern of variation in folklore, she found minute differences that could be rationalized. According to her, if one rolled one’s hands outward on "kumbaya," it was Indian. If the hands were rolled inward, it was deaf sign language. [14]
All these women were associated with Camp Fire Girls’ camps. [15] The organization was founded in 1910 by Luther Halsey Gulick as the parallel organization to the Boy Scouts. His wife, Charlotte Vetter Gulick, developed much of the program at their family camp in Maine. The Indian content was suggested by Ernest Thompson Seton a decade before his ideas were adopted by the American Camping Association. [16]
Indian imagery remained important in the CFG program in the middle-1950s when first-year members created Indian names and second-year ones turned the names in symbolgrams using dictionaries published by the organization. [17] Council fires were held every week in summer resident camps. Any song that made a reference to Native Americans was cherished.
Most of this lore was superficial. [18] Sign language was not part of the CFG program in the 1950s; any ideas about its form came from films and television programs. The interest usually was sincere even when the sources were bogus and it created a readiness to accept activities if they could be attributed to Native Americans. In 1976, 65% of the girls in the responding Camp Fire camps knew the gestures for "Kumbaya." [19]
Performers
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: girls aged ten to twelve
Instrumental Accompaniment: none
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: not noted at the time
Verses: kumbaya, praying, crying, singing
Vocabulary:
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Format: 4 verse song
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Line Length: 8 syllables
Ending: none
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
I made a cassette tape in 1974, and transcribed the words without comments on the music. I still have the tape, but have not tried to play it, because I do not how well it has aged. I would have made a note if the singing style differed from the song I knew. Based on that, the tune was the standard 1-3-5. Since the emphasis was on the gestures, the girls probably sang in unison. It was sung after lunch and, at that time, would not have had a slow tempo.
Notes on Performance
Occasion: Wyandot County, Ohio, 4-H day camp after-lunch sing, 12 July 1974
Location: Camp Trinity, Upper Sandusky, Ohio
Microphones: none
Notes on Movement
Kumba: roll hands around each other in outward direction
Ya: hands out flat, palms facing up
Lord: cross self diagonally, with hand, from one shoulder to opposite wrist
Oh: make circle with thumb and forefinger
Someone: point to sky
Praying: hands in prayer
Crying: trace tear down cheek with finger
Singing: move hand outward from mouth following a tune
Notes on Performers
The Wyandot county seat of Upper Sandusky first was settled by Northerners: Presbyterians and Methodists formed congregations in 1845. Then came families from Pennsylvania, followed by those from German-speaking states. The English-speaking Evangelical Lutheran Church organized in 1849; the Church of God in 1851; Trinity Reformed Church of the Synod of the Reformed Church, which offered German and English Sabbath schools in 1852; the Roman Catholics, with a few Irish among the Germans in 1857; the United Brethren Church in 1858; Trinity Church of the Evangelical Association, with German and English Sunday schools in 1860; the German-speaking Evangelical Lutheran Church in 1868, and the Universalist Church in 1870. [20]
United Brethren were heirs to the Moravians who had contact with John Wesley and George Whitefield. Church of God was the formal name taken by followers of John Winebrenner, who broke with the German Reformed church in 1823. They had fled wars in the Palatinate in the 1730s. [21] One of his disciples, Jeremiah Tabler, led revivals in Upper in its early years. [22]
A constant influx of German-speaking immigrants meant new music traditions were mixed with existing ones. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi had encouraged the development of male singing groups to nurture the national spirit. [23] These liedertafel were suppressed after the 1848 revolution. Group singing turned to folk music in sängerbunds that implicitly denied any support for a supra-state identity. Würzburg organized the first festival in 1845. [24]
In 1849, male choruses from Louisville, Kentucky, and Madison, Indiana, both located on the Ohio river, joined in Cincinnati for a sängerfest. [25] Upper organized its first sängerbund in 1858 and began going to sängerfests in 1860. [26]
When I lived in Wyandot County between 1973 and 1975, many of the oldest buildings along the road I drove to Upper were Pennsylvania German-style banked barns. Evangelical United Brethren had merged with the Methodist Church in 1968, but none of the small rural churches had changed their signs. [27]
Camp Trinity was built by Upper’s Trinity Evangelical and Reformed Church. The original Trinity Reformed had become the Evangelical Assembly, and, in 1934, been subsumed into the E and R. It had been assimilated in the United Church of Christ by the Congregational Church in 1957, [28] but had not changed it name.
I did not interview any campers in 1974: I was trying to record their singing traditions without being intrusive. I did not learn their names or addresses, so do not know which parts of the county population were reached by the 4-H camping program.
Availability
My version is not available and I have not yet found any similar video on YouTube.
End Notes
1. The use of someone to refer to God appeared in the 1956 film "Someone Up There likes Me." The theme song used somebody, and was sung by Perry Como. I don’t know how popular a film about boxer Rocky Graziano was with children attending camps, but the record reached spot 18 on the Billboard chart that year. (Wikipedia. "Perry Como discography.")
2. Wikipedia said "the term is currently used for utterances which are not considered words." In a more specific sense, it said
"Such non-lexical vocables are often used in music, for example la la la or dum dee dum [. . .] Many Native American songs consist entirely of vocables." ("Vocable.")
3. Obernkirchen Children’s Choir performed the song in England in 1953, and recorded it on a British label. The original lyrics were by Florenz Siegesmund, and were adapted by Edith Möller to music by her brother, Friedrich Wilhelm Möller. The common English translation was made by Antonia Ridge. (Wikipedia. "The Happy Wanderer.")
4. The 4-H agent had accumulated a collection of song sheets dating back at least 30 years.
5. Lauritz Melchoir, a Wagnerian tenor, popularized "Vive l’Amour" in 1944; he often had his audiences sing along. I remember this was used by a Calhoun County, Michigan, 4-H song leader at an awards program in 1956; people had to shake the hand of the person on their right and left.
6. "Cuckoo - (Kuckuck)." Austria. English by K. F. R. [Katharine Ferris Rohrbough]. Copyright 1953, Cooperative Recreation Service, Inc., Delaware, Ohio. The original was "ho li rah hi hi ha," but camps converted it into a consonant rhyme with "oh lay ah cuckoo."
7. "Vrenalie." Swiss. Translation by V. M. S. [Violet Synge]. In Janet Tobitt. The Ditty Bag. Published by Tobitt, 1946. Republished in CRS songbooks.
8. Both were sung at Kitanniwa, the Battle Creek, Michigan, CFG camp. They changed the "yo ho ho" chorus of "Vrenalie" into a call-response section and used patterned gestures for "Cuckoo." (Camp Songs. 309, 178, 185.)
9. William D. Doebler. Tape of camp songs. Wayne State University folklore archives. 1965. The archives no longer exist.
10. A woman who attended Camp o’ the Hills, sponsored by the Irish Hills Girl Scout Council in Jackson, Michigan, from 1963 to 1970. Email to author, 12 April 2016.
11. I mailed the questionnaire to camps of all sorts during the summer season in 1976. Since I already had heard from a number of CFG camps, I include as many boys’ camps and camps with different sponsors in different part of the company as possible. I believe I sent out some 400 letters to camps listed in the then current directory of the American Camping Association.
While the sample was designed to be representative, the responses were not. Perhaps because a number of the songs came from the CFG repertoire, many of the answers came from people who shared the Midwestern girls’ traditions.
12. Camp Songs. 68.
13. Camp Songs. 68.
14. Camp Songs. 68-69.
15. One woman was at Kitanniwa (see #8), a second was a CFG leader in Maryland, and the third was the music counselor at Aloha Hive. Technically, the last was a private camp. However, it was founded by Edward Leeds Gulick. He was the brother of the organizer of the Camp Fire Girls. In the early years they shared program ideas.
16. Camp Songs. On the founding of CFG, 12; Seton was discussed throughout the book. He changed his name from Ernest Evan Thompson, and also was known as Ernest Seton Thompson.
17. The requirements for ranks were specified in The Book of the Camp Fire Girls. (New York: Camp Fire Girls, Inc., 1953. 88, 92. The source for symbolgrams was Francis Loomis Wallace and Earlleen Kirby. Your Symbol Book. (New York: Camp Fire Girls, Inc., 1951). My mother apparently did not have a copy of the name dictionary, but several were recommended based on one compiled by Charlotte V. Gulick. A List of Indian Words. (New York: The Camp Fire Outfitting Company, 1915.)
18. Indian lore often degenerated when it was used in camps that did not provide an institutional framework like that in CFG camps. I remember only one song that was filled with negative stereotypes, "We Are the Redmen." In the 1970s, when camps were purging their repertoires, this was the hardest to remove from CFG repertoires. I think it was because girls learned it so young they had no idea what the words meant, and built up associations with it, Native Americans, and camp or Camp Fire that were positive.
19. As suggested in #11, the total sample of responses did not represent the variety of summer camps in 1976. However, I had no reason to think any serious biases colored the subsets of responses. The one factor that may have skewed the results was the order of questions. The first asked it they had sung "Kumbaya" with motions, and the second was had they sung it without. Many may simply have seen the song title in the first line, checked it, and gone on without reading the detail.
In descending order, 89% of the Girl Scout camps who answered by questionnaire knew gestures for "Kumbaya," followed by 66% of CFG camps, 61% of religious camps, 44% of general public camps, 29% of private camps, and 20% of Boy Scout camps.
20. The History of Wyandot County Ohio. Chicago: Leggett, Conaway and Company, 1884. 537-543.
21. Sydney E. Ahlstrom. A Religious History of the American People. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972. 616.
22. Wyandot County, history. 503-505.
23. Pestalozzi lived in a Swiss community twice occupied by Napoléon’s troops. (Wikipedia. "Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi.")
24. Camp Songs. 482.
25. Charles Frederic Goss. Cincinnati, the Queen City, 1788-1912. Cincinnati: The S. J. Clark Publishing Company, 1912. 2:466-467.
26. Wyandot County, history. 548. It originally was called a männerchor and was still active in 1884, but was having problems attracting the American-born sons of its first members (p 551).
27. Wikipedia. "Evangelical United Brethren Church."
28. Wikipedia. "Evangelical and Reformed Church."
Wednesday, October 18, 2017
Nina Simone - Com’ By H’Yere
Topic: Political versions
Nina Simone wrote one of the bluntest protest songs in 1963: "Mississippi Goddam." [1] More than a decade passed between then and her recording of "Come by Here," years in which the demand for civil rights moved from being given equal access to educations to demanding equal time for the African-American experience in history and literature classes.
Academics, both Black and white, began researching the history of slavery: the memoirs collected from ex-slaves during the depression by WPA workers like Ruby Pickens Tartt were consulted and published. Other scholars began more systematic studies of the African past. And, starting in the middle-1960s, American Blacks began making pilgrimages to the ancestral continent. [2]
Spaulding Givens became part of the African revival movement. He played piano for Charles Mingus in 1951, then began experimenting with native instruments and changed his name to Nadi Qamar in the 1960s. [3] By 1971, he was playing oud and thumb piano for Simone at Carnegie Hall. [4] He and her longtime collaborator, Al Schackman, accompanied her on "Come by Here."
She included it on the last commercial album she made, It Is Finished. She had become increasingly disillusioned with life in this country after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, and left for Barbados in 1972. Simone recorded it on a brief visit to the United States in 1974, before she relocated to Liberia.
Her verses were ones popularized by the Civil Rights movement (somebody’s dying, praying), but her musical interludes were duets by the western piano and African thumb piano. Rattles were the primary rhythm instrument. They may have been attached to the mbira, much like the zis on a tambourine.
The textual structure probably came from her childhood experiences in the Colored Methodist Episcopal church [5] in western North Carolina where her mother was a minister. [6] She treated it as an open-ended song in which she sang the "come by here" verse three times, the "dying" verse twice, and the other quatrains once.
The stanzaic sequence was superimposed on a musical pattern that alternated two vocal repetitions with a musical interlude. The intensification of the interludes may also have come from the church. She told a Canadian interviewer "the gospel singing that I heard in church influenced me tremendously, and that’s no one person, that’s a real and a feeling, a rapport that you get in a big audience when you can’t hear anything but rhythm." [7]
Several of the songs on the album wrapped her political commentary in religious imagery, especially "Dambala." One verse of "Come by Here" may have been an allusion to her own problems with the government: "I’m on trial Lord." [8] The mere selection of this song may have been a merger of the religious, the political, and the personal. She had been deeply affected two years earlier by the deaths of her father [9] and the older sister [10] who took care of her while her mother was busy. [11]
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Nina Simone
Vocal Accompaniment: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: Nina Simone, piano; Nadi Qamar, thumb piano; Avram Schackman, guitar
Rhythm Accompaniment: piano chords and rattle; audience clapped along after the last interlude
The thumb piano or mbira was an African plucked instrument made from tuned bars attached to a sounding board. It usually was placed in or on a resonator like a box or gourd. [12] Traditionally the bars were fashioned from bamboo, but now are metal strips. The tones lingered a brief time, contributing to the unique sound. [13] Some musicians placed shells or pieces of metal on the keys or board. [14]
It developed in southeastern Africa and came to its greatest development among the Shona in what is today Zimbabwe. Around 1900, it was taken to Nigeria. [15] It had many local names. Qamar used the Ugandan term likembe, which appeared in French Congo popular music in the early 1950s. [16]
Credits
Written-By – Trad. [17]
Arranged By – Harold Wheeler, Nina Simone
Public Domain
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Verses: come by here, I’m on trial, dying, praying
Vocabulary:
Pronoun: I, somebody
Pronunciation: she emphasized the /s/ in "please come by here," did not pronounce the terminal /g/ of "dying" or ‘praying,’ and pronounced the /d/ in Lord very softly.
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: I’m on trial
Format: open-ended
Verse Repetition Pattern: AxBxBAA
Line Length: 9 syllables
Special Features: none
Influences: She attended the Allen School while Claire Lovejoy Lennon was superintendent. [18] With a two decades gap between her graduation in 1950 and her recording and, and the intervening popularity of other recordings, it is impossible to know if her version had any connection with the unknown one of Lennon.
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-5
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: alternated an instrumental section with two vocal verses four times (IVV-IVV-IVV-IV). Each time the instrumental interludes marked an increase in rhythmic intensity. The guitar played the melody in the introduction. In the second interlude, Simone played the melody in chords against the rhythm of the guitar and thumb piano.
Singing Style: generally one syllable to one note, with the exceptions of Lord in "come by here good Lord come by here." Whenever she sustained a tone, she treated it with vibrato. The number of sustained notes increased in later verses.
Notes on Performance
Applause after the third instrumental section and at the end indicated it was a live performance. She probably made several appearances in 1974, including one in Canada when she was interviewed by the CBC. The only one I have found mentioned on the internet was a solo concert at the Newport Jazz Festival. [19] The liner notes only said it was remixed in New York City.
Audience Perceptions
In its 1974 review, an Ebony writer wrote: "She creates a mood of camp meeting exultation on Com’ By H’Here Good Lord." [20]
Notes on Performers
Both Simone and Odetta were encouraged as young girls by white patrons to aspire to roles in classical music. However, Odetta, as mentioned in the post for 16 October 2017, suspected the dream was a chimera and looked for an alternative career in the folk music revival clubs on the West Coast. Simone believed she could make it as a concert pianist, and was bitterly disappointed when Curtiss Institute did not accept her after she had spent time at Juilliard. Her move into jazz nightclubs on the East Coast was driven by the need to eat. [21]
She was working in New Hope, Pennsylvania, in 1957, when she met Al Schackman. He had grown up playing Yiddish music, and worked "with a band that played Armenian and Turkish music." [22] He noted he was able to compliment her playing without instructions. As the years passed, the rapport deepened. He remembered once in Holland:
"‘Music is all we have now, isn’t it?’ she said to me. I said yeah ... 85 percent. She said ‘95 percent for me’." [23]
Availability
Album: It Is Finished. RCA APL1-0241. 1974.
YouTube: uploaded by TeddyCool23, 11 July 2011.
YouTube: uploaded by Mikael Sjögren, 3 March 2012.
YouTube: uploaded by Jeroen Verdonck, 24 April 2015.
YouTube: uploaded by Sony Music Entertainment, 24 May 2015.
End Notes
1. Nina Simone. "Mississippi Goddam." Nina Simone in Concert. Phillips PHM 200-135. 1964.
For more information on the WPA Slave Narratives project, see the post for 23 January 2019.
2. John Darnton. "Nigeria Evoking a Lost Past For U.S. Black Performers." The New York Times. 28 January 1977.
3. German Wikipedia. "Nadi Qamar."
4. Radcliffe Joe. "Nina Simone." Billboard. 22 May 1971. 22. Several biographies and films existed about Simone. Most were interested in her personal life and discussed the texts of her songs. I did not find any that dealt with her development as a musician.
5. The Colored Methodist Episcopal church was organized by freedmen in 1870 when it became clear they would have no role in the Methodist Episcopal Church South. They changed the name to the Christian ME church in 1956. (Encyclopædia Britannica. "Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.")
6. Simone was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon. According to Alan Light, her mother, born Mary Kate Irvin, "came from a family of preachers (fifteen of them in all, according to Simone.)" What Happened, Miss Simone? New York: Crown Archetype, 2016. No page numbers in on-line version.
7. Nina Simone. Interviewed by Martin Bronstein. The Entertainers. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Broadcast 3 November 1974.
8. She had problems with unpaid taxes. Her husband had been her manager until she moved to Barbados and the marriage ended. (Alan Light. "How David Bowie Helped Nina Simone Out of a Slump." Time website. 11 January 2016.)
9. Simone’s father died 23 October 1972 of pancreatic cancer. (Erica Howton. "Johnnie Devan Waymon." Geni website. 10 March 2017.)
10. Her sister Lucille died in 1972. ("Lucille Julia Waddell [Waymon]." Geni website. 6 December 2016.)
11. Light said Lucille took care of Simone when she was a young child. (What Happened.)
12. Virginia Gorlinski. "Mbira." Encyclopædia Britannica. 12 October 2009; last updated 8 November 2013.
13. Wikipedia. "Mbira."
14. Gorlinski.
15. Wikipedia, Mbira.
16. N. Scott Robinson. "Mbira." His website. This was the best source on the instrument.
17. "Nina Simone – It Is Finished." Discogs website.
18. Lennon and the Allen School is discussed in the post for 25 October 2020.
19. "Today’s Events in the Newport Jazz Festival." The New York Times, 29 June 1974.
20. Phyl Garland. Review. Ebony. December 1974. 30.
21. Wikipedia. "Nina Simone."
22. Al Schackman. Quoted by Ellis Widner. "Simone, Music Director in Perfect Harmony, Schackman Recalls." Arkansas Online website. 17 February 2009.
23. Schackman.
Monday, October 16, 2017
Odetta - Kumbaya
Topic: Political versions
Odetta may be the only popular performer who kept "Kumbaya" in her repertoire after the end of the Vietnam war because peace to her was not a civic, but a spiritual state. She never recorded the song, and no one has uploaded a concert video to YouTube, although one performance tape does exist on the internet. Without those recordings, all that remains of her version are descriptions made at the time. They made clear, context for her was more important than content.
Graham Reid, who saw her in New Zealand in 1989, said she opened the concert by carrying incense and then asked the audience "to focus with her for a moment, and then join together in singing ‘Kumbaya,’ a spiritual whose Swahili title translates as ‘Come By Here.’ A gentle call for the Lord’s presence, the song functioned as a unifying force, conjuring up the spiritual energy that fueled Odetta’s performance." [1]
Toby Bielawski made similar comments about a show in a San Francisco coffee house in 1998:
"Suddenly, I had the feeling that we had all come not just to hear music, but to share a spiritual experience. As Odetta began her performance, leading us together through the familiar African spiritual ‘Kumbaya,’ a transformation took place: for over an hour that evening—which was, fittingly, a Sunday—the coffeehouse became a house of soul healing, a church of song for all denominations." [2]
She was a child of the great migration. Her parents moved from Birmingham, Alabama, to Los Angeles during the depression. Although she was trained there to sing opera, Odetta never believed a major opera house would cast a large African-American woman in an important role. While she was working instead in a road troupe for a musical comedy, she discovered the coffee houses of San Francisco where the folk music revival was developing in the early 1950s. [3]
She later said the "formal training was ‘a nice exercise, but it had nothing to do with my life’." [4] In fact, training for the stage influenced her approach to songs. Instead of assimilating every text into her own style, she tried "to recreate the feeling of her folk songs." [5]
Thus, her a capella version of "Kumbaya" captured on a tape from 1998 was meant to evoke the singing of Africans adjusting to plantation life in the American South. She shouted more than sang the lyrics. On her last repetition of the kumbaya burden, she inhaled strongly before singing the "kum" that began the lines. Zora Neale Hurston observed:
"Negro singing and formal speech are breathy. The audible breathing is part of the performance and various devices are resorted to to adorn the breath taking. Even the lack of breath is embellished with syllables. This is, of course, the very antithesis of white vocal art. European singing is considered good when each syllable floats out on a column of air, seeming not to have any mechanics at all. Breathing must be hidden. Negro song ornaments both the song and the mechanics." [6]
This vocal technique was not part of Odetta’s inherited musical vocabulary. Her classical training made smooth breathing instinctive, and, despite her early years in a Baptist church, her important childhood religious experiences came from a Congregational one. [7] She told Reid
"I do not call myself religious. I am suspicious of those who are the keepers of religion, and I am suspicious if someone says, ‘God told me to tell you....’ That means they’re trying to control me. And since we’re both children of God, why does He have your number and not mine? How come He just don’t call me up? Or She, thank you very much! But I’m highly spiritual. Religious, no. Spiritual, yes. And I think I couldn’t help but be, because of the magic and the healing that I’ve experienced in the music." [8]
She treated Civil Rights organizations with the same skepticism. She told Amy Goodman:
"I once tried to be — no, twice tried to be a joiner and belong to a group, because I know you need to do that in order to affect anything. And I had no patience with people going through their ego trips before they could even deal with the problem that we had gotten together with. And so, a long time ago I made the decision that I would be on the supportive end. And for all those brave ones who could sit through all that stuff and get something focused, I would go there and be supportive in whatever way I could." [9]
Instead of marching at Selma, Alabama, she sang at the concert for marchers camped the last night six miles from Montgomery. [10] Her most famous performance was Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington where she sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, [11] but she also sang wherever she was invited.
Bernice Johnson Reagon heard her at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1962 between the time she had been expelled from Albany College and before she dropped out of Spelman to join the Freedom Singers. Instead of performing protest songs, Odetta sang "Prettiest chain that I have ever seen" and "Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho." Johnson Regaon recalled:
"One of the things that happens sometimes when you take root music and take it to the concert stage, something happens to it. You recognize it, but it’s been sort of shifted a bit. And Odetta did shift these songs, because these are songs that are work songs. But when she sang prison songs or work song, she still rendered the passion, the energy and the position and the function that those songs created for the people who sang them as a way of balancing their lives. She was just, the spring of 1962, what I needed to begin my life as a freedom fighter and as a Freedom Singer." [12]
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Odetta
Vocal Accompaniment: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: none
Rhythm Accompaniment: it sounded like she was hitting something metallic, but it was not picked up by the microphone and was very faint.
Credits
In Berkeley she said it was a " song from the Georgia Sea Island, Cum By ya, My Lord. That is a patois of come by here, my Lord, help me, will you, help me."
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: cum-BY-yah with strong emphasis on second syllable
Verses: kumbaya, needs you
Theme: the peace she sought in "Kumbaya" was not the simple peace of someone escaping war or fighting for civil rights, but the equipoise required to overcome the destructive emotions created by both. As she told the Auckland audience before they sang it together:
"Even if all of us live right next door to each other, we come from different places. So-and-so burned the toast this morning, the kids were slow in getting ready: your focus has been taken away into doing other things. And I, too, have come from another—let’s call it life. So then we get together in one room to do something together, and we all focus on this one thing—the music—and from there, we can go anywhere." [13]
Vocabulary:
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Format: verse-burden
Verse Repetition Pattern: AxA
Line Length: 8 syllables
Ending: none
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: first note on 1, rest on 5
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: strophic
Singing Style: neither sung nor spoken; rougher sound than Bernice Johnson Reagon discussed in the post for 14 October 2017.
Notes on Performance
Occasion: Benefit concert for Seva Foundation, 15 May 1998
Location: Berkeley Community Theatre, Berkeley, California
Notes on Audience
The microphone picked up applause but did not record any other sounds from the audience. Her comment "I hear ya, I hear ya" was the only indication they joined in singing.
Notes on Performers
Odetta was not simply a musical actress donning African-influenced stage costumes; she had a robust voice and a strong sense of music. Rhythm was more important than melody. When she asked the audience to sing with her in Berkeley she told them:
"It’s filled with those of you whose friends and neighbors and teachers told you ‘you shouldn’t sing because you were not in the right key,’ or whatever. Forget them and sing in whatever key you’re gonna sing in. [pause] I’m strict on rhythm, but [end of tape]." [14]
Hurston noted the resulting dissonance was traditional: "The harmony of the true spiritual is not regular. The dissonances are important and not to be ironed out by the trained musician." [15] She added, "The real Negro singer cares nothing about pitch. The first notes just burst out and the rest of the church join in—fired by the same inner urge. Every man trying to express himself through song. Every man for himself. Hence the harmony and disharmony, the shifting keys and broken time that makes up the spiritual." [16]
Availability
The Seva Foundation uploaded tapes to its Concert Vault website. You have to pay for a monthly membership, but can get free access for a few days and cancel anytime.
The presentation was confusing. It listed three items: Kumbaya - 3:10, Maybe She Go/Sitting Here in Limbo - 8:20, and (Something Inside) So Strong - 4:14. The first was actually a 31 second introduction by an unidentified man. The second was a 1.18 minute welcome by Odetta, similar in tone to the performance described by Reid. The last was three verses of "Kumbaya" in 1.27 minutes ending with applause.
It was enough to let you hear her style, if not enough to apprehend her version.
End Notes
1. Graham Reid. "Odetta: A Legend Ignored. Elsewhere website. 17 January 2011.
2. Toby Bielawski. "The Wisdom and Music of Odetta." Radiance website. Winter 1999.
3. Randy Lewis and Mike Boehm. "Odetta Holmes Dies at 77; Folk Singer Championed Black History, Civil Rights." Los Angeles Times, 3 December 2008.
4. "Odetta." Biography website. Last updated 8 December 2014.
5. "Baby in the Cradle. Time, 5 December 1960. Quoted by Tim Weiner. "Odetta, Voice of Civil Rights Movement, Dies at 77." The New York Times, 3 December 2008.
6. Zora Neale Hurston. "Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals." 79-84 in The Sanctified Church. Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1983. 81-82.
7. Reid.
8. Odetta. Quoted by Reid.
9. Odetta. Interview with Amy Godman. Speaking for Ourselves. 20 December 1986. Replayed by Goodman. "Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon Remembers Musical Icon Odetta (1930-2008)." Democracy Now! 30 December 2008.
10. John Shearer. "How The Selma March Was Covered In The 1965 Chattanooga Papers." The Chattanoongan [Tennessee] website. 23 March 2015.
11. Odetta, Biography.
12. Bernice Johnson Reagon. Interview with Amy Goodman. Democracy Now! 30 December 2008.
13. Reid.
14. Odetta. Quoted by Reid.
15. Hurston. 80.
16. Hurston. 80-81.
Odetta may be the only popular performer who kept "Kumbaya" in her repertoire after the end of the Vietnam war because peace to her was not a civic, but a spiritual state. She never recorded the song, and no one has uploaded a concert video to YouTube, although one performance tape does exist on the internet. Without those recordings, all that remains of her version are descriptions made at the time. They made clear, context for her was more important than content.
Graham Reid, who saw her in New Zealand in 1989, said she opened the concert by carrying incense and then asked the audience "to focus with her for a moment, and then join together in singing ‘Kumbaya,’ a spiritual whose Swahili title translates as ‘Come By Here.’ A gentle call for the Lord’s presence, the song functioned as a unifying force, conjuring up the spiritual energy that fueled Odetta’s performance." [1]
Toby Bielawski made similar comments about a show in a San Francisco coffee house in 1998:
"Suddenly, I had the feeling that we had all come not just to hear music, but to share a spiritual experience. As Odetta began her performance, leading us together through the familiar African spiritual ‘Kumbaya,’ a transformation took place: for over an hour that evening—which was, fittingly, a Sunday—the coffeehouse became a house of soul healing, a church of song for all denominations." [2]
She was a child of the great migration. Her parents moved from Birmingham, Alabama, to Los Angeles during the depression. Although she was trained there to sing opera, Odetta never believed a major opera house would cast a large African-American woman in an important role. While she was working instead in a road troupe for a musical comedy, she discovered the coffee houses of San Francisco where the folk music revival was developing in the early 1950s. [3]
She later said the "formal training was ‘a nice exercise, but it had nothing to do with my life’." [4] In fact, training for the stage influenced her approach to songs. Instead of assimilating every text into her own style, she tried "to recreate the feeling of her folk songs." [5]
Thus, her a capella version of "Kumbaya" captured on a tape from 1998 was meant to evoke the singing of Africans adjusting to plantation life in the American South. She shouted more than sang the lyrics. On her last repetition of the kumbaya burden, she inhaled strongly before singing the "kum" that began the lines. Zora Neale Hurston observed:
"Negro singing and formal speech are breathy. The audible breathing is part of the performance and various devices are resorted to to adorn the breath taking. Even the lack of breath is embellished with syllables. This is, of course, the very antithesis of white vocal art. European singing is considered good when each syllable floats out on a column of air, seeming not to have any mechanics at all. Breathing must be hidden. Negro song ornaments both the song and the mechanics." [6]
This vocal technique was not part of Odetta’s inherited musical vocabulary. Her classical training made smooth breathing instinctive, and, despite her early years in a Baptist church, her important childhood religious experiences came from a Congregational one. [7] She told Reid
"I do not call myself religious. I am suspicious of those who are the keepers of religion, and I am suspicious if someone says, ‘God told me to tell you....’ That means they’re trying to control me. And since we’re both children of God, why does He have your number and not mine? How come He just don’t call me up? Or She, thank you very much! But I’m highly spiritual. Religious, no. Spiritual, yes. And I think I couldn’t help but be, because of the magic and the healing that I’ve experienced in the music." [8]
She treated Civil Rights organizations with the same skepticism. She told Amy Goodman:
"I once tried to be — no, twice tried to be a joiner and belong to a group, because I know you need to do that in order to affect anything. And I had no patience with people going through their ego trips before they could even deal with the problem that we had gotten together with. And so, a long time ago I made the decision that I would be on the supportive end. And for all those brave ones who could sit through all that stuff and get something focused, I would go there and be supportive in whatever way I could." [9]
Instead of marching at Selma, Alabama, she sang at the concert for marchers camped the last night six miles from Montgomery. [10] Her most famous performance was Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington where she sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, [11] but she also sang wherever she was invited.
Bernice Johnson Reagon heard her at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1962 between the time she had been expelled from Albany College and before she dropped out of Spelman to join the Freedom Singers. Instead of performing protest songs, Odetta sang "Prettiest chain that I have ever seen" and "Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho." Johnson Regaon recalled:
"One of the things that happens sometimes when you take root music and take it to the concert stage, something happens to it. You recognize it, but it’s been sort of shifted a bit. And Odetta did shift these songs, because these are songs that are work songs. But when she sang prison songs or work song, she still rendered the passion, the energy and the position and the function that those songs created for the people who sang them as a way of balancing their lives. She was just, the spring of 1962, what I needed to begin my life as a freedom fighter and as a Freedom Singer." [12]
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Odetta
Vocal Accompaniment: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: none
Rhythm Accompaniment: it sounded like she was hitting something metallic, but it was not picked up by the microphone and was very faint.
Credits
In Berkeley she said it was a " song from the Georgia Sea Island, Cum By ya, My Lord. That is a patois of come by here, my Lord, help me, will you, help me."
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: cum-BY-yah with strong emphasis on second syllable
Verses: kumbaya, needs you
Theme: the peace she sought in "Kumbaya" was not the simple peace of someone escaping war or fighting for civil rights, but the equipoise required to overcome the destructive emotions created by both. As she told the Auckland audience before they sang it together:
"Even if all of us live right next door to each other, we come from different places. So-and-so burned the toast this morning, the kids were slow in getting ready: your focus has been taken away into doing other things. And I, too, have come from another—let’s call it life. So then we get together in one room to do something together, and we all focus on this one thing—the music—and from there, we can go anywhere." [13]
Vocabulary:
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Format: verse-burden
Verse Repetition Pattern: AxA
Line Length: 8 syllables
Ending: none
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: first note on 1, rest on 5
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: strophic
Singing Style: neither sung nor spoken; rougher sound than Bernice Johnson Reagon discussed in the post for 14 October 2017.
Notes on Performance
Occasion: Benefit concert for Seva Foundation, 15 May 1998
Location: Berkeley Community Theatre, Berkeley, California
Notes on Audience
The microphone picked up applause but did not record any other sounds from the audience. Her comment "I hear ya, I hear ya" was the only indication they joined in singing.
Notes on Performers
Odetta was not simply a musical actress donning African-influenced stage costumes; she had a robust voice and a strong sense of music. Rhythm was more important than melody. When she asked the audience to sing with her in Berkeley she told them:
"It’s filled with those of you whose friends and neighbors and teachers told you ‘you shouldn’t sing because you were not in the right key,’ or whatever. Forget them and sing in whatever key you’re gonna sing in. [pause] I’m strict on rhythm, but [end of tape]." [14]
Hurston noted the resulting dissonance was traditional: "The harmony of the true spiritual is not regular. The dissonances are important and not to be ironed out by the trained musician." [15] She added, "The real Negro singer cares nothing about pitch. The first notes just burst out and the rest of the church join in—fired by the same inner urge. Every man trying to express himself through song. Every man for himself. Hence the harmony and disharmony, the shifting keys and broken time that makes up the spiritual." [16]
Availability
The Seva Foundation uploaded tapes to its Concert Vault website. You have to pay for a monthly membership, but can get free access for a few days and cancel anytime.
The presentation was confusing. It listed three items: Kumbaya - 3:10, Maybe She Go/Sitting Here in Limbo - 8:20, and (Something Inside) So Strong - 4:14. The first was actually a 31 second introduction by an unidentified man. The second was a 1.18 minute welcome by Odetta, similar in tone to the performance described by Reid. The last was three verses of "Kumbaya" in 1.27 minutes ending with applause.
It was enough to let you hear her style, if not enough to apprehend her version.
End Notes
1. Graham Reid. "Odetta: A Legend Ignored. Elsewhere website. 17 January 2011.
2. Toby Bielawski. "The Wisdom and Music of Odetta." Radiance website. Winter 1999.
3. Randy Lewis and Mike Boehm. "Odetta Holmes Dies at 77; Folk Singer Championed Black History, Civil Rights." Los Angeles Times, 3 December 2008.
4. "Odetta." Biography website. Last updated 8 December 2014.
5. "Baby in the Cradle. Time, 5 December 1960. Quoted by Tim Weiner. "Odetta, Voice of Civil Rights Movement, Dies at 77." The New York Times, 3 December 2008.
6. Zora Neale Hurston. "Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals." 79-84 in The Sanctified Church. Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1983. 81-82.
7. Reid.
8. Odetta. Quoted by Reid.
9. Odetta. Interview with Amy Godman. Speaking for Ourselves. 20 December 1986. Replayed by Goodman. "Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon Remembers Musical Icon Odetta (1930-2008)." Democracy Now! 30 December 2008.
10. John Shearer. "How The Selma March Was Covered In The 1965 Chattanooga Papers." The Chattanoongan [Tennessee] website. 23 March 2015.
11. Odetta, Biography.
12. Bernice Johnson Reagon. Interview with Amy Goodman. Democracy Now! 30 December 2008.
13. Reid.
14. Odetta. Quoted by Reid.
15. Hurston. 80.
16. Hurston. 80-81.
Saturday, October 14, 2017
Bernice Johnson Reagon - Come By Hyar
Topic: Political Versions
Folkways Records released a sample of Carl Benkert’s recordings from Selma, Alabama, in 1965. That same year it issued a collection of African-American songs sung by a woman who had been part of the Freedom Singers founded by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Bernice Johnson grew up in rural Dougherty County, Georgia, and entered the nearby Albany State College [1] to study music in 1959. [2] She joined the NAACP and remembered they began singing in their meetings in 1960 after television news programs showed people singing at a Nashville sit-in that began two weeks after the one in Greensboro, North Carolina. [3] Johnson was expelled when she became active in the local drive against segregation in 1961 and transferred to Spelman College in Atlanta in the spring. [4]
Cordell Reagon had been part of the Nashville protests, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee sent him to support the Albany Movement. [5] Johnson remembered all the SNCC organizers were "incredible singers," but they had a different style than the one in Albany. At the first mass meeting, "when black people of Albany packed that church and began to sing out of the energy of the movement, I remember Cordell and Sherrard saying ‘Man what is this?’ They were basically saying that they had never heard that kind of singing before." [6]
Meanwhile, Pete Seeger had begun touring Southern Black colleges to raise funds for SNCC. When his effort did not earn much, the group’s head, James Foreman, asked Reagon to organize its own fund-raising group. He recruited Johnson, another young woman from Albany, and a man he had met when he was working in Cairo, Illinois. [7]
The Freedom Singers debuted in Atlanta in November 1962 at a concert with Seeger. After the concert, Johnson met Seeger, who told her about the Almanac Singers. She asked his wife, Toshi Seeger, to book a tour for them. The group traveled from February to August of 1963, raising money and educating white supporters. [8]
Grace Elizabeth Hale argued they were successful because they embodied notions created by people like Seeger about folk protests: they were using songs borrowed from union movement, but singing them in "authentic" African-American styles. [9] Johnson said they were unique because they "were basically singing the same song that the Nashville students were singing but we actually charged it with a sort of approach that we would have done any congregational song of that style in southwest Georgia." [10]
At the time she recorded for Folkways in 1965 the group had disbanded [11] and Johnson was married to Reagon. Their daughter was born in January 1964 [12] and their son in 1965. [13]
Her version of "Come by Here" used one verse from Carawan ("we want freedom") and two from the standard song (crying, praying), but her melody, frame, and song structure came from her childhood in her father’s Baptist church. [14] Instead of using the "somebody’s verb" syntax of the ritual versions used to make contact with the Holy Spirit, she used "we’re down here verb" in the way Lightnin’ Hopkins had to evoke the conversion experience itself. [15]
She used the Hightowers’ tune, but, since she did not use the three-beat "somebody," she changed "by" to two tones so "come by" would fit three pulses. Otherwise, the melody dictated her pronunciation. It supported nine syllables. Whenever the text had fewer, she sang a word on two notes. Thus, she made "here" a two-syllable word when it end the "come by here" line, and treated "we" with two-tones in "we need you Lord."
A song has many elements beside language, including an arc, tempo, rhythm, key, and pacing. Whites, trained in western European concepts of music, use the term "melody" to refer to them as a unit. In contrast, Reagon wrote: "There are many rhythms by which to sing this song, this is the first one I remember." [16]
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Bernice Johnson Reagon
Vocal Accompaniment: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: none
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Notes on Lyrics
Verses: come by here, singing, need you, praying, wanna be free
Vocabulary:
Pronoun: we
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: we’re down here
Format: verse-burden
Verse Repetition Pattern: AxxAxAxA
Line Length: 9 syllables
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-5.
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: strophic, with no pause between repetitions
Singing Style: she neither sang melodically nor spoke nor shouted the lyrics, but pronounced the words within the tune. When she tried to explain the southwest Georgia style, she distinguished it from singing in urban churches where "the vocal production was a little more of a western aesthetic" and "different than what I learned studying western choral music in high school and in college in southwest Georgia." [17]
Notes on Performers
Folkways was founded in 1948 by Moses Asch to issue recordings from all parts of the world. His family had left Poland for Paris in 1912, then fled the war there for New York in 1915. His father was the Yiddish-language novelist and playwright, Sholem Asch. Sholem was working for The Jewish Daily Forward in 1938 when it asked Moses to build the transmitter for its radio station. That led to his first foray in producing records in 1940. [18]
Availability
Album: Folk Songs: The South. Folkways FA 2457. 1965.
YouTube: uploaded by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings on 24 May 2015.
End Notes
1. Bernice Johnson Reagon. Liner notes.
2. Wikipedia. "Bernice Johnson Reagon."
3. Rhonda Baraka. "Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon: A Powerful Journey through the Universe." Georgia Music website. 7 July 2005. The Greensboro sit-in began 1 February 1960; the one in Nashville began 13 February 1960. (Wikipedia. "Geensboro Sit-Ins" and "Nashville Sit-Ins.)
4. Edward A. Hatfield. "Bernice Johnson Reagon." New Georgia Encyclopedia. 2 November 2007. Last updated by Chris Dobbs on 6 June 2017.
5. "Cordell Reagon." Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee website.
6. Johnson Reagon. Quoted by Baraka. Charles Sherrod was the SNCC leader.
7. Grace Elizabeth Hale. "Black as Folk: The Southern Civil Rights Movement and the Folk Music Revival." In The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism. Edited by Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. No page numbers in on-line version. The other members of the group were Rutha Mae Harris and Charles Neblett.
8. Hale. Other sources gave different versions of the roles of Guy Carawan, Seeger, and Johnson. It probably was the case the more famous were interviewed more often, and their memories may have been altered by the constant need to describe themselves. Hale had done the most extensive archival research.
9. Hale.
10. Johnson Reagon. Quoted by Baraka.
11. The Freedom Singers disbanded at the end of the tour. (Wikipedia. The Freedom Singers.")
12. Wikipedia. "Toshi Reagon"
13. Hatfield.
14. Her father, Jessie Johnson, was a Baptist minister. (Hatfield.)
15. For more on the special uses of word "down," see the post for 21 August 2017.
16. Johnson Reagon, liner notes. Emphasis added.
17. Johnson Reagon. Quoted by Baraka.
18. Wikipedia. "Moses Asch."
Folkways Records released a sample of Carl Benkert’s recordings from Selma, Alabama, in 1965. That same year it issued a collection of African-American songs sung by a woman who had been part of the Freedom Singers founded by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Bernice Johnson grew up in rural Dougherty County, Georgia, and entered the nearby Albany State College [1] to study music in 1959. [2] She joined the NAACP and remembered they began singing in their meetings in 1960 after television news programs showed people singing at a Nashville sit-in that began two weeks after the one in Greensboro, North Carolina. [3] Johnson was expelled when she became active in the local drive against segregation in 1961 and transferred to Spelman College in Atlanta in the spring. [4]
Cordell Reagon had been part of the Nashville protests, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee sent him to support the Albany Movement. [5] Johnson remembered all the SNCC organizers were "incredible singers," but they had a different style than the one in Albany. At the first mass meeting, "when black people of Albany packed that church and began to sing out of the energy of the movement, I remember Cordell and Sherrard saying ‘Man what is this?’ They were basically saying that they had never heard that kind of singing before." [6]
Meanwhile, Pete Seeger had begun touring Southern Black colleges to raise funds for SNCC. When his effort did not earn much, the group’s head, James Foreman, asked Reagon to organize its own fund-raising group. He recruited Johnson, another young woman from Albany, and a man he had met when he was working in Cairo, Illinois. [7]
The Freedom Singers debuted in Atlanta in November 1962 at a concert with Seeger. After the concert, Johnson met Seeger, who told her about the Almanac Singers. She asked his wife, Toshi Seeger, to book a tour for them. The group traveled from February to August of 1963, raising money and educating white supporters. [8]
Grace Elizabeth Hale argued they were successful because they embodied notions created by people like Seeger about folk protests: they were using songs borrowed from union movement, but singing them in "authentic" African-American styles. [9] Johnson said they were unique because they "were basically singing the same song that the Nashville students were singing but we actually charged it with a sort of approach that we would have done any congregational song of that style in southwest Georgia." [10]
At the time she recorded for Folkways in 1965 the group had disbanded [11] and Johnson was married to Reagon. Their daughter was born in January 1964 [12] and their son in 1965. [13]
Her version of "Come by Here" used one verse from Carawan ("we want freedom") and two from the standard song (crying, praying), but her melody, frame, and song structure came from her childhood in her father’s Baptist church. [14] Instead of using the "somebody’s verb" syntax of the ritual versions used to make contact with the Holy Spirit, she used "we’re down here verb" in the way Lightnin’ Hopkins had to evoke the conversion experience itself. [15]
She used the Hightowers’ tune, but, since she did not use the three-beat "somebody," she changed "by" to two tones so "come by" would fit three pulses. Otherwise, the melody dictated her pronunciation. It supported nine syllables. Whenever the text had fewer, she sang a word on two notes. Thus, she made "here" a two-syllable word when it end the "come by here" line, and treated "we" with two-tones in "we need you Lord."
A song has many elements beside language, including an arc, tempo, rhythm, key, and pacing. Whites, trained in western European concepts of music, use the term "melody" to refer to them as a unit. In contrast, Reagon wrote: "There are many rhythms by which to sing this song, this is the first one I remember." [16]
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Bernice Johnson Reagon
Vocal Accompaniment: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: none
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Notes on Lyrics
Verses: come by here, singing, need you, praying, wanna be free
Vocabulary:
Pronoun: we
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: we’re down here
Format: verse-burden
Verse Repetition Pattern: AxxAxAxA
Line Length: 9 syllables
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-5.
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: strophic, with no pause between repetitions
Singing Style: she neither sang melodically nor spoke nor shouted the lyrics, but pronounced the words within the tune. When she tried to explain the southwest Georgia style, she distinguished it from singing in urban churches where "the vocal production was a little more of a western aesthetic" and "different than what I learned studying western choral music in high school and in college in southwest Georgia." [17]
Notes on Performers
Folkways was founded in 1948 by Moses Asch to issue recordings from all parts of the world. His family had left Poland for Paris in 1912, then fled the war there for New York in 1915. His father was the Yiddish-language novelist and playwright, Sholem Asch. Sholem was working for The Jewish Daily Forward in 1938 when it asked Moses to build the transmitter for its radio station. That led to his first foray in producing records in 1940. [18]
Availability
Album: Folk Songs: The South. Folkways FA 2457. 1965.
YouTube: uploaded by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings on 24 May 2015.
End Notes
1. Bernice Johnson Reagon. Liner notes.
2. Wikipedia. "Bernice Johnson Reagon."
3. Rhonda Baraka. "Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon: A Powerful Journey through the Universe." Georgia Music website. 7 July 2005. The Greensboro sit-in began 1 February 1960; the one in Nashville began 13 February 1960. (Wikipedia. "Geensboro Sit-Ins" and "Nashville Sit-Ins.)
4. Edward A. Hatfield. "Bernice Johnson Reagon." New Georgia Encyclopedia. 2 November 2007. Last updated by Chris Dobbs on 6 June 2017.
5. "Cordell Reagon." Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee website.
6. Johnson Reagon. Quoted by Baraka. Charles Sherrod was the SNCC leader.
7. Grace Elizabeth Hale. "Black as Folk: The Southern Civil Rights Movement and the Folk Music Revival." In The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism. Edited by Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. No page numbers in on-line version. The other members of the group were Rutha Mae Harris and Charles Neblett.
8. Hale. Other sources gave different versions of the roles of Guy Carawan, Seeger, and Johnson. It probably was the case the more famous were interviewed more often, and their memories may have been altered by the constant need to describe themselves. Hale had done the most extensive archival research.
9. Hale.
10. Johnson Reagon. Quoted by Baraka.
11. The Freedom Singers disbanded at the end of the tour. (Wikipedia. The Freedom Singers.")
12. Wikipedia. "Toshi Reagon"
13. Hatfield.
14. Her father, Jessie Johnson, was a Baptist minister. (Hatfield.)
15. For more on the special uses of word "down," see the post for 21 August 2017.
16. Johnson Reagon, liner notes. Emphasis added.
17. Johnson Reagon. Quoted by Baraka.
18. Wikipedia. "Moses Asch."
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