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."
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