Topic: Origins - Ring Shout
Ring shouts may no longer follow Protestant ceremonies in African-American churches, but many churches allow special music at the ends of services. George Nesbitt led the singing "after the preached word" at Trinity Missionary Baptist Church north of Charleston, South Carolina, in 2013.
His version of "Right Now Jesus" was borrowed from one by Henry Dixon that in turn was based on the variant by Inez Andrews discussed in the post for 27 August 2017. The seven-minute video began while he was singing and ended before the music stopped. Six rows of pews were between the altar where Nesbitt sang and the camera.
Dixon’s recording used a choir to repeat key phrases while he sang the opening chorus five times. By the time the Goose Creek church video began, Nesbitt was singing the chorus and a couple seated women were clapping as were a few women in the choir. On the second iteration, two other middle-aged women stood in front of their pew bench. One swung her arms while the other clapped.
At the end of the first minute, others were standing to clap and Nesbitt bent forward a little while he sang, then straightened. After another half minute, he began to shift from diagonal to diagonal but remained in place.
Fifteen seconds later, the drums became louder and he started using vocables. One of the standing women was patting her thigh. Half a minute after that, on the other side of the church, a man in a dark suit, who might have been an usher or deacon, stood. Either the bass drum changed to a dull thud or a wood block was used [1] to play double time, while Nesbitt’s torso moved up and down. He may have been bending his knees, but it was impossible to see anything below his waist. [2]
As the wood block became louder, the choir sometimes could be heard. More often, the camera microphone only picked up Nesbitt’s vocables. He bent more, and his shifts to the left and right were more pronounced. He soon began waving his free hand, then let it swing.
At about the half-way point in the video, three women walked in front of the camera, and began double clapping. He leaned forward forty-five degrees from his hips, while the usher moved to the edge of the altar to clap. Twenty seconds later, the sound of the block was more pronounced and Nesbitt had one hand on his hip. The other man turned to face the congregation and bent his knees in synch with Nesbitt.
A bit later, the woman who had been waving her arms at her sides, raised them over her head. He stayed tilted forward from the hips as he sang. Occasionally he was silent, so only the drums and hand claps could be heard. The woman began shifting her weight from foot to foot.
After almost five minutes, everyone was double clapping, including women in the choir and the usher. Nesbitt’s arms were bent at the elbows and his body tilted further forward as it rose and fell. Around the sixth minute of the video, he was standing again, and the tambourine played by a woman in the chorus could be seen by the camera.
Then, he set the mike down, and moved toward the center where he was lost from the view of the lens. The wood block, tambourine, and clapping were continuing with no singing when the video stopped.
The camera’s view was limited, but the increased sounds of clapping suggested others in the church had joined the polyrhythm. The women in front of the camera were dressed in Sunday clothes and probably were wearing nylon hose and shoes with low heels that constrained their ability to move. [3] It was impossible to know what was occurring on the other side of the center aisle.
During the singing, a man stood behind the pulpit. He joined the clapping early, bringing one hand down on the other, then switching hands between claps. Later he moved from left to right from the waist.
Performers
Trinity Inspirational Mass Choir
Vocal Soloist: George Nesbitt
Vocal Group: Trinity Inspirational Mass Choir
Instrumental Accompaniment: organ [4]
Rhythm Accompaniment: hand claps, tambourine, wood block, drum
H. E. Dixon
Vocal Soloist: Henry Dixon
Vocal Group: Truth Tabernacle Choir
Instrumental Accompaniment: organ, synthesizer
Rhythm Accompaniment: drums, cymbal, hand claps
Credits
Trinity Inspirational Mass Choir
"a song by Pastor H.E. Dixon" [5]
H. E. Dixon
(C) OPHIRGOSPEL
Notes on Lyrics
Trinity Inspirational Mass Choir
Language: English
Phrases: right now Jesus, it’s a needed time
Vocabulary
Pronoun: we
Term for Deity: Jesus
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: open-ended
Verse Repetition Pattern: repeated one verse, with some comments
Ending: none
Unique Features: none
H. E. Dixon
Language: English
Phrases: right now Jesus, it’s a needed time
Vocabulary
Pronoun: we
Term for Deity: Jesus
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: prelude-denouement
Prelude: five repetitions of "it’s a needed time" chorus
Transition: three verses that listed reasons we needed Jesus against repetitions of "it’s a needed time;" ended with a repetition of the Prelude chorus
Denouement: repeated the phrase "it’s a needed time," followed by the Prelude chorus
Ending: none
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
Trinity Inspirational Mass Choir
Opening Phrase: Inez Andrews
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: repetition with variations in rhythm
Singing Style: Nesbitt began singing, then only repeated phrases that were hard to hear from where the camera’s microphone was located.
Solo-Group Dynamics: the choir began by repeating "needed time," then stopped and let the instruments support him.
Vocal-Instrumental Dynamics: organ maintained a continuo; toward the end, when no one was singing, it played the melody with a strong rhythm.
Vocal-Rhythm Dynamics: it took over the functions of the chorus as a continuo for the organ and soloist, and then was all that was heard.
H. E. Dixon
Opening Phrase: Inez Andrews
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: tripartite. Organ introduction was followed by synthesizer and drums; the drum beat pattern changed with the same instruments in the second part; hand claps and musical interlude occurred before third part with same instrumentation as second.
Solo Singing Style: occasional use of guttural pronunciations; he made interjections like "tell it" to begin lines.
Group Singing Style: generally timbraic harmony; at the ends of verses the choir used diverging chords.
Solo-Group Dynamics: the group sang one phrase over and over. Dixon began by singing with them, then began to start a little before or after with slightly different words.
Vocal-Instrumental Dynamics: remained constant
Vocal-Rhythm Dynamics: changes in rhythm demarcated segments
Notes on Performance
Trinity Inspirational Mass Choir
Occasion: church service
Location: Trinity Missionary Baptist Church, Goose Creek, South Carolina
Microphones: Nesbitt had a hand-held microphone with a cord.
Clothing: the women in the choir were dressed in black. Nesbitt was wearing a red shirt and black vest.
Notes on Audience
H. E. Dixon
Some applause at end.
Notes on Performers
Trinity Missionary Baptist Church was on Old State Road in Goose Creek, South Carolina, north of Charleston. Nesbitt and Dixon were from Huger and Cordesville. The communities were about five miles apart of the edge of the Francis Marion National Forest, and about 35 miles from Goose Creek. [6]
The area was not part of the Goose Creek community that dominated South Carolina trade and politics in the early years, but a bit upstream. Men probably grew indigo and rice, until the introduction of flood irrigation. The land probably was just beyond the area that could be flooded, and land owners either planted cotton or other less-commercial crops.
The State Road was opened in 1747 to connect Charleston with the capital at Columbia and Scots-Irish settlements in the interior. It served as the route to the frontier for those immigrants from the British Isles who arrived by ship. [7] No doubt the traffic may have supported small farms and local tradesmen.
The early slaves would have come from the same shipments as those that supplied the coast. Many may have left the area with emancipation after the Civil War. Much of the area reverted to forest that was logged at the end of the nineteenth century. [8] African Americans were the primary timber workers in those years, [9] and ones who stayed in the area would have been hired. They might have been joined by those from the coast and islands were rice was no longer a commercial crop. [10]
There were indications a Nesbitt Plantation had existed in the area of Huger, but its location was unknown. A Nesbitt family cemetery survived. [11] George Nesbitt remained a common name in the area.
Goose Creek was incorporated in 1961 as a navy town. [12] The first dates on Trinity Missionary Baptist Church’s website were from the 1990s when Idelphia Salley was pastor. [13] The choir sang for church services and was available, for a price, for "your next: Choir Anniversary, Gospel Concert, Birthday Celebration, Service, Revival, etc." Its photograph showed four men and ten women. [14]
The man who uploaded the video, Tyre Singleton, played with the choir in 2013 when the video was made, [15] and performed for the Johnson Temple Church in Huger on 14 May 2017. [16] He posted more videos of music from other local churches.
The songwriter, Henry Dixon, was from the Saw Mill section of Cordesville. In 1973 he received a prophecy that led him to organize the Truth Tabernacle. He performed with some members of his choir for other events, and was available as an evangelist. In 2007, he began selling CDs. [17]
Availability
Trinity Inspirational Mass Choir
YouTube: uploaded by Ty Singleton on 20 May 2013.
H. E. Dixon
Album: Pastor H. E. Dixon and Truth Tabernacle. "A Need It Time." Sweetwater Series, Volume 1. 2011. CD.
YouTube: uploaded by Music Video Distributors Inc. on 17 September 2017.
End Notes
1. Ty Singleton uploaded a video of in which a woman was using a drum stick to beat a small wooden box or block. ("Homegoing Celebration for Aunt Jackie." Uploaded to YouTube on 11 July 2013.)
2. LanGuide TV posted a video of "Brother George Nesbitt singing at Trinity Baptist Church." He was surrounded by a group of men, but it sometimes was possible to seem him move. (Uploaded to YouTube on 1 January 2018.)
3. The women who were dancing in Keith Johnson’s video wore slacks and tops to the concert. They either wore athletic shoes or were free to take off their shoes to move. Johnson’s video was discussed on 23 September 2018.
4. The choir won two organs in the McDonald Choir Showcases in 2013 and 2014. ("Trinity Missionary Baptist Church Inspirational Choir." Church website.)
5. YouTube notes for Trinity Inspirational Mass Choir.
6. Distances from Huger to Goose Creek, and from Huger to Cordesville calculated by Distance Cities website.
7. "Old South Carolina State Road." Family Search website sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
8. Al Hester. "Prelude to a National Forest: Cooperative Forestry in the Lowcountry, 1901-1918." 26 June 2001. United States Forest Service website, "History of the Francis Marion Ranger District."
9. Logging, saw and planing mills were the major industrial employer of Blacks in the Southeast from 1880. William Jones said, 83,000 were working for such mills in 1910. Indeed, he said "before World War II, no other industry employed more African Americans." (William Powell Jones. The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005. 1.)
10. Charleston began losing its rice markets in the Civil War when new supplies were developed in Asia. By the end of the century, rice was being grown less expensively in Louisiana and Arkansas with Artesian wells pumping from the aquifer; few growers were left in South Carolina.
11. "Berkeley County SC Cemetery GPS Mapping Project" listed Nesbitt Gardens and Nesbitt House Plantation, but said it had no location information for them. (South Carolina Genealogical Society website) A man named George Nesbitt, Junior, was buried in Nesbitt Gardens in 2016. (His obituary. Tributes website.)
12. Wikipedia. "Goose Creek, South Carolina." It noted, "most of the Naval Weapons Station Charleston is in Goose Creek."
13. "Church History." Trinity church website.
14. Trinity church website, choir page.
15. Rickey Ciapha Dennis Jr. "Not the Average Church Choir." The [Summerville, South Carolina] Gazette website. 14 February 2018.
16. "Johnson Temple Church." Facebook. 16 May 2017.
17. "About Henry Dixon." Facebook.
Sunday, September 30, 2018
Thursday, September 27, 2018
Ring Shouts (Reconstruction)
Topic: Origins - Ring Shout
Things changed very rapidly with the end of the Civil War. Missionaries swarmed south to convert and civilize freedmen. Few were as tolerant of ring shouts as William Francis Allen, who published a collection of their songs. [1] More were like the sister of his co-editor, Harriet Ware who, the more she understood them, the more she was repulsed by the rituals. [2] Protestant evangelists, including African-American preachers like Daniel Payne, [3] transferred these values to converts, especially those born in this country, who were anxious to leave behind reminders of slavery.
In May of 1867, Thomas Ruggles [4] wrote Charles Pickard Ware that music had changed on Saint Helena island.
"I don’t suppose we shall be able to make any new additions to your collection of negro songs. They sing but very little nowadays to what they used to. Do you remember those good old days when the Methodists used to sing up in that cotton-house at Fuller’s? Wasn’t it good? They never sing any of them at the church, and very few in their praise-meeting." [5]
Harriet Beecher Stowe met difficulties finding a congregation that had not been tamed when she visited Jacksonville, Florida, in 1867. She was able to observe one shout that occurred after a sermon and prayers.
"The other style of singing, which they practice when they are by themselves, and which they do because they feel like it, is evidently a traditional descent from that which Mungo Park describes as heard in Africa years ago. It is a sort of union of singing and rhythmic movement, of a solemn and serious character and conducted with a perfect time. The brethren formed a ring outside the altar, the sisters began to form into line, while one voice struck up a wild, peculiar air, and the first sister in the female procession shook hands with the first brother, singing the chorus and concluding with a short courtesy, and then passing on to the next repeated the same. Soon there was seen a double-file of these men and women moving and singing, and shaking hands and courtesying, all in the most exact time and with the most solemn gravity. The airs were wild and full of spiri’, the words simple and often repeated"
After providing examples of the lyrics, Stowe continued:
"Very soon there was a rhythmical column extending up one aisle, down the other, and slowly moving out of the house at one end. The singing and motion was kept up till every member of the congregation had taken their turn and so passed out.
"When the fervor was at its height, the wild commingling of voices, the rhythmical movement of turbaned heads, the sense of time and tune that seemed to pervade the whole procession, was quite wonderful. All this while the two old preachers sat back in the shadows of the pulpit, black and unmoved as the marble statutes of Memmon, in Egyptian museums. It was really a most curious sight." [6]
Fredrika Bremer found shouts survived within a different context in Methodists churches. In New Orleans before the war, one had adapted John Wesley’s class meetings as a vehicle for perpetuating older forms of religious instruction.
He introduced such weekly sessions in 1739 when he took over a congregation led by George Whitefield. [7] So many people claimed an interest in Christ, Wesley wasn’t able to give each the attention needed to complete his or her conversion. He experimented with small group meetings, based on bunds he had seen at the Moravian colony of Herrnhut in Saxony where individuals met to confess, monitor, and encourage each other. [8]
Bremer had visited an African-American class meeting in Washington, DC, where church members elected "their own leaders and exhorters. These exhorters go around at the class meeting to such of the members of their class as they deem to stand in need of consolation or encouragement, talk to them, aloud or in an under voice, receive their confessions, impart advice to them, and so on." [9]
In New Orleans in 1852, the class meeting was held after the service. [10] She watched the exhorters go around and, "they talked for a minute before the person addressed came into a state of exaltation, and began to speak and perorate more loudly and more vehemently than the exhorter himself." [11]
She observed that, as the exhorters continued to talk to congregants,
"By degrees the noise increased in the church and became a storm of voices and cries. The words were heard, ‘Yes, come, Lord Jesus! come, oh come, oh glory!’ and they who thus cried aloud began to leap—leaped aloft with a motion as of a cork flying out of a bottle, while they waved their arms and handkerchiefs in the air, as if they were endeavoring to bring something down, and all the while crying aloud, ‘Come, oh come!’" [12]
much like Keith Jackson had repeated "come on" at the end of his version of "Come by Here" described in the post for 23 September 2018.
Bremer’s description continued for several pages. As mentioned in the post for 18 September 2018, she was a published novelist like Stowe. While neither were discerning about movement, both noticed details in events and were able to record them as narrative scenes. Further, they were comfortable writing paragraphs and pages, rather than sentences. A reader could deduce the farewell formalities in Florida merged with secular dances, while one became aware of the logistics of a shout in Louisiana.
End Notes
I have not done research in this area and am grateful to the individuals mentioned below. I have read the original sources cited by them.
1. The Slave Songs of the United States. Edited by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison. New York: A. Simpson and Company, 1867. Allen was discussed in post on 25 September 2018.
2. Harriet Ware was quoted in the post for 20 September 2018.
3. Payne’s description of a shout and his reaction to it were quoted in the post for 9 August 2017.
4. Thomas Edwin Ruggles was at Corner Farm plantation on Saint Helena Island. Only his initials appeared when his letter was published. He was identified by James Robert Hester who edited A Yankee Scholar in Coastal South Carolina: William Francis Allen’s Civil War Journals. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2015. No page numbers in on-line version; footnote 21.
5. T. E. R. Letter to C. P. W. 21 May 1867. In Letters from Port Royal Written at the Time of the Civil War. Edited by Elizabeth Ware Pearson. Boston: W. B. Clarke Company, 1906. No page numbers in on-line version.
6. Harriet Beecher Stowe. "A Negro Prayer Meeting—Letter from Florida." Christian Watchman and Reflector. Part 1, 18 April 1867. Reprinted by Sacramento Daily Union, 22 May 1867. Errors corrected that were made in digitization. Quoted by Slave Songs. xx. Park published a journal of his travels in Africa under several titles. I could not locate Stowe’s reference. Perhaps she was referring to a news article, lecture, or interview.
7. Wikipedia. "John Wesley."
8. Tom Kiser. "John Wesley’s Accountability Discipleship Groups." Go Forth Alliance website.
9. Fredrika Bremer. Letter. About 27 January 1851. In America of the Fifties: Letters of Fredrika Bremer. Edited by Adolph B. Benson. New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1924. 275. Sterling Stuckey brought this to my attention. Slave Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 edition. 60.
10. Bremer did not specify the church she visited, but only said it was African and Methodist. It most likely was Saint James AME church founded in 1844. Like most antebellum Black churches, its membership was limited to freedmen by laws or other restraints. ("A Brief History of Historic St. James AME Church." Its website.)
11. Bremer. 275.
12. Bremer. 276.
Things changed very rapidly with the end of the Civil War. Missionaries swarmed south to convert and civilize freedmen. Few were as tolerant of ring shouts as William Francis Allen, who published a collection of their songs. [1] More were like the sister of his co-editor, Harriet Ware who, the more she understood them, the more she was repulsed by the rituals. [2] Protestant evangelists, including African-American preachers like Daniel Payne, [3] transferred these values to converts, especially those born in this country, who were anxious to leave behind reminders of slavery.
In May of 1867, Thomas Ruggles [4] wrote Charles Pickard Ware that music had changed on Saint Helena island.
"I don’t suppose we shall be able to make any new additions to your collection of negro songs. They sing but very little nowadays to what they used to. Do you remember those good old days when the Methodists used to sing up in that cotton-house at Fuller’s? Wasn’t it good? They never sing any of them at the church, and very few in their praise-meeting." [5]
Harriet Beecher Stowe met difficulties finding a congregation that had not been tamed when she visited Jacksonville, Florida, in 1867. She was able to observe one shout that occurred after a sermon and prayers.
"The other style of singing, which they practice when they are by themselves, and which they do because they feel like it, is evidently a traditional descent from that which Mungo Park describes as heard in Africa years ago. It is a sort of union of singing and rhythmic movement, of a solemn and serious character and conducted with a perfect time. The brethren formed a ring outside the altar, the sisters began to form into line, while one voice struck up a wild, peculiar air, and the first sister in the female procession shook hands with the first brother, singing the chorus and concluding with a short courtesy, and then passing on to the next repeated the same. Soon there was seen a double-file of these men and women moving and singing, and shaking hands and courtesying, all in the most exact time and with the most solemn gravity. The airs were wild and full of spiri’, the words simple and often repeated"
After providing examples of the lyrics, Stowe continued:
"Very soon there was a rhythmical column extending up one aisle, down the other, and slowly moving out of the house at one end. The singing and motion was kept up till every member of the congregation had taken their turn and so passed out.
"When the fervor was at its height, the wild commingling of voices, the rhythmical movement of turbaned heads, the sense of time and tune that seemed to pervade the whole procession, was quite wonderful. All this while the two old preachers sat back in the shadows of the pulpit, black and unmoved as the marble statutes of Memmon, in Egyptian museums. It was really a most curious sight." [6]
Fredrika Bremer found shouts survived within a different context in Methodists churches. In New Orleans before the war, one had adapted John Wesley’s class meetings as a vehicle for perpetuating older forms of religious instruction.
He introduced such weekly sessions in 1739 when he took over a congregation led by George Whitefield. [7] So many people claimed an interest in Christ, Wesley wasn’t able to give each the attention needed to complete his or her conversion. He experimented with small group meetings, based on bunds he had seen at the Moravian colony of Herrnhut in Saxony where individuals met to confess, monitor, and encourage each other. [8]
Bremer had visited an African-American class meeting in Washington, DC, where church members elected "their own leaders and exhorters. These exhorters go around at the class meeting to such of the members of their class as they deem to stand in need of consolation or encouragement, talk to them, aloud or in an under voice, receive their confessions, impart advice to them, and so on." [9]
In New Orleans in 1852, the class meeting was held after the service. [10] She watched the exhorters go around and, "they talked for a minute before the person addressed came into a state of exaltation, and began to speak and perorate more loudly and more vehemently than the exhorter himself." [11]
She observed that, as the exhorters continued to talk to congregants,
"By degrees the noise increased in the church and became a storm of voices and cries. The words were heard, ‘Yes, come, Lord Jesus! come, oh come, oh glory!’ and they who thus cried aloud began to leap—leaped aloft with a motion as of a cork flying out of a bottle, while they waved their arms and handkerchiefs in the air, as if they were endeavoring to bring something down, and all the while crying aloud, ‘Come, oh come!’" [12]
much like Keith Jackson had repeated "come on" at the end of his version of "Come by Here" described in the post for 23 September 2018.
Bremer’s description continued for several pages. As mentioned in the post for 18 September 2018, she was a published novelist like Stowe. While neither were discerning about movement, both noticed details in events and were able to record them as narrative scenes. Further, they were comfortable writing paragraphs and pages, rather than sentences. A reader could deduce the farewell formalities in Florida merged with secular dances, while one became aware of the logistics of a shout in Louisiana.
End Notes
I have not done research in this area and am grateful to the individuals mentioned below. I have read the original sources cited by them.
1. The Slave Songs of the United States. Edited by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison. New York: A. Simpson and Company, 1867. Allen was discussed in post on 25 September 2018.
2. Harriet Ware was quoted in the post for 20 September 2018.
3. Payne’s description of a shout and his reaction to it were quoted in the post for 9 August 2017.
4. Thomas Edwin Ruggles was at Corner Farm plantation on Saint Helena Island. Only his initials appeared when his letter was published. He was identified by James Robert Hester who edited A Yankee Scholar in Coastal South Carolina: William Francis Allen’s Civil War Journals. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2015. No page numbers in on-line version; footnote 21.
5. T. E. R. Letter to C. P. W. 21 May 1867. In Letters from Port Royal Written at the Time of the Civil War. Edited by Elizabeth Ware Pearson. Boston: W. B. Clarke Company, 1906. No page numbers in on-line version.
6. Harriet Beecher Stowe. "A Negro Prayer Meeting—Letter from Florida." Christian Watchman and Reflector. Part 1, 18 April 1867. Reprinted by Sacramento Daily Union, 22 May 1867. Errors corrected that were made in digitization. Quoted by Slave Songs. xx. Park published a journal of his travels in Africa under several titles. I could not locate Stowe’s reference. Perhaps she was referring to a news article, lecture, or interview.
7. Wikipedia. "John Wesley."
8. Tom Kiser. "John Wesley’s Accountability Discipleship Groups." Go Forth Alliance website.
9. Fredrika Bremer. Letter. About 27 January 1851. In America of the Fifties: Letters of Fredrika Bremer. Edited by Adolph B. Benson. New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1924. 275. Sterling Stuckey brought this to my attention. Slave Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 edition. 60.
10. Bremer did not specify the church she visited, but only said it was African and Methodist. It most likely was Saint James AME church founded in 1844. Like most antebellum Black churches, its membership was limited to freedmen by laws or other restraints. ("A Brief History of Historic St. James AME Church." Its website.)
11. Bremer. 275.
12. Bremer. 276.
Tuesday, September 25, 2018
Christianized Ring Shouts
Topic: Origins - Ring Shout
The ability of Protestant evangelists to convert slaves in the antebellum South depended on the goodwill of plantation owners. Baptists, like those of Saint Helena, [1] were more likely to Christianize their chattel than others. Margaret Washington indicated most slave owners in lowland and insular South Carolina wouldn’t let Methodists near their lands because the church was associated with abolition. [2] The camp meetings that included slaves, like the one visited on the Georgia piedmont by Fredrika Bremer, [3] were held in the uplands.
When church services were introduced before the Civil War, slaves adjusted their activities to perpetuate ring shouts. In late January 1853, Frederick Law Olmsted visited Richard James Arnold near Savannah in Bryan County, Georgia. Arnold was a Quaker from Providence, Rhode Island, who had become a slave owner when he married. [4] Olmsted observed:
"On most of the large rice plantations which I have seen in this vicinity, there is a small chapel, which the Negroes use as their prayer-house. The owner of one of these told me that, having furnished the prayer-house with seats having a back rail, his negroes petitioned him to remove it because it did not leave them room enough to pray. It was explained to me that it is their custom, in social worship, to work themselves up to a great pitch of excitement, in which they yell and cry aloud, and, finally, shriek and leap up, clapping their hands and dancing, as it is done at heathen festivals. The back rail they found to seriously impede this exercise." [5]
Edward Pierce visited Saint Helena island in January 1862 to assess its cotton crop. He noted
"more than one-half of the adults being members of churches. -Their meetings are held twice or three times on Sundays, also on the evenings of Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. They are conducted with fervent devotion by themselves alone or in presence of a white clergyman, when the services of one are procurable. They close with what is called "a glory shout," one joining hands with another, together in couples singing a verse and beating time with the foot. A fastidious religionist might object to this exercise; but being in accordance with usage, and innocent enough in itself, it is not open to exception." [6]
On the same island in May 1862, Harriet Ware observed a shout at the end of a church service:
"They then shook hands all round, when one of the young girls struck up one of their wild songs, and we waited listening to them for twenty minutes more. It was not a regular ‘shout,’ but some of them clapped their hands, and they stamped in time. It was very difficult to understand the words, though there was so much repetition that I generally managed to make out a good deal, but could not remember it much, still less the music, which is indescribable, and no one person could imitate it at all." [7]
Later in the war, a contributor to the Continental Monthly described praise meetings held by freed Baptists and Methodists in South Carolina. He or she was the only person to actually try to describe the steps rather than the formation.
"there usually follows the very singular and impressive performance of the ‘Shout,’ or religious dance of the negroes. Three or four standing still, clapping their hands and beating time with their feet, commence singing in unison one of the peculiar shout melodies, while the others walk around in a ring, in single file, joining also in the song. Soon those in the ring leave off their singing, the others keeping it up while with increased vigor, and strike into the shout step, observing most accurate time with the music. The step is something halfway between a shuffle and a dance, as difficult for an uninitiated person to describe as to imitate. At the end of each stanza of the song the dancers stop short with a slight stamp on the last note, and then, putting the other foot forward, proceed through the next verse. They will often dance to the same song for twenty or thirty minutes, once or twice, perhaps, varying the monotony of their movement by walking for a little while their hands and drawling out in a monotonous sort of chant something about the ‘River Jawdam’." [8]
One other description of Civil War shouts on Saint Helena appeared in the 30 May 1867 issue of The Nation.
"But the benches are pushed back when the formal meeting is over [. . .] when the "spirichil" is struck up, begin first walking and by-and-by shuffling round, one after the other, in a ring. The foot is hardly taken from the floor, and the progression is mainly due to a jerking, hitching motion, which agitates the entire shouter, and soon brings out streams of perspiration. Sometimes they dance silently, sometimes as they shuffle they sing the chorus of the spiritual, and sometimes the song is also sung by the dancers. But more frequently a band, composed of some of the best singers and of tired shouters, stand at the side of the room to ‘base’ the others, singing the body of the song and clapping their hands together or on the knees." [9]
End Notes
I have not done research in this area and am grateful to the individuals mentioned below. I have read the original sources cited by them.
1. William Francis Allen and his wife were missionaries assigned to Seaside, the John Edwin Fripp Plantation on Saint Helena. He and Harriet Ware’s brother, Charles, collected the songs they heard. He wrote in the introduction to The Slave Songs of the United States: "so far as I can learn, the shouting is confined to the Baptists; and it is, no doubt, to the overwhelming preponderance of this denomination on the Sea Islands that we owe the peculiar richness and originality of the music there." (Slave Songs. Edited by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison. New York: A. Simpson and Company, 1867. xv.) Examples from Saint Helena were discussed in the post for 20 September 2018.
2. Margaret Washington Creel. "A Peculiar People." New York: New York University Press, 1988.
3. Fredrika Bremer was quoted in the post for 18 September 2018.
4. Olmsted identified the plantation owner as Mr. X. Charles Hoffmann and Tess Hoffmann identified him in North by South: The Two Lives of Richard James Arnold. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988 edition. 1.
5. Frederick Law Olmsted. A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States. New York: Dix and Edwards, 1856. 449. Emphasis in original. Katrina Hazzard-Donald brought this to my attention. "Hoodoo Religion and American Dance Traditions: Rethinking the Ring Shout." The Journal of Pan African Studies 4:194-212:September 2011. 197. Olmsted visited the South in 1853 for the New York Daily Times.
6. E. L. Pierce. "The Negroes at Port Royal." Report to Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, 3 February 1862. Boston: R. F. Wallcutt, 1862. 31. He was mentioned in the post for 20 September 2018.
7. Harriet Ware. Letter for 1 May 1862. In Letters from Port Royal Written at the Time of the Civil War. Edited by Elizabeth Ware Pearson. Boston: W. B. Clarke Company, 1906. No page numbers in on-line copy. She was mentioned in the post for 20 September 2018.
8. "Under the Palmetto." The Continental Monthly. 4:188-203:1863 (spring?). 196.
9. The Nation 4:432-433:1867. Reprinted in Slave Songs. xiii-xiv. Either Allen or Ware could have written the article to publicize the release of their book. The third editor, Lucy McKim, arrived in South Carolina in June 1862 with her father, mentioned in the post for 20 September 2018. He was gathering information for the Philadelphia Port Royal Relief Committee. In 1865 she married Wendell Phillips Garrison, who was the literary editor for the recently founded Nation. Her father was one of the men who financed it as a way to continue working for freedmen’s rights. (Margaret Hope Bacon. "Lucy Mckim Garrison: Pioneer in Folk Music." Pennsylvania History 54:1-16:1987.)
The ability of Protestant evangelists to convert slaves in the antebellum South depended on the goodwill of plantation owners. Baptists, like those of Saint Helena, [1] were more likely to Christianize their chattel than others. Margaret Washington indicated most slave owners in lowland and insular South Carolina wouldn’t let Methodists near their lands because the church was associated with abolition. [2] The camp meetings that included slaves, like the one visited on the Georgia piedmont by Fredrika Bremer, [3] were held in the uplands.
When church services were introduced before the Civil War, slaves adjusted their activities to perpetuate ring shouts. In late January 1853, Frederick Law Olmsted visited Richard James Arnold near Savannah in Bryan County, Georgia. Arnold was a Quaker from Providence, Rhode Island, who had become a slave owner when he married. [4] Olmsted observed:
"On most of the large rice plantations which I have seen in this vicinity, there is a small chapel, which the Negroes use as their prayer-house. The owner of one of these told me that, having furnished the prayer-house with seats having a back rail, his negroes petitioned him to remove it because it did not leave them room enough to pray. It was explained to me that it is their custom, in social worship, to work themselves up to a great pitch of excitement, in which they yell and cry aloud, and, finally, shriek and leap up, clapping their hands and dancing, as it is done at heathen festivals. The back rail they found to seriously impede this exercise." [5]
Edward Pierce visited Saint Helena island in January 1862 to assess its cotton crop. He noted
"more than one-half of the adults being members of churches. -Their meetings are held twice or three times on Sundays, also on the evenings of Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. They are conducted with fervent devotion by themselves alone or in presence of a white clergyman, when the services of one are procurable. They close with what is called "a glory shout," one joining hands with another, together in couples singing a verse and beating time with the foot. A fastidious religionist might object to this exercise; but being in accordance with usage, and innocent enough in itself, it is not open to exception." [6]
On the same island in May 1862, Harriet Ware observed a shout at the end of a church service:
"They then shook hands all round, when one of the young girls struck up one of their wild songs, and we waited listening to them for twenty minutes more. It was not a regular ‘shout,’ but some of them clapped their hands, and they stamped in time. It was very difficult to understand the words, though there was so much repetition that I generally managed to make out a good deal, but could not remember it much, still less the music, which is indescribable, and no one person could imitate it at all." [7]
Later in the war, a contributor to the Continental Monthly described praise meetings held by freed Baptists and Methodists in South Carolina. He or she was the only person to actually try to describe the steps rather than the formation.
"there usually follows the very singular and impressive performance of the ‘Shout,’ or religious dance of the negroes. Three or four standing still, clapping their hands and beating time with their feet, commence singing in unison one of the peculiar shout melodies, while the others walk around in a ring, in single file, joining also in the song. Soon those in the ring leave off their singing, the others keeping it up while with increased vigor, and strike into the shout step, observing most accurate time with the music. The step is something halfway between a shuffle and a dance, as difficult for an uninitiated person to describe as to imitate. At the end of each stanza of the song the dancers stop short with a slight stamp on the last note, and then, putting the other foot forward, proceed through the next verse. They will often dance to the same song for twenty or thirty minutes, once or twice, perhaps, varying the monotony of their movement by walking for a little while their hands and drawling out in a monotonous sort of chant something about the ‘River Jawdam’." [8]
One other description of Civil War shouts on Saint Helena appeared in the 30 May 1867 issue of The Nation.
"But the benches are pushed back when the formal meeting is over [. . .] when the "spirichil" is struck up, begin first walking and by-and-by shuffling round, one after the other, in a ring. The foot is hardly taken from the floor, and the progression is mainly due to a jerking, hitching motion, which agitates the entire shouter, and soon brings out streams of perspiration. Sometimes they dance silently, sometimes as they shuffle they sing the chorus of the spiritual, and sometimes the song is also sung by the dancers. But more frequently a band, composed of some of the best singers and of tired shouters, stand at the side of the room to ‘base’ the others, singing the body of the song and clapping their hands together or on the knees." [9]
End Notes
I have not done research in this area and am grateful to the individuals mentioned below. I have read the original sources cited by them.
1. William Francis Allen and his wife were missionaries assigned to Seaside, the John Edwin Fripp Plantation on Saint Helena. He and Harriet Ware’s brother, Charles, collected the songs they heard. He wrote in the introduction to The Slave Songs of the United States: "so far as I can learn, the shouting is confined to the Baptists; and it is, no doubt, to the overwhelming preponderance of this denomination on the Sea Islands that we owe the peculiar richness and originality of the music there." (Slave Songs. Edited by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison. New York: A. Simpson and Company, 1867. xv.) Examples from Saint Helena were discussed in the post for 20 September 2018.
2. Margaret Washington Creel. "A Peculiar People." New York: New York University Press, 1988.
3. Fredrika Bremer was quoted in the post for 18 September 2018.
4. Olmsted identified the plantation owner as Mr. X. Charles Hoffmann and Tess Hoffmann identified him in North by South: The Two Lives of Richard James Arnold. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988 edition. 1.
5. Frederick Law Olmsted. A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States. New York: Dix and Edwards, 1856. 449. Emphasis in original. Katrina Hazzard-Donald brought this to my attention. "Hoodoo Religion and American Dance Traditions: Rethinking the Ring Shout." The Journal of Pan African Studies 4:194-212:September 2011. 197. Olmsted visited the South in 1853 for the New York Daily Times.
6. E. L. Pierce. "The Negroes at Port Royal." Report to Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, 3 February 1862. Boston: R. F. Wallcutt, 1862. 31. He was mentioned in the post for 20 September 2018.
7. Harriet Ware. Letter for 1 May 1862. In Letters from Port Royal Written at the Time of the Civil War. Edited by Elizabeth Ware Pearson. Boston: W. B. Clarke Company, 1906. No page numbers in on-line copy. She was mentioned in the post for 20 September 2018.
8. "Under the Palmetto." The Continental Monthly. 4:188-203:1863 (spring?). 196.
9. The Nation 4:432-433:1867. Reprinted in Slave Songs. xiii-xiv. Either Allen or Ware could have written the article to publicize the release of their book. The third editor, Lucy McKim, arrived in South Carolina in June 1862 with her father, mentioned in the post for 20 September 2018. He was gathering information for the Philadelphia Port Royal Relief Committee. In 1865 she married Wendell Phillips Garrison, who was the literary editor for the recently founded Nation. Her father was one of the men who financed it as a way to continue working for freedmen’s rights. (Margaret Hope Bacon. "Lucy Mckim Garrison: Pioneer in Folk Music." Pennsylvania History 54:1-16:1987.)
Sunday, September 23, 2018
Keith Johnson - Come By Here
Topic: Origins - Ring Shout
Contemporary gospel music concerts may be the nearest equivalent to plantation ring shouts that exists. They aren’t direct descendants because so many changes occurred in the intervening 150 years in African-American churches and the music industry. But, modern musicians, like those observed by Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1862, [1] were rewarded for serving the needs of the group.
The most important point about both was they were not Protestant services: there might have been some testifying in concerts, but no sermons reminded the audience of its sinful nature, no altar calls were made for the unconverted. Concerts and shouts were group meetings in which music facilitated spiritual experiences for individuals who already were members of the community.
Touring gospel artists were professionals who, like the Bolton Brothers and Evereadys, had incorporated styles popularized by Motown artists. [2] Ray Allen said "such dramatizations are recognized by the singers and their audience as stylized representations of holy dance that is, not the ‘real thing’." However, "the Spiritual Voices feel their theatrics contribute to the power of their overall performance which, they hope, will culminate with possession by the Holy Ghost and ‘genuine’ holy dance." [3]
Spiritual Voices was formed in Brooklyn by Philip Johnson and his brothers, and possibly brothers-in-law in the 1960s. [4] They made records that included Darrell McFadden when he was a lad. [5] About the time McFadden left to form his own group in 1980, [6] Johnson’s son Keith joined them. [7] He was called "Wonderboy" and continued to use that name.
When Keith performed "Come by Here" in Creedmore, North Carolina, in 2002, four men filmed a VHS version that was edited, mixed, and overdubbed. [8] Thus, while all the images came from that night, they might not necessarily have been in the order presented. The video uploaded to YouTube represented an idealized version of what occurred.
The Christian Faith Center where the Spiritual Voices performed was founded as a Baptist church in 1911. It became nondenominational in 1986 [9] with some association with Keith Butler’s Word of Faith in Southfield, Michigan. [10] It believed "in the infilling of the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues." [11] Thus, one can assume most who attended the concert were comfortable with expressive manifestations of religion.
The video began with Johnson standing on the floor in front of the stage. He asked his audience: "Anyone need the Lord to do something? Anybody got a special blessing they need to Lord to do for you?"
He continued:
"If you need the Lord to do something for you. What I want you do, step out in an aisle and come down to the front now. Come on down to the front. If you need the Lord to bless you, come on down."
After defining a space available for would-be participants, he climbed up onto the stage where he began singing "come by here" and "we need a blessing." The backup group echoed his words as the instrumental accompaniment became more intense and more rhythmic.
Johnson spoke again, this time making his invitation to participate explicit:
"When that blessing is coming, the best way to that get that blessing to manifest is for you to celebrate it. The best way is with a dance. Grab somebody by the hand."
The cameras didn’t show anyone below the waist, except those musicians who were seated. Many in the audience were filmed from the back moving from side to side. After the invitation to dance, pairs, many of them women, faced one another with their upper bodies, arms and heads in motion. Later, people standing in rows clapped to the rhythm.
Johnson’s movements went through three phases. In the prelude, when he was singing lines of verses and the group was repeating "we need you right now," his body was erect, while he bent his knees, and moved a few steps to the left or right. [12]
In the transition, his phrases were shorter and the group began repeating "right now" as a continuo. [13] Johnson moved his shoulders at one time, and then leaned his body forward slightly as he started walking farther to the left and right on bent knees. Just before his invocation to dance, he tilted his body farther forward, and at one point sang vocables as he bent and raised his body from the waist. He returned to walking left and right, but with his torso at a more acute angle.
The significance of the concert as a communal experience that drew upon elements of ring shouts was obvious when one compared YouTube videos with recordings of the same songs. As already mentioned in the posts about Evelyn Turrentine-Agee [14] and the Evereadys, recordings were played by people in the privacy of their homes and thus the words were easier to understand and the instrumentation more subdued.
Johnson included "Come by Here" on an album with more verses in the prelude, and no spoken invitations to the audience to participate. He used a more musical voice in his soliloquies while he asked God to help the homeless and jobless in the denouement, rather than rhythmically repeating "come on." One woman wrote, " the words to the songs" on the album "truly ministered to my soul and elevated my mind to heaven.’ [15]
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Keith Johnson
Vocal Group: Hezekiah Bethea, Tyrone Jackson, Duwand Wright, Ray Braswell, Jr.
Instrumental Accompaniment: Tyrone Jackson, lead guitar; Hezekiah Bethea, bass guitar; Ray Braswell, Jr., keyboards [16]
Rhythm Accompaniment: Antrum Sherrills, drums
Credits
Album: (C) 2002 Worldwide Gospel
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Phrases: come by here, we need a blessing
Vocabulary
Pronoun: we, I
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: blessing
Literary Devices: rhymed couplets
Basic Form: prelude-denouement
Prelude: verse-chorus with two verses, one based on "come by here," the other a memory of a past healing service. The chorus used the phrase "right now."
Denouement: repetitions of "come on" by Johnson and "right now" by the group
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: one note
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: tempo, dynamics, harmony, and instrumentation remained the same; segments were defined by instrumental breaks and changes in the interaction between vocal parts.
Solo Singing Style: strategic use of rasp and scream
Group Singing Style: parallel harmony; on the album, the quartet sound was more obvious than in the concert.
Vocal-Rhythm Dynamic: in the final part of the denouement, the drums were more obvious in the video than on the album.
Notes on Performance
Occasion: concert
Location: stage, Christian Faith Center, Creedmore, North Carolina
Microphones: Johnson had a hand-held, cordless mike; the back-up singers had floor mikes.
Clothing: everyone was dressed in all black. The members of the band wore slacks and shirts. Johnson, wore a suit and tie, and carried a black handkerchief.
Notes on Movement
Most of the musicians used their bodies to keep time; only the guitar player, Tyrone Jackson, stood in place. Duwand Wright, the backup singer, bent his knees as he sang, while the bass player, Heze Bethea, shifted his weight from foot to foot. Ray Braswell was seated at the keyboards, and lifted his left knee. Antrum Sherrils used his right foot on the bass drum.
Audience Perceptions
The video did not include verbal responses from the audience. One person on YouTube wrote: "God is in this place." [17]
Notes on Performers
Keith Johnson was at least two generations removed from the south. His father ran a barbershop in Brooklyn. [18] However, his cousin Darrell, spent "every summer of his youth with relatives in rural South Carolina." [19] McFadden and the Disciples’ Facebook page said the band was based in Concord, North Carolina, [20] home of the Reeves Chapel A.M.E. Zion Church mentioned in the post for 9 August 2017.
Johnson and McFadden had separate careers, but McFadden occasionally appeared as a member of Spiritual Voices on Johnson’s albums. [21] The men sometimes shared musicians. Spanky Williams produced albums and played guitar or bass guitar for both. [22] Antrum Sherrils was listed as McFadden’s drummer on Facebook. [23]
Availability
Album: Send a Revival. World Wide Gospel. 28 May 2002. CD.
YouTube: VHS version uploaded by Pannellctp Traditional Gospel Music on 3 August 2013.
End Notes
1. Higginson’s observations were reprinted in the post for 20 September 2018.
2. Bolton Brother’s performance was discussed in the post for 12 August 2017. The Evereadys’ live performance was described in the post for 3 August 2017. Motown choreographer Cholly Atkins was discussed in the post for 18 October 2018.
3. Ray Allen. Singing in the Spirit. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. 100.
4. Robert Termorshuizen listed two men who sang lead, Philip Johnson and Tyrone Jefferson. [5] Keith Johnson said the singers were his father and uncles. [7] Darrell McFadden said they were his uncles. [6] Keith continue to use the name Spiritual Voices and listed his father as a member on the video.
5. Termorshuizen reproduced a picture of an album cover from 1968 that showed six adult men and a boy. "Phillip Johnson & Spiritual Voices: Search Me Jesus." Record Connexion website. The record was Gospel Recording Co. LP 1395.
6. "McFadden’s ‘I’ve Got a Right’ Hits the Stores." Muncie [Indiana] Times 1,6:17 August 2006. 6.
7. Wikipedia said Keith Johnson was born in 1972. ("Keith ‘Wonderboy’ Johnson.") Bob Marovich repeated Johnson began singing with the group when he was five-years-old. ("‘Making A Way’ Keith ‘Wonderboy’ Johnson & the Spiritual Voices." Journal of Gospel Music website, 4 April 2009.)
8. The video give credit to all the technicians.
9. "History." Christian Faith Center website.
10. Its current pastor, Tim Timberlake, graduated from the Pistis Bible College founded by Butler. His father Mark converted the Baptist church into a non-profit organization. ("Meet Our Pastors," Christian Faith Center website, and "Pistis: School of Ministry," Word of Faith website).
11. "What We Believe." Christian Faith Center website.
12. I am surmising he was bending his knees because the upper part of his body was rising and falling on a vertical axis.
13. Allen used the term "vocal percussion" for this use of short phrases (page 280). He labeled the transition and denouement the "drive." He wrote: "A drive section begins when the instrumentalists stall on one chord while the background singers repeat a single vocal line over and over. At this point the lead singer begins to ad-lib, switching from his or her regular singing voice into a tense, high pitched, rhythmically repetitive chant or singing chant." (page 119) Elsewhere, he observed: "Spontaneous, ‘authentic’ holy dance does occur when a singer and/or congregation members come under the anointment of the Holy Ghost. This frequently happens during a drive section." (page 101)
14. Turrentine-Agee was discussed in the post for 6 August 2017. The recording by the Evereadys was described in the post for 2 August 2017.
15. Ness. Comment posted 24 November 2013. Amazon website for album.
16. The credits at the end of the video mentioned Steve Lyles played organ. He wasn’t on stage and the video didn’t show footage of him like it did for the rest of the musicians.
17. Linda Lavalais. YouTube comment, June 2018.
18. "Phil Johnson, manager of the Spiritual Voices, in front of his barber shop on Ralph Avenue, Brooklyn, 1989. Photo by Ray Allen." (Allen. 95.)
19. Muncie Times.
20. "The OFFICIAL Darrell Mcfadden & the Disciples FAN PAGE." Facebook.
21. For example, McFadden sang "background vocals" on Johnson’s New Season. 2004. Verity CD. (Oldies website)
22. In 2006, Parthan Williams described himself as "the man behind the songs and production of 2 of gospel hottest young group’s, Darrell Mcfadden & the Disciples and Keith ‘wonderboy’ Johnson & the Spiritual Voices." ("Personal Testimony by Spanky Williams." CD Baby website). All Music listed his specific contributions by album. ("Spanky Williams.") He was from Brooklyn. (Wikipedia. "Men of Vizion.")
23. Facebook.
Contemporary gospel music concerts may be the nearest equivalent to plantation ring shouts that exists. They aren’t direct descendants because so many changes occurred in the intervening 150 years in African-American churches and the music industry. But, modern musicians, like those observed by Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1862, [1] were rewarded for serving the needs of the group.
The most important point about both was they were not Protestant services: there might have been some testifying in concerts, but no sermons reminded the audience of its sinful nature, no altar calls were made for the unconverted. Concerts and shouts were group meetings in which music facilitated spiritual experiences for individuals who already were members of the community.
Touring gospel artists were professionals who, like the Bolton Brothers and Evereadys, had incorporated styles popularized by Motown artists. [2] Ray Allen said "such dramatizations are recognized by the singers and their audience as stylized representations of holy dance that is, not the ‘real thing’." However, "the Spiritual Voices feel their theatrics contribute to the power of their overall performance which, they hope, will culminate with possession by the Holy Ghost and ‘genuine’ holy dance." [3]
Spiritual Voices was formed in Brooklyn by Philip Johnson and his brothers, and possibly brothers-in-law in the 1960s. [4] They made records that included Darrell McFadden when he was a lad. [5] About the time McFadden left to form his own group in 1980, [6] Johnson’s son Keith joined them. [7] He was called "Wonderboy" and continued to use that name.
When Keith performed "Come by Here" in Creedmore, North Carolina, in 2002, four men filmed a VHS version that was edited, mixed, and overdubbed. [8] Thus, while all the images came from that night, they might not necessarily have been in the order presented. The video uploaded to YouTube represented an idealized version of what occurred.
The Christian Faith Center where the Spiritual Voices performed was founded as a Baptist church in 1911. It became nondenominational in 1986 [9] with some association with Keith Butler’s Word of Faith in Southfield, Michigan. [10] It believed "in the infilling of the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues." [11] Thus, one can assume most who attended the concert were comfortable with expressive manifestations of religion.
The video began with Johnson standing on the floor in front of the stage. He asked his audience: "Anyone need the Lord to do something? Anybody got a special blessing they need to Lord to do for you?"
He continued:
"If you need the Lord to do something for you. What I want you do, step out in an aisle and come down to the front now. Come on down to the front. If you need the Lord to bless you, come on down."
After defining a space available for would-be participants, he climbed up onto the stage where he began singing "come by here" and "we need a blessing." The backup group echoed his words as the instrumental accompaniment became more intense and more rhythmic.
Johnson spoke again, this time making his invitation to participate explicit:
"When that blessing is coming, the best way to that get that blessing to manifest is for you to celebrate it. The best way is with a dance. Grab somebody by the hand."
The cameras didn’t show anyone below the waist, except those musicians who were seated. Many in the audience were filmed from the back moving from side to side. After the invitation to dance, pairs, many of them women, faced one another with their upper bodies, arms and heads in motion. Later, people standing in rows clapped to the rhythm.
Johnson’s movements went through three phases. In the prelude, when he was singing lines of verses and the group was repeating "we need you right now," his body was erect, while he bent his knees, and moved a few steps to the left or right. [12]
In the transition, his phrases were shorter and the group began repeating "right now" as a continuo. [13] Johnson moved his shoulders at one time, and then leaned his body forward slightly as he started walking farther to the left and right on bent knees. Just before his invocation to dance, he tilted his body farther forward, and at one point sang vocables as he bent and raised his body from the waist. He returned to walking left and right, but with his torso at a more acute angle.
The significance of the concert as a communal experience that drew upon elements of ring shouts was obvious when one compared YouTube videos with recordings of the same songs. As already mentioned in the posts about Evelyn Turrentine-Agee [14] and the Evereadys, recordings were played by people in the privacy of their homes and thus the words were easier to understand and the instrumentation more subdued.
Johnson included "Come by Here" on an album with more verses in the prelude, and no spoken invitations to the audience to participate. He used a more musical voice in his soliloquies while he asked God to help the homeless and jobless in the denouement, rather than rhythmically repeating "come on." One woman wrote, " the words to the songs" on the album "truly ministered to my soul and elevated my mind to heaven.’ [15]
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Keith Johnson
Vocal Group: Hezekiah Bethea, Tyrone Jackson, Duwand Wright, Ray Braswell, Jr.
Instrumental Accompaniment: Tyrone Jackson, lead guitar; Hezekiah Bethea, bass guitar; Ray Braswell, Jr., keyboards [16]
Rhythm Accompaniment: Antrum Sherrills, drums
Credits
Album: (C) 2002 Worldwide Gospel
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Phrases: come by here, we need a blessing
Vocabulary
Pronoun: we, I
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: blessing
Literary Devices: rhymed couplets
Basic Form: prelude-denouement
Prelude: verse-chorus with two verses, one based on "come by here," the other a memory of a past healing service. The chorus used the phrase "right now."
Denouement: repetitions of "come on" by Johnson and "right now" by the group
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: one note
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: tempo, dynamics, harmony, and instrumentation remained the same; segments were defined by instrumental breaks and changes in the interaction between vocal parts.
Solo Singing Style: strategic use of rasp and scream
Group Singing Style: parallel harmony; on the album, the quartet sound was more obvious than in the concert.
Vocal-Rhythm Dynamic: in the final part of the denouement, the drums were more obvious in the video than on the album.
Notes on Performance
Occasion: concert
Location: stage, Christian Faith Center, Creedmore, North Carolina
Microphones: Johnson had a hand-held, cordless mike; the back-up singers had floor mikes.
Clothing: everyone was dressed in all black. The members of the band wore slacks and shirts. Johnson, wore a suit and tie, and carried a black handkerchief.
Notes on Movement
Most of the musicians used their bodies to keep time; only the guitar player, Tyrone Jackson, stood in place. Duwand Wright, the backup singer, bent his knees as he sang, while the bass player, Heze Bethea, shifted his weight from foot to foot. Ray Braswell was seated at the keyboards, and lifted his left knee. Antrum Sherrils used his right foot on the bass drum.
Audience Perceptions
The video did not include verbal responses from the audience. One person on YouTube wrote: "God is in this place." [17]
Notes on Performers
Keith Johnson was at least two generations removed from the south. His father ran a barbershop in Brooklyn. [18] However, his cousin Darrell, spent "every summer of his youth with relatives in rural South Carolina." [19] McFadden and the Disciples’ Facebook page said the band was based in Concord, North Carolina, [20] home of the Reeves Chapel A.M.E. Zion Church mentioned in the post for 9 August 2017.
Johnson and McFadden had separate careers, but McFadden occasionally appeared as a member of Spiritual Voices on Johnson’s albums. [21] The men sometimes shared musicians. Spanky Williams produced albums and played guitar or bass guitar for both. [22] Antrum Sherrils was listed as McFadden’s drummer on Facebook. [23]
Availability
Album: Send a Revival. World Wide Gospel. 28 May 2002. CD.
YouTube: VHS version uploaded by Pannellctp Traditional Gospel Music on 3 August 2013.
End Notes
1. Higginson’s observations were reprinted in the post for 20 September 2018.
2. Bolton Brother’s performance was discussed in the post for 12 August 2017. The Evereadys’ live performance was described in the post for 3 August 2017. Motown choreographer Cholly Atkins was discussed in the post for 18 October 2018.
3. Ray Allen. Singing in the Spirit. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. 100.
4. Robert Termorshuizen listed two men who sang lead, Philip Johnson and Tyrone Jefferson. [5] Keith Johnson said the singers were his father and uncles. [7] Darrell McFadden said they were his uncles. [6] Keith continue to use the name Spiritual Voices and listed his father as a member on the video.
5. Termorshuizen reproduced a picture of an album cover from 1968 that showed six adult men and a boy. "Phillip Johnson & Spiritual Voices: Search Me Jesus." Record Connexion website. The record was Gospel Recording Co. LP 1395.
6. "McFadden’s ‘I’ve Got a Right’ Hits the Stores." Muncie [Indiana] Times 1,6:17 August 2006. 6.
7. Wikipedia said Keith Johnson was born in 1972. ("Keith ‘Wonderboy’ Johnson.") Bob Marovich repeated Johnson began singing with the group when he was five-years-old. ("‘Making A Way’ Keith ‘Wonderboy’ Johnson & the Spiritual Voices." Journal of Gospel Music website, 4 April 2009.)
8. The video give credit to all the technicians.
9. "History." Christian Faith Center website.
10. Its current pastor, Tim Timberlake, graduated from the Pistis Bible College founded by Butler. His father Mark converted the Baptist church into a non-profit organization. ("Meet Our Pastors," Christian Faith Center website, and "Pistis: School of Ministry," Word of Faith website).
11. "What We Believe." Christian Faith Center website.
12. I am surmising he was bending his knees because the upper part of his body was rising and falling on a vertical axis.
13. Allen used the term "vocal percussion" for this use of short phrases (page 280). He labeled the transition and denouement the "drive." He wrote: "A drive section begins when the instrumentalists stall on one chord while the background singers repeat a single vocal line over and over. At this point the lead singer begins to ad-lib, switching from his or her regular singing voice into a tense, high pitched, rhythmically repetitive chant or singing chant." (page 119) Elsewhere, he observed: "Spontaneous, ‘authentic’ holy dance does occur when a singer and/or congregation members come under the anointment of the Holy Ghost. This frequently happens during a drive section." (page 101)
14. Turrentine-Agee was discussed in the post for 6 August 2017. The recording by the Evereadys was described in the post for 2 August 2017.
15. Ness. Comment posted 24 November 2013. Amazon website for album.
16. The credits at the end of the video mentioned Steve Lyles played organ. He wasn’t on stage and the video didn’t show footage of him like it did for the rest of the musicians.
17. Linda Lavalais. YouTube comment, June 2018.
18. "Phil Johnson, manager of the Spiritual Voices, in front of his barber shop on Ralph Avenue, Brooklyn, 1989. Photo by Ray Allen." (Allen. 95.)
19. Muncie Times.
20. "The OFFICIAL Darrell Mcfadden & the Disciples FAN PAGE." Facebook.
21. For example, McFadden sang "background vocals" on Johnson’s New Season. 2004. Verity CD. (Oldies website)
22. In 2006, Parthan Williams described himself as "the man behind the songs and production of 2 of gospel hottest young group’s, Darrell Mcfadden & the Disciples and Keith ‘wonderboy’ Johnson & the Spiritual Voices." ("Personal Testimony by Spanky Williams." CD Baby website). All Music listed his specific contributions by album. ("Spanky Williams.") He was from Brooklyn. (Wikipedia. "Men of Vizion.")
23. Facebook.
Thursday, September 20, 2018
Ring Shouts (Civil War)
Topic: Origins - Ring Shout
Our knowledge of ring shouts increased after the Union forces took control of Port Royal, South Carolina, in 1861. Confederate supporters fled to rebel-held lands, and slaves escaped to army camps for safety. By February 1862, at least 600 had moved into the army camp on Hilton Head, and the commander, Thomas Sherman, was asking Washington for help.
The Treasury secretary sent Edward Pierce to investigate. Philadelphia abolitionists sent Miller McKim in June. Pierce’s main interest was keeping the plantations on islands like Saint Helena producing cotton that could be sold to finance the war. [1] McKim’s concerns were humanitarian.
In April, Federal troops took the harbor defenses for Savannah, and in May David Hunger began recruiting Black troops. Neither Lincoln nor Congress was ready to see Black men armed, and Hunter was ordered to disband his army. He kept his first hundred troops on Saint Simons to protect the refugees there. [2]
Lincoln was worried arming African-American men might drive some border states to join the Confederacy. [3] However, he reconsidered his Hunter decision when the army had trouble enlisting men. In late August, he ordered the military governor of the South, Rufus Saxton, to create a Black regiment. The hundred men at Saint Simon became Company A under the command of their existing commander, Charles Trowbridge.
Saxton recruited Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a Unitarian minister, as the first white commander, of the new regiment. [4] He was the first to describe the ring shout just as men who had lived on isolated plantations were coming together to create a common culture. In his diary for 1862, he noted that every night he saw some enter a hut made from palm leaves where they began chanting, stamping their feet, and clapping their hands.
"Then the excitement spreads: inside and outside the enclosure men begin to quiver and dance, others join, a circle forms, winding monotonously round some one in the centre; some ‘heel and toe’ tumultuously, others merely tremble and stagger on, others stoop and rise, others whirl, others caper sideways, all keep steadily circling like dervishes." [5]
While Higginson was commanding the first African-American regiment on Saint Helena Island, missionaries were arriving to convert the abandoned slaves and keep them working in the fields. Some of them also left descriptions of shouts from plantations that were just beginning to lose their isolation.
Laura Matilda Towne Towne was assigned to The Oaks. [6] Its owner, John Jeremiah Theus Pope, spent the war in Charleston where he died in 1864. His wife, Mary Frampton Townsend, had died in February 1861, before the Union occupation of Beaufort. [7] Pope had 122 slaves and was an Episcopalian Baptist. [8] On 28 April 1862 she wrote a friend:
"Last night I was at the ‘Praise House’ for a little time and saw Miss Nelly reading to the good women. Afterwards we went to the ‘shout,’ a savage, heathenish dance out in Rina’s house. Three men stood and sang, clapping and gesticulating, The others shuffled along on their heels, following one another in a circle and occasionally bending the knees in a kind of curtsey. They began slowly, a few going around and more gradually joining in, the song getting faster and faster, till at last only the most marked part of the refrain is sung and the shuffling, stamping and clapping get furious. As they danced they, of course, got out of breath, and the singing was kept up principally by the three apart, but it was astonishing how long they continued and how soon after a rest they were ready to begin again. Miss Walker and I, Mrs Whiting and her husband were there—a little white crowd at the door looking at this wild firelight scene; for there was no other light than that from the fire, which they kept replenishing. They kept up the ‘shout’ till very late." [9]
Harriet Ware was sent to William Fripp’s abandoned Pine Grove plantation. At the time he died in the Battle of Port Royal, he had 3,000 acres of land and 313 slaves, divided into several plantations. [10] Margaret Washington described him as "a ‘chief mover and supporter’ of white Baptist activity in the Sea Island region." [11] Ware mentioned several shouts in letters to her family. On Sunday, 4 May 1862 she told them:
"They had had a ‘Shout,’ which I had heard distinctly at three o’clock in the morning when I happened to wake up. They come from all the plantations about, when these meetings take place for the examination of new members, ‘prodigals and raw souls,’ as ’Siah said, he being an elder and one of the deacons. They do not begin till about ten o’clock Saturday night, when the examinations commence and the other services, after which they keep up the shout till near daylight, when they can see to go home. They admitted two this time, and, as Uncle Sam remarked, ‘they say there is joy in Heaven over one sinner that repenteth, so we rejoice over these souls that have come in.’ [12]
Seven months later, on 26 December 1862, she was at Higginson’s army post. She noted, "they had no ‘taps’ Christmas Eve or night, and the men kept their ‘shout’ up all night." [13] A week later, after New Year’s, she wrote on 2 January 1865:
"Then I let the children sing some of their own songs in genuine, shouting style, a sight too funny in the little things, but sad and disagreeable to me in the grown people, who make it a religious act. It is impossible to describe it--the children move round in a circle, backwards, or sideways, with their feet and arms keeping energetic time, and their whole bodies undergoing most extraordinary contortions, while they sing at the top of their voices the refrain to some song sung by an outsider. We laughed till we almost cried over the little bits of ones, but when the grown people wanted to ‘shout,’ I would not let them, and the occasion closed by their ‘drawing’ candy from C. as they passed out." [14]
Considered as dance, the shouts combined three elements. The circle formation, in which individuals each moved alone, was separate from the discrete steps and combinations, while the music was provided by two groups. The singers did not participate, although dancers might join them when they were resting. They could be located inside the circle or to the side. The participants themselves provided the rhythm with their foot stomps and hand claps.
The genius of the choreography was participants shared the same rhythm and counterclockwise direction, but had no physical contact and were free to step as they chose. This allowed slaves from different areas of Africa to come together, without sacrificing their unique heritages. Cross-fertilization could occur, especially when children were learning steps before they were allowed to participate in ceremonies.
Many of the accompanying spirituals "consisted of a chorus alone, with which the verses of other songs might be combined at random." Higginson added, some were repeated "for half an hour at a time" by substituting the names of everyone present into a line like "Hold your light, Brudder Robert." [15] In others, every line was different, but the refrains were constant.
End Notes
1. The Confiscation Act of 1861 allowed the government to seize property of rebel soldiers, including their slaves who were used as laborers.
2. Willie Lee Rose. Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1964. 189.
3. United States War Department. "General Order 143: Creation of the U.S. Colored Troops." 1863. Posted by the National Archives on Our Documents. On Lincoln’s motives.
4. This was the same Higginson who encouraged Emily Dickinson.
5. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. Army Life in a Black Regiment. Boston: Fields, Osgood, and Company, 1870. 17-18.
6. After the war, Towne and and Ellen Murray bought Frogmore plantation on Saint Helena in 1868 to continue educating local Black children at the Penn School. When Towne died, the school was transferred to Hampton Institute. After the state took over education in 1948, Hampton converted the school into the Penn Community Service Center. Much of the land was sold when Murray died in 1909. ["The Penn Center (1862 - )." Black Past website. And Wikipedia. "Penn Center (Saint Helena Island, South Carolina)."]
7. "History of The Oaks Plantation." Oaks Plantation website.
8. Chalmers Gaston Davison. "100 Laurens Street." In The Last Foray. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1971. Cited by Roots and Recall website.
9. Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne; Written From the Sea Islands of South Carolina, 1862-1884. Edited by Rupert Sargent Holland. Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1912. 22-23. Washington brought this to my attention. See #11. 298.
10. South Carolina. General Assembly. Report of State Officers, Board and Committees to the General Assembly of the State of South Carolina. 1900. On Fripp’s death, 35-36.
11. Margaret Washington Creel. "A Peculiar People." New York: New York University Press, 1988. 211.
12. Harriet Ware. In Letters from Port Royal Written at the Time of the Civil War. Edited by Elizabeth Ware Pearson. Boston: W. B. Clarke Company, 1906. No page numbers in on-line copy.
13. Ware. In Pearson.
14. Ware. In Pearson
15. Higginson. 198-199.
Our knowledge of ring shouts increased after the Union forces took control of Port Royal, South Carolina, in 1861. Confederate supporters fled to rebel-held lands, and slaves escaped to army camps for safety. By February 1862, at least 600 had moved into the army camp on Hilton Head, and the commander, Thomas Sherman, was asking Washington for help.
The Treasury secretary sent Edward Pierce to investigate. Philadelphia abolitionists sent Miller McKim in June. Pierce’s main interest was keeping the plantations on islands like Saint Helena producing cotton that could be sold to finance the war. [1] McKim’s concerns were humanitarian.
In April, Federal troops took the harbor defenses for Savannah, and in May David Hunger began recruiting Black troops. Neither Lincoln nor Congress was ready to see Black men armed, and Hunter was ordered to disband his army. He kept his first hundred troops on Saint Simons to protect the refugees there. [2]
Lincoln was worried arming African-American men might drive some border states to join the Confederacy. [3] However, he reconsidered his Hunter decision when the army had trouble enlisting men. In late August, he ordered the military governor of the South, Rufus Saxton, to create a Black regiment. The hundred men at Saint Simon became Company A under the command of their existing commander, Charles Trowbridge.
Saxton recruited Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a Unitarian minister, as the first white commander, of the new regiment. [4] He was the first to describe the ring shout just as men who had lived on isolated plantations were coming together to create a common culture. In his diary for 1862, he noted that every night he saw some enter a hut made from palm leaves where they began chanting, stamping their feet, and clapping their hands.
"Then the excitement spreads: inside and outside the enclosure men begin to quiver and dance, others join, a circle forms, winding monotonously round some one in the centre; some ‘heel and toe’ tumultuously, others merely tremble and stagger on, others stoop and rise, others whirl, others caper sideways, all keep steadily circling like dervishes." [5]
While Higginson was commanding the first African-American regiment on Saint Helena Island, missionaries were arriving to convert the abandoned slaves and keep them working in the fields. Some of them also left descriptions of shouts from plantations that were just beginning to lose their isolation.
Laura Matilda Towne Towne was assigned to The Oaks. [6] Its owner, John Jeremiah Theus Pope, spent the war in Charleston where he died in 1864. His wife, Mary Frampton Townsend, had died in February 1861, before the Union occupation of Beaufort. [7] Pope had 122 slaves and was an Episcopalian Baptist. [8] On 28 April 1862 she wrote a friend:
"Last night I was at the ‘Praise House’ for a little time and saw Miss Nelly reading to the good women. Afterwards we went to the ‘shout,’ a savage, heathenish dance out in Rina’s house. Three men stood and sang, clapping and gesticulating, The others shuffled along on their heels, following one another in a circle and occasionally bending the knees in a kind of curtsey. They began slowly, a few going around and more gradually joining in, the song getting faster and faster, till at last only the most marked part of the refrain is sung and the shuffling, stamping and clapping get furious. As they danced they, of course, got out of breath, and the singing was kept up principally by the three apart, but it was astonishing how long they continued and how soon after a rest they were ready to begin again. Miss Walker and I, Mrs Whiting and her husband were there—a little white crowd at the door looking at this wild firelight scene; for there was no other light than that from the fire, which they kept replenishing. They kept up the ‘shout’ till very late." [9]
Harriet Ware was sent to William Fripp’s abandoned Pine Grove plantation. At the time he died in the Battle of Port Royal, he had 3,000 acres of land and 313 slaves, divided into several plantations. [10] Margaret Washington described him as "a ‘chief mover and supporter’ of white Baptist activity in the Sea Island region." [11] Ware mentioned several shouts in letters to her family. On Sunday, 4 May 1862 she told them:
"They had had a ‘Shout,’ which I had heard distinctly at three o’clock in the morning when I happened to wake up. They come from all the plantations about, when these meetings take place for the examination of new members, ‘prodigals and raw souls,’ as ’Siah said, he being an elder and one of the deacons. They do not begin till about ten o’clock Saturday night, when the examinations commence and the other services, after which they keep up the shout till near daylight, when they can see to go home. They admitted two this time, and, as Uncle Sam remarked, ‘they say there is joy in Heaven over one sinner that repenteth, so we rejoice over these souls that have come in.’ [12]
Seven months later, on 26 December 1862, she was at Higginson’s army post. She noted, "they had no ‘taps’ Christmas Eve or night, and the men kept their ‘shout’ up all night." [13] A week later, after New Year’s, she wrote on 2 January 1865:
"Then I let the children sing some of their own songs in genuine, shouting style, a sight too funny in the little things, but sad and disagreeable to me in the grown people, who make it a religious act. It is impossible to describe it--the children move round in a circle, backwards, or sideways, with their feet and arms keeping energetic time, and their whole bodies undergoing most extraordinary contortions, while they sing at the top of their voices the refrain to some song sung by an outsider. We laughed till we almost cried over the little bits of ones, but when the grown people wanted to ‘shout,’ I would not let them, and the occasion closed by their ‘drawing’ candy from C. as they passed out." [14]
Considered as dance, the shouts combined three elements. The circle formation, in which individuals each moved alone, was separate from the discrete steps and combinations, while the music was provided by two groups. The singers did not participate, although dancers might join them when they were resting. They could be located inside the circle or to the side. The participants themselves provided the rhythm with their foot stomps and hand claps.
The genius of the choreography was participants shared the same rhythm and counterclockwise direction, but had no physical contact and were free to step as they chose. This allowed slaves from different areas of Africa to come together, without sacrificing their unique heritages. Cross-fertilization could occur, especially when children were learning steps before they were allowed to participate in ceremonies.
Many of the accompanying spirituals "consisted of a chorus alone, with which the verses of other songs might be combined at random." Higginson added, some were repeated "for half an hour at a time" by substituting the names of everyone present into a line like "Hold your light, Brudder Robert." [15] In others, every line was different, but the refrains were constant.
End Notes
1. The Confiscation Act of 1861 allowed the government to seize property of rebel soldiers, including their slaves who were used as laborers.
2. Willie Lee Rose. Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1964. 189.
3. United States War Department. "General Order 143: Creation of the U.S. Colored Troops." 1863. Posted by the National Archives on Our Documents. On Lincoln’s motives.
4. This was the same Higginson who encouraged Emily Dickinson.
5. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. Army Life in a Black Regiment. Boston: Fields, Osgood, and Company, 1870. 17-18.
6. After the war, Towne and and Ellen Murray bought Frogmore plantation on Saint Helena in 1868 to continue educating local Black children at the Penn School. When Towne died, the school was transferred to Hampton Institute. After the state took over education in 1948, Hampton converted the school into the Penn Community Service Center. Much of the land was sold when Murray died in 1909. ["The Penn Center (1862 - )." Black Past website. And Wikipedia. "Penn Center (Saint Helena Island, South Carolina)."]
7. "History of The Oaks Plantation." Oaks Plantation website.
8. Chalmers Gaston Davison. "100 Laurens Street." In The Last Foray. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1971. Cited by Roots and Recall website.
9. Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne; Written From the Sea Islands of South Carolina, 1862-1884. Edited by Rupert Sargent Holland. Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1912. 22-23. Washington brought this to my attention. See #11. 298.
10. South Carolina. General Assembly. Report of State Officers, Board and Committees to the General Assembly of the State of South Carolina. 1900. On Fripp’s death, 35-36.
11. Margaret Washington Creel. "A Peculiar People." New York: New York University Press, 1988. 211.
12. Harriet Ware. In Letters from Port Royal Written at the Time of the Civil War. Edited by Elizabeth Ware Pearson. Boston: W. B. Clarke Company, 1906. No page numbers in on-line copy.
13. Ware. In Pearson.
14. Ware. In Pearson
15. Higginson. 198-199.
Tuesday, September 18, 2018
Ring Shouts (Antebellum)
Topic: Ring Shout
The origins of dance are lost: it left no material artifacts. All we have are images from Egyptian tomb paintings and Greek vases that were filtered through the artistic styles of the time that may have distorted more than represented physical movements.
Once writing was invented, verbal descriptions survived. If they were made by observers, they were hindered by the difficulties of describing an activity that used so many muscles. If they were made by dancers, they may have been in the language of the trade with terms whose precise meanings have been lost.
Into the vacuum rushed many with theories based on extrapolations and views of culture. Some were insightful, some silly. A number revealed more about the writer than about dance.
Many believed the ring shout was the precursor of dance-like movements in contemporary African-American religious services. It’s generally agreed shouts emerged on plantations in the southern United States before the Civil War when Africans from different villages were thrown together in close quarters.
Lydia Parrish noted:
"Shouting appears to be of two types: Along the coast of Georgia and South Carolina the most popular form is the ring-shout, in which a number of dancers move counter-clockwise in a circle. Occasionally individuals are seen in church using the same rhythmic shout step. In North Carolina and Virginia, however, the solo performance is apparently the only form in use, and the ring-shout seems to be unknown." [1]
The surviving descriptions were made by outsiders - not just by whites, but by whites who did not live with slaves. The earliest I’ve seen quoted was made by George Whitefield, the English Methodist evangelist, when he was visiting the colonies.
On Saturday, the night of 2 January 1740, he and his companions got lost when they were riding from one plantation to another in South Carolina. The Stono Rebellion by slaves from Angola had occurred less than four months before, and whites were still afraid. [2] The travelers already had met some men they suspected were runaways, and so did not approach this group to ask directions. It was a new moon. [3]
"Soon after we saw another great Fire near the Road Side, but imagining there was another Nest of such Negroes, we made a Circuit into the Woods, and one of my Friends at a Distance observed them dancing round the Fire. The Moon shining bright, we soon found our way." [4]
Benjamin Henry Latrobe was born in England and trained as an engineer and architect. He immigrated to Virginia in 1796, and moved to Philadelphia the next year where he designed neo-classical buildings. In 1818, he visited New Orleans where the city was building a waterworks he had designed. [5] His observations were contained in his record for February 26 February 1819.
"[. . .] formed into circular groupes [sic] in the midst of four of which, which I examined (but there were more of them), was a ring, the largest not ten feet in diameter. In the first were two women dancing. They held each a coarse handkerchief extended by the corners in their hands & set to each other in a miserably dull & slow figure, hardly moving their feet or bodies. Most of the circles contained the same sort of dancers. One was larger, in which a ring of a dozen women walked, by way of dancing, round, the music in the center." [6]
Charles Lyell already had revolutionized geology [7] when he was asked to lecture in the United States in 1841. [8] On his second trip, the Scotsman visited a number of plantations in 1846, including one owned by James Hamilton Couper.
"Of dancing and music the negroes are passionately fond. On the Hopeton plantation above twenty violins have been silenced by the Methodist missionaries, yet it is notorious that the slaves were not given to drink or intemperance in their merry-makings.
"At the Methodist prayer-meetings, they are permitted to move round rapidly in a ring, joining hands in token of brotherly love, presenting the right hand and then the left, in which manœuver, I am told, they sometimes contrive to take enough exercise to serve as a substitute for the dance, it being a kind of spiritual boulanger, while the singing of psalms, in an out of chapel, compensates for the songs they have been required to renounce." [9]
Couper’s father, John Couper had left Glasgow for Philadelphia after the Revolution. He moved to South Carolina, then, with James Hamilton, another Scots immigrant, he moved again to Saint Simons Island in 1793. Hamilton returned to Philadelphia in 1826, and died in 1829. James Hamilton Couper managed Hamilton’s plantations for him, and, then, for himself. [10]
Saint Simons was off the coast of the Altamaha river. Macon, Georgia, was located near the fall line on a tributary of the river. In May 1850, Fredrika Bremer [11] attended a camp meeting there that had separate services for slaves and whites. Late in the evening the Swedish novelist walked around the slave area where "all the tents were still full of religious exaltation, each separate tent presenting some new phase." In one she observed
"women dancing the ‘holy dance’ for one of the newly converted. This dancing, however, having been forbidden by the preachers, ceased immediately on our entering the tent. I saw merely a rocking movement of women who held each other by the hand in a circle, singing the while." [12]
One of Couper’s neighbors on Saint Simon was Pierce Butler, who married an English actress, Fanny Kemble, in 1834. He was an absentee land owner, and spent only one winter there with Kemble. Butler sold most of his slaves in 1859 to pay debts. [13]
Another neighbor had been Tom Spalding, who sold his land in 1834 to start farming on nearby Sapelo Island. His slaves included those owned by his father on Saint Simons, and ones he purchased in Savannah and Charleston. [14]
Katie Brown was born about 1850 on his Sapelo Island plantation. [15] In the 1930s, she told WPA interviewers:
"harvest time was time for drums. Then they had big time. When harvest in, they had big gathering. They beat drum, rattle dry gourd with seeds in them, and beat big flat tin plates. They shout and move round in circle and look like march going to heaven. Harvest festival they call it." [15]
"harves time wuz time fuh drums. Den deh hab big time. Wen hahves in, dey hab big gadderin. Dey beat drum, rattle dry goad wid seed in um, an beat big flat tin plates. Dey shout an moob roun in succle an look lak mahch goin tuh heabm. Hahves festival, dey call it."
At most one knows two things from these descriptions. The shouts appeared very early and in different forms in New Orleans and in the South Carolina-Georgia lowlands. Beyond that, all the travelers described was a formation.
End Notes
I have not done research in this area and am grateful to the individuals mentioned below. I have read the original sources cited by them.
1. Lydia Parrish. Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. New York: Creative Age Press, 1942. Reprint edition, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992. 54.
2. The Stono Rebellion occurred 9-10 September 1739 southwest of Charleston. Wikipedia. "Stono Rebellion" and "Stono River."
3. Fred Espenak. "Phases of the Moon: 1701 to 1800." AstroPixels website.
4. George Whitefield. A continuation of the Reverend Mr. Whitefield’s journal, from his embarking after the embargo, to his arrival at Savannah in Georgia. London: W. Strahan, 1740. 78. Margaret Washington Creel brought this to my attention. "A Peculiar People." New York: New York University Press, 1988. 102.
5. Wikipedia. "Benjamin Henry Latrobe."
6. Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Impressions Respecting New Orleans, Diary and Sketches, 1818 – 1820. Edited by Samuel Wilson Jr. New York: Columbia University Press, 1951. Book 4, February 16-February 26, 1819. 49-51. Quoted by Katrina Hazzard-Donald. "Hoodoo Religion and American Dance Traditions: Rethinking the Ring Shout." The Journal of Pan African Studies 4:194-212:September 2011. 199.
7. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (London: J. Murray, 1830) described forces that shaped the history of the planet, especially mountains. The book influenced Charles Darwin.
8. Richard W. Macomber. "Sir Charles Lyell, Baronet." Encyclopædia Britannica. Uploaded 27 May 1999; last updated 15 February 2018.
9. Charles Lyell. A Second Visit to the United States. NY: Harper and Brothers, 1849. 1:269-270. Quoted by Washington, 297-298, and by Sterling Stuckey. Slave Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 edition. 22.
10. James M. Clifton. "Hopeton, Model Plantation of the Antebellum South." The Georgia Historical Quarterly 66:429-449:1982. 429-430.
11. Bremer hoped to replicate the experiences of Alexis de Tocqueville when she visited the United States. He had written Democracy in America for a French audience in 1835. (Wikipedia. "Fredrika Bremer.")
12. Fredrika Bremer. America of the Fifties: Letters of Fredrika Bremer. Edited by Adolph B. Benson. New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1924. 119. Letter dated 7 May 1850.
13. Stephen W. Berry. "Butler Family." New Georgia Encyclopedia. 3 September 2002. Last updated 3 September 2014.
14. Dylan E. Mulligan. "The Original Progressive Farmer: The Agricultural Legacy of Thomas Spalding of Sapelo." Honors thesis. Georgia Southern University, April 2015. 3.
15. Parrish. 131.
16. Georgia Writers Project. Dreams and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes. Project director, Mary Granger. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1940. 152. Quoted by Michael A. Gomez. Exchanging Our Country Marks. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 266.
The origins of dance are lost: it left no material artifacts. All we have are images from Egyptian tomb paintings and Greek vases that were filtered through the artistic styles of the time that may have distorted more than represented physical movements.
Once writing was invented, verbal descriptions survived. If they were made by observers, they were hindered by the difficulties of describing an activity that used so many muscles. If they were made by dancers, they may have been in the language of the trade with terms whose precise meanings have been lost.
Into the vacuum rushed many with theories based on extrapolations and views of culture. Some were insightful, some silly. A number revealed more about the writer than about dance.
Many believed the ring shout was the precursor of dance-like movements in contemporary African-American religious services. It’s generally agreed shouts emerged on plantations in the southern United States before the Civil War when Africans from different villages were thrown together in close quarters.
Lydia Parrish noted:
"Shouting appears to be of two types: Along the coast of Georgia and South Carolina the most popular form is the ring-shout, in which a number of dancers move counter-clockwise in a circle. Occasionally individuals are seen in church using the same rhythmic shout step. In North Carolina and Virginia, however, the solo performance is apparently the only form in use, and the ring-shout seems to be unknown." [1]
The surviving descriptions were made by outsiders - not just by whites, but by whites who did not live with slaves. The earliest I’ve seen quoted was made by George Whitefield, the English Methodist evangelist, when he was visiting the colonies.
On Saturday, the night of 2 January 1740, he and his companions got lost when they were riding from one plantation to another in South Carolina. The Stono Rebellion by slaves from Angola had occurred less than four months before, and whites were still afraid. [2] The travelers already had met some men they suspected were runaways, and so did not approach this group to ask directions. It was a new moon. [3]
"Soon after we saw another great Fire near the Road Side, but imagining there was another Nest of such Negroes, we made a Circuit into the Woods, and one of my Friends at a Distance observed them dancing round the Fire. The Moon shining bright, we soon found our way." [4]
Benjamin Henry Latrobe was born in England and trained as an engineer and architect. He immigrated to Virginia in 1796, and moved to Philadelphia the next year where he designed neo-classical buildings. In 1818, he visited New Orleans where the city was building a waterworks he had designed. [5] His observations were contained in his record for February 26 February 1819.
"[. . .] formed into circular groupes [sic] in the midst of four of which, which I examined (but there were more of them), was a ring, the largest not ten feet in diameter. In the first were two women dancing. They held each a coarse handkerchief extended by the corners in their hands & set to each other in a miserably dull & slow figure, hardly moving their feet or bodies. Most of the circles contained the same sort of dancers. One was larger, in which a ring of a dozen women walked, by way of dancing, round, the music in the center." [6]
Charles Lyell already had revolutionized geology [7] when he was asked to lecture in the United States in 1841. [8] On his second trip, the Scotsman visited a number of plantations in 1846, including one owned by James Hamilton Couper.
"Of dancing and music the negroes are passionately fond. On the Hopeton plantation above twenty violins have been silenced by the Methodist missionaries, yet it is notorious that the slaves were not given to drink or intemperance in their merry-makings.
"At the Methodist prayer-meetings, they are permitted to move round rapidly in a ring, joining hands in token of brotherly love, presenting the right hand and then the left, in which manœuver, I am told, they sometimes contrive to take enough exercise to serve as a substitute for the dance, it being a kind of spiritual boulanger, while the singing of psalms, in an out of chapel, compensates for the songs they have been required to renounce." [9]
Couper’s father, John Couper had left Glasgow for Philadelphia after the Revolution. He moved to South Carolina, then, with James Hamilton, another Scots immigrant, he moved again to Saint Simons Island in 1793. Hamilton returned to Philadelphia in 1826, and died in 1829. James Hamilton Couper managed Hamilton’s plantations for him, and, then, for himself. [10]
Saint Simons was off the coast of the Altamaha river. Macon, Georgia, was located near the fall line on a tributary of the river. In May 1850, Fredrika Bremer [11] attended a camp meeting there that had separate services for slaves and whites. Late in the evening the Swedish novelist walked around the slave area where "all the tents were still full of religious exaltation, each separate tent presenting some new phase." In one she observed
"women dancing the ‘holy dance’ for one of the newly converted. This dancing, however, having been forbidden by the preachers, ceased immediately on our entering the tent. I saw merely a rocking movement of women who held each other by the hand in a circle, singing the while." [12]
One of Couper’s neighbors on Saint Simon was Pierce Butler, who married an English actress, Fanny Kemble, in 1834. He was an absentee land owner, and spent only one winter there with Kemble. Butler sold most of his slaves in 1859 to pay debts. [13]
Another neighbor had been Tom Spalding, who sold his land in 1834 to start farming on nearby Sapelo Island. His slaves included those owned by his father on Saint Simons, and ones he purchased in Savannah and Charleston. [14]
Katie Brown was born about 1850 on his Sapelo Island plantation. [15] In the 1930s, she told WPA interviewers:
"harvest time was time for drums. Then they had big time. When harvest in, they had big gathering. They beat drum, rattle dry gourd with seeds in them, and beat big flat tin plates. They shout and move round in circle and look like march going to heaven. Harvest festival they call it." [15]
"harves time wuz time fuh drums. Den deh hab big time. Wen hahves in, dey hab big gadderin. Dey beat drum, rattle dry goad wid seed in um, an beat big flat tin plates. Dey shout an moob roun in succle an look lak mahch goin tuh heabm. Hahves festival, dey call it."
At most one knows two things from these descriptions. The shouts appeared very early and in different forms in New Orleans and in the South Carolina-Georgia lowlands. Beyond that, all the travelers described was a formation.
End Notes
I have not done research in this area and am grateful to the individuals mentioned below. I have read the original sources cited by them.
1. Lydia Parrish. Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. New York: Creative Age Press, 1942. Reprint edition, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992. 54.
2. The Stono Rebellion occurred 9-10 September 1739 southwest of Charleston. Wikipedia. "Stono Rebellion" and "Stono River."
3. Fred Espenak. "Phases of the Moon: 1701 to 1800." AstroPixels website.
4. George Whitefield. A continuation of the Reverend Mr. Whitefield’s journal, from his embarking after the embargo, to his arrival at Savannah in Georgia. London: W. Strahan, 1740. 78. Margaret Washington Creel brought this to my attention. "A Peculiar People." New York: New York University Press, 1988. 102.
5. Wikipedia. "Benjamin Henry Latrobe."
6. Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Impressions Respecting New Orleans, Diary and Sketches, 1818 – 1820. Edited by Samuel Wilson Jr. New York: Columbia University Press, 1951. Book 4, February 16-February 26, 1819. 49-51. Quoted by Katrina Hazzard-Donald. "Hoodoo Religion and American Dance Traditions: Rethinking the Ring Shout." The Journal of Pan African Studies 4:194-212:September 2011. 199.
7. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (London: J. Murray, 1830) described forces that shaped the history of the planet, especially mountains. The book influenced Charles Darwin.
8. Richard W. Macomber. "Sir Charles Lyell, Baronet." Encyclopædia Britannica. Uploaded 27 May 1999; last updated 15 February 2018.
9. Charles Lyell. A Second Visit to the United States. NY: Harper and Brothers, 1849. 1:269-270. Quoted by Washington, 297-298, and by Sterling Stuckey. Slave Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 edition. 22.
10. James M. Clifton. "Hopeton, Model Plantation of the Antebellum South." The Georgia Historical Quarterly 66:429-449:1982. 429-430.
11. Bremer hoped to replicate the experiences of Alexis de Tocqueville when she visited the United States. He had written Democracy in America for a French audience in 1835. (Wikipedia. "Fredrika Bremer.")
12. Fredrika Bremer. America of the Fifties: Letters of Fredrika Bremer. Edited by Adolph B. Benson. New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1924. 119. Letter dated 7 May 1850.
13. Stephen W. Berry. "Butler Family." New Georgia Encyclopedia. 3 September 2002. Last updated 3 September 2014.
14. Dylan E. Mulligan. "The Original Progressive Farmer: The Agricultural Legacy of Thomas Spalding of Sapelo." Honors thesis. Georgia Southern University, April 2015. 3.
15. Parrish. 131.
16. Georgia Writers Project. Dreams and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes. Project director, Mary Granger. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1940. 152. Quoted by Michael A. Gomez. Exchanging Our Country Marks. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 266.
Sunday, September 16, 2018
Newton North High School - Come By Here
Topic: Pedagogy - Goals
One wonders if the limited participation in public school music programs by African Americans and others wasn’t ultimately the result of university academics re-erecting the barriers breached by Satis Colemen and Joseph Maddy in the 1920s. She remembered how frustrated she had been as a child when her piano teacher forced her to read music and punished her for playing by ear. [1] He remembered when he first took music lessons three-fourths of the students dropped out because they had to master scales before they could play tunes. [2] Each assumed students would acquire technical proficiency when it mattered to them. [3]
It’s hard to imagine a nine-year-old would have enjoyed singing "Kumbaya" in a class where the teacher followed all the recommendations of Eunice Boardman’s [4] or Charles Leonhard’s teams. [5] I doubt college entrance exams asked high-school seniors to name the chord on the fifth note of a scale, or that many later would attend concerts so they could comprehend the structure of a piece as John Zdechlik would have preferred. [6]
In 1929, the president of the Music Educators National Conference asked teachers what was the primary goal of their classes:
"Is it to teach facts about music and develop skill in reading music, or is it to awaken and stimulate joy and interest? You must introduce music to these children as a thing of beauty to be enjoyed and not as something to be struggled with." [7]
The debate over sight-reading or playing by ear entered African-American communities. Black college glee clubs in the early twentieth century embraced the traditions of Ivy League schools, while jazz musicians played by ear. It was simply an extension of the arguments over assimilation in the post-Reconstruction South where religious leaders like Daniel Payne condemned freemen who perpetuated ring shouts. [8]
African-American students may learn sight-reading in public-school music classes and oral traditions at home and church. The Dreher High School Chorus in Columbia, South Carolina, used an arrangement of "Come By Here" by Uzee Brown for a concert in 2014, while the Jubilee Singers of Newton North High School near Boston used one in the prelude-denouement form for a 2015 performance.
Brown, who was music director at Martin Luther King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and former chairman of the music department at Clark University, [9] used the traditional melody for "Kumbaya," while Sheldon Reid, who directed the Kuumba Singers of Harvard, used the Hightower Brother’s tune. Kuumba had been formed in 1970 as a way for African-American students to express their spirituality in an environment that still was hostile to integration. [10]
Both Walter Graham, director of Dreher, and Reid, conductor at Newton North, used female soloists supported by choral groups singing harmony. Brown had not used a soloist when his own group recorded his version. He scored four-part chordal harmony, so that every time a syllable was sung on more than one note, the chorus moved as a unit.
Columbia’s Liz [11] had a clear soprano voice with little tremolo that delivered the text simply so the audience could understand the emotion embedded in words that used the pronoun "someone." The Jubilee Singers sang one verse in harmony, then the chorus repeated "come by here" while Swabira Mayanja moved from singing a verse to phrases. She used her voice to convey the emotions with the pronoun "I." [12]
Dreher sang a capella, although Brown had used a piano and had suggested the "organ or piano may improvise on the chordal harmonies if desired." A piano sounded four notes to signal the voices before they began. Drums, keyboard, and an electric bass played before the Jubilee Singers began, and continued throughout the piece with instrumental breaks between stanzas.
The students who represented 53% of the southern school’s population of 1,300 [13] stood with still with their arms at their sides and their eyes on the conductor. Graham stood erect in front to use small gestures with both arms.
At Newton North, where Blacks were 5% of the 2,000 member student body, [14] the singers began with their arms at their sides looking at the conductor. When Mayanja began, they started stepping side to side. Part way through, after a brief instrumental interlude, they started clapping as they stepped. Reid used large arm movements and bent his knees to keep time.
The audience in the Red Bank United Methodist Church where the Dreher chorus performed listened attentively and applauded at the end. In Newton, some members of the audience stood and began marking time with their hands to the singing before the choir itself began clapping. [15] They were the only audience on a public school video of "Kumbaya" to shatter the proscenium arch and become part of the music.
Performers
Uzee Brown
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: SATB choir
Instrumental Accompaniment: piano or organ
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Dreher
Vocal Soloist: soprano
Vocal Group: 28 girls, 14 boys
Vocal Director: Walter Graham
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Newton North
Vocal Soloist: soprano
Vocal Group: 29 girls, 17 boys
Vocal Director: Sheldon Reid
Instrumental Accompaniment: keyboard, electric bass
Rhythm Accompaniment: drum set, hand claps
Credits
Uzee Brown
Spiritual, arr. Uzee Brown, Jr.
Arrangement Copyright (C) by GIA Publications, Inc
For the Cascade United Methodist Chancel Choir of Atlanta, Georgia
Notes on Lyrics
Uzee Brown
Language: English
Verses: come by here, needs you, praying, crying
Vocabulary
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: four-verse song
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Ending: none
Unique Features: none
Newton North
Language: English
Verses: come by here, I’ve been waiting; references to needs you, praying
Vocabulary
Pronoun: I
Term for Deity: Jesus, Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: ritual prelude-denouement structure
Notes on Music
Uzee Brown
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Time Signature: 2/4
Tempo: slow and prayerful
Key Signature: three flats
Basic Structure: strophic repetition
Dreher
Tempo: slow, but faster than that used by the Uzee Brown Society of Choraliers
Newton North
Opening Phrase: 1-5
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: instrumental accompaniment used strophic repetition with changes in key
Notes on Performance
Dreher
Occasion: "Light The Way concert series benefiting homeless charity organizations in the Columbia, SC area," 10 April 2014
Location: Red Bank United Methodist Church, Lexington, South Carolina
Microphones: none
Clothing: girls wore black dresses of different styles; boys wore black shirts and slacks of various styles; the director wore a black suit
Newton North
Occasion: concert, 7 February 2015
Location: stage
Microphones: at least five floor mikes; Mayanja detached one to use as a hand mike
Clothing: girls wore long, empire-style dresses with short, puffed sleeves of a black, glossy fabric; boys wore black slacks and long-sleeved shirts with silver-gray ties; [16] the director wore a black suit.
Notes on Movement
The Dreher choir stood behind the altar rail in four rows on three steps. The conductor had an elaborate music stand that probably was a church fixture.
The Newton North chorus stood in three rows in two tiers of risers. They filed off at the end. Only the musicians had music.
Notes on Performers
Graham was raised in the Pee Dee region of northeastern South Carolina that had grown cotton before the Civil War. [17] After receiving his music education degree from the University of South Carolina, he taught at Crayton Middle School in Columbia. Dreher hired him while he was working on his masters. [18] Graham also was active with the choir at Trenholm United Methodist Church. [19]
Reid enrolled at Harvard College as a chemistry major and was hired by Newton North as a science teacher. While earning his masters in music education, [20] he worked with Rich Travers, the school’s choral conductor, to create a class "that studies African Diaspora music and social issues to gain a better understanding of other cultures." [21] Eventually, Reid became Jubilee’s full-time director and transferred to the music faculty. In 2017, it gave a joint concert with Kuumba. [22]
Availability
Uzee Brown, Junior
Sheet Music: "Come by Here." Chicago: GIA Publications, 1997.
Album: Uzee Brown Society of Choraliers. My Lord’s Gettin’ Us Ready. Z-Mark/Alewa CD. Uploaded to YouTube by The Orchard Enterprises on 28 January 2016.
Dreher High School Chorus
YouTube: "Come By Here." Uploaded by Kevin Oliver on 21 April 2014.
Jubilee Singers of Newton North High School
YouTube: "Come By Here." Uploaded by Alex Klavens on 12 February 2015.
End Notes
1. Satis N. Coleman. "I wanted to play the piano, not study queer marks in a book. My fingers ached to make a tune that sounded ‘pretty,’ or to play some of the little songs I already knew how to sing; but she would neither show me how nor let me try. The disappointment was bitter." (Creative Music for Children. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, April 1922. 14.) For more on Coleman’s contributions to music education, see the post for 30 August 2018.
2. "Maddy has recorded his experiences in a beginning instrumental class: ‘I recall the beginners’ band in which I learned to play the piccolo at the age of seven [which would have been about 1898]. Sixty ambitious youngsters purchased instruments and entered the class, only to be treated at each rehearsal to a series of lectures on musical theory, tone-production and behavior until all but fourteen of us had drooped [sic] out. . . . I do not recall ever playing a tune on the piccolo, though I studied this instrument for nearly two years and played it for most of that time in the band" (Joseph E. Maddy. "The Beginning Wind Instrument Class." School Music 39:9:January-February 1928. Quotation from Merry Elizabeth Texter. "A Historical and Analytical Investigation of the Beginning Band Method Book." PhD dissertation. The Ohio State University, 1975. 53.) For more Maddy, see the post on 27 June 2018.
3. Frank E. Churchley, mentioned in the post for 25 July 2018, played piano as a child, but said he did not truly learn to read music until he was in college and was forced to learn to play by ear. He remembered: "I enjoyed playing by ear. Improvising helped my reading because I had to develop my memory and imagination. Just working with your four or five pieces for an examination doesn’t help you become a good reader. You need to practise reading to become a good reader." (Interviewed by Betty Hanley. "Frank E. Churchley: Gentleman, Scholar, Teacher." March 2005. 16."
4. For more on Eunice Boardmand and Beth Landis, see the post for 24 June 2018.
5. For more on Charles Leonhard, see the post for 19 August 2018.
6. Mark Montemayor discussed Zdechlik in the post for 9 September 2018. He continued the composer’s comments on structure cited in that post by quoting him: "Structure, then, isn’t a static element of composition. It becomes dynamic, which I think is an important experience for both the performers and the audience." ("John Zdechlik." In A Composer’s Insight. Edited by Timothy Salzman. Galesville, Maryland: Meredith Music Publications, volume 3, 2006. 300. Emphasis added.)
7. Mabelle Glenn. "What It Means to Be a Music Supervisor." Music Supervisors Journal 14(1):51:1927. Quoted by Patrick K. Freer and Diana R. Dansereau. "Extending the Vision: Three Women Who Saw the Future of Music Education." 2007. Georgia State University website. Maybelle Glenn, along with Lorrain Watters, was a co-editor of Lilla Belle Pitts Our Singing World series mentioned in the post for 30 August 2018.
8. Daniel Payne headed the African Methodist Episcopal Church after the Civil War. In his autobiography he remembered attending a meeting where a ring shout followed the sermon. "I then went, and taking their leader by the arm requested him to desist and to sit down and sing in a rational manner. I told him also that it was a heathenish way to worship and disgraceful to themselves, the race, and the Christian name." (Recollections of Seventy Years. Compiled and arranged by Sarah C. Bierce Scarborough; edited by C. S. Smith. Nashville: Publishing House of the A. M. E. Sunday School Union, 1888. 253-254.) Payne was discussed in the post for 9 August 2017.
9. Wikipedia. "Uzee Brown Jr."
10. Wikipedia. "The Kuumba Singers of Harvard College." Kuumba was a Swahili word for "creativity [or to create], though the literal meaning is subtler: it is the creativity of leaving a space better than you found it; it is the spirit of positively impacting through modes of creativity."
11. Graham introduced Liz, but the camera’s microphone was remote and I couldn’t understand her last name.
12. Jessica Tharaud said "Mayanja’s voice had incredible range and depth." ("Review: Jubilee Singers Energizes Audience with Incredible Talent." The Newtonite [Massachusetts] website. 3 February 2014.)
13. "Dreher High School." Great Schools website.
14. "Newton North High School." Great Schools website.
15. Tharaud reviewed a Jubilee concert the year before the one on the videro. She wrote: "For the final song, sophomore Swabira Mayanja floored the audience with her solo in ‘Watch God Move,’ written by the Colorado Mass Choir. Not even half way through the number, the audience stood up and began dancing along’."
16. A year earlier Tharaud observed the "girls wore black dresses and boys wore black pants and dress shirts with silver ties."
17. Deborah Swearingen. "All-City Junior Chorus Performs at South Florence High School." The [Florence, South Carolina] Morning News website. 7 April 2016.
18. Item posted 2 May 2012 to USC-Columbia Music Education Alumni Facebook page.
19. Paul Osmundson. "Twenty under Forty: 20 Young Professionals Helping To Build the Midlands." The State [Columbia, South Carolina] website. 21 March 2016; last updated 22 March 2016.
20. Office for the Arts at Harvard. Program for In the Spirit of Duke, 22 April 2006.
21. "Rick Travers, Music Director." Newton Community Chorus website.
22. Nour Chahboun. "Jubilee Joined with the Kuumba Singers of Harvard College To Perform Passionate Pieces." The Newtonite [Massachusetts] written. 6 February 2017.
One wonders if the limited participation in public school music programs by African Americans and others wasn’t ultimately the result of university academics re-erecting the barriers breached by Satis Colemen and Joseph Maddy in the 1920s. She remembered how frustrated she had been as a child when her piano teacher forced her to read music and punished her for playing by ear. [1] He remembered when he first took music lessons three-fourths of the students dropped out because they had to master scales before they could play tunes. [2] Each assumed students would acquire technical proficiency when it mattered to them. [3]
It’s hard to imagine a nine-year-old would have enjoyed singing "Kumbaya" in a class where the teacher followed all the recommendations of Eunice Boardman’s [4] or Charles Leonhard’s teams. [5] I doubt college entrance exams asked high-school seniors to name the chord on the fifth note of a scale, or that many later would attend concerts so they could comprehend the structure of a piece as John Zdechlik would have preferred. [6]
In 1929, the president of the Music Educators National Conference asked teachers what was the primary goal of their classes:
"Is it to teach facts about music and develop skill in reading music, or is it to awaken and stimulate joy and interest? You must introduce music to these children as a thing of beauty to be enjoyed and not as something to be struggled with." [7]
The debate over sight-reading or playing by ear entered African-American communities. Black college glee clubs in the early twentieth century embraced the traditions of Ivy League schools, while jazz musicians played by ear. It was simply an extension of the arguments over assimilation in the post-Reconstruction South where religious leaders like Daniel Payne condemned freemen who perpetuated ring shouts. [8]
African-American students may learn sight-reading in public-school music classes and oral traditions at home and church. The Dreher High School Chorus in Columbia, South Carolina, used an arrangement of "Come By Here" by Uzee Brown for a concert in 2014, while the Jubilee Singers of Newton North High School near Boston used one in the prelude-denouement form for a 2015 performance.
Brown, who was music director at Martin Luther King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and former chairman of the music department at Clark University, [9] used the traditional melody for "Kumbaya," while Sheldon Reid, who directed the Kuumba Singers of Harvard, used the Hightower Brother’s tune. Kuumba had been formed in 1970 as a way for African-American students to express their spirituality in an environment that still was hostile to integration. [10]
Both Walter Graham, director of Dreher, and Reid, conductor at Newton North, used female soloists supported by choral groups singing harmony. Brown had not used a soloist when his own group recorded his version. He scored four-part chordal harmony, so that every time a syllable was sung on more than one note, the chorus moved as a unit.
Columbia’s Liz [11] had a clear soprano voice with little tremolo that delivered the text simply so the audience could understand the emotion embedded in words that used the pronoun "someone." The Jubilee Singers sang one verse in harmony, then the chorus repeated "come by here" while Swabira Mayanja moved from singing a verse to phrases. She used her voice to convey the emotions with the pronoun "I." [12]
Dreher sang a capella, although Brown had used a piano and had suggested the "organ or piano may improvise on the chordal harmonies if desired." A piano sounded four notes to signal the voices before they began. Drums, keyboard, and an electric bass played before the Jubilee Singers began, and continued throughout the piece with instrumental breaks between stanzas.
The students who represented 53% of the southern school’s population of 1,300 [13] stood with still with their arms at their sides and their eyes on the conductor. Graham stood erect in front to use small gestures with both arms.
At Newton North, where Blacks were 5% of the 2,000 member student body, [14] the singers began with their arms at their sides looking at the conductor. When Mayanja began, they started stepping side to side. Part way through, after a brief instrumental interlude, they started clapping as they stepped. Reid used large arm movements and bent his knees to keep time.
The audience in the Red Bank United Methodist Church where the Dreher chorus performed listened attentively and applauded at the end. In Newton, some members of the audience stood and began marking time with their hands to the singing before the choir itself began clapping. [15] They were the only audience on a public school video of "Kumbaya" to shatter the proscenium arch and become part of the music.
Performers
Uzee Brown
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: SATB choir
Instrumental Accompaniment: piano or organ
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Dreher
Vocal Soloist: soprano
Vocal Group: 28 girls, 14 boys
Vocal Director: Walter Graham
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Newton North
Vocal Soloist: soprano
Vocal Group: 29 girls, 17 boys
Vocal Director: Sheldon Reid
Instrumental Accompaniment: keyboard, electric bass
Rhythm Accompaniment: drum set, hand claps
Credits
Uzee Brown
Spiritual, arr. Uzee Brown, Jr.
Arrangement Copyright (C) by GIA Publications, Inc
For the Cascade United Methodist Chancel Choir of Atlanta, Georgia
Notes on Lyrics
Uzee Brown
Language: English
Verses: come by here, needs you, praying, crying
Vocabulary
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: four-verse song
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Ending: none
Unique Features: none
Newton North
Language: English
Verses: come by here, I’ve been waiting; references to needs you, praying
Vocabulary
Pronoun: I
Term for Deity: Jesus, Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: ritual prelude-denouement structure
Notes on Music
Uzee Brown
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Time Signature: 2/4
Tempo: slow and prayerful
Key Signature: three flats
Basic Structure: strophic repetition
Dreher
Tempo: slow, but faster than that used by the Uzee Brown Society of Choraliers
Newton North
Opening Phrase: 1-5
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: instrumental accompaniment used strophic repetition with changes in key
Notes on Performance
Dreher
Occasion: "Light The Way concert series benefiting homeless charity organizations in the Columbia, SC area," 10 April 2014
Location: Red Bank United Methodist Church, Lexington, South Carolina
Microphones: none
Clothing: girls wore black dresses of different styles; boys wore black shirts and slacks of various styles; the director wore a black suit
Newton North
Occasion: concert, 7 February 2015
Location: stage
Microphones: at least five floor mikes; Mayanja detached one to use as a hand mike
Clothing: girls wore long, empire-style dresses with short, puffed sleeves of a black, glossy fabric; boys wore black slacks and long-sleeved shirts with silver-gray ties; [16] the director wore a black suit.
Notes on Movement
The Dreher choir stood behind the altar rail in four rows on three steps. The conductor had an elaborate music stand that probably was a church fixture.
The Newton North chorus stood in three rows in two tiers of risers. They filed off at the end. Only the musicians had music.
Notes on Performers
Graham was raised in the Pee Dee region of northeastern South Carolina that had grown cotton before the Civil War. [17] After receiving his music education degree from the University of South Carolina, he taught at Crayton Middle School in Columbia. Dreher hired him while he was working on his masters. [18] Graham also was active with the choir at Trenholm United Methodist Church. [19]
Reid enrolled at Harvard College as a chemistry major and was hired by Newton North as a science teacher. While earning his masters in music education, [20] he worked with Rich Travers, the school’s choral conductor, to create a class "that studies African Diaspora music and social issues to gain a better understanding of other cultures." [21] Eventually, Reid became Jubilee’s full-time director and transferred to the music faculty. In 2017, it gave a joint concert with Kuumba. [22]
Availability
Uzee Brown, Junior
Sheet Music: "Come by Here." Chicago: GIA Publications, 1997.
Album: Uzee Brown Society of Choraliers. My Lord’s Gettin’ Us Ready. Z-Mark/Alewa CD. Uploaded to YouTube by The Orchard Enterprises on 28 January 2016.
Dreher High School Chorus
YouTube: "Come By Here." Uploaded by Kevin Oliver on 21 April 2014.
Jubilee Singers of Newton North High School
YouTube: "Come By Here." Uploaded by Alex Klavens on 12 February 2015.
End Notes
1. Satis N. Coleman. "I wanted to play the piano, not study queer marks in a book. My fingers ached to make a tune that sounded ‘pretty,’ or to play some of the little songs I already knew how to sing; but she would neither show me how nor let me try. The disappointment was bitter." (Creative Music for Children. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, April 1922. 14.) For more on Coleman’s contributions to music education, see the post for 30 August 2018.
2. "Maddy has recorded his experiences in a beginning instrumental class: ‘I recall the beginners’ band in which I learned to play the piccolo at the age of seven [which would have been about 1898]. Sixty ambitious youngsters purchased instruments and entered the class, only to be treated at each rehearsal to a series of lectures on musical theory, tone-production and behavior until all but fourteen of us had drooped [sic] out. . . . I do not recall ever playing a tune on the piccolo, though I studied this instrument for nearly two years and played it for most of that time in the band" (Joseph E. Maddy. "The Beginning Wind Instrument Class." School Music 39:9:January-February 1928. Quotation from Merry Elizabeth Texter. "A Historical and Analytical Investigation of the Beginning Band Method Book." PhD dissertation. The Ohio State University, 1975. 53.) For more Maddy, see the post on 27 June 2018.
3. Frank E. Churchley, mentioned in the post for 25 July 2018, played piano as a child, but said he did not truly learn to read music until he was in college and was forced to learn to play by ear. He remembered: "I enjoyed playing by ear. Improvising helped my reading because I had to develop my memory and imagination. Just working with your four or five pieces for an examination doesn’t help you become a good reader. You need to practise reading to become a good reader." (Interviewed by Betty Hanley. "Frank E. Churchley: Gentleman, Scholar, Teacher." March 2005. 16."
4. For more on Eunice Boardmand and Beth Landis, see the post for 24 June 2018.
5. For more on Charles Leonhard, see the post for 19 August 2018.
6. Mark Montemayor discussed Zdechlik in the post for 9 September 2018. He continued the composer’s comments on structure cited in that post by quoting him: "Structure, then, isn’t a static element of composition. It becomes dynamic, which I think is an important experience for both the performers and the audience." ("John Zdechlik." In A Composer’s Insight. Edited by Timothy Salzman. Galesville, Maryland: Meredith Music Publications, volume 3, 2006. 300. Emphasis added.)
7. Mabelle Glenn. "What It Means to Be a Music Supervisor." Music Supervisors Journal 14(1):51:1927. Quoted by Patrick K. Freer and Diana R. Dansereau. "Extending the Vision: Three Women Who Saw the Future of Music Education." 2007. Georgia State University website. Maybelle Glenn, along with Lorrain Watters, was a co-editor of Lilla Belle Pitts Our Singing World series mentioned in the post for 30 August 2018.
8. Daniel Payne headed the African Methodist Episcopal Church after the Civil War. In his autobiography he remembered attending a meeting where a ring shout followed the sermon. "I then went, and taking their leader by the arm requested him to desist and to sit down and sing in a rational manner. I told him also that it was a heathenish way to worship and disgraceful to themselves, the race, and the Christian name." (Recollections of Seventy Years. Compiled and arranged by Sarah C. Bierce Scarborough; edited by C. S. Smith. Nashville: Publishing House of the A. M. E. Sunday School Union, 1888. 253-254.) Payne was discussed in the post for 9 August 2017.
9. Wikipedia. "Uzee Brown Jr."
10. Wikipedia. "The Kuumba Singers of Harvard College." Kuumba was a Swahili word for "creativity [or to create], though the literal meaning is subtler: it is the creativity of leaving a space better than you found it; it is the spirit of positively impacting through modes of creativity."
11. Graham introduced Liz, but the camera’s microphone was remote and I couldn’t understand her last name.
12. Jessica Tharaud said "Mayanja’s voice had incredible range and depth." ("Review: Jubilee Singers Energizes Audience with Incredible Talent." The Newtonite [Massachusetts] website. 3 February 2014.)
13. "Dreher High School." Great Schools website.
14. "Newton North High School." Great Schools website.
15. Tharaud reviewed a Jubilee concert the year before the one on the videro. She wrote: "For the final song, sophomore Swabira Mayanja floored the audience with her solo in ‘Watch God Move,’ written by the Colorado Mass Choir. Not even half way through the number, the audience stood up and began dancing along’."
16. A year earlier Tharaud observed the "girls wore black dresses and boys wore black pants and dress shirts with silver ties."
17. Deborah Swearingen. "All-City Junior Chorus Performs at South Florence High School." The [Florence, South Carolina] Morning News website. 7 April 2016.
18. Item posted 2 May 2012 to USC-Columbia Music Education Alumni Facebook page.
19. Paul Osmundson. "Twenty under Forty: 20 Young Professionals Helping To Build the Midlands." The State [Columbia, South Carolina] website. 21 March 2016; last updated 22 March 2016.
20. Office for the Arts at Harvard. Program for In the Spirit of Duke, 22 April 2006.
21. "Rick Travers, Music Director." Newton Community Chorus website.
22. Nour Chahboun. "Jubilee Joined with the Kuumba Singers of Harvard College To Perform Passionate Pieces." The Newtonite [Massachusetts] written. 6 February 2017.
Thursday, September 13, 2018
Pebblebrook High School - Kumbaya
Topic: Pedagogy - Goals
One thing that struck me as I watched videos of "Kumbaya" from public school music programs was the overwhelming whiteness of the participants. As the table at the bottom shows, the schools usually had larger percentages of African-American students than existed in their tax-paying communities. And, within those schools, the numbers of Blacks appearing in the videos were much lower than their presence in the student bodies.
There are many problems with such a sweeping generalization, beginning with the fact my sample was defined by music teachers who chose to perform "Kumbaya" in a concert. Their preference for a song associated with children’s summer residential camps in the 1970s may have reflected a general taste for music that attracted certain students and discouraged others.
But it was striking that even in schools like Fayette Middle School in Georgia [1] where the percussion program included non-western instruments, the children taking advantage of the program were overwhelmingly white while the student body was 78% African-American.
Funding and access to technology were more subtle factors. While many audience members owned smartphones that could record performances, not all knew how or desired to upload videos to YouTube. Money for music programs was eliminated in many school districts since the 1970s. The program at Llewellyn Elementary in Portland, Oregon, was funded by a private parents’ foundation. [2] Poor communities don’t have the resources to organize such legal entities.
Schools that were given adequate support often offered a number of choral and instrument organizations, but in others, like the one I attended in Michigan in the late 1950s, there was only one band class, one string class, and two vocal classes. In schools that offered multiple music classes, African Americans may have selected groups that did not perform "Kumbaya."
Some districts responded to financial problems with magnet schools like Las Vegas Academy, mentioned in the post for 6 September 2018. Pebblebrook High School in Mableton, Georgia, was both Cobb County’s magnet school for the performing arts and a neighborhood high school. The total student body was close to 2,300 students. One wonders if any of the students in that school or others in the county who were not accepted by the arts program had any opportunities to sing or play an instrument. Soulful Praise was "the only one of the school’s vocal groups composed of both PA and traditional students." [3]
School size probably was important. When a high school like California’s Mission Viejo had more than 2,400 students, it’s hard to imagine how an average student would have had the opportunity to participate. But, then, the Seventh-day Adventist’s Hilltop Christian, also in California, only had 73 students, and no obvious African Americans participated in a wind ensemble led by a Black wind player. The school’s enrollment was 77% Black, but the four "brown" faces looked more Asian from a distance. The fact the instrumental teacher was only available after normal school hours may have been limited the ability of some to participate. [4]
One suspects part of the problem wasn’t the selection of songs like "Kumbaya," but the lingering influence of the Saint Olaf choir mentioned in the post for 12 August 2018. Walter Turnbull, who founded the Boys Choir Harlem, said he heard them when they appeared at his Alabama college. He remembered:
"I had never heard a sound like that before and had mixed feelings. It was a white sound, very straight with little vibrato. It was totally opposite of the one that I had grown to love.
"I tried to get my boys to have that classic European sound for years. It never sounded right. I wanted the natural sound I heard in Leontyne Price. I heard it on radio stations playing rhythm and blues, and I heard it over the telephone. There is something unique and warm about the black voice that has nothing to do with diction and it clearly distinguishable." [5]
One can hear the difference in two performances of the Soweto Gospel Choir’s version of "Kumbaya," one by an all-white group from Hermiston High School and one by Pebblebrook High School that included some African-American singers.
Joshua Rist remained faithful to Kurt Runestad’s transcription in Oregon. [6] He began with the sopranos singing in clear voices. When the group joined them, they blended into one sound with no depth from overtones. The low voices sang the Zulu section, but were in the back where the video camera’s microphone did not pick them up.
Evelyn White transposed the Soweto arrangement into an African-American song in Georgia. She began with one soprano soloist backed by the group. Soulful Praise sang the middle part together with a fuller sound. Instead of a Zulu chant, White had one girl sing phrases of "Kumbaya" in a falsetto voice that was rough rather than smooth in its intonation. The group sang harmony behind her.
The two choirs had differing accompaniments that reflected the background of their conductors. Rist, who had spent time in Nigeria, had a young woman play a floor drum play throughout the piece. White was a jazz pianist who used a strong piano accompaniment. A drum was used in the last part, as was done by Soweto, but the drummer sat on the floor in the wings.
Performers
Pebblebrook High School
Vocal Soloist: two girls
Vocal Group: girls and boys
Vocal Director: Evelyn White
Instrumental Accompaniment: piano
Rhythm Accompaniment: hand-played drum, hand claps
Hermiston High School
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: girls and boys
Vocal Director: Joshua Rist
Instrumental Accompaniment: none
Rhythm Accompaniment: hand-played drum, hand claps
Credits
Hermiston High School
Khumbaya (Soweto Gospel Choir), arr. Kurt Runestad
Notes on Lyrics
See post for 28 August 2017 for details on Soweto Gospel Choir version.
Notes on Music
See post for 29 August 2017 for details on Soweto Gospel Choir version.
Notes on Performance
Pebblebrook High School
Occasion: Christmas Concert
Location: First Christian Church of Mableton, Georgia
Microphones: two floor mikes; one was used by the soloists.
Clothing: the girls wore black dresses with scarves of maroon, yellow, or white; the boys wore black shirts and slacks
Hermiston High School
Occasion: Choirs of the Valley 2015, LeGrande, Oregon
Location: stage
Microphones: none
Clothing: the choir wore robes; the drummer wore a long, dark dress; the director wore a light colored suit
Notes on Movement
Pebblebrook High School
Soulful Praise stood in two rows on the stage floor. After the first soloist returned to her place, the group began stepping side to side. When the second soloist went to the microphone, they began clapping while they stepped. They clasped hands and raised their arms at the end. No one had a music stand or sheet music.
Hermiston High School
The chamber choir stood in a semicircle in four rows on three tiers of risers. The drummer was in front at stage right; the director stood in the center. They began clapping half-way through. Most continued to stand in place looking at the director while they dropped their arms between claps in front of their chests. Rist used both arms symmetrically except when pointing to a group to begin; he clapped with the choir. No one had a music stand or sheet music.
Notes on Audience
Audiences applauded at the ends of both performances.
Notes on Performers
White played piano in the Mount Olive Baptist Church in Clarksville, Tennessee, when she was a child. After graduating with a degree in piano performance from Austin Peay State University, she played professionally. Tony Bennett and Nancy Wilson helped her become a singer. She then performed with jazz groups until she joined the high school faculty as coordinator of the piano laboratory. [7]
Rist was home schooled in Shedd, Oregon, where he took piano lessons and played in "worship and garage bands at his church." He joined his first choir when he attended Linn Benton Community College. [8] After his trip to Nigeria with "a church humanitarian group," he earned his music education degree from Oregon State University. [9] During the three years, he was at Hermiston, [10] the vocal music program grew "from 70 students in four choirs to more than 220 in five choirs [11] drawn from 1,400 students. [12]
Availability
Soulful Praise Gospel Choir of Pebblebrook High School
YouTube: "Kumbaya." Uploaded by Personnia Rawls on 15 December 2015.
Hermiston High School Chamber Choir
YouTube: "Khumbaya." Uploaded by Rick Scheibner on 16 October 2015.
Table
2010 Census data for city populations was taken from Wikipedia. Data on school demographics came from Great Schools and School Digger websites. Neither may have represented the time period of the video. Comments on the racial composition of performing groups are vague because shadows, poor lighting, fuzzy camera work, and long-distance shots all made it difficult to judge face color, especially in schools known to have large numbers of Asian or self-identified Hispanic students.
End Notes
1. For more information on Fayette Middle School, see the post for 28 August 2018.
2. "What is the Llewellyn Elementary Foundation?" Its website.
3. Jay Young. "Pebblebrook Gospel Choir Performs at The Black Box." South Cobb [County, Georgia] Patch website. 7 May 2011. PA referred to the performing arts program.
4. For more on the Pleasant Hill program, see the post for 18 July 2018.
5. Walter Turnbull. Lift Every Voice. With Howard Manly. New York: Hyperion, 1995. 207. For more on Turnbull and the Boys Choir Harlem, see the post for 1 October 2017.
6. For more on Runestad’s transcription, see the post for 28 August 2017.
7. "Evelyn White, Collaborative Pianist & Piano Laboratory Coordinator." School website.
8. "Singing His Story." Terra website. 19 July 19 2013.
9. Claire Sykes. "The Music Men." Oregon State University website.
10. "About Josh Rist." Facebook.
11. Derek Wiley. "McNary Taps its New Choir Director." Keizer [Oregon] Times website. 22 July 2016.
12. "Hermiston High School." Great Schools website.
One thing that struck me as I watched videos of "Kumbaya" from public school music programs was the overwhelming whiteness of the participants. As the table at the bottom shows, the schools usually had larger percentages of African-American students than existed in their tax-paying communities. And, within those schools, the numbers of Blacks appearing in the videos were much lower than their presence in the student bodies.
There are many problems with such a sweeping generalization, beginning with the fact my sample was defined by music teachers who chose to perform "Kumbaya" in a concert. Their preference for a song associated with children’s summer residential camps in the 1970s may have reflected a general taste for music that attracted certain students and discouraged others.
But it was striking that even in schools like Fayette Middle School in Georgia [1] where the percussion program included non-western instruments, the children taking advantage of the program were overwhelmingly white while the student body was 78% African-American.
Funding and access to technology were more subtle factors. While many audience members owned smartphones that could record performances, not all knew how or desired to upload videos to YouTube. Money for music programs was eliminated in many school districts since the 1970s. The program at Llewellyn Elementary in Portland, Oregon, was funded by a private parents’ foundation. [2] Poor communities don’t have the resources to organize such legal entities.
Schools that were given adequate support often offered a number of choral and instrument organizations, but in others, like the one I attended in Michigan in the late 1950s, there was only one band class, one string class, and two vocal classes. In schools that offered multiple music classes, African Americans may have selected groups that did not perform "Kumbaya."
Some districts responded to financial problems with magnet schools like Las Vegas Academy, mentioned in the post for 6 September 2018. Pebblebrook High School in Mableton, Georgia, was both Cobb County’s magnet school for the performing arts and a neighborhood high school. The total student body was close to 2,300 students. One wonders if any of the students in that school or others in the county who were not accepted by the arts program had any opportunities to sing or play an instrument. Soulful Praise was "the only one of the school’s vocal groups composed of both PA and traditional students." [3]
School size probably was important. When a high school like California’s Mission Viejo had more than 2,400 students, it’s hard to imagine how an average student would have had the opportunity to participate. But, then, the Seventh-day Adventist’s Hilltop Christian, also in California, only had 73 students, and no obvious African Americans participated in a wind ensemble led by a Black wind player. The school’s enrollment was 77% Black, but the four "brown" faces looked more Asian from a distance. The fact the instrumental teacher was only available after normal school hours may have been limited the ability of some to participate. [4]
One suspects part of the problem wasn’t the selection of songs like "Kumbaya," but the lingering influence of the Saint Olaf choir mentioned in the post for 12 August 2018. Walter Turnbull, who founded the Boys Choir Harlem, said he heard them when they appeared at his Alabama college. He remembered:
"I had never heard a sound like that before and had mixed feelings. It was a white sound, very straight with little vibrato. It was totally opposite of the one that I had grown to love.
"I tried to get my boys to have that classic European sound for years. It never sounded right. I wanted the natural sound I heard in Leontyne Price. I heard it on radio stations playing rhythm and blues, and I heard it over the telephone. There is something unique and warm about the black voice that has nothing to do with diction and it clearly distinguishable." [5]
One can hear the difference in two performances of the Soweto Gospel Choir’s version of "Kumbaya," one by an all-white group from Hermiston High School and one by Pebblebrook High School that included some African-American singers.
Joshua Rist remained faithful to Kurt Runestad’s transcription in Oregon. [6] He began with the sopranos singing in clear voices. When the group joined them, they blended into one sound with no depth from overtones. The low voices sang the Zulu section, but were in the back where the video camera’s microphone did not pick them up.
Evelyn White transposed the Soweto arrangement into an African-American song in Georgia. She began with one soprano soloist backed by the group. Soulful Praise sang the middle part together with a fuller sound. Instead of a Zulu chant, White had one girl sing phrases of "Kumbaya" in a falsetto voice that was rough rather than smooth in its intonation. The group sang harmony behind her.
The two choirs had differing accompaniments that reflected the background of their conductors. Rist, who had spent time in Nigeria, had a young woman play a floor drum play throughout the piece. White was a jazz pianist who used a strong piano accompaniment. A drum was used in the last part, as was done by Soweto, but the drummer sat on the floor in the wings.
Performers
Pebblebrook High School
Vocal Soloist: two girls
Vocal Group: girls and boys
Vocal Director: Evelyn White
Instrumental Accompaniment: piano
Rhythm Accompaniment: hand-played drum, hand claps
Hermiston High School
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: girls and boys
Vocal Director: Joshua Rist
Instrumental Accompaniment: none
Rhythm Accompaniment: hand-played drum, hand claps
Credits
Hermiston High School
Khumbaya (Soweto Gospel Choir), arr. Kurt Runestad
Notes on Lyrics
See post for 28 August 2017 for details on Soweto Gospel Choir version.
Notes on Music
See post for 29 August 2017 for details on Soweto Gospel Choir version.
Notes on Performance
Pebblebrook High School
Occasion: Christmas Concert
Location: First Christian Church of Mableton, Georgia
Microphones: two floor mikes; one was used by the soloists.
Clothing: the girls wore black dresses with scarves of maroon, yellow, or white; the boys wore black shirts and slacks
Hermiston High School
Occasion: Choirs of the Valley 2015, LeGrande, Oregon
Location: stage
Microphones: none
Clothing: the choir wore robes; the drummer wore a long, dark dress; the director wore a light colored suit
Notes on Movement
Pebblebrook High School
Soulful Praise stood in two rows on the stage floor. After the first soloist returned to her place, the group began stepping side to side. When the second soloist went to the microphone, they began clapping while they stepped. They clasped hands and raised their arms at the end. No one had a music stand or sheet music.
Hermiston High School
The chamber choir stood in a semicircle in four rows on three tiers of risers. The drummer was in front at stage right; the director stood in the center. They began clapping half-way through. Most continued to stand in place looking at the director while they dropped their arms between claps in front of their chests. Rist used both arms symmetrically except when pointing to a group to begin; he clapped with the choir. No one had a music stand or sheet music.
Notes on Audience
Audiences applauded at the ends of both performances.
Notes on Performers
White played piano in the Mount Olive Baptist Church in Clarksville, Tennessee, when she was a child. After graduating with a degree in piano performance from Austin Peay State University, she played professionally. Tony Bennett and Nancy Wilson helped her become a singer. She then performed with jazz groups until she joined the high school faculty as coordinator of the piano laboratory. [7]
Rist was home schooled in Shedd, Oregon, where he took piano lessons and played in "worship and garage bands at his church." He joined his first choir when he attended Linn Benton Community College. [8] After his trip to Nigeria with "a church humanitarian group," he earned his music education degree from Oregon State University. [9] During the three years, he was at Hermiston, [10] the vocal music program grew "from 70 students in four choirs to more than 220 in five choirs [11] drawn from 1,400 students. [12]
Availability
Soulful Praise Gospel Choir of Pebblebrook High School
YouTube: "Kumbaya." Uploaded by Personnia Rawls on 15 December 2015.
Hermiston High School Chamber Choir
YouTube: "Khumbaya." Uploaded by Rick Scheibner on 16 October 2015.
Table
| State | Town | School | Type | % Black | % Black | % Black | Posted |
| Public | Town | School | Group | ||||
| SC | Columbia | Dreher | H | 42.2 | 53 | Most | 9/16/18 |
| Ga | Mableton | Pebblebrook | H | 39 | 62 | Most | Today |
| Ga | Fayetteville | Fayette | M | 33.9 | 78 | Total 3 | 8/28/18 |
| Ill | Freeport | Freeport | H | 13.8 | 23.7 | Couple | 8/5/18 |
| Nev | Las Vegas | Las Vegas Acad | H | 11.1 | 7 | None obvious | 9/6/18 |
| Wisc | Madison | Jefferson | M | 7.3 | 21.3 | 19% | 8/9/18 |
| Ore | Portland | Llewellyn | E | 6.3 | 9.7 | None obvious | 8/9/18 |
| Calif | La Verne | Bonita | H | 3.4 | 0.5 | 0 | 8/23/18 |
| Mass | Newton | Newton North | H | 2.5 | 5 | Some | 8/16/18 |
| Calif | Mission Viejo | Mission Viejo | H | 1.3 | 3 | Total 1 | 8/23/18 |
| NY | Bemus Point | Bemus Point | E | 1.1 | 1 | 0 | 8/9/18 |
| Ore | Hermiston | Hermiston | H | 0.8 | 1 | 0 | Today |
| Ohio | West Milton | Milton-Union | M | 0.5 | 2 | 0 | 7/18/18 |
| Iowa | Packwood | Pekin | H | 0 | 0 | 0 | 8/5/18 |
| Ga | Decatur | Columbia | H | N/A | N/A | Total 1 | 8/12/18 |
| Religious | |||||||
| Ill | Lansing | Illiana Calvinist | H | 31.59 | 18 | None obvious | 8/23/18 |
| Calif | Antioch | Hilltop SDA | E | 17.3 | 77 | None obvious | 7/1/18 |
| Calif | Sebastopol | Pleasant Hill | E | 5.1 | 0 | None obvious | 7/18/18 |
| Wisc | Greendale | Martin Luther | H | 2.8 | 4 | None obvious | 8/23/18 |
2010 Census data for city populations was taken from Wikipedia. Data on school demographics came from Great Schools and School Digger websites. Neither may have represented the time period of the video. Comments on the racial composition of performing groups are vague because shadows, poor lighting, fuzzy camera work, and long-distance shots all made it difficult to judge face color, especially in schools known to have large numbers of Asian or self-identified Hispanic students.
End Notes
1. For more information on Fayette Middle School, see the post for 28 August 2018.
2. "What is the Llewellyn Elementary Foundation?" Its website.
3. Jay Young. "Pebblebrook Gospel Choir Performs at The Black Box." South Cobb [County, Georgia] Patch website. 7 May 2011. PA referred to the performing arts program.
4. For more on the Pleasant Hill program, see the post for 18 July 2018.
5. Walter Turnbull. Lift Every Voice. With Howard Manly. New York: Hyperion, 1995. 207. For more on Turnbull and the Boys Choir Harlem, see the post for 1 October 2017.
6. For more on Runestad’s transcription, see the post for 28 August 2017.
7. "Evelyn White, Collaborative Pianist & Piano Laboratory Coordinator." School website.
8. "Singing His Story." Terra website. 19 July 19 2013.
9. Claire Sykes. "The Music Men." Oregon State University website.
10. "About Josh Rist." Facebook.
11. Derek Wiley. "McNary Taps its New Choir Director." Keizer [Oregon] Times website. 22 July 2016.
12. "Hermiston High School." Great Schools website.
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