Society for the Preservation of Spirituals - Come by Yuh

Topic: Early Versions - Collectors
The Society for the Preservation of Spirituals included "Come by Yuh" in its 1931 collection of songs from The Carolina Low Country. [1]

The Charleston group was organized in 1922 after a successful community sing sponsored by the Poetry Society. Membership was open to both Blacks and whites, but "limited to those plantation bred or plantation broken with good, but not professional, voices." [2] Barbara Bellows said it quickly became the "last bastion of planter aristocracy." [3]

DuBose Heyward was among the founding members. That summer he went to the MacDowell art colony in New Hampshire where he met his future wife, Dorothy Kuhns. [4] He published his first novel, Porgy, in 1925. [5] She converted it into a play in 1927. [6] When it was staged with an African-American cast in New York, the actors added their own "bits." [7]

Another society member, Bernice Ravenel, graduated from what became Radcliffe. While in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she wrote poems influenced by her friend, Amy Lowell. [8] In 1926, she published The Arrow of Lightning [9] after her first husband, Francis Gualdo Ravenel, died and before she married his second cousin, Samuel Prioleau Ravenel. [10]

Josephine Pinckney spent a semester at Radcliffe hoping to have the same kind of experiences as Ravenel. She joined the spiritual society after she returned from Cambridge in the summer of 1922. [11] Her own collection of poems, Sea-drinking Cities, appeared in 1927. [12]

Many, like Heyward, Ravenel, and Pinckney, had spent time in the north where they realized their native speech patterns not only were different, but also were culturally significant. Dick Reeves remembered he was mocked for reflexively using a Gullah [13] word when he arrived at a prep school in Front Royal, Virginia.

"They chided me about my accent and I wondered (tape malfunction) why it was that I talked so differently from the rest of the people. And when I got a chance I studied why Charlestonians speak differently. And it’s on account of our familiarity with the Gullah dialect and our Charleston brogue is influenced by the Gullah dialect." [14]

Gullah is a creole language dating back to slavery that developed when Africans from different communities were thrown together in holding areas in Africa, on ships transporting them to the United States, and in slave quarters. At each stage, they also needed to respond to whites who controlled their communities. Initially, only plantation owners and overseers needed to speak Gullah, but when African-American women were used as nannies, maids, and cooks, the language spread to all whites who had close contact with Blacks.

Society members could see the changes that came with World War I when rural African Americans began moving into cities where "standardized hymn sheets were becoming popular." [15] Pinckney’s cousin, Mary Elliott Hutson, thought the group should go beyond singing to collecting and preserving songs. [16]

Reeves told an interviewer in 1971:

"Many of us recalled the Negroes singing the spirituals. Sometimes we’d go in a member’s kitchen and the cook would sing to us, and at other times we’d go out in the country and learn the spirituals in the churches. And that’s how we learned them. Many individual members of the Society had remembered some of the spirituals sung in their locality by the Negroes on their plantation." [17]

Herbert Ravenel Sass suggested they publish the songs with essays to raise money "for the relief and medical care of the ‘old time negroes’." [18] This was personal to him and many others in Charleston. Rice production had not recovered after the Civil War, and the last crop was grown by Sass’s mother’s second cousin in 1927. [19]

Samuel Freedman said "members of Episcopal, Lutheran and Reform Jewish congregations [. . .] set about visiting Gullah churches in Charleston and the nearby Sea Islands." [20] Those who had grown up hearing and speaking the local Gullah language did the transcriptions. Heyward insisted they be "letter perfect." [21]

Members’ experiences had varied. Hutson may have been the only one who grew up on a working farm. Her father owned a cotton plantation near Beaufort, South Carolina. [22] Her parents retired to Charleston in 1916. [23]

Others, like Sass, only knew their family lands after they had reverted to second-growth woodland that was purchased by wealthy northerners for hunting preserves. E. F. Hutton bought the last rice plantation from Theodore Ravenel and merged it with four others. [24] Sass’ first books were The Way of the Wild [25] and Adventures in Green Places. [26] He was working for Charleston’s News and Courier when he joined the society. [27]

Pinckney’s family had owned five rice plantations on the Santee River before the Civil War. After the war her father negotiated with former slaves at El Dorado to work as share croppers. He gave up growing rice in 1886, a decade before Josephine was born. [28] One of her cousins continued living there until a chimney fire destroyed the house. The freedmen probably stayed near their family burial grounds. She inherited the land in 1915. [29]

When she was growing up, only one African American was constant in the house: the cook, Victoria Rutledge. Bellows said she’d been "born in 1875 probably in the freedman settlements along the Santee River." [30] Later, Lula Pencel Moore joined the household staff, and stayed with Pinckney until Pinckney’s death in 1957. The one sang spirituals, the other modern hymns. [31]

Heyward’s grandparents’ house north of Charleston was burned during the Civil War. After his grandfather died, his grandmother moved the family to Charleston, where Heyward’s mother was raised. His childhood was considerably less comfortable than Pinckney’s, especially after his father was killed in an accident at the rice mill where he was a wage laborer in 1888. [32]

The plantation was just a memory. What Gullah he heard came from his family and growing up in the city. His mother made money telling stories in Gullah, usually to northern visitors. [33]

End Notes
I pieced together the relationships between people and their ancestries from entries on sites like Geni and Find a Grave.

1. "Come by Yuh." The Carolina Low Country. Edited by the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1931. 308-309.

2. Barbara L. Bellows. A Talent for Living: Josephine Pinckney and the Charleston Literary Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. 69.

3. Bellows. 69.

4. Felicia Hardison Londré. "Heyward, Dorothy (Hartzell) Kuhns." In American Women Writers. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 2002.

5. DeBose Heyward. Porgy. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1925.

6. Dorothy Heyward and DuBose Heyward. Porgy: A Play in Four Acts. Garden City: Doubleday, Page and Company. The play became the basis for George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in 1935.

7. David Schiff. "The Man Who Breathed Life Into ‘Porgy and Bess’." The New York Times. 5 March 2000. His source was Dubose’s preface to the published play.

8. Wikipedia. "Beatrice Ravenel."
9. Bernice Ravenel. The Arrow of Lightning. New York: H. Vinal, 1926.
10. Wikipedia, Beatrice Ravenel.
11. Bellows. 68.
12. Josephine Pinckney. Sea-drinking Cities. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1927.

13. Gullah was a creole language that had developed in Carolina and Georgia. The fate of some African-American Gullah speakers was mentioned in the post for 5 October 2017.

14. Harold Stone Reeves. Interviewed by Joan Ball for the South Carolina Historical Society, 24 March 1971. Reeve wasn’t a writer but a story teller like Janie Screven DuBose Heyward. He recorded an album in 1963. Gullah, a Breath of the Carolina Low Country. Charleston: Lenwal Enterprises.

15. Bellows. 68.
16. Bellows. 69.
17. Reeves.
18. Bellows. 140.

19. Federal Writers Project. South Carolina: a Guide to the Palmetto State. Compiled by workers of the Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration in the State of South Carolina. New York: Bacon and Wieck, 1941. 289. The crop was harvested by Theodore Ravenel.

20. Samuel G. Freedman. "A Black Cultural Tradition and Its Unlikely Keepers." The New York Times. 17 June 2011.

21. Bellows. 69.

22. Anthony Harrigan. "My Family’s America: The Charleston Experience." Modern Age 282-289:1983. Her father was Marion Martin Hutson. Sass was Harrigan’s uncle.

23. Bellows. 69.

24. Charles F. Philips, Jr. "Colleton County Connections: Its People and the Events They Inspired." Colleton Genealogical Society website.

25. Herbert Ravenel Sass. The Way of the Wild. New York: Minton, Balch and Company, 1925.

26. Herbert Ravenel Sass. Adventures in Green Places. New York: Minton, Balch and Company, 1926.

27. James Hutchisson. "The Naturalist." Charleston 21:164-171:October 2007.
28. Wikipedia. "Thomas Pinckney (American Civil War)."

29. "Eldorado Plantation - McClellanville - Charleston County." South Carolina Plantations website.

30. Bellows. 25. Rutledge was her married name.
31. Bellows. 122-3.

32. Harlan Greene. "Charleston Childhood: The First Years of Dubose Heyward." The South Carolina Historical Magazine 83:154-167:1982.

33. "Mrs. Heyward To Present Reading." The Gaffney [South Carolina] Ledger. 29 January 1925. 1. Copy posted to Newspapers website by dubose1465 on 26 August 2015.