agápe - Kum Ba Yah~

Topic: Religious Folk Music Revival
The Methodist Church South sired Pentecostal denominations when it renounced the Holiness movement in 1894. [1]  The United Methodist Church was more circumspect with the Charismatic Movement, if for no other reason than its membership had begun to drop in 1964. [2]  Of those who remained, 18% “identified” with the movement in 1972. [3]

That year, 1972, the General Conference appointed a commission to investigate speaking in tongues.  Its 1976 report distinguished between Methodist and Pentecostal theology, and said charismatic manifestations were acceptable, so long as they fell within the Wesleyan framework.  Specifically, the authors condemned substituting “experience for doctrine.” [4]

The commission noted that at the time Pentecostalism arose in the Azusa Street revival, some northern Methodist churches were promoting the Social Gospel. [5]  The erosion of membership in the 1960s coincided with the Civil Rights movement and the withdrawal of people into churches that operated segregated, private, Christian schools.

The two impulses, the one toward social activism and the other toward a religion of personal experience, led to two different responses by the Methodist-Presbyterian Hope Publishing company [6] in 1973.

Carlton Young’s Genesis Songbook contained a number of secular songs suitable for youth meetings and coffeehouses, while John Wilson only used songs with religious themes. [7]  Wilson’s Folk Encounter was subtitled “the Now hymnal,” while Young described his as “songs for getting it all together.” [8]

Both used material from Presbyterian and Roman Catholic liturgical reform composers like Richard Avery, David Marsh, [9] and Ray Repp, [10] and both reprinted the versions of “Kum Ba Yah” they had used in earlier publications. [11]

The counterculture that appeared in San Francisco in 1967 was not interested in Civil Rights or the war in Vietnam.  Individuals were protesting the emptiness of middle-class expectations for good grades and good jobs that demanded delayed gratification.  The Now Generation got its name from wanting some pleasures immediately.

The Genesis Songbook included Malvina Reynolds’ “Little Boxes” [12] and six songs recorded by Simon and Garfunkle. [13]  In addition, Young included two songs by Bob Dylan, [14] two by the Beatles, [15] and two religious songs popularized by commercial folk-music revival singers: Judy Collins’ “Amazing Grace” [16] and Cat Stevens’ “Morning Has Broken.” [17]

Wilson used two songs from the Jesus Movement, Larry Norman’s “I Wish We’d All Been Ready” [18] and Marsha Stevens’ “For Those Tears I Died. [19]   He used nine songs from Word composers Ralph Carmichael, Kurt Kaiser, and Sonny Salsbury, mentioned in the post for 13 December 2020.  In addition he published “Put Your Hand in the Hand” [20] and “Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.” [21]

This was as far as Hope would go. [22]  Genesis was the last songbook Young published for youth under the agápe imprint he had established to reach that group. [23]  His Exodus Songbook of 1976 was for adults with easy listening tastes. [24]

When Jesus music began using electric instruments and techniques borrowed from acid rock, agápe turned to the British hymnody revival that began in Dunblane, Scotland, in 1962.  It was a reaction against contemporary hymns that used tunes influenced by popular music, but with texts and imagery that did not reflect changes introduced by Dunblane’s 1961 translation of the New Testament. [25]

The group’s secretary had served as a “minister of Congregational and reformed churches in England and Scotland.” [26]  Erik Routley believed songs should advance theological goals.  He criticized Charles Wesley for focusing “hymn writing too narrowly on the ‘evangelical’ themes of personal salvation.” [27]

The emphasis on theology over experience anticipated UMC’s pronouncements on speaking in tongues.  In 1974, agápe published a work by Routley [28] and a setting of two Charles Wesley communion anthems by Young. [29]

Routley moved to Princeton, New Jersey in 1975. [30]  Two years later agápe introduced many of the British songs to the United States in the Ecumenical Songbook. [31]  Fourteen hymns used the word “Christ” in their titles, but only two used “Jesus.”  Another three used “Jesus Christ.”

Young became less active with agápe.  Two of his last releases were choir songs accompanied by handbells. [32]  Eventually, the label only published handbell arrangements [33] like the version of “Kumbaya” by Wilson that is discussed in the post for 16 December 2018.

Young’s next project was editing the next release of the Methodist hymnal.  As mentioned in the post for 14 February 2019, it included “Kumbaya.”  He also included five works by Routley and one by Sydney Carter, who influenced the Dunblane group. [34]

The hymnal included Collins’ “Amazing Grace,” but “Simple Gifts” appeared as the tune for Carter’s “Lord of the Dance.” [35]  Young only included one song by Avery and Marsh, “We Are the Church,” [36] and one song from the religious repertoire that immediately preceded Jesus music, Kurt Kaiser’s “Pass It On.” [27]

Presbyterians retreated from the worship innovations of Avery and March.  The 1990 hymnal, which included “Kum ba Yah,” used their “Gloria Patria” and rhythmic “Doxology,” but did not list them in its index of composers.  The collection also used “Amazing Grace,” “Morning Has Broken,” and two works with Routley’s name. [38]

The 2012 revision replaced both their works with others, and added five more songs composed, arranged, or translated by Routley.  It retained “Kum ba Yah,” “Amazing Grace,” and “Morning Has Broken.”

Performers
Same as post for 9 August 2020

Credits
Same as post for 9 August 2020

Notes on Lyrics
Same as post for 9 August 2020

Notes on Music
Same as post for 9 August 2020

Notes on Performance
Hope produced albums to accompany the songbooks that exploited stereophonic technology: one track contained the vocal part, the other the instrumental.  The liner notes gave instructions on manipulating phonographs to hear just one track.  It also indicated the length of the instrumental introductions and the verses recorded. [39]

Neither included “Kumbaya,” but the instrumental styles for other songs suggest the aesthetics of the collections.  Genesis [40] used simple unison vocal arrangements, while Encounter [41] illustrated settings suitable for young choirs.  They included male and female parts, variations in dynamics, and changes in key.

Both albums relied primarily on piano accompaniments, supplemented with guitars, drums, and electric guitars and bases.  Wilson’s arrangements on Encounter were more influenced by Easy Listening music than either the commercial folk-music revival or Jesus music.  Wilson’s concern was with the reactions of adults in an audience.

Young hired Fred Bock to produce the Genesis record.  He was then on the music staff at Bel Air Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles, [42] where the pastor had been one of the first to allow charismatic manifestations among his congregation. [43]  Many of the piano accompaniments used techniques borrowed from Southern Gospel music. [44]  Both the vocal and instrumental parts were syncopated, while only Wilson’s accompaniments were rhythmic.  Bock wished to engage the interests of participants.

Notes on Performers
Wilson was featured in the posts for 16 December 2018 and 19 December 2018.  Young is mentioned in the post for 14 February 2019.

Bock’s early career with Word Records is mentioned in the post for 12 July 2020.  He left Word in 1971 to work as a freelance arranger and editor.  In 1973, he had works published by the Nazarenes, Baptists, and Singspiration. [45]  He also was working closely with Benson Publishing and Bill Gaither, who is discussed in the post for 17 December 2017.

He later moved to Hollywood Presbyterian, under the pastor who replaced the one who supported the coffee houses. [46]  Lloyd Ogilvie was more restrained about speaking in tongues.  Bock died in 1993.  His widow established a music institute in his name at Fuller Seminary. [47]

Availability
Book: “Kum Ba Yah.”  The Genesis Songbook.  Edited by Carlton R. Young.  Carol Stream, Illinois: agápe, 1973.  46.

Book: “Kum Ba Yah.”  Folk Encounter.  Carol Stream, Illinois: Hope Publishing Company, 1973.  34.

End Notes
1.  For more on the reaction of Methodist hierarchies to Phoebe Palmer’s theory of Holiness, see the post for 9 February 2020.

 2.  “The Methodist Church: Recent Membership Trends.”  True Discipleship website.  It absorbed the Evangelical Brethren Church in 1968, which broadened its theological heritage.  The church also may have realized that, because of all those missionary drives, the church had members in Africa and the Philippines who had very different interpretations of the Holy Spirit.

3.  Gallop poll cited by Charles Yrigoyen, Jr.  T & T Clark Companion to Methodism.  London: T and T Clark, 2010.  286.

4.  “The Charismatic Movement: Its Historical Base and Wesleyan Framework.”  The UMC revised its guidelines in 2004.  Seeking 4 Truth website claimed it was posting the 1976 version in its post “Guidelines: The United Methodist Church and the Charismatic Movement.”

5.  Seeking 4 Truth.
6.  Hope Publishing is discussed in the post for 9 August 2020.

7.  Wilson didn’t mention the Jesus movement.  On the inside front cover, he wrote “The emergence of a new song, as well as an increase appreciation of our musical heritage, has resulted in ‘New Music’ for Christians.”

8.  The National Conference of Christians and Jews had used the Youngbloods’ version of “Get Together” [48] in 1969 “in a radio public service announcement as a call for brotherhood.” [49]

9.  Avery and March are discussed in the post for 9 August 2020.
10.  Repp is discussed in the post for 16 August 2020.
11.  See the post for 9 August 2020.

12.  Malvina Reynolds.  “Little Boxes.”  Copyrighted by Schroeder Music Company in 1962.  Pete Seeger popularized it on We Shall Overcome.  Columbia CS 8901.  Recorded 8 June 1963; released 1965.  [Discogs entry.]

13.  They only printed lyrics for three.
14.  “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’!”
15.  “Imagine” and “Let It Be.”
16.  Details are provided in the post for 13 December 2020.

17.  Cat Stevens.  “Morning Has Broken.”  Teaser and The Firecat.  A&M Records 8T-4313.  1971.  Camp Songs, Folk Songs traced the history of the tune used for Eleanor Farjeon’s words in 1931.

18.  Larry Norman is discussed in the post for 4 October 2020.
19.  Marsha Stevens is discussed in the post for 4 October 2020.
20.  Details are provided in the post for 13 December 2020.
21.  Details are provided in the post for 2 August 2020.

22.  Generalizations on agápe are based on a WorldCat search conducted 7 June 2020 with the keywords “Agape” and “Young.”

23.  For more on the origins of Hope’s agápe imprint, see the post for 9 August 2020.

24.  Carlton R Young.  Exodus Songbook.  Carol Stream, Illinois: agápe, 1976.  For example, it included “Alfie,” “Mack the Knife,” and “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”

25.  Robin A. Leaver.  “British Hymnody Since 1950.”  555–599 in The Hymnal 1982 Companion.  Edited by Raymond F. Glover.  New York: The Church Hymnal Corporation, 1990.  1:567–568.  The translation was done by the Joint Committee on the New Translation of the Bible.  The New English Bible.  Cambridge, England: Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, 1961.

26. “Routley, Erik.”  An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church.  Edited by Don S. Armentrout and Robert Boak Slocum.  New York: Church Publishing, 2000.  Republished on the Episcopal Church website.

27.  Erik Routley.  “The Case Against Charles Wesley.”  Bulletin of the Hymn Society.  88:252–259:1960.  257.   Quoted by Margaret Anne Leask.  “The Development of English-Language Hymnody and Its Use in Worship: 1960-1995.”  PhD dissertation.  University of Durham, 2000.  10.

28.  Carlton R Young and Erik Routley.  “New Songs of Celebration: Concertato for Two Part Mixed Choir, Congregation, Brass and Organ.”  Carol Stream, Illinois: agápe, 1974.  [WorldCat entry.]

29.  Carlton R Young and Charles Wesley.  “Two Communion Anthems.”  Carol Stream, Illinois: agápe, 1974.  [WorldCat entry.]

30.  Wikipedia.  “Erik Routley.”

31.  Carlton R. Young.  Ecumenical Praise.  Carol Stream, Illinois: agápe, 1977.  [WorldCat entry.]

32.  Carlton R Young and Christian H Bateman.  “Ring and Sing Alleluia: Two Part Mixed Voices and Handbells.”  Carol Stream, Illinois: agápe, 1977.  [WorldCat entry.]

Samuel Sebastian Wesley and Carlton R Young.  “Lead me Lord: For SA(T)B Voices with Handbells and Optional Accompaniment.”  Carol Stream, Illinois: agápe, 1978.  [WorldCat entry.]

33.  “Hope Publishing Company History.”  Its website.
34.  Carter talked at the Dunblane meeting in 1964. [50]

35.  Sydney Carter.  “Lord of the Dance.”  Copyrighted by Galliard in 1963.  The tune was identified as a “19th cent. Shaker tune; adapt. By Sydney Carter, 1963.  The post for 13 December 2020 has more details.

36.  Richard K. Avery and Donald S. Marsh.  “We Are the Church.”  Copyrighted by Hope Publishing in 1972.  This became their most popular song. [51]

37.  “Pass It On” is discussed in the posts for 4 October 2020 and 13 December 2020.
38.  The Presbyterian hymnals are discussed in the post for 17 December 2019.
39.  As mentioned in the post for 13 August 2020, Word used this technique in 1972.

40.  The Genesis Singalong.  agápe Records ARS-1013.  1973.  Produced by Fred Bock.

41.  Folk Encounter Singalong.  Hope Recordings HCP-2030.  1973.  Produced by John F. Wilson.

42.  Notice about Easter service.  Van Nuys Valley News And Green Sheet [Los Angeles, California].  9 April 1971.  91 “Music will be by the combined children’s and Chancel choirs under the direction of Dr. Keith Clark with Fred Bock at the organ.”

“Indianapolis Nov. Gospel Site.”  Billboard 87:56:6 September 1975.  “Fred Bock, minister of music at Bel Air Presbyterian Church.”

43.  Louis Evans, Jr, is discussed in the post for 27 September 2020.

44.  The album liner notes did not list musicians, but Bock was an accomplished piano and organ player.  I suspect he was the pianist, if, for no other reasons, than to save money.  The album was recorded by Toby Foster at Whitney Studios.  That studio was established to support Loren Whiney and the Haven of Rest Quartet. [52]

Wilson used the Sound Studios in Chicago.  The engineer, Stu Black, previously had worked with Chess Records and knew local blues musicians. [53]

45.  This is based on a search of works by Fred Bock in WorldCat conducted 18 June 2020.  He also had arrangements distributed by Theodore Presser.

46.  Lloyd John Ogilvie replaced Raymond Lindquist in 1972.  I suspect Bock moved when Ogilvie began a weekly television program in 1978. [54]

47.  Post about Fred Bock Institute of Music on Fuller Theological Seminary Facebook page.  2 January 2017.

48.  The Youngbloods.  “Get Together.”  The Youngbloods.  RCA Victor LSP-3724.  1967.  It was reissued as a single on RCA Victor 47-9752 in June 1969.  [Discogs entries.]

49.  Wikipedia.  “Get Together (Youngbloods Song).”
50.  Leask.  106.

51.  “Presbyterian Pastor, Songwriter Richard Avery Dies.”  Presbyterian Church of USA, Presbytery Mission Agency website.  23 March 2020.

52.  “Whitney Recording Studios.”  Discogs website.  The Haven of Rest Quartet is mentioned in the posts for 27 November 2017 and 21 October 2018.

53.  Bruce Iglauer and Patrick A. Roberts.  Bitten by the Blues.  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018.  45.

54.  “Our History.”  First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood website.

Campus Crusade for Christ - Kum Ba Yah

Topic: Religious Folk Music Revival
The Jesus Movement grew from work by local Pentecostal groups in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco. [1]  As it attracted publicity, it, like their blue jeans, became a brand too valuable to be left to the people who created it.

Billy Graham was one of the first to attempt coopting the label.  He noticed people working the crowds of the Rose Bowl parade, when he was Grand Marshall in 1971. [2]  Later that year he wrote a book about The Jesus Generation. [3]  The publisher said it didn’t sell well. [4]

Campus Crusade for Christ’s efforts to engage students in San Francisco followed the Human Be-In that initiated the Jesus Movement, but were driven by a desire to condemn the political activities on the Berkley campus that were critical of the United States government. [5]

The group had volunteers call every person on campus to invite them to concerts and other alternative events, including a speech by Graham. [6]  Meantime, its Christian World Liberation Front had reserved space on campus for an event that happened to coincide with firing of the university’s president by the governor, Ronald Reagan.  It adopted the techniques of leftist organizers to outmaneuver them that day. [7]

The Liberation Front parted ways with Campus Crusade, because its leader, Jack Sparks, felt hampered by the Campus Crusade bureaucracy. [8]  On the other side, Bill Bright, head of Campus Crusade, was afraid some of his wealthy donors would be offended by the group’s dress and tactics. [9]

Bright seemed more interested in restoring a society in which people like his family, Republican ranchers in Oklahoma, [10] were the leaders than in implementing any particular Protestant interpretation of the Bible.

When he moved to Los Angeles in 1942, [11] Bright came under the influence of Harriet Mears, [12] the Baptist head of the youth department of First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood. [13]  Her primary concern was training a new generation of Christian leaders.  He adopted her views, indeed lived with her from 1953 [14] until her death in 1963. [15]

She believed that, if one influenced the fraternity presidents and football players, others would follow. [16]  That strategy was introduced in the late nineteenth century by Henry Drummond, and popularized by the YMCA before World War I. [17]  It coincided with Bright’s social ambitions to be part of the elite described by F. Scott Fitzgerald when he was at Princeton before World War I. [18]  Communism, which arose during World War I, was seen as the great enemy.

Campus Crusade was interested in influencing the average, middle-class students who attended state-supported public universities.  It had no interest in reaching the street people who created the Jesus Movement.

After his Berkley Blitz, Bright planned a large gathering in Dallas to recruit college students to evangelize the country. [19]  He had met Graham though Mears, [20] and Graham agreed to be honorary chairman of Explo ’72. [21]  In publicizing the event, Graham appropriated another symbol of the young.  He announced it would be a “Religious Woodstock.” [22]

Instead of college students, more than of the third of the participants were high school kids. [23]  They spent the mornings hearing lectures, the afternoons practicing evangelizing, and the evenings in the Cotton Bowl where music groups performed before speakers like Graham and Roger Staubach. [24]  One night, they had a candle light ceremony that dramatized Kurt Kaiser’s song, “Pass It On.” [25]

The final day was an open-air concert that included some Jesus Music artists like Larry Norman, [26] Randy Matthews, [27] and Love Song. [28]  The names of the other performers [29] have been eclipsed by the headliners: country music artists Johnny Cash, Kris Kristoferson, and Connie Smith. [30]

The same year as Explo, and probably as part of it, the Campus Crusade published its official songbook, Pass It On.  “Kumbaya” shared the two-page spread with Kaiser’s song. [31]

The contents reflected the neutrality of Campus Crusade’s theology.  The first section, “Praise,” contained Graham’s theme song, “How Great Thou Art” [32] along with hymns by Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley, and nineteenth-century gospel songs by Fanny Crosby and William Bradbury.

The second section, “Songs of Good News,” featured works by John W. Peterson, discussed in the post for 2 August 2020.  The “Choruses” in the fourth section generally were written after World War II.  The spirituals, for the most part, were from African-American tradition, though none were so identified.

Pass It On perpetuated the repertoire as it existed, just prior to the emergence of Jesus Music.  There were no songs by Norman or others in California, while most of the folk songs were written by Kaiser or Ralph Carmichael.

Bright would not have been comfortable with the charismatic beliefs of the Jesus Movement that influenced Jesus Music.  He had tolerated speaking in tongues when his primary support came from Bob Jones University. [35]  After Jones broke with Billy Graham over the acceptance of support from mainline churches in 1957, [36] Bright turned to the Dallas Theological Seminary for recruits.  It believed supernatural gifts had ended with the apostles. [37]  In 1960, Bright banned tongue speaking by his staff. [38]

He could control his employees, but not the streets of Dallas, where vendors, including Pentecostals, set up stands.  The New York Times observed his staff did make “efforts to discourage such group from handing out literature not specifically approved by Campus Crusade or pushing ideas such as speaking in tongues.  They explained that they felt a responsibility to parents to control what their children would be encountering.” [39]

Performers
Vocal Soloist: single melodic line
Vocal Group: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: piano, guitar chords
Rhythm Accompaniment: none

Credits
From Angola, Africa

Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: KUM is pronounced “koom”
Verses: kumbaya, cryin’, singin’, prayin’

Vocabulary
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none

Basic Form: verse-burden
Verse Repetition Pattern: repeat chorus after each stanza
Ending: none
Unique Features: none

Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Time Signature: 3/4
Tempo: very slowly
Key Signature: two sharps
Guitar Chords: D G A A7

Basic Structure: strophic repetition
Singing Style: two notes to a syllable on “yah” and the final “Lord”

Vocal-Accompaniment Dynamics: chords on the first beat of each measure, and on “kum”

Ending: none

Notes on Performance
The cover of the spiral-bound book dramatized Bright and Mear’s beliefs that men were more important than women, and that sorority girls and beauty queens were more desirable than others.  A drawing of a young man singing and playing a guitar was on an olive-green background.  He had on a long-sleeved, white shirt and striped tie, with sideburns and a short mustache.  Inside the inset, at the bottom, were drawings of four women; one was dark skinned, two were brunettes, and the largest was a blonde.  One of the two men was dark skinned.

Notes on Performers
Bright was born in 1921, and raised on a cattle ranch located between Tulsa and Muskogee, Oklahoma. [40]  He graduated from Northeastern State College, [41] where he pledged a new fraternity spreading in former normal schools. [42]  After spending a short period working in a county extension office, [43] he moved to Los Angeles.

Campus Crusade for Christ was founded in 1951.  Bright retired in 2001, and the name was changed to Cru in 2011. [44]  He died in 2003. [45]

Availability
Book: “Kum Ba Yah.”  Pass It On.  San Bernadino, California: Campus Crusade for Christ International, 1972.  85.

End Notes
1.  For more on the Jesus Movement, see the post for 27 September 2020.

2.  Larry Eskridge.  “God’s Forever Family: the Jesus People Movement in America, 1966-1977.”  PhD dissertation.  University of Stirling, July 2005. 185–186.

3.  Billy Graham.  The Jesus Generation.  Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1971.

4.  James E. Ruark.  The House of Zondervan.  Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2006.  72.

5.  John G. Turner.  Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ.  Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008.  122.

6.  Turner.  122–123.
7.  Turner.  119.

8.  Ronald M. Enroth, Edward E. Ericson, Jr., and C. Breckinridge Peters.  The Jesus People.  Grand Rapids. Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1972.  108.

9.  Turner.  129.  I could find nothing specific on his donors at this time.  Turner cited several Campus Crusade employees from the time who said he drew on conservative businessmen who were members of Hollywood Presbyterian.  Many also supported the John Birch Society. [46]  After the success of Explo, he attracted the support of conservative foundations like those of the Hunt and Pew families. [47]

10.  Turner.  13–14.
11.  Turner.  16.
12.  Turner.  19.
13.  First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood was discussed in the post for 4 October 2020.
14.  Turner.  49.
15.  Turner.  116.
16.  Turner.  46.

17.  David C. Belden.  “The Origins and Development of the Oxford Group (Moral Re-Armament).”  D. Phil Thesis.  St. Edmund Hall, Oxford University, January 1976.  116.

Daniel Sack.  Moral Re-Armament.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.  13.

18.  Bright was a student at Princeton Seminary in the fall of 1946. [48]  While he has mentioned his unhappiness with some of his classes, one wonders if his attitudes against universities were formed when he encountered the closed social world of the Ivy League that ignored, rather than rejected, outsiders.  While he got in trouble with the university president when he left religious leaflets everywhere on campus, [49] he remembered kneeling together in prayer with the head of the seminary. [50]

19.  Paul Eschleman, the man who produced Explo, said Bright got his idea from the U. S. Congress on Evangelism in 1969. [51]  Eshleman was the son of a Baptist minister who opened a religious retreat for snowbirds in Boca Raton in 1950. [52]  While he says he didn’t commit himself to Christ until later, [53] he learned management here before he earned an MBA from Michigan State University. [54]  Graham had visited his father in 1949 when both were just starting. [55]

20.  Graham had been at Mear’s retreat center before his 1949 crusade. [56]

21.  Turner.  139.

22.  Edward B. Fiske.  “‘Religious Woodstock’ Draws 75,000.”  The New York Times website.  16 June 1972.

23.  Turner.  141.

Paul Eshelman.  The Explo Story.  With Norman Rohrer.  Glendale, California: Regal Books, 1972.  16, 19.

24.  Fiske.

25.  Paul Baker.  Contemporary Christian Music.  Westchester, Illinois: Crossway Books, 1985.  54–55.  This ritual was taken back to camps, or was reinvented in them.  John Duffy remembered: “At my camp, we sang it to close out each week.  We stood on a hill under a rugged pine cross, held candles, and passed the flame as we sang from one person to the next until the entire circle, some 150 people, was lit.” [57]  Paul Eshler remembered that Graham introduced the candles at Explo to signify a commitment to Christ, and that they sang Graham’s “How Great Thou Art.” [58]

26.  Larry Norman was discussed in the post for 4 October 2020.
27.  Randy Matthews was discussed in the post for 13 December 2020.
28.  Love Song was discussed in the post for 4 October 2020.

29.  Campus Crusade produced an album to consolidate the image of Explo.  It included Armageddon Experience, Great Commission Company, Danny Lee and Children of Truth, and the Forerunners. [59] Paul Baker mentioned Barry McGuire. [60]

30.  The album also included African American singers, Willa Dorsey and Andraé Crouch, and a Southern Gospel group, the Speer Family.  Paul Baker mentioned another Southern Gospel singer, Reba Rambo. [61]

31.  “Pass It On” was discussed in the posts for 4 October 2020 and 13 December 2020.
32.  “How Great Thou Art” was discussed in the post for 1 March 2020.
35.  Turner.  75–76.
36.  Turner.  77.
37.  Turner.  88.
38.  Turner.  90.
39.  Fiske.
40.  Turner.  13.
41.  Turner.  15–16.
42.  Wikipedia.  “Sigma Tau Gamma.”
43.  Turner.  16.
44.  Wikipedia.  “Cru (Christian Organization).”
45.  Wikipedia.  “Bill Bright.”
46.  Turner.  107–108, 110–111.

47.  Deborah Huntington and Ruth Kaplan.  “Whose Gold Is Behind the Altar?  Corporate Ties to Evangelicals.”  Contemporary Marxism :62–94:Winter 1981/1982.  They used financial reports to compile a list of Campus Crusade’s major donors from 1976 [pages 83–84].

48.  Turner.  24.
49.  Turner.  24.
50.  Richard Quebedeaux.  I Found It.  New York: Harper and Row, 1979.  12.
51.  Eshelman, Explo,  95–96.

52.  James D. Davis.  “Church Founder’s Son Has a ‘Crusade’.”  [Deerfield Beach, Florida] Sun-Sentinel website.  2 June 2000.

53.  Paul Eshleman.  1978.  Quoted in Evangelical-Unification Dialogue.  Edited by Richard Quebedeaux and Rodney Sawatsky.  New York: The Rose of Sharon Press, 1979.  14–15.

54.  Eshelman, Explo.  96.

55.  Billy Graham.  Just As I Am.  New York: HarperCollins, 2001 digital edition.  127–128.

56.  Turner.  34–36.

57.  John Duffy.  “Kurt Kaiser’s Music Changed My Life and Moved a Generation.”  Sojourner magazine website.  27 November 2018.

58.  Eshler, Explo.  67, 69.
59.  Jesus Sound Explosion.  Campus Crusade For Christ.  1972. [Discogs entry.]
60.  Baker.  55.
61.  Baker. 55.

Charles F. Brown - Kum Ba Yah

Topic: Religious Folk Music Revival
The Southern Baptist Convention did not accept speaking in tongues because it “did not accord with their doctrines and traditions.” [1]  The pop music of Up with People was as far as it would venture into music favored by adolescents. [2]

The convention was headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee.   Bob Oldenburg remembered, after a Moral Rearmament group appeared in the city in 1966, “the young people they impacted were not the regular kids off the street—these were kids in the church.  All of the sudden, the ministers of music in Nashville discovered that the kids were leaving the church in droves, and the youth music programs were going down the drain.” [3]

A church member recruited to play in the local Up with People group asked a friend, who worked for the Sunday School Board, why couldn’t the Southern Baptists “have something like this.”  Eddie Lunn was turned over to Oldenburg, but men higher in the hierarchy were skeptical.  The board told them to “conduct a test at Church Recreation Week at both Glorieta Baptist Assembly in New Mexico and Ridgecrest Baptist Assembly in North Carolina that summer to see how young people would respond to religious folk music.” [4]

The result was a “a compilation of eighteen Christian-themed folk songs for choir and soloists accompanied by rhythm instruments.”  Good News was so popular at Glorieta, Broadman Press sent recording engineers and a stenographer to record the music and produce a songbook. [5]  A group then toured the country, and performed before Billy Graham at the national convention in Houston. [6]  Local churches copied them. [7]  Broadman sold 72,576 copies of the score in 1968. [8]

Kurt Kaiser watched the performance in Houston, and asked the choir director to meet the owner of Word Records in Waco.  Billy Ray Hearn had met Joel McCracken earlier when Hearn was a student at Baylor in the early 1950s. [9]  He was officially hired as director of music promotion in 1968. [10]

The first musical by Kaiser and Ralph Carmichael, released in 1969, alluded to Hippies with its title, Tell It Like It Is. [11]  The 1970 Natural High [12] used the gloss of the Jesus Movement, but was described as “a folk musical about God’s son,” rather than about “Jesus.”

The scores were marketed as folk musicals because they used acoustic instruments.  Tell It Like It Is, like Good News, was sung by church choirs who often took it on local tours. [13]  Kaiser’s song, “Pass It On,” entered tradition. [14]

By the time Natural High was published, the innovation was familiar.  Rick Warren remembered some campers who brought “some early Jesus songs” to Cazadero Baptist Camp in northern California in 1970.  The response was climatic: “it was ‘our kind of music’—written by us, for us, in contrast to the many youth musicals that were circulating in churches those days.” [15]

Meantime, Hearn tiptoed into the Jesus music genre in 1970 when he produced an album by Randy Matthews that included Larry Norman’s “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.” [16]  It was sung by someone steeped in country music. [17]  The accompaniment for his own songs used electric guitars, drums, and female backup singers.  It was only later that he would use rock motifs. [18]

The album was released with an accompanying songbook.

Charles Brown was working for Word’s publishing division at the time.  Something prompted him to produce a songbook in 1971 that bridged the chasm between Word’s usual religious music and that emerging on the west coast.  Sing ‘n’ Celebrate! included both two songs recorded by Matthews and “Kum Ba Yah.”

The selections were made by Kaiser, Hearn, and Sonny Salsbury.  The last was involved with summer resident camps in Washington. [19]  His most famous song, “Psalm 19,” began “Don’t you wonder why the stars are in the sky.” [20]  All were born before or during World War II.

Like Matthews’ singing, the collection was more attuned to Nashville than California.  The popular songs included were Anne Murray’s “Put You Hand in the Hand” [21] and Glen Campbell’s “Less of Me.” [22]  It also reprinted songs from the folk mass movement by Ray Repp [23] and Peter Scholtes, [24] along with “Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.” [25]

The compilers included the two hymns popularized by Judy Collins, [26] three Negro spirituals, [27] and nineteenth-century gospel songs by Fanny Crosby [28] and Philip Bliss. [29]  The rest came from the Word catalog: 61 of 92.  More than half of the Word songs were by the four men involved in the book.  Three of those were from the most recent musical, Natural High.

The version of “Kum Ba Yah” used the verse order introduced by Tommy Leonetti, with an additional verse, “shouting.”  It did not include his premillennial interlude.

Performers
Vocal Soloist: single melodic line
Vocal Group: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: piano, guitar
Rhythm Accompaniment: none

Credits
From Angola, Africa
Arr. ©1971 by Word Music, Inc., in Sing ‘N’ Celebrate

Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: Kum is pronounced “koom”
Verses: kumbaya, crying, praying, singing, laughing

Vocabulary
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none

Basic Form: verse-burden
Verse Repetition Pattern: repeat chorus after each stanza
Ending: none
Influences: Tommy Leonetti’s verse order

Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Time Signature: 3/4
Tempo: not indicated
Key Signature: no sharps or flats
Guitar Chords:  C F G7

Basic Structure: strophic repetition
Singing Style: one syllable to one note except for final “Lord”

Vocal-Accompaniment Dynamics: chords at the beginning of each measure and each “kumbaya”

Ending: none

Notes on Performance
The songbook’s orange cover featured a photograph of seven young women and five young men.  The girls all had long, straight hair.  The boys had sideburns, but not long hair; one had a short beard.  The title was in bright yellow.

Word released an album to teach choir leaders how to perform the new material.  It exploited the technology of stereo recording by placing the voices on one track and the instruments on the other.  Individuals could manipulate the dial on their phonograph so one, the other, or both were heard.  It assumed that people learned by listening, rather than by reading music. [30]

All the arrangements used piano, acoustic guitar, muted drums, and, probably, a bass.  The arrangements of songs by Brown, Kaiser, and Carmichael relied on techniques associated with piano bars and easy listening jazz.  Salsbury’s songs used Southern Gospel piano motifs and more syncopation.  It did not include “Kumbaya.”

Audience Perceptions
A friend of Brown said Brown produced “what would become an industry-disrupting idea of his own - a collection of new music called Sing N Celebrate.” [31]  Its success spawned additional volumes, [32] including some for children. [33]

One person told Amazon customers Sing ‘n’ Celebrate! included “all the songs I remember as a teen singing in church youth group choir.” [34]

Notes on Performers
Hearn had the greatest influence on Word’s future relations with contemporary Christian music.  In 1972, he established the Myrrh Label [35] for Matthew’s second album. [36]  It later became the home of Amy Grant. [36]

He was born in 1929 [37] into a family of Southern Baptists in Beaumont, Texas. [38]  He was working as the minister of music in Thomasville, Georgia, [39] when Oldenburg asked him to get involved with Good News.” [40]  Lunn remembered: “he had a good sense of what songs “worked” and which didn’t, and if a song didn’t work with the staffers in the choir he’d recommend that we rewrite it.” [41]

Brown, born in 1942, [42] was the son of a Southern Baptist preacher assigned to churches in Texas.  He graduated with a degree in music from Baylor and earned a masters from Southern Methodist University.  While he worked for Word, he also worked with Baylor student songwriters. [43]

Salsbury graduated from Pasadena College in 1956. [44]  Although he was raised in the Church of the Nazarene, he directed the Gospel Press youth choir for the Yakima, Washington, Presbyterian church that toured local churches.  Robert Redman remembered he used the 8 am service

“to experiment with new contemporary worship songs.  Our introits and anthems were songs from youth musicals that were popular then, including many of Sonny’s own songs.  We also sang the new ‘Jesus music’ from southern California, along with some of the early Scripture choruses coming out of some charismatic churches.  Sonny was a stickler for detail.  We practiced everything, including the hymns.  The organ usually accompanied them, but from time to time the Gospel Press band played instead.” [45]

He came as close as any of the men involved with Sing ‘n’ Celebrate! to have some contact with the charismatic movement.  When he was a youth minister in La Jolla, California, he was interested in the work of C. S. Lewis, mentioned in the post for 27 September 2020. [46]  His music remained in the folk-revival period that preceded the Jesus Movement. [47]

Kurt Kaiser was born in 1934.  See the post for 15 December 2017 for more information on him.

Availability
Book: “Kum Ba Yah.”  In Sing ‘n’ Celebrate!  Waco, Texas: Word Music, 1971.  62.

End Notes
1.  Vinson Synan.  The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition.  Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1997 edition.  259.

2.  Up with People is discussed in the post for 23 February 2020.

3.  Bob Oldenburg.  Quoted by Will Bishop.  “‘We’re Gonna Change This Land’: An Oral History Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of Good News: A Christian Folk-Musical.”  Artistic Theologian 5:58–81:2017.

4.  Bishop.
5.  Bishop.

6.  Bob Gerszytn.  “Billy Ray Hearn.”  Jesus Rocks the World website.  23 February 2016.

7.  Recordo Obscuro posted a description of Good News that attracted comments from people who had sung it in the 1970s. [48]  A woman remembered the Memorial Baptist Church in Grapevine, Texas, “sang it at TX prisons as a ministry.” [49]  Another living in Umatilla, Florida, recalled they “ had a production of this as well.  We were fortunate enough to travel all over the state” [50]

8.  Bishop.
9.  Gerszytn.

10.  “A Short Autobiography with Some Philosophy.”  Billy Ray Hearn website.  3 September 2008.

11.  Ralph Carmichael and Kurt Kaiser.  Tell It Like It Is: A Folk Musical About God.  Light Records LS-5512-LP.  1969.  Vinyl LP.  [Discogs entry.]

12.  Ralph Carmichael and Kurt Kaiser.  Natural High.  Light Records LS-5558-LP.  1971.  Vinyl LP.  [Discogs entry.]

13.  One person told Amazon customers that “my youth choir performed this numerous times at local churches in the early 70’s.  The congregation accepted guitars and autoharps and we thought we were on the cutting edge of contemporary worship music.” [51] This was one of several such comments.

14. Charles E. Fromm.  “Textual Communities and New Song in the Multimedia Age: The Routinization of Charisma in the Jesus Movement.”  PhD dissertation.  Fuller Theological Seminary, 2006.  179.  Camp Songs, Folk Songs heard from 24 people in camps in 1976 who were singing “Pass It On.”

15.  Fromm.  204.  This is the same Rick Warren who founded Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California.  He was then sixteen-years-old and working as a lifeguard.  At night, he played guitar and led singing around campfires. [52]

16.  Randy Matthews.  Wish We’d All Been Ready.  Word WST-8547-LP.  1971.  Vinyl LP.  [Discogs entry.]  Larry Eskridge said Hearn auditioned Matthews after Matthews called him from Cincinnati to tell him “that the music we were doing [youth musicals] really wasn’t connecting with kids on the street.” [53]

17.  Mathews was raised in Missouri.  His father was a Disciples of Christ preacher [54] and member of the Zionaires southern gospel quartet. [55]  Earlier, Monty Matthews had been in the group that became the Jordonaires when they worked with Red Foley on the Grand Old Opry.  He left in 1948. [56]

18.  Matthews began singing religious folk-revival influenced songs when he was in college.  He became increasingly involved with rock idioms after he signed with Word. [57]  In 1974, he was forcibly removed from the stage at a Jesus Festival in Mercer, Pennsylvania, because his rendition of “Four Horsemen” [58] used electric guitars that exploited amplifiers. [59]

19.  James D. Berkley.  Leadership Handbook of Preaching and Worship.  Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1992.   Salsbury was identified as the executive director of Camp Ghormley in Rimrock, Washington.   It was sponsored by the First Presbyterian Church of Yakima. [60]

20.  Sonny Salsbury.  “Psalm 19.”  Copyrighted by Sacred Songs in 1968.

21.  Anne Murray. “Put Your Hand In The Hand.”  Capitol Records 3082.  1971.  It was written by Gene MacLellan.  [Discogs entry.]

22.  Glen Campbell.  “Less of Me.”  Copyrighted by Beechwood Music in 1965.  Recorded on Burning Bridges.  Capitol Records T 2679.  1967.  Vinyl LP.  [Discogs entry]

23.  Ray Repp.  “Allelu!”  This is discussed in the post for 16 August 2020.

24.  Peter Scholtes.  “They’ll Know We Are Christians by Our Love.”  Copyrighted by F. E. L. Publications in 1966.

25.  “Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow” is discussed in the post for 2 August 2020.

26.  Judy Collins.  “Amazing Grace” and “Simple Gifts.”  Whales And Nightingales.  Elektra EKS-75010.  1970.  Vinyl LP.  [Discogs entry.]  The Shaker’s “Simple Gifts” was first revived by Aaron Copeland in his Appalachian Spring ballet of 1944.

27.  “Amen” was identified as Traditional, but was African-American.  “Jacob’s Ladder” was described as a “Traditional Negro Spiritual.”  “Standin’ in the Need of Prayer” also was classed as African American, although I’m not sure that’s correct.

28.  Fanny J. Crosby and W. H. Doane.  “To God Be the Glory.”  In Brightest and Best.  Edited by Robert Lowry and W. Howard Doane.  New York: Biglow and Main, 1875.

29.  Horatio G. Spafford and Philip P. Bliss.  “Is It Well with My Soul.”  In Sacred Songs No. 2.  Edited by Ira D. Sankey, James McGranahan and George C. Stebbins.  New York: Biglow and Main, 1899.

30.  Sing ‘n’ Celebrate Chorus of Baylor University.  Sing ‘n’ Celebrate!  Word WST-8578-LP.  1972.  Vinyl LP.

31.  Anonymous comment on David Cain.  “A Common Love -- Charles F. Brown.”  Sing Scoops website.  30 July 2016.

32.  Sing ‘n’ Celebrate II.  Waco, Texas: Word Inc., 1975.

Sing ‘n’ Celebrate III.  Waco, Texas: Word, 1982.

33.  Sing ‘n’ Celebrate for Kids!  Waco, Texas: Word, 1977.

Sing ‘n’ Celebrate for kids!, Volume II.  Waco, Texas: Word, 1982.  This one contained “Kum by yah.”   This will be discussed in a future post.

34.  Roland Close.  Comment added on 10 May 2020 to Amazon page for the 1971 paperback edition of the songbook.

35.  Hearn, Autobiography.

36.  Randy Matthews.  All I Am Is What You See.  Myrrh MSA 6502.  1972.  Vinyl LP.  [Discogs entry.]

37.  Wikipedia.  “Amy Grant.”
38.  Gerszytn.
39.  Hearn, Autobiography.
40.  Bishop.
41.  Eddie Lunn.  Quoted by Bishop.
42.  “Charles F. Brown.”  Hymnary website.
43.  “Charles F. Brown.”  Texas Gospel Music Hall of Fame and Museum website.

44.  La Sierra.  Pasadena College yearbook, 1956.  He was in the choir and quartet.  Pasadena College was run by the Nazarenes. [61]

45.  Robert Redman.  “How I Caught the Worship Bug: and Never Got Over it.”  Reformed Worship website.

46.  Will Vaus.  “Hidden Story of Narnia in California.”  His website.  22 October 2010.

47.  In 1975, Salsbury recorded The Backpacker’s Suite for Word WST 8659. [62]  The vinyl LP  used a choir, orchestra, and “an assortment of guitars, banjos, and other acoustic instruments.”  One person at the time noted it “was ‘three years late,’ providing the kind of production that might have satisfied young Christians’ thirst for contemporary worship music in the days before the Jesus movement revival drastically increased their options.” [63]

48.  “Good News: A Christian Folk-Musical.”  Recordo Obscura website.  12 April 2009.
49.  Susan Sanford.  Obscura.  Comment added 4 January 2012.
50.  Elise.  Obscura.  Comment added 9 December 2018.

51.  Kyriel West.  Comment posted 8 November 2011 to Amazon page for the original recording of Tell It Like It Is.

52.  Jeffery L. Sheler.  Prophet of Purpose.  New York: Doubleday, 2009.  54.

53.  Larry Eskridge.  God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.  No page in online edition.

54.  Wikipedia.   “Foggy River Boys.”
55.  Wikipedia.  “Randy Matthews.”
56.  Wikipedia, Foggy River Boys.
57.  Wikipedia, Matthews.

58.  Randy Matthews.  “Four Horsemen.  Later recorded on Eyes To The Sky.  Myrrh MSA-6547-LP.  1975.  Vinyl LP.  The album cover listed guitars, keyboards, a bass, drums, and percussion.  [Discogs entry.]

59.  Wikipedia.  “Christian Music Festival.”
60.  Camp Ghormley website.
61.  Wikipedia.  “Point Loma Nazarene University.”
62.  Discogs entry.

63.  “Sonny Salsbury.”  Christian Music Archive website.  It quoted Blue Samuel Flying - a popular ’70s reviewer for Harmony magazine.  Its source was MA Powell.  Encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian Music. Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 2003 edition.

Sumter County, Alabama, Religious Beliefs

Topic: Early Versions
Child rearing practices in cotton-growing Alabama exposed slaves to a variety of beliefs.  Infants spent their early days with their mothers.  Then women were sent back to the fields, and nursed four times a day.  Ank Bishop recalled:

“All the women on Lady Liza’s place had to go the field every day, and them what had sucklin’ babies would come in about nine o’clock in the mornin and when the bell ring at twelve and sucklin them.  One women tended to all of them in one house.” [1]

Eugene Genovese found that, contrary to popular notions, those women actually supervised older pre-adolescent children, who in turn took care of younger children. [2]  One of his examples was a planter living in Marengo County, across the river from Sumter County. [3]

By the age of eight, children could do chores and help pick cotton.  Around age twelve, they were sent to the fields.  Boys, especially, then spent time with predominantly male work groups. [4]  Instead of an age-group initiation that existed in Africa, they were assimilated slowly into their gender groups.

The division of control meant specific beliefs were melded into general ones shared by everyone raised on a plantation.  Details, especially those related to complex cosmologies, were lost, and core values were distilled.  Often those most compatible with Baptist theology survived longest.

The Kongo had been exposed to Roman Catholicism before they were captured.  Michael Gomez said they thought “the recently dead were divided into the evil bankugu and the good banzambi bamungu.  The former dwelled in the forest or were forced to wander about homeless.  The banzambi bampungu, however, lived in the land of the good spirits, mpemba.” [5]

These beliefs were adapted to Protestantism by two individuals who talked with interviewers for the Federal Writers Project in the late 1930s.  Lucindia Washington said “We’s got one good spirit an’ one bad un.  One goes to heaben an’ de udder stays on earth.” [6]  Bishop believed:

“This is the evil spirit what the Bible tells about when it says a person has got two spirits, a good one and a evil one.  They good spirit goes to a place of happiness and rest, and you don’t see it no more, but the evil spirit ain’t got no place to go.  Its dwelling place done tore down when the body died, and it’s just wanderin and waitin for Gabriel to blow his trumpet.” [7]

As mentioned in the post for 13 March 2019, the Mende believed the dead required help crossing into the land of the ancestors, where they became guardians for their descendants.  In Sumter County, they only appeared as harbingers of death, and then materialized as dreams or visions.  Despite their rarity, they were heeded.

Tom Moore’s son was struck by an automobile.  He said “I ought to have been expectin it ’cause I dreamed about white horses, but I just said to myself, Shucks, ain’t nothin to that.  But it bothered me mightily and I told Jerry that same Saturday, ‘Be careful with them mules’.” [8]

Similarly, Amy Chapman’s daughter-in-law remembered two weeks before Chapman died, she “made the long trip to town to see them.  ‘She said the spirits told her to come and see us, and I was afraid then that somthin was gonna happen’.” [9]

There was general agreement among the Civil War generation in Sumter County that spirits were most active between a death and a burial, and that burials must be done quickly.  Josh Horn, who became a pastor at Mount Nebo Primitive Baptist church, [10] told Ruby Pickens Tartt “I don’t exactly believe in ghosties.” [11]  Then, he told her:

“I head Mr. Marshall Lee say he was ridin on home one night and a woman stepped out in the road and say, ‘Marshall, let me ride.’  He say, ‘My horse won’t tote double.’  She say, ‘Yes it will,’ and she jump up behind him.  And that horse bucked and jumped nigh about from under him, but when he got home, she warn’t there.  He say his sister had just died and it might have been her.” [12]

When his own wife died on a Saturday, Horn turned the mirror against the wall  and stopped the clock. [13]  He knew her “spirit had done gone ’cause she had a home in the gloryland waitin for here.  Them is evil spirits what hangs around, or comes back, ’cause they ain’t got to resting place to go to.”  Even so, he believed that if her body “stay in the house over Sunday it sure bring death in the family ’fore the year is out.” [14]

One reason Horn was sure her spirit was safe was she hadn’t suffered a bad death, like the ones of the Igbo mentioned in the post for 29 November 2020.  He called a doctor, because he knew her illness “warn’t no conjure, cause Alice never had no fallin out with nobody in her life, and you got to have enemies to get conjured.” [15]

Conjuring, hoodoo, and voodoo often are treated as the same thing by whites.  Melville Herskovits said the first tended to be practiced by women who used herbs, while the second was associated with men who used magic and animals. [16]  The last was a sect found in New Orleans and Haiti. [17]

Carrie Dykes admitted she saw a “conjure woman” in Sumter County when “I had somethin’ in my ankle and I don’t care where I walked when I come back home I’d be lame for two day.” [18] The woman told her:

“‘somebody throwed at you.  Grudge what you got.’  But she say she could uphand anything brought before her, so I asked here to work on me.  She took to the house and got three things, I don’t what they was, but they was three things she put on my ankle and rubbed it.  And that was just as well as the other one, and it ain’t bothered me a bit since!” [19]

Dykes worked as a midwife, and suspected the conjure woman indulged in tricks as much as she did legitimate cures.  Another midwife, who was the aunt of Carrie Pollard, was summoned to Sumterville by a white woman.  While there she had a dream “somthin done happened to her children and that they was in trouble.” [20]  The white woman told her to see the local fortune teller, who

“cut the cards, and then she looked up and told Aunt Cynthy, ‘All you children and your husband done gone and I can’t tell you where they’s at’.” [21]

Cynthy was a free woman, as were her children.  The white woman sent a messenger who discovered Cynthy’s husband’s master was taking the children to Mississippi to sell into slavery.  A posse was dispatched, and the children saved [22] because Cynthy and the white woman shared a belief in spirits.

Rich Amerson and his sister, Earthy Ann Coleman, both claimed to practice hoodoo.  She said “I could conjure with little animals and pick up folks’ tracks so good, and keep them wondering where to find them.” [23]  Amerson intimated he did both legitimate work utilizing animals like lizards, and practiced tricks on people. [24]

Jake Green recalled the owner of the plantation next to his was so mean, his slaves continually ran away.  “One nigger, Rich Parker, runned off one time an’ whilst he gone he seed a hoodoo man, so when he got back Mr. Brasefiel’ tuck sick two or three weeks.” [25]

Hilliard Johnson remembered right after “Surrender,” the sheriff still was using dogs to track Freedmen and “det sot de dogs on dat nigger and ’fo’ yer knowed hit dat nigger done lef’ dere and had dem dogs treein a nekked tree.  ’Twa’n’t nobody dere.  Dey calls hit hoodooin’ de dogs.  And I’se seen hit more times than one.” [26]

[they set the dogs on the man and before you knowed it that man done left there and had them dogs treeing a naked tree.  There was nobody there.  They calls it hoodooing the dogs.  And I’ve seen it more times than once.] [27]

Once individuals accepted the idea both good and bad spirits existed, they learned to differentiate between the two.  Oliver Bell knew he confronted a bad one while he was passing a graveyard “one night, ridin on about midnight, and something come draggin a chain by me like a dog, and I got down off my hose and couldn’t see nothin with no chain, so I got back on the horse and there right in front of me was a jack-er-lantern, with the brightest light you ever seed, tryin to lead me off, and every time I’d get back in the road it would head me off again.  You sure will get lost if you follow a jack-er-lantern.” [28]

Hattie Harris told Newbell Niles Puckett that “Jack sold himself to the devil,” but when his time was due he tricked him.  When Jack died, he was condemned to wander the Earth because neither God nor Satan would let him in. [29]  He became homeless like those mentioned in the post for 29 November 2020 who died Bad Deaths.

George Young justified the existence of good spirits by telling Tartt that “Christ appeared to the apostles, didn’t He, after He been dead?” [30]  Then he told her:

“I’s seed folks done been dead just as natural in the day as you is now. [. . .]  But I ain’t scared of ’em.  I gets out the path plenty times to let ’em by, and if you can see ’em, walk around ’em.  If you can’t see ’em, then they’ll walk around you.  If they gets too plentiful, I just hangs a horseshoe upside down over the door, and don’t have no more trouble.” [31]

Bishop also connected ghosts with Protestantism.  He said “spirits ain’t nothing but a lot of folks out of Christ.  Haints ain’t nothin but somebody died out of Christ and his spirit ain’t at rest, just in a wanderin condition in the world.” [32]  He added:

“I ain’t scared of them, though.  I passes them and goes right on plowin, but if you wants them to get out of your way, all you gotta do is just turn your head least bit and look back.  They gone just like that!” [33]

End Notes
1.  Ank Bishop.  “Gabriel Blow Soft!  Gabriel Blow Loud!”  Transcribed by Ruby Pickens Tartt for the WPA’s Slave Narratives collection from Alabama. [34]  126–128 in Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens.  Toting the Lead Row.  University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981.  126–127.  Owens modernized Tartt’s transcriptions to make them easier to read. [35]

2.  Eugene Genovese.  Roll, Jordan Roll.  New York: Pantheon Press, 1974.  This section is based on his discussion of “Children,” 502–518.

3.  Marengo Planter.  “This Season’s Work.”  American Cotton Planter 2:280:September 1854.  Cited by Genovese.  509.

4.  I started thinking about gender differences after reading Brown and Owens’ comment that Benjamin Botkin [36] thought belief in Hoodoo was stronger among men than women because they worked in the fields and thus had less contact with European beliefs. [37]

5.  Michael A. Gomez.  Exchanging Our Country Marks.  Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998.  147.

6.  Lucindia Washington.  Transcribed by Alice S. Barton for the WPA’s Slave Narratives from Alabama.  Reprinted by Alan Brown and David Taylor as “A Slave Story.”  99–102 in Gabr’l Blow Sof’.  Livingston, Alabama: Livingston Press, 1997.  101–102.

7.  Bishop.  127.

8. Tom Moore.  “Tom Moore and His Death Money.”  Transcribed by Tart.  77–79 in Brown and Owens.  78.

9.  Ruby Pickens Tartt.  “Amy Chapman’s Funeral.”  79–83 in Brown and Owens.  82.
10.  Brown and Taylor.  70.

11.  Josh Horn.  “Blow Your Horn, Josh.”  Transcribed by Tartt.  105–107 in Brown and Owens.  106.

12.  Horn.  106.

13.  Ruby Pickens Tartt.  “Alice.”  Southwest Review 34:192–195:Spring 1949.  100–105 in Brown and Owens.  Mirror, 101; clock, 102.  These beliefs were shared with whites, who may have been the source for the practice.  Puckett notes house slaves often were the ones asked to handle mirrors and clocks when someone died. [38]  The association between mirrors and spirits is much older, and may go back to the ancient pan-Mediterranean culture mentioned in the post for 19 May 2019.

14.  Tartt, Alice.  102.  Her source was Josh Horn.  A similar belief was discussed in the post for 29 November 2020.

15.  Tartt, Alice.  101.  Tartt said Chapman “had no use for her black neighbors and would not allow any of them to come near her house.  Privately, I often thought she was afraid of being conjured. [39]

16.  Melville J. Herskovits.  The Myth of the Negro Past.  Boston: Beacon Press, 1958 edition.  It first was published in 1941.  239–240.

17.  Wikipedia.  “Louisiana Voodoo” and “Haitian Vodou.”

18.  Ruby Pickens Tartt.  “Carrie Dykes: Midwife.”  21–29 in From Hell to Breakfast.  Edited by  Mody C. Boatright and Donald Day.  Austin: Texas Folk-Lore Society, 1944.  66–71 in Brown and Owens.  70.

19.  Tartt, Dykes.  70.

20.  Carrie Pollard.  “A Husband Couldn’t Be Bought.”  Transcribed by Tartt, WPA.  132–133 in Brown and Owens.  133.

21.  Pollard.  133.
22.  Pollard.  133.
23.  Brown and Owens.  157.

24.  Rich Amerson.  “Hoodoo Doctor.”  Transcribed by Tartt.  115–117 in Brown and Owens.

25.  Jake Green.  “A Conju’ Didn’ Wuk.”  Transcribed by Tartt, WPA.  47–49 in Brown and Taylor.  48.

26.  Hilliard Johnson.  “Hoodooin’ de Dogs.”  Transcribed by Tartt, WPA.  83–86 in Brown and Taylor.  86.   This is the same use of herbs to obscure a trail that was mentioned by Coleman.

27.  Brown and Taylor did not modernize Tartt’s transcriptions.

28.  Oliver Bell.  “That Tree Was My Nurse.”  Transcribed by Tartt, WPA.  134–137 in Brown and Owens.  136.  Uncle Remus told a boy “While I was crossing the branch just now, I come up with a Jacky-my-lantern, and she was burning worse than a bunch of lightning-bugs.  I knew she was fixing to lead me into the quagmire down in the swamp, and I steered clear.” [40]

29.   Newbell Niles Puckett.  Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro.  Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1926.  135–136.  Hattie Harris was from Columbus, Mississippi.  Most of Joel Chandler Harris’ tale was about a blacksmith who tricked the “Bad Man.”  He noted: “This story is popular on the coast and among the rice-plantations, and, since the publication of some of the animal-myths in the newspapers, I have received a version of it from a planter in southwest Georgia; but it seems to me to be an intruder among the genuine myth-stories of the negroes.  It is a trifle too elaborate.  Nevertheless, it is told upon the plantations with great gusto, and there are several versions in circulation.” [42]  Cydney Grannan said the tale of Stingy Jack had Irish origins. [43]  Bell did not mention it to Tartt.

30.  George Young.  “Peter Had No Keys ’ceptin His.”  Transcribed by Tartt, WPA.  120–122 in Brown and Owens.  122.

31.  Young.  122.
32.  Bishop.  127.
33.  Bishop.  127.

34.  For more information on Tartt and the WPA Slave Narratives project, see the post for 23 January 2019.

35.  Laurella Owens.  “Introduction.”  59–60 in Brown and Owens.  60.
36.  B. A. Botkin.  A Treasure of Southern Folklore.  New York: Crown, 1949.  631–633.
37.  Brown and Owens.  153.
38.  Puckett.  80.
39.  Tartt, funeral.  80.

40.  Joel Chandler Harris.  “Jacky-My-Lantern.”  160–166 in Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings.  New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1921 revised edition.  160.  Dialect removed.  Puckett brought this to my attention. [41]

41.  Puckett.  134.  He was using the 1917 version.
42.  Joel Chandler Harris.  160.
43.  Cydney Grannan.  “Why Do We Carve Pumpkins at Halloween?”  Britannica website.

Sumter County, Alabama, Religious Rituals

Topic: Early Versions
Rituals for baptisms and death are the African-American religious rites of passage best known to outsiders.  After the Civil War, Walter Fleming wrote in Alabama:

“Baptizings were as popular as the opera among the whites to-day.  That ceremony took place at the river or creek side.  Thousands were sometimes assembled, and the air was electric with emotion.  The negro was then as near Paradise as he ever came in his life.  The Baptist ceremony of immersion was preferred, because, as one of them remarked, ‘It looks more the business.’  Shouting they went into the water and shouting they came out.” [1]

In Sumter County, Oliver Bell remembered “us got baptized in the river back of Horn’s Bridge, but that wasn’t till after the Surrender.” [2]

Margaret Washington connected baptisms among Gullah-speakers in South Carolina with Mende initiation rituals. [3]  The Julia Tutwiler Library has photographs of one on the banks of the Tombigbee that match those described by Washington.  In one picture, five men, dressed in white, are standing in the water with a pastor clothed in black.  In another, a large group is assembled on the bank.  Most are wearing white.  The skirt styles and hem lengths suggest the photo was taken just before or after World War I. [4]

Most descriptions of Sumter County baptisms, however, are as simple as Bell’s.  Amy Chapman told Ruby Pickens Tartt: “I was baptized in Jones Creek, and Dr. Edmonds, a white preacher, joined me to the Jones Creek Baptist church long before the war.” [5]

Similarly, Lewis Brown told Charles Octavius Boothe, he “was baptized by a Mr. Edmonds into the fellowship of the Jones’ Creek Church.” [6]

Alma Edwards Towns was born in 1919.  She told an interviewer in 2011: “I was baptized by Reverend L. S. Partridge from Demopolis, Alabama in the Jim Matthews pond in Coatopa, Alabama.” [7]

These people remember two things: the body of water, and the name of the person who did the initiation.  These perfunctory comments might suggest the long-lasting fear of white vigilantes who disrupt public ceremonies, [8] but I suspect they indicate a different cultural heritage than that of the Mende.

As mentioned in the posts for 8 September 2019, many of the slaves in Sumter County came from Igbo areas of modern-day Nigeria through Virginia and North Carolina.  Their most important initiation ceremony occurs soon after birth when the parents seek the identity of the ancestor who has been reincarnated in their child. [9]

Chapman may have been alluding to this ritual when she told Ruby Pickens Tartt “I would admire to stay on a little longer.  There is a baby comin on the Johnson place soon, and don’t nobody know about the signs like I do.” [10]  Her mother came from Petersburg, Virginia, and her father from Richmond, Virginia. [11]

Igbo traditions also may have influenced funereal traditions.  Richard Henderson says Igbo mortuary ceremonies involve two stages: “burial and lamentation.” [12]  In 1866, a Clarke County, Alabama, newspaper reported “black preachers travel about and preach funerals of persons who died many years ago.” [13]  In the 1930s, Tartt noted:

“Among the Negro people of Sumter County the actual internment is referred to as the ‘burying.’  The funeral is preached later on a Sunday chosen by the family, sometimes after a year has elapsed.” [14]

This was an easy tradition for Igbo to perpetuate on Southern plantations where sacred time was limited during certain seasons of the agricultural cycle.  Angie Garrett remembered “If any us died in them days, buried us quick as they could and got out there and got to work.” [15]

More important, Henderson said the the postponed part of the Igbo ritual occurs during the dry season after the harvest is complete. [16]  Ida Gayle said at the Black Bluff Missionary Baptist Church near Whitfield “the fourth Sunday of each July was the beginning of two-week revival services.  On this day funerals would be preached for all members who had died during the previous twelve months.  When a member died, they were buried the same day.” [17]

Tom Moore’s son was killed by a careless driver in the late 1930s.  He told Tartt “it all happened on Saturday and us had to hurry and get the grave dug and bury Jerry before dust on Sunday ’cause we knowed it naturally won’t do to carry him over in the house on Sunday or some of the rest would be gone before this year is up.” [18]

Moore indicates burials were done quickly to lay spirits to rest.  Among the Igbo, Henderson said “when a person dies, the elemental ghostly components of the personal god ordinarily return to the land of the dead, whence they may be born again through a compact with another personal god.” [19]  They are key to maintaining the cycle of reincarnation that is part of the post-natal rituals.

Henderson noted things are more serious when a “bad death” occurs, that is one that doesn’t have a natural cause.  Then, “the ghostly components become attached to the shrine of that spirit and are not reincarnated but remain dangerous to the living.” [20]

When Stephen Renfroe killed Frank Sledge and Caesar Davis in 1869, [21] Oliver Bell remembered the freedmen “went down there that night and got them, and they buried” them. [22]

Tartt attended AmyChapman’s burial in 1938. [23]  She said that after the grave was filled and a mound had been shaped over it, saplings were “placed in the soft earth at its head and foot to mark it.”  Then, “each worker rested his spade against the mound’s side, iron point in the earth and handle pointing toward the sky.” [24]

Next, the preacher asked for flowers.  Following the protocols of white supremacy still governing social relations, Tartt went first “with my bowl of zinnias.”  When the others followed, they “made small hollows in the earth in which they placed their bouquets so that they stood upright.” [25]

When she later asked Chapman’s family about the shovels, they brushed Tartt off with “it is custom.” [26]  The saplings that Tartt took for granted may have come from the Kongo who planted trees on graves as “a sign of spirit, on its way to the other world.” [27]

Chapman was “buried on the plantation where she was born.”  The grave was “beside her Aunt Mary’s and near her sister’s.  A few steps down the hillside were other, unmarked graves, members of her family who had gone before.” [28]

Separate African-American cemeteries with headstones don’t appear in Sumter County until the 1890s [29] when a cash economy had been introduced around Cuba, and individuals and groups could accumulate money to buy land for churches. [30]

That did not mean individuals didn’t know where their parents and grandparents were buried.  It may be the reason people returned to their old masters after the war. [31]  The fact whites believed some freedmen were being loyal or rewarding good people may have been a convenient fiction to which Blacks acquiesced to protect what was sacred to them.

In the late 1930s, Oliver Bell remembered they buried Sledge and Frank “up there in the old Travis graveyard right there on that place.  My mammy and daddy buried there too.” [27]

People carried a map of the unseen in their heads.

End Notes
1.  Walter L. Fleming.  Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama.  New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905.  273.  His sources were Huntsville newspapers, denomination histories, and “conversations with various negroes and whites.”

2.  Oliver Bell.  “That Tree Was My Nurse.”  Transcribed by Ruby Higgins Tartt for the WPA’s Slave Narratives collection from Alabama. [33]  134–137 in Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens.  Toting the Lead Row.  University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981.  134.  Owens modernized Tartt’s transcriptions to make them easier to read. [34]

3.  Margaret Washington Creel.  “A Peculiar People.”  New York: New York University Press, 1988.  293–295.

4.  M. J. Turpentine.  “Negro Baptising ‘Big B’ river, Gainesville, Ala.” and another unlabeled photograph.  Julia Tutwiler Library, University of West Alabama.  Reprinted by Alan Brown.  Sumter County.  Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2015.  29.

5.  Amy Chapman.  “The Masters Good but Overseers Mean.”  Transcribed by Tartt.  128–129 in Brown and Owens.  129.  I’ve found nothing about Edmonds.

6.  Charles Octavius Boothe.  The Cyclopedia of the Colored Baptists of Alabama.  Birmingham: Alabama Publishing Company, 1895.  117.

7.  Alma Edwards Towns.  Interviewed by Gwendolyn Moore DeLaine in Demopolis, Alabama, on 22 July 2011.  23–25 in Back Then.  Edited by Tammy Jackson Montgomery and DeLaine.  University of Western Alabama website.  24.  Jno. Matthews owned 152 slaves in Sumter County in 1860. [35]

8.  The post for 6 September 2020 has a description of an African-American frolic being disrupted by a man “with a white sheet round him.”

9.   Igbo initiation into adulthood is an individual affair that is a prerequisite for marriage. [36]

10.  Ruby Pickens Tartt.  “Amy Chapman’s Funeral.”  79–83 in Brown and Owens.  79–80.  Tartt simply noted: “the superstitions connected with a baby’s birth were important to Amy.” [37]

11.  Chapman.  128.

12.  Richard N. Henderson.  The King in Every Man.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972.  400.  The Igbo source also is mentioned by Newbell Niles Puckett. [38]

13.  Clarke County Journal.  18 October 1866.  Cited by Peter Kolchin.  First Freedom. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1972.  118.

14.  Tartt, Funeral.  81.

15.  Angie Garrett.  “Turned Lose without Nothin.”  Transcribed by Tartt, WPA.  140–142 in Brown and Owens.  141.

16.  Henderson.  385.

17.  Ida Gayle.  “Black Bluff Missionary Baptist Church.”  1982.  Jud K. Arrington collection, Tutwiler Library.  44 in The Heritage of Sumter County, Alabama.  Edited by Charles Walker.  Clayton, Alabama: Heritage Publishing Consultants, 2005.

18.  Tom Moore.  “Tom Moore and His Death Money.”  Transcribed by Tart.  77–79 in Brown and Owens.  78.

19.  Henderson.  122.
20.  Henderson.  122.
21.  The deaths of Sledge and Davis are described in the post for 13 September 2020.
22.  Bell.  135.

23.  Brown and Owens.  “Appendix: Biographies of Sumter County Singers and Storytellers.”  156.

24.  Tartt, Funeral.  82.
25.  Tartt, Funeral.  82–83.

26.  Tartt, Funeral.  82.  In Columbus, Mississippi, to the northwest of Sumter County, Puckett was told “the tools used in digging a grave are left on the site for a day or so after burial. [39]  In Calhoun, Alabama, they were “laid across the grave.” [40]

27.  Fu-Kiau Bunseki.  Interview, 9 October 1977.  Quoted by Robert Faris Thompson.  Flash of the Spirit.  New York: Vintage Books, 1984.  139.  Bunseki was the Belgian Congo-born scholar who articulated the Kongo cosmology. [41]

28.  Tartt, Funeral.  81.

29.  The earliest date for an African-American cemetery in a list published by The University of Alabama, is 1890 in the Jones Creek Baptist Church. [42]  Jenkins seemed to think few white graves had headstones because of the difficulty of transporting them by steamer and dirt road. [43]  This overlooks the fact part of the county was limestone bluffs.  The raw material was present, but apparently no settler had the skills to make headstones or to train slaves to do the work.  This probably was a consequence of the county’s hostility to skilled tradesmen, especially those from Europe.

30.  The economic renaissance in southwestern Sumter County is discussed in the post for 20 September 2020.

31.  Gwendolyn Midlo Hall believed Igbo women where especially attached “to the land where their first child was born.” [44]

32.  Bell.  135.  The Travis cemetery was a white family graveyard begun for Enoch Travis, who died in 1841.  Travis’ daughter married Ed Bell. [45]  It’s also known as the Bells Cemetery. [46]

33.  For more information on Tartt and the WPA Slave Narratives project, see the post for 23 January 2019.

34.  Laurella Owens.  “Introduction.”  59–60 in Brown and Owens.  60.

35.  Tom Blake.  “Sumter County, Alabama: Largest Slaveholders from 1860 Slave Census Schedules and Surname Matches for African Americans on 1870 Census.”  Ancestry website.

36.  Vincent De Paul U. Mbah.  “Igbo Child Initiation and Christian Baptism: A Case Study in Inculturation.”  PhD dissertation.  Universidad De Navarra, 1993.

37.  Tartt, Funeral.  80.

38.  Newbell Niles Puckett.  Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro.  Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1926.  91.  His source was Arthur Glyn Leonard.  The Lower Niger and Its Tribes.  London: Macmillan and Company, 1906.  154.

39.  Puckett.  94–95.  His source was Rena Franks.
40.  Puckett.  95.  His source was Qeither Y. Stanfield.

41.  Wyatt MacGaffey.  “Constructing a Kongo Identity: Scholarship and Mythopoesis.”  Comparative Studies in Society and History 58:159–180:2016.  165.

42.  List of Sumter County Cemeteries.  The University of Alabama, Department of Geography Alabama Maps website.

43.  Jenkins.  164–165.

44.  Gwendolyn Midlo Hall.  Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.  142.

45.  Jenkins.  165.
46.  University of Alabama.

Sumter County, Alabama, Religious Forms

Topic: Early Versions
The lexical history of Sumter County, Alabama, slave communities differed from that in the Georgia and South Carolina sea islands.  In places like Saint Helena, plantations had imported manpower from Africa before the close of the Atlantic slave trade, and kept groups isolated from one another.  During the Civil War, William Francis Allen noted:

“the different plantations have their own peculiarities, and adepts profess to be able to determine by speech of a negro what part of the island he belongs to, or even, in some cases, his plantation.  I can myself vouch for the marked peculiarities of one plantation from which I had scholars, and which are hardly more than a mile distant from another which lacked these peculiarities.” [1]

All but seven slaves in Sumter County in 1850 were born in this country. [2]  As indicated in the post for 8 September 2019, ancestors of the ones interviewed by Ruby Pickens Tartt in the 1930s, had come from Virginia and North Carolina.  Over generations, a regional vocabulary developed that attached African concepts to English words.

Homogenization accelerated when people moved about after Emancipation.  By the time people were talking to Tartt, they had common terms for describing their secret meetings with iron pots described in the post for 22 September 2019.  They either shouted or prayed easy, depending on the situation.

There was no agreement on the location of these meetings.  Margaret Washington said in South Carolina in the 1840s, Baptist slave owners began setting aside buildings for religious use to “deprive the inhabitants of various plantations of an opportunity to mingle.” [3]

Whites knew these as Praise Houses, but Samuel Lawton found local Gullah speakers really were saying “Prays.” [4]  Washington observed Gullahs were adept at double meanings, [5] which allowed simultaneous communication with whites and among themselves.

No term existed in Sumter County.  Josh Horn said his master, Isaac Horn, provided “an old house with a dirt floor in the quarters.” [6]  George Young implied slaves on Reuben Chapman’s plantations appropriated an “old house with a dirt floor.” [7]  Oliver Bell simply said they “shut the door” on Tresvan De Graffenreid’s place. [8]

Freedmen agreed they were Baptists after the war, but, beyond full-immersion baptism by adults, that term had little meaning.  As mentioned in the posts for 19 January 2020 and 26 January 2020, Baptists in Pamlico County, North Carolina, continually were confronted by proselytizing groups bent of changing their ways.  This continued in Sumter County, where Bethany Baptist church split in 1838 between Missionary and Old Side groups. [9]

When one looks beyond dogma, which was of little interest to most slaves and whites, the primary difference between factions was their view on what constituted qualification for membership and ordination.  Anabaptists, General Baptists, Free Will Baptists, and Primitive Baptists all believed a religious experiences was sufficient.  Particular Baptists and Missionary Baptists were more influenced by Calvin, and believed an individual needed to recognize his or her own depravity and that ministers should have some training.

Individuals who talked to Tartt had had owners from a variety of family traditions.  De Graffenreid’s great-grandfather founded the Anabaptist colony in New Berne, North Carolina. [10]  Jim Godfrey, the owner of Lucindia Williams, [11] was a Methodist from South Carolina. [12]  His aunts were married to John Evander Brown and George A. Brown, [13] whose early ancestors moved from Rhode Island to a Baptist colony in New Jersey. [14]

Ancestors of the owners of Berry Smith and Josh Horn had contacts with Quakers.  James Harper’s great-grandfather [15] lived in Friend’s communities in the Carolinas and Georgia, [16]  while one  of Isaac Horn’s father’s [17] brothers joined the Quakers in Edgecombe, North Carolina. [18]

Many who moved to Edgecombe County were fleeing religious persecution in Virginia. [19]  Another of Horn’s father’s relatives was a founding member of the Kehukee Baptist Association [20] formed by General Baptists.  Isaac’s father’s brother, his uncle Josiah, [21] helped organize the Methodist Protestant Church in Panola with Quakers and Primitive Baptists from that same part of Edgecombe County. [22]

Descendants’ religious affiliations may have changed and their public theology probably evolved to fit that of their neighbors in Sumter County.  What may not have changed were attitudes and values passed on through early child rearing practices.  Godfrey’s father’s will stipulated:

“it is my will that in the event any of the negroes be dissatisfied or unwilling to go to or live or serve any of my heirs to which they may fall in the division, it is my will my executioners shall swap exchange or sell to some other person or persons to whom the dissatisfied slave may be willing to live with.” [23]

No one has left a record of Freedmen’s actions in the first year of Emancipation in Sumter County.  In the pine woods of Clarke County south of Marengo County, a local newspaper complained that preachers were “springing up among them . . . without ordination, and claiming to receive their ministerial commissions and Biblical information directly from the mouth of God.” [24]

The following year brush arbors were reported.  There was no shared agreement on this term in Sumter County.  While most used “bush arbor,” some contributors to The Heritage of Sumter County in 2005 used the term “brush harbor.”  Mary Jo Square wrote “bush hobbler (meaning tent).” [25]

It probably began as a white term coming from Phoebe Palmer’s Holiness Movement that spread after 1867, [26] and was used by Freedmen to camouflage an African-American event with a label soothing to outsiders.  One suspects the retreat into the country provided a means of perpetuating what remnants of older African initiation rituals had survived.

Not all Freedmen wished to continue antebellum practices.  Many wanted “to do what was ‘right’ and behave as they thought free men did.” [27]  In Sumter County they were affected most by Jeremiah Brown and Abner Scarborough.  Brown’s father had been an English Baptist pastor in Darlington, South Carolina. [28]  Scarborough’s father was converted in 1811 [29] in Edgecombe County. [30]

Both were in the Missionary Baptist tradition, which emphasized centralized organizations that defined theology.  Brown donated to the Baptist seminary in Marion, Alabama. [30]  Scarborough was active in the Bigbee Baptist Association [32] in Sumter and Greene counties that was founded in 1853. [33]

One Freedman they influenced was Lewis Brown.  He was from Saint Louis, and had been purchased by Jeremiah in 1845.  Lewis was baptized in Jones Creek Church in 1863 where, Charles Octavius Boothe said, “the chief persons in the presbtery were Revs. Abner Scarber (white) and Mr. Wright.” [34]

Nathan Ashby organized the Colored Missionary Convention of the State of Alabama as a parallel organization [35] to the white Alabama Baptist Association in 1868.  That same year the regional Bethlehem Association was formed “in association with Jones Creek” to mirror the Bigbee conference. [36]

Like Daniel Payne, who tried to suppress ring shouts in the AME church, [37] Ashby sought to spread “correct gospel knowledge and influence” and elevate the “standard of ministerial education, piety and usefulness.” [38]  Boothe, head of a church in Montgomery, [39] condemned local Baptist ministers for acting on “dreams and suggestions which, they say, are made to them by ‘the spirit’.” [40]

Lewis was newly ordained [41] when Jones Creek hosted the founding meeting of the Bethlehem association.  By 1895, it had 6,000 members in 37 congregations, and sent more students to the church’s seminary in Selma “than any other association in the state.” [42]

Scarborough’s last pastorate was New Prospect Missionary Baptist, where he moved after he bought a plantation in the area in 1866. [43]  The year before he died, [44] white membership had dwindled, and ownership was turned over to African-American members. [45]

Tartt talked with three individuals about this church.  Tom Moore said his wife belonged to “the Prospect Baptist Missionary, and she just sets and prays and sings.” [46]  Laura Clark lived “across the road from that church over yonder and can’t go ’cause I’s crippled and blind.  But I hears them singin.” [47]  Emma Crocket told Tartt “I goes now to de New Prophet Church, and my favorite song” has the line “move Daniel, rock me home Daniel, rock by faith Daniel.” [48]

The white form was Missionary Baptist, but the African-American substance was much older.

End Notes
1.  William Francis Allen.  “Introduction.”  The Slave Songs of the United States.  Edited by Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison.  New York: A. Simpson and Company, 1867.  xxiv.

2.  Nelle Morris Jenkins.  Pioneer Families of Sumter County, Alabama.  Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Willo Publishing Company, 1961.  Reprinted by Bloutsville, Alabama: The Yarbrough National Genealogical and Historical Association, 14 June 2015.  128.  Most were on one plantation owned by “Poole who bought them from a man by the name of Jones in North Carolina.”

3.  Margaret Washington Creel.  “A Peculiar People.”  New York: New York University Press, 1988.  233 and 277.  Quotation, 277.

4.  Samuel Lawton.  “The Religious Life of Coastal and Sea Island Negroes.”  PhD dissertation.  George Peabody College for Teachers, 1939.  54–56.  Cited by Washington.  391, note 44.

5.  Washington.  391, note 44.  “The Gullahs’ mastering of double meaning however may also inform the discussion.  They often asked white Northerners to ‘jine praise wid we.’ [. . .]  Thus the Gullahs went to the meetinghouse to praise and pray.”

6.  Ruby Pickens Tartt.  “Alice.”  Southwest Review 34:192–195:1949.  Reprinted by Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens.  Toting the Lead Row.  University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981.  103.  Her source was Josh Horn.  A fuller quotation appears in the post for 22 September 2020.

7.  George Young.  “Peter Had No Keys ’ceptin His.”  Transcribed by Tartt for the WPA’s Slave Narratives collection from Alabama. [49]  120–122 in Brown and Owens.  121.  Owens modernized Tartt’s transcriptions to make them easier to read. [50]  A fuller quotation appears in the post for 22 September 2019.

8.  Oliver Bell.  “That Tree Was My Nurse.”  Transcribed by Tartt, WPA.  134–137 in Brown and Owens.  134.

9.  Jenkins.  38.

10.  Bell.  134.  For more on the founding of New Bern, see the post for 19 January 2020.

11.  Lucindia Washington.  Collected by Alice S. Barton for the WPA’s Slave Narratives collection from Alabama.  Reprinted by Alan Brown and David Taylor as “A Slave Story.”  99–102 in  Gabr’l Blow Sof’.  Livingston, Alabama: Livingston Press, 1997.  101–102.

12.  James Godfrey was buried in the Sumterville Methodist Church’s cemetery. [51]

13.  Robert D. Spratt.  A History of the Town of Livingston, Alabama.  Edited by Nathaniel Reed.  Livingston: University of West Alabama, 1997.  24.

14.  The line was Nicolas > Abraham > Abraham > John > Samuel > John Evander.  Jenkins identified John Evander’s grandfather. [52]  The Cummings Family provided the rest of the genealogy. [53]

15.  James M. Allen, Jr., identified Harper’s parents as Robert Harper and Mary Dunlap in “James Allen of Scotland and Virginia: A Partial List of His Descendants.”  11 January 2007.  North Carolina Digital Collections website.

16.  House of Harper Genealogy.  “Robert Harper Sr. of Georgia.”  Genealogy and History Blog.  5 May 2017.  “By 1774 Robert Harper, Sr., was in Georgia, in the neighborhood of the Quaker settlement at Wrightsborough, St. Paul’s Parish (now McDuffie County) [. . .] Records show that Robert Harper, Sr. had previously lived near Quaker settlements in North Carolina and South Carolina.”

17.  Isaac’s line was William > Jacob > Thomas > Isaac.  Thomas’ siblings included John, Jeremiah, and Edith, mentioned in the post for 13 September 2020.   Relationships pieced from a number of sources.

18.  Robert Gordon Horn.  “Henry (the Quaker) Horn.”  Horns of Tennessee/Kentucky website Henry was the son of William and brother of Jacob.  The immigrant ancestor, William, had land south of a Quaker meeting house.  Henry set two of his seven slaves free in his will.

19.  George Stevenson.  “Surginer, William.”  NC Pedia website.  1994.

20.  Old Reporter.  “Col. William Horn.”  Rocky Mount [North Carolina] Telegram.  17 March 1961.  4.  Posted by Jeanealogy058 on 21 April 2018.  William was the son of Henry.

21.  Jenkins identified Josiah Horn as another brother of Thomas. [54]

22.  R. M. Arrington.  “Shady Grove Methodist Church, Panola, Alabama.”  60–61 in The Heritage of Sumter County, Alabama.  Edited by Charles Walker.  Clayton, Alabama: Heritage Publishing Consultants, 2005.

23.  William Godfrey.  Will recorded 13 March 1854 by B. J. H. Gaines.  151–153 in Gwendolyn Lynette Hester.  Sumter County Alabama Wills.  Dallas: Southern Roots, 1998.  152.

24.  Clarke County Journal.  18 October 1866.  Quoted Peter Kolchin.  First Freedom.  Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1972.  118.

25.  Mary Jo Square.  “The History of Shady Grove Baptist Church.”  60 in Heritage.

26.  For more on Phoebe Palmer’s camp meetings, see the post for 9 February 2020.  I’ve found neither an etymology for the term “brush arbor” nor a reference that was published before 1865.  I suspect once camp meetings (an activity) and brush arbors (a structure) became associated, they became synonymous, and once synonymous, the term brush arbor was extended back in time so that now it refers to any outdoor meeting that occurred after the Cane Ridge revival of 1801. [55]  If anyone has a published reference from before the Civil War, I’d love to see it.

27.  Kolchin.  61.

28.  T. A. Deland and A. Davis Smith.  “Jeremiah H. Brown.”  Northern Alabama, Historical and Biographical.  Birmingham, Alabama: Smith and De Land.  1888.  219.

29.  Jewell Davis Scarborough.  “Southern Kith and Kin.”  1957 edition.  59.  Roots Web website.

30.  Karen Hoy.  “John Rasberry Scarborough (1787 - 1846).”  Wiki Tree website.  10 May 2014; last updated 12 October 2019.

31.  DeLand.  The school was Howard College, now Samford University. [56]
32.  fdmal.  “Rev Abner Rasberry Scarborough.”  Find a Grave website.  12 August 2009.
33.  “Bigbee Baptist Association.”  Samford University website.

34.  Charles Octavius Boothe.  The Cyclopedia of the Colored Baptists of Alabama.  Birmingham: Alabama Publishing Company, 1895.  117.

35.  Edward R. Crowther.  “Interracial Cooperative Missions among Blacks by Alabama’s Baptists, 1868-1882.”  The Journal of Negro History 80:131–139:1995.  132.

36.  Boothe.  58.
37.  Payne is discussed in the post for 9 August 2017.
38.  Crowther.  132.
39.  Crowther.  133.  Boothe’s church was the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

40.  Boothe.  Quoted by Crowther.  134–135.  His sources were the Alabama Baptist for 20 April 1877, 2; Alabama Baptist for 17 May 1877, 1; and Minutes of the Alabama Baptist Convention, 1877, 24–25.

41.  Boothe.  117.
42.  Boothe.  58.

43.  In 1866, Scarborough purchased the plantation of John H. Gary, who was moving to Meridian, Mississippi. [57]

44.  fdmal.

45.  Jud K. Arrington.  “Bluffport.”  Arrington collection, Julia Tutwiler Library, University of West Alabama.  25 in Heritage.

46.  Tom Moore.  “Tom Moore and His Death Money.”  Transcribed by Tart.  77–79 in Brown and Owens.  77.

47.  Laura Clark.  “Children in Every Graveyard.  Transcribed by Tartt, WPA.  123–126 in Brown and Owens.  123.

48.  Emma Crockett.  Transcribed by Tartt, WPA.  Reprinted as “Ex-Slave Emma Crockett.”  29–31 in Brown and Taylor.  30.  On their “map of Sumter County showing where Ruby Pickens Tartt found singers and storytellers,” Brown and Owens showed Crockett with New Prospect. [58]  I found no mention of a Prophet church.

49.  For more information on Tartt and the WPA Slave Narratives project, see the post for 23 January 2019.

50.  Laurella Owens.  “Introduction.”  59–60 in Brown and Owens.  60.

51.  A.  “Dr James Myers Godfrey.”  Find a Grave website.  20 October 2008; updated by Doug Fitchett.

52.  Jenkins.  175.

53.  The Cummings Family of Sumter, South Carolina.  “Descendants of Nicholas Brown.”  Roots Web website.  Last updated 20 January 2019.

54.  Jenkins.  166.
55.  For more on Cane Ridge, see the post for 26 January 2020.
56.  Wikipedia.  “Samford University.”

57.  Mary H. Abbe.  “Scarborough Family.”  254 in Heritage.

Mary Anne Habbe.  “Gary/Scarborough Deed.”  November 1866.  AlGen website.

58.  Brown and Owens.  vi.