Topic: Religious Folk Music Revival
Continued from previous post dated 21 June 2020
Performers
Vocal Soloist: single melodic line
Vocal Group: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: guitar chords
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Credits
Traditional
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: no comment
Verses: kumbaya, crying, singing, praying
Vocabulary
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: open-ended 4-verse song; after last verse "and so on. It could end up with "Come by here, My Lord, Kum ba yah."
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Ending: none
Unique Features: none
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"
Ending: none
Influences: Concordia Published issued a companion album with songs from the collection. [1] Three were by Ray Repp and two by Richard Koehneke and Norman Habel. "Kumbaya" was not included, but "All My Trials" was recorded in an arrangement close to that of Peter, Paul, and Mary [2] by two men and a woman.
Notes on Performance
Paul Firnhaber was the guest editor for the first two volumes. He used beige paper with photographs of people. Large-type comments were scattered around the songs to create a collage of words, music, and pictures.
For "We Shall Overcome" the text was "In every man’s heart there’s a secret place he would like to go." The photographs included an African-American boy, an Asian child, a woman who could have been a Native American, and one who might have been from Latin America.
The second volume was less daring. There were no comments, and the picture with "Kumbaya" showed people sitting on park benches in New York City. They were in shadow, so no features could be discerned. They probably were older men.
Koehneke, the editor for the third volume, used a different colored paper for every page, and often superimposed songs on photographs. Most looked to be white people. The ones who might have come from other cultures were so enlarged, their features were lost.
Audience Perceptions
The introduction to Hymns for Now II said that "in a little over two years, nearly 200,000 copies" of earlier collection had been distributed. "This is nothing short of a phenomenon considering that it was not available on the commercial market, and was reprinted and distributed solely through the subscription office of" the Walther League’s Workers Quarterly.
Notes on Performers
Dean Kell edited the Workers Quarterly that published Hymns for Now I. The native of Wausau, Wisconsin, [3] did field work with a local church and interned in Minneapolis while he was a student at Indiana’s Valparaiso University. [4] After graduating in 1960, [5] he became the youth director for a Lutheran Church in Melrose Park, Illinois. [6] Following the disestablishment of the Walther League, [7] he moved to Estes Park, Colorado, where he "taught himself to build houses while starting his general contractor company." [8]
The biographical information for the man he selected as editor for Hymns is less detailed. [9] Rolan Paul Firnhaber studied shamanism with Mircea Eliade at the University of Chicago. [10] Perhaps it was while he was a graduate student that he took photographs of a César Chávez aide at a Chicago League meeting in 1967. [11] In 1969, Firnhaber moved to Estes Park, where he worked as a "researcher, writer, editor, and photographer." [12] He later moved to Estonia.
Less still is known about Martin Steyer, the man responsible for Hymns for Now II. He was a Lutheran pastor in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1956. [13] By 1973, he was an assistant to the head of the Board of Youth in Saint Louis. [14] His last pastorate was in Santa Maria, California. [15]
Koehneke, like Steyer, worked for a congregation in North Carolina before he edited Hymns for Now III. [16] In addition to the youth album, he and Habel issued a recording of the Lutheran liturgy as a competitor to folk masses [17] for the Synod’s radio station. [18] In 1972, he wrote a Christian rock opera with John Schroeder. [19] His last appointment was in Fort Wayne. [20]
Availability
Book: "Kum Ba Yah." Hymns for Now II. In Resources for Youth Ministry 1(3):1969. Edited by Martin W. Steyer. 2.
End Notes
1. Hymns for Now 2: How. Produced by James E. Bottom, David Dister, and Victor Growcock. Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House. Concordia 79-9021.
2. Peter, Paul, and Mary. "All My Trials." In The Wind. Warner Brothers Records. WS 1507. 1963.
3. Dean C. Kell. Obituary. Loveland [Colorado] Reporter-Herald. 5 January 2018.
4. Jon Pahl. Hopes and Dreams of All. Chicago: Wheat Ridge Ministries, 1993. 222. Valparaiso is a Lutheran university unaffiliated with any synod. [21] A version of "Kumbaya" recorded by a vocal group sponsored by the school was mentioned in the post for 4 September 2018.
5. Death notice for Dean Kell in "Valpo Remembers." Valpo Magazine website. 29 January 2019.
6. "Lutheran Pastors Attend Convention." The [Maywood, Illinois] Sunday Herald. 7 July 1963. 4.
7. Kell was executive secretary of the Walther League from 1968 to 1970. [22]
8. Kell, obituary.
9. James C. Burkee. Power, Politics, and the Missouri Synod. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011. When he began research for this book, he discovered "many were unwilling to talk" about the events surrounding the rise of Jack Preus. "The reasons were diverse. For some, the emotional wounds were still fresh. Some were embarrassed by their involvement. Others had professional reasons, wanting to stay ‘neutral’ while serving in official capacities in the church. Some were afraid of reprisals. The most unsettling, however, was the stonewalling from men who did not want the truth exposed; who did not want aired the details of a veiled organization that, it was implied, still rules the synod." [23] He added, "I believe everyone knows, but few will confess." [24]
10. Gregor Taul. "Art Life outside the Capital City." Estonian Art website. The index of Eliade’s papers in the University of Chicago library does not list Firnhaber’s dissertation. [25] This suggests he did not complete work on his PhD. There is no record of it, or other professional papers on the internet.
11. Miriam Pawel. The Union of Their Dreams. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. The caption for a photograph by Firnhaber on page 50 read: Eliseo Medina "teaches a workshop for Lutheran youth at the Walther League in Chicago to enlist help in the grape boycott."
12. "R. Paul Firnhaber." Imagi Gallery, Viljandi, Estonia, website. The biographical sketch was written to accompany publication of his book, Magic in the Mountains, in 2007. [26]
13. "Lutheran Church Starts Five Mission Services." Greenbelt [Maryland] News Review. 21:1:18 October 1956. It said Steyer was giving a "special sermon for the children each evening."
14. The Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod. Convention Handbook for 1973. 300.
15. "Martin Steyer." LinkedIn website.
16. Gene Brunow. "Wellness." His website.
17. Richard Koehneke and Norman Habel. Invitation; The Lutheran Liturgy. KFUO, Clayton, Missouri. KRES 769. [Discogs website.]
18. KFUO is owned by the Missouri Synod and located on the campus of Concordia Seminary. [27] It originally was a project of the Walther League. [28]
19. Richard Koehneke and John E. Schroeder. Alpha Omega: Meet God Man. Concordia 79-9895. 1972. [Discogs website.]
20. Brunow.
21. Wikipedia. "Valparaiso University."
22. Pahl. 303.
23. Burkee. 4.
24. Burkee. 4.
25. "Guide to the Mircea Eliade Papers 1926-1998." University of Chicago Library website.
26. James Frank and R. Paul Firnhaber. Magic in the Mountains. Estes Park, Colorado: Our Natural Heritage Publishing, 2007.
27. Wikipedia. "KFUO (AM)."
28. Pahl. 120–121.
Sunday, June 28, 2020
Sunday, June 21, 2020
Walther League - Kum Ba Yah
Topic: Religious Folk Music Revival
On 6 January 1967, Time magazine declared people under the age of 25 its persons of the year, and dubbed them the Now Generation. [1] It aimed to ease the anxieties of its older, conservative readers by explaining the restlessness of the young. The conservative Henry Luce publication assured parents that not all were dropouts.
Inter-generational conflict had erupted in the Lutheran’s Missouri Synod in 1965 when the Walther League invited Pete Seeger to perform at the youth group’s convention. [2] The most vocal critic was associated with the man who published None Dare Call It Treason [3] in 1964. [4] Herman Otten [5] filled every issue of his weekly Lutheran News with reminders that Seeger had been accused of being a Communist. [6]
Tensions were inherent in the Synod’s evolution. Its nucleus had been a group who left Saxony in 1838 to escape Friedrich Wilhelm III’s attempts to standardize religious practices in Prussia. [7] It had expanded in the nineteenth century to include Lutherans from many cultural traditions. [8]
Lutherans split over slavery. Those who had moved to the South, often from German-speaking areas, owned slaves and supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. Scandinavians in the upper Midwest were against human bondage. [9]
The head of the Missouri Synod tried to stay neutral. C. F. W. Walther claimed being a slave was punishment for a sin, and abolitionists were misguided in their attempts to eliminate it. [10] On the other head, he opposed rebellion against the government because Martin Luther had supported Protestant princes and burghers in 1525 during the Peasant’s Rebellion. [11]
The Walther League was organized around the turn of the twentieth century by young northerners to help rural and European immigrants to cities remain in the church. [12] The Synod refused to recognize the group until 1920, [13] because it existed outside the oversight of local pastors. [14] In return for its support, the hierarchy demanded more time be devoted to Bible study, and less to other activities. [15]
The chasm widened in 1950 when the Texas-born head of the Synod moved its headquarters to Saint Louis from northern Illinois, [16] while the League remained in Chicago. [17] Club members were exposed to new ideas when they attended conventions [18] and summer resident camps [19] sponsored by the League.
In 1953, the League was selling a customized songbook published by Lynn Rohrbough’s Cooperative Recreation Service. [20] One member in Saskatchewan remembered singing "Jacob’s Ladder" and "I’m Gonna Sing" from Sing Again. [21] In 1914, when the League published its first song list, it didn’t even know what a spiritual was, despite tours by groups like the Fisk Jubilee Singers. It used the term to refer to the group’s spirit or pep songs. A few songs by Stephen Foster graced the collection of hymns. [22]
The League published Hymns for Now six months after Time introduced the Now Generation. It contained only one overtly political song, "We Shall Overcome." [23] It didn’t credit Seeger, but a publication from an even bigger nemesis for men like Otten, the World Council of Churches. [24]
Hymns for Now differed from the Methodist songbook described on 9 February 2020 [25] in ways that revealed how Lutherans in general, and those in the Synod in particular, differed from churches descended from the Anglo-Scots Reformation. It included fewer folk songs (19% versus 42%), [26] but about the same number of African-American religious songs (12% versus 10%). What was unique was the number taken from the Roman Catholic folk mass movement (about 15%). [27]
This suggests the Synod hierarchy wasn’t just feeling pressure from the laity over Civil Rights activities, and from young pastors over interpretations of the Bible. [28] It also saw one of its traditional enemies being more open to its youth after Vatican II in 1964 than it was itself. [29]
The Synod stopped funding the League the year it published Hymns for Now, [30] and sponsored a parallel youth program. [31] It 1968, Fortress Press issued an alternative record album, For Mature Audiences Only. [32] It featured settings by Richard Koehneke of poems by young parishioners collected by Norman Habel.
It 1969, the Board of Youth Ministries published a second volume of Hymns for Now. The numbers of African-American spirituals [33] and other folk songs declined, but the percentage of Roman Catholic ones remained the same.
Rohrbough’s version of "Kum Ba Yah" was included without an attribution. It simply said it was "Traditional."
1969 was the year men like Otten took control of the Synod. [34] The Board of Youth Ministries published a final edition of Hymns for Now in 1972, the year before the Synod began eliminating liberal professors from the Concordia Seminary faculty. It contained no spirituals or folk songs, but the same number of Catholic ones. Koehneke was the guest editor. He wrote 7 of the 27 songs. [35]
(Continued in next post, dated 28 June 2020)
End Notes
1. "Man Of The Year: The Inheritor." Time. 6 January 1967.
2. Jon Pahl. Hopes and Dreams of All. Chicago: Wheat Ridge Ministries, 1993. 266–267.
3. John A. Stormer. None Dare Call It Treason. Florissant, Missouri: Liberty Bell Press, 1964.
4. James C. Burkee. Power, Politics, and the Missouri Synod. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011. 64. In 1965, Stormer taught Otten how to self-publish.
5. Otten was the son of German immigrants. He began rebelling against modern trends in the Lutheran church when he was young. [36] Burkee believed Otten was used by men who sought power in the Synod. He wrote, Otten "was exploited by conservatives too cowardly to publicly associate their respectable names and clerical collars with his ethically questionable actions. Several times during his career as the synod’s chief antagonist, Otten led crusades that began with scores of professing supporters in underground gatherings, only to find himself alone and abandoned when the campaign reached daylight." [37]
6. Burkee. 61.
7. Wikipedia. "Saxon Lutheran Immigration of 1838–39."
8. Wikipedia. "Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod."
9. Mark Granquist. Lutherans in America. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015. No page numbers in on-line edition.
10. Granquist. C. F. W. Walther took over the leadership of the Saxon Lutheran community in Missouri in the early years. [38] The youth group was named after him.
11. Richard M. Chapman. "Just Enough? Lutherans, Slavery, and the Struggle for Racial Justice." The Cresset 71(5):16–20:2008. For more on Luther and the Peasant’s War, see Wikipedia’s "German Peasants’ War" and "Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants." This same acceptance of discrimination that did not end in civil violence remained part of the Synod’s intellectual tradition. In the 1920s, the Walther League Messenger simultaneously denounced African-American religious practices and the Ku Klux Klan. [39] Likewise, the publication’s editor, Walter A. Maier, had no problem with making anti-Semitic statements in 1933, then criticizing Hitler’s extremes in 1939. [40]
12. The League’s most important activity was sponsoring boarding houses. [41] One of Frank Buchman’s first tasks as a Lutheran minister was running such a hospice. The founder of Moral Re-Armament was discussed in the post for 16 February 2020.
13. Pahl. 108.
14. Pahl. 62.
15. Pahl. 109.
16. Burkee. 22. John Behnken spent much of his early life in a German community near Houston. [42]
17. Pahl. 189–190. Its Chicago headquarters was built in 1942.
18. Pahl. 239. Pastors complained about the conventions. One wrote the president of the Walther League in 1953: "In the home congregations the young people are warned against the sinful dances, [but] when they young folks return from the [Walther League] convention...they report what a wonderful time they had . . . ‘dancing to beat the band.’" [43]
19. Pahl. 217–218.
20. Gerhard Schroth. "Singing Is Fun." Walther League Messenger 61:16:June 1953. Cited by Pahl. 225. Larry Nial Holcomb listed Sing Again as a CRS publication done for the Walther League in "A History of the Cooperative Recreation Service." PhD diss. University of Michigan, 1972. 230.
21. Elizabeth Zoller. Letter to Jon Pahl. 23 September 1991. Quoted by Pahl. 225.
22. Pahl. 96.
23. Walther League. Hymns for Now I. In Workers Quarterly 39(3):July 1967. Edited by Dean Kell. Reprinted by Concordia Publishing House of Saint Louis. 11.
24. The song appeared in Paul Abels’ "New Hymns for a New Day." Risk 2(3):1–80:1966. Risk was sponsored by the Youth Department of the World Council of Churches. Otten attacked the organization with innuendos. [44] Stormer called the related National Council of Churches a communist front. [45]
25. The songbook was Sing It Again.
26. The folk songs were from China, Nigeria, Israel, Portugal, and the Netherlands. In contrast, half the songs in Sing It Again were from Europe, especially areas that spoke Germanic languages. "Shalom" was printed in the English translation used in Risk, not the Hebrew one publicized by CRS.
27. Two of the Catholic songs were by Ray Repp, who composed the first folk liturgy in 1964, Mass for Young Americans. The others were issued by FEL Publications, which specialized in post-Vatican II music for Roman Catholics. [46]
28. Challenges to inerrancy, or the literal interpretations of the Bible, were an underlying current in all the attacks by conservatives. Norman Habel drew their ire for arguing "the ‘fall narrative’ (the Genesis account of Adam and Eve) could be legitimately considered as a ‘symbolical religious history’." [47] In his second year as a student at Concordia Seminary in Saint Louis, Otten demanded an older student answer the question, "Do you accept Adam and Eve as real historical persons?" [48] Stormer, who was pastor of the independent Heritage Baptist Church in suburban Saint Louis, damned the National Council of Church’s edition of the Bible that changed the word "virgin" to "young woman" to describe Christ’s mother. [49]
29. Lutherans had an equally strong antipathy for Jews that was grounded in history. During the years Otten became active, evidence of the Holocaust was accumulating. First came Anne Frank’s diary in 1952, [50] then the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, [51] and finally Hannah Arendt’s introduction of the term "banality of evil" in 1963. [52] She didn’t see Eichmann as some kind of monster, but a logical consequence of the German acceptance of authority, which went back to Luther, and individuals’ desires to conform with their neighbors. [53] Otten began publishing his Lutheran News in 1962, [54] and soon became "active in the Holocaust-denial movemnt." [55] Pahl noted the Walther League magazine article that caused the greatest controversy was one published in 1965 on Lutheran anti-Semitism. [56]
30. Pahl. 271.
31. Pahl. 268–269, 271. The Board for Young People’s Work was reorganized in 1966.
32. Norman Habel and Richard Koehneke. For Mature Adults Only. Philadelphia: Fortress Records. 32-2147-74. 1968. [Discogs website.]
33. The "Introduction" said: "We have included some traditional spirituals, simply because they have taken on new meanings as more and more we share the struggles they express."
34. Jack Preus was elected head of Synod; he had taken over the conservative movement [57] and oversaw the purge of liberals from the faculty of Concordia Seminary in Saint Louis. Habel was banned for the heresy of Gospel Reductionism. [58]
35. Hymns for Now III. In Resources for Youth Ministry 4(1):Winter 1972. Edited by Martin W. Steyer.
36. Burkee. 27–28.
37. Burkee. 8.
38. Wikipedia. "Saxon Lutheran Immigration."
39. Pahl. 133–134.
40. Pahl. 172–175.
41. Pahl. 63–69.
42. Wikipedia. "John William Behnken."
43. Rev. T. J. Vogel, Amherst, Nebraska. Letter to Edgar Fritz. 21 March 1953. Quoted by Pahl. 239.
44. Burkee. 60.
45. Stormer. 125–126.
46. William Grady. "Publisher Won’t End Battle over Hymns." Chicago Tribune. 13 June 1990.
47. Norman Habel. "The Form and Meaning of the Fall Narrative." Saint Louis: Concordia Seminary Print Shop, 1965. Cited by Burkee. 25.
48. Burkee. 31.
49. Stormer. 128. The reference was to Isaiah 7:14.
50. 1952 book. Anne Frank. The Diary of a Young Girl. Translated by B. M. Mooyaat-Doubleday. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.
1955 play. Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. The Diary of Anne Frank.
1959 film. The Diary of Anne Frank. (Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation.)
51. The same year, a dramatization of one of the 1947 U. S. military trials, Judgment at Nuremberg, won an Academy Award for Maximilian Schell.
52. Hannah Arendt. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press, 1963.
53. Wikipedia. "Hannah Arendt."
54. Burkee. 6.
55. Burkee. 9.
56. Warren Saffen. "A Lutheran Looks at the Jews." Arena 73. Spring 1965. Cited by Pahl. 265.
57. Burkee. 9.
58. Norman Habel. "My Story." His website. "I first became a controversial figure when I gave a exploratory paper on Genesis 3 to the council of presidents of The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. That paper became known as the Green Dragon. The controversy about how to interpret the Bible escalated until a Synod assembly declared that the way a majority of our faculty was reading the Bible was, in fact, an unknown heresy known as Gospel Reductionism!"
On 6 January 1967, Time magazine declared people under the age of 25 its persons of the year, and dubbed them the Now Generation. [1] It aimed to ease the anxieties of its older, conservative readers by explaining the restlessness of the young. The conservative Henry Luce publication assured parents that not all were dropouts.
Inter-generational conflict had erupted in the Lutheran’s Missouri Synod in 1965 when the Walther League invited Pete Seeger to perform at the youth group’s convention. [2] The most vocal critic was associated with the man who published None Dare Call It Treason [3] in 1964. [4] Herman Otten [5] filled every issue of his weekly Lutheran News with reminders that Seeger had been accused of being a Communist. [6]
Tensions were inherent in the Synod’s evolution. Its nucleus had been a group who left Saxony in 1838 to escape Friedrich Wilhelm III’s attempts to standardize religious practices in Prussia. [7] It had expanded in the nineteenth century to include Lutherans from many cultural traditions. [8]
Lutherans split over slavery. Those who had moved to the South, often from German-speaking areas, owned slaves and supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. Scandinavians in the upper Midwest were against human bondage. [9]
The head of the Missouri Synod tried to stay neutral. C. F. W. Walther claimed being a slave was punishment for a sin, and abolitionists were misguided in their attempts to eliminate it. [10] On the other head, he opposed rebellion against the government because Martin Luther had supported Protestant princes and burghers in 1525 during the Peasant’s Rebellion. [11]
The Walther League was organized around the turn of the twentieth century by young northerners to help rural and European immigrants to cities remain in the church. [12] The Synod refused to recognize the group until 1920, [13] because it existed outside the oversight of local pastors. [14] In return for its support, the hierarchy demanded more time be devoted to Bible study, and less to other activities. [15]
The chasm widened in 1950 when the Texas-born head of the Synod moved its headquarters to Saint Louis from northern Illinois, [16] while the League remained in Chicago. [17] Club members were exposed to new ideas when they attended conventions [18] and summer resident camps [19] sponsored by the League.
In 1953, the League was selling a customized songbook published by Lynn Rohrbough’s Cooperative Recreation Service. [20] One member in Saskatchewan remembered singing "Jacob’s Ladder" and "I’m Gonna Sing" from Sing Again. [21] In 1914, when the League published its first song list, it didn’t even know what a spiritual was, despite tours by groups like the Fisk Jubilee Singers. It used the term to refer to the group’s spirit or pep songs. A few songs by Stephen Foster graced the collection of hymns. [22]
The League published Hymns for Now six months after Time introduced the Now Generation. It contained only one overtly political song, "We Shall Overcome." [23] It didn’t credit Seeger, but a publication from an even bigger nemesis for men like Otten, the World Council of Churches. [24]
Hymns for Now differed from the Methodist songbook described on 9 February 2020 [25] in ways that revealed how Lutherans in general, and those in the Synod in particular, differed from churches descended from the Anglo-Scots Reformation. It included fewer folk songs (19% versus 42%), [26] but about the same number of African-American religious songs (12% versus 10%). What was unique was the number taken from the Roman Catholic folk mass movement (about 15%). [27]
This suggests the Synod hierarchy wasn’t just feeling pressure from the laity over Civil Rights activities, and from young pastors over interpretations of the Bible. [28] It also saw one of its traditional enemies being more open to its youth after Vatican II in 1964 than it was itself. [29]
The Synod stopped funding the League the year it published Hymns for Now, [30] and sponsored a parallel youth program. [31] It 1968, Fortress Press issued an alternative record album, For Mature Audiences Only. [32] It featured settings by Richard Koehneke of poems by young parishioners collected by Norman Habel.
It 1969, the Board of Youth Ministries published a second volume of Hymns for Now. The numbers of African-American spirituals [33] and other folk songs declined, but the percentage of Roman Catholic ones remained the same.
Rohrbough’s version of "Kum Ba Yah" was included without an attribution. It simply said it was "Traditional."
1969 was the year men like Otten took control of the Synod. [34] The Board of Youth Ministries published a final edition of Hymns for Now in 1972, the year before the Synod began eliminating liberal professors from the Concordia Seminary faculty. It contained no spirituals or folk songs, but the same number of Catholic ones. Koehneke was the guest editor. He wrote 7 of the 27 songs. [35]
(Continued in next post, dated 28 June 2020)
End Notes
1. "Man Of The Year: The Inheritor." Time. 6 January 1967.
2. Jon Pahl. Hopes and Dreams of All. Chicago: Wheat Ridge Ministries, 1993. 266–267.
3. John A. Stormer. None Dare Call It Treason. Florissant, Missouri: Liberty Bell Press, 1964.
4. James C. Burkee. Power, Politics, and the Missouri Synod. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011. 64. In 1965, Stormer taught Otten how to self-publish.
5. Otten was the son of German immigrants. He began rebelling against modern trends in the Lutheran church when he was young. [36] Burkee believed Otten was used by men who sought power in the Synod. He wrote, Otten "was exploited by conservatives too cowardly to publicly associate their respectable names and clerical collars with his ethically questionable actions. Several times during his career as the synod’s chief antagonist, Otten led crusades that began with scores of professing supporters in underground gatherings, only to find himself alone and abandoned when the campaign reached daylight." [37]
6. Burkee. 61.
7. Wikipedia. "Saxon Lutheran Immigration of 1838–39."
8. Wikipedia. "Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod."
9. Mark Granquist. Lutherans in America. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015. No page numbers in on-line edition.
10. Granquist. C. F. W. Walther took over the leadership of the Saxon Lutheran community in Missouri in the early years. [38] The youth group was named after him.
11. Richard M. Chapman. "Just Enough? Lutherans, Slavery, and the Struggle for Racial Justice." The Cresset 71(5):16–20:2008. For more on Luther and the Peasant’s War, see Wikipedia’s "German Peasants’ War" and "Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants." This same acceptance of discrimination that did not end in civil violence remained part of the Synod’s intellectual tradition. In the 1920s, the Walther League Messenger simultaneously denounced African-American religious practices and the Ku Klux Klan. [39] Likewise, the publication’s editor, Walter A. Maier, had no problem with making anti-Semitic statements in 1933, then criticizing Hitler’s extremes in 1939. [40]
12. The League’s most important activity was sponsoring boarding houses. [41] One of Frank Buchman’s first tasks as a Lutheran minister was running such a hospice. The founder of Moral Re-Armament was discussed in the post for 16 February 2020.
13. Pahl. 108.
14. Pahl. 62.
15. Pahl. 109.
16. Burkee. 22. John Behnken spent much of his early life in a German community near Houston. [42]
17. Pahl. 189–190. Its Chicago headquarters was built in 1942.
18. Pahl. 239. Pastors complained about the conventions. One wrote the president of the Walther League in 1953: "In the home congregations the young people are warned against the sinful dances, [but] when they young folks return from the [Walther League] convention...they report what a wonderful time they had . . . ‘dancing to beat the band.’" [43]
19. Pahl. 217–218.
20. Gerhard Schroth. "Singing Is Fun." Walther League Messenger 61:16:June 1953. Cited by Pahl. 225. Larry Nial Holcomb listed Sing Again as a CRS publication done for the Walther League in "A History of the Cooperative Recreation Service." PhD diss. University of Michigan, 1972. 230.
21. Elizabeth Zoller. Letter to Jon Pahl. 23 September 1991. Quoted by Pahl. 225.
22. Pahl. 96.
23. Walther League. Hymns for Now I. In Workers Quarterly 39(3):July 1967. Edited by Dean Kell. Reprinted by Concordia Publishing House of Saint Louis. 11.
24. The song appeared in Paul Abels’ "New Hymns for a New Day." Risk 2(3):1–80:1966. Risk was sponsored by the Youth Department of the World Council of Churches. Otten attacked the organization with innuendos. [44] Stormer called the related National Council of Churches a communist front. [45]
25. The songbook was Sing It Again.
26. The folk songs were from China, Nigeria, Israel, Portugal, and the Netherlands. In contrast, half the songs in Sing It Again were from Europe, especially areas that spoke Germanic languages. "Shalom" was printed in the English translation used in Risk, not the Hebrew one publicized by CRS.
27. Two of the Catholic songs were by Ray Repp, who composed the first folk liturgy in 1964, Mass for Young Americans. The others were issued by FEL Publications, which specialized in post-Vatican II music for Roman Catholics. [46]
28. Challenges to inerrancy, or the literal interpretations of the Bible, were an underlying current in all the attacks by conservatives. Norman Habel drew their ire for arguing "the ‘fall narrative’ (the Genesis account of Adam and Eve) could be legitimately considered as a ‘symbolical religious history’." [47] In his second year as a student at Concordia Seminary in Saint Louis, Otten demanded an older student answer the question, "Do you accept Adam and Eve as real historical persons?" [48] Stormer, who was pastor of the independent Heritage Baptist Church in suburban Saint Louis, damned the National Council of Church’s edition of the Bible that changed the word "virgin" to "young woman" to describe Christ’s mother. [49]
29. Lutherans had an equally strong antipathy for Jews that was grounded in history. During the years Otten became active, evidence of the Holocaust was accumulating. First came Anne Frank’s diary in 1952, [50] then the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, [51] and finally Hannah Arendt’s introduction of the term "banality of evil" in 1963. [52] She didn’t see Eichmann as some kind of monster, but a logical consequence of the German acceptance of authority, which went back to Luther, and individuals’ desires to conform with their neighbors. [53] Otten began publishing his Lutheran News in 1962, [54] and soon became "active in the Holocaust-denial movemnt." [55] Pahl noted the Walther League magazine article that caused the greatest controversy was one published in 1965 on Lutheran anti-Semitism. [56]
30. Pahl. 271.
31. Pahl. 268–269, 271. The Board for Young People’s Work was reorganized in 1966.
32. Norman Habel and Richard Koehneke. For Mature Adults Only. Philadelphia: Fortress Records. 32-2147-74. 1968. [Discogs website.]
33. The "Introduction" said: "We have included some traditional spirituals, simply because they have taken on new meanings as more and more we share the struggles they express."
34. Jack Preus was elected head of Synod; he had taken over the conservative movement [57] and oversaw the purge of liberals from the faculty of Concordia Seminary in Saint Louis. Habel was banned for the heresy of Gospel Reductionism. [58]
35. Hymns for Now III. In Resources for Youth Ministry 4(1):Winter 1972. Edited by Martin W. Steyer.
36. Burkee. 27–28.
37. Burkee. 8.
38. Wikipedia. "Saxon Lutheran Immigration."
39. Pahl. 133–134.
40. Pahl. 172–175.
41. Pahl. 63–69.
42. Wikipedia. "John William Behnken."
43. Rev. T. J. Vogel, Amherst, Nebraska. Letter to Edgar Fritz. 21 March 1953. Quoted by Pahl. 239.
44. Burkee. 60.
45. Stormer. 125–126.
46. William Grady. "Publisher Won’t End Battle over Hymns." Chicago Tribune. 13 June 1990.
47. Norman Habel. "The Form and Meaning of the Fall Narrative." Saint Louis: Concordia Seminary Print Shop, 1965. Cited by Burkee. 25.
48. Burkee. 31.
49. Stormer. 128. The reference was to Isaiah 7:14.
50. 1952 book. Anne Frank. The Diary of a Young Girl. Translated by B. M. Mooyaat-Doubleday. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.
1955 play. Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. The Diary of Anne Frank.
1959 film. The Diary of Anne Frank. (Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation.)
51. The same year, a dramatization of one of the 1947 U. S. military trials, Judgment at Nuremberg, won an Academy Award for Maximilian Schell.
52. Hannah Arendt. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press, 1963.
53. Wikipedia. "Hannah Arendt."
54. Burkee. 6.
55. Burkee. 9.
56. Warren Saffen. "A Lutheran Looks at the Jews." Arena 73. Spring 1965. Cited by Pahl. 265.
57. Burkee. 9.
58. Norman Habel. "My Story." His website. "I first became a controversial figure when I gave a exploratory paper on Genesis 3 to the council of presidents of The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. That paper became known as the Green Dragon. The controversy about how to interpret the Bible escalated until a Synod assembly declared that the way a majority of our faculty was reading the Bible was, in fact, an unknown heresy known as Gospel Reductionism!"
Sunday, June 14, 2020
Minnie Lee’s Logging Songs
Topic: Early Versions - Performers
What little history of African Americans who settled in Pamlico County, North Carolina, can be gleamed from genealogies and notes on early burials suggests those who moved to the county to work after the Civil War came from nearby communities or from coastal ones a bit farther north like Hyde County.
That’s consistent with the general migration premise that people don’t marry or move far from home, unless there’s a strong reason like the push of Jim Crow or the pull of jobs in Northern cities during and after World War I.
What’s unknown is the origins of the more migratory workers who came and went with railroad construction, logging camps, and saw mills. They left no kin, and only some would have left a trace in the Census for 1910. Then, since they left no descendants, [1] no one has looked for them, and Pamlico County is hardly the candidate for a major review of the demographic data by an ambitious graduate student.
Minnie Lee’s logging songs suggest non-local sources, but not transmission links. One she "heard in a logging camp" probably originated on the popular stage. The six-line verse described a man who asked another for a loan and was told his friend had no money because he’d lent it to others. The three-line chorus began "if I had it you could get it." [2]
The verse was heard from African Americans in Lowndes County, Alabama, around 1915 by A. H. Williamson. [3] The key line in the chorus was used in work songs heard by Howard Odum around Tupelo, Mississippi, [4] in 1905 and 1906. [5] He heard the phrase "If I had it you could git it, Baby mine" in one, [6] and "if I make it/you shall have it" [7] in another "free labor gang song."
The one Lee called "A Woodman’s Song" was actually the ubiquitous "Frog Went a Courting." [8] The last verse was described as "an intruder from the body of floating bird and animal jingles." [9] Its lines
"Jay bird died with the whoopingcough.
’Long come de bird with his tail bobbed off." [10]
appeared in another of her songs as:
"Jay bird died with the whoopingcough.
Black bird died with the colic;
’Long came a toad-frog with his tail bobbed off
And that broke up the frolic." [11]
The jaybird line was introduced in 1838 in "Jim Along Josey." Black-face artist Ned Harper sang it in a New York show, [12] then published sheet music in 1840. [13] The song entered popular tradition, [14] including in children’s summer camps, [15] and became almost as well known as "Frog."
The colic/frolic end rhyme was heard by Eber Perrow from "country whites" in Mississippi in 1908 [16] and in Pickens County, Alabama, from "a white man imitating a ‘Negro song’" by Ray Browne. [17] The rhyme with the phrase "end of the frolic" was reported from African Americans living in Marion County, South Carolina, by Robert Bass. [18]
In 1931, Bass noted:
"About twenty-five years ago Negro men from this section frequently went to Georgia to work in the turpentine woods, or to Virginia to work in the coal mines, or followed railroad construction camps and lumber camps all over this state." [19]
The historian also noted that during the Depression men were going, instead, to "large industrial centers like Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York, returning after a few years to live with their parents and families. This contact with other laborers teaches them more songs which they introduce into their home communities, varying them as they please." [20]
This comment suggested the presence of songs in Lee’s repertoire from Mississippi and Alabama did not mean men from those states worked in North Carolina. More likely, a series of overlapping economic spheres existed so men from the Deep South might meet men from someplace like Florida, who in turn might teach songs to friends who then went to Georgia where the process was repeated until someone from Pamlico County went south or met someone coming north.
End Notes
1. None appeared in the African-American genealogies compiled by Ray Credle [21] and Bill Smith. [22] Before 1920, they only mentioned Pamlico, Craven, and Hyde counties. Whether this was a class distinction — stable families didn’t mix with transients — or if the people who remained, who often were illiterate, simply lost touch with individuals who left is unknown.
Mark Wetherington found evidence of such bias among whites in Georgia who feared "life in company camps—marked as it was by violence, gambling, and drinking—would erode traditional values." He quoted letters received by a commissary clerk from a sister and a girl friend warning him associating with the impure. [23]
2. Minnie Lee. "Logging Song." Collected by Julian P. Boyd in Alliance, North Carolina, in 1926. The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. Durham: Duke University Press, 1952. 3:556–557.
3. A. H. Williamson manuscript. Reprinted by Newman I. White. American Negro Folk Songs. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928. 309.
4. Lynn Moss Sanders. Howard W. Odum’s Folklore Odyssey. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. 9.
5. Rupert B. Vance. "Odum, Howard Washington." NC Pedia website. 1991.
6. "Baby Mine." 385 in Howard W. Odum. "Folk-Song and Folk-Poetry as Found in the Secular Songs of the Southern Negroes (Concluded)." The Journal of American Folklore 24:351–396:1911.
7. "O Lawd, Minnie." 91–92 in Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson. Negro Workday Songs. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1926. 91.
8. Minnie Lee. "Woodman’s Song." Collected by Julian P. Boyd in Alliance, North Carolina, in 1926. Brown 3:161.
9. Henry M. Belden and Arthur Palmer Hudson. Headnote to Lee, "Woodman’s Song." Brown 3:161.
10. Lee, "Woodman’s Song."
11. Minnie Lee. "Jay Bird Died with the Whoopingcough." Collected by Julian P. Boyd in Alliance, North Carolina, in 1926. Brown 3:201.
12. Edward Le Roy Rice. Monarchs of Minstrelsy. New York City: Kenny Publishing Company 1911. 24. The play was The Free Nigger of New York.
13. Edward Harper and John N. Smith. "Jim Along Josey." New York: Firth and Hall, 1840. Available on Connecticut College website. The original line was: "A Bullfrog died wid de hooping cough."
14. White [24] found it was reprinted in the Negro Singer’s Own Book in 1846 [25] and in a Christy Minstrels songbook the next year. [26]
15. A version with patterned gestures was discussed in Camp Songs, Folk Songs.
16. Dr. Herrington manuscript. 1909. Reprinted by as "The Jaybird Died." 133 in E. C. Perrow. "Songs and Rhymes from the South." The Journal of American Folklore 26:123–173:1915.
17. "Jaybird Died With the Whooping Cough." 45 in Ray B. Browne. The Alabama Folk Lyric. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Press, 1979.
18. Robert Duncan Bass. "Negro Songs from the Pedee Country." The Journal of American Folklore 44:418–436:1931. 425. He also noted African Americans in Marion County, where he graduated from high school, [27] did not speak Gullah.
19. Bass. 418. Labor recruiters for West Virginia coal mines were mentioned in the post for 4 August 2019.
20. Bass. 419.
21. Ray Credle. "From Hyde County To Pamlico County." Ancestry website.
22. Sonny William Smith. "In Search Of Rodger 1710-2004." Genealogy website. 28 July 2004. Smith was mentioned in the posts for 8 December 2019 and 24 May 2020.
23. Mark V. Wetherington. The New South Comes to Wiregrass Georgia, 1860-1910. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1994. 131–132.
24. White. 242–243.
25. The Negro Singer’s Own Book. Philadelphia: Turner and Fisher, 1846.
26. Christy’s Nigga Songster. New York: T. W. Strong, 1847.
27. W. Eric Emerson. "Bass, Robert Duncan." South Carolina Encyclopedia website. 2 August 2016.
What little history of African Americans who settled in Pamlico County, North Carolina, can be gleamed from genealogies and notes on early burials suggests those who moved to the county to work after the Civil War came from nearby communities or from coastal ones a bit farther north like Hyde County.
That’s consistent with the general migration premise that people don’t marry or move far from home, unless there’s a strong reason like the push of Jim Crow or the pull of jobs in Northern cities during and after World War I.
What’s unknown is the origins of the more migratory workers who came and went with railroad construction, logging camps, and saw mills. They left no kin, and only some would have left a trace in the Census for 1910. Then, since they left no descendants, [1] no one has looked for them, and Pamlico County is hardly the candidate for a major review of the demographic data by an ambitious graduate student.
Minnie Lee’s logging songs suggest non-local sources, but not transmission links. One she "heard in a logging camp" probably originated on the popular stage. The six-line verse described a man who asked another for a loan and was told his friend had no money because he’d lent it to others. The three-line chorus began "if I had it you could get it." [2]
The verse was heard from African Americans in Lowndes County, Alabama, around 1915 by A. H. Williamson. [3] The key line in the chorus was used in work songs heard by Howard Odum around Tupelo, Mississippi, [4] in 1905 and 1906. [5] He heard the phrase "If I had it you could git it, Baby mine" in one, [6] and "if I make it/you shall have it" [7] in another "free labor gang song."
The one Lee called "A Woodman’s Song" was actually the ubiquitous "Frog Went a Courting." [8] The last verse was described as "an intruder from the body of floating bird and animal jingles." [9] Its lines
"Jay bird died with the whoopingcough.
’Long come de bird with his tail bobbed off." [10]
appeared in another of her songs as:
"Jay bird died with the whoopingcough.
Black bird died with the colic;
’Long came a toad-frog with his tail bobbed off
And that broke up the frolic." [11]
The jaybird line was introduced in 1838 in "Jim Along Josey." Black-face artist Ned Harper sang it in a New York show, [12] then published sheet music in 1840. [13] The song entered popular tradition, [14] including in children’s summer camps, [15] and became almost as well known as "Frog."
The colic/frolic end rhyme was heard by Eber Perrow from "country whites" in Mississippi in 1908 [16] and in Pickens County, Alabama, from "a white man imitating a ‘Negro song’" by Ray Browne. [17] The rhyme with the phrase "end of the frolic" was reported from African Americans living in Marion County, South Carolina, by Robert Bass. [18]
In 1931, Bass noted:
"About twenty-five years ago Negro men from this section frequently went to Georgia to work in the turpentine woods, or to Virginia to work in the coal mines, or followed railroad construction camps and lumber camps all over this state." [19]
The historian also noted that during the Depression men were going, instead, to "large industrial centers like Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York, returning after a few years to live with their parents and families. This contact with other laborers teaches them more songs which they introduce into their home communities, varying them as they please." [20]
This comment suggested the presence of songs in Lee’s repertoire from Mississippi and Alabama did not mean men from those states worked in North Carolina. More likely, a series of overlapping economic spheres existed so men from the Deep South might meet men from someplace like Florida, who in turn might teach songs to friends who then went to Georgia where the process was repeated until someone from Pamlico County went south or met someone coming north.
End Notes
1. None appeared in the African-American genealogies compiled by Ray Credle [21] and Bill Smith. [22] Before 1920, they only mentioned Pamlico, Craven, and Hyde counties. Whether this was a class distinction — stable families didn’t mix with transients — or if the people who remained, who often were illiterate, simply lost touch with individuals who left is unknown.
Mark Wetherington found evidence of such bias among whites in Georgia who feared "life in company camps—marked as it was by violence, gambling, and drinking—would erode traditional values." He quoted letters received by a commissary clerk from a sister and a girl friend warning him associating with the impure. [23]
2. Minnie Lee. "Logging Song." Collected by Julian P. Boyd in Alliance, North Carolina, in 1926. The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. Durham: Duke University Press, 1952. 3:556–557.
3. A. H. Williamson manuscript. Reprinted by Newman I. White. American Negro Folk Songs. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928. 309.
4. Lynn Moss Sanders. Howard W. Odum’s Folklore Odyssey. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. 9.
5. Rupert B. Vance. "Odum, Howard Washington." NC Pedia website. 1991.
6. "Baby Mine." 385 in Howard W. Odum. "Folk-Song and Folk-Poetry as Found in the Secular Songs of the Southern Negroes (Concluded)." The Journal of American Folklore 24:351–396:1911.
7. "O Lawd, Minnie." 91–92 in Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson. Negro Workday Songs. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1926. 91.
8. Minnie Lee. "Woodman’s Song." Collected by Julian P. Boyd in Alliance, North Carolina, in 1926. Brown 3:161.
9. Henry M. Belden and Arthur Palmer Hudson. Headnote to Lee, "Woodman’s Song." Brown 3:161.
10. Lee, "Woodman’s Song."
11. Minnie Lee. "Jay Bird Died with the Whoopingcough." Collected by Julian P. Boyd in Alliance, North Carolina, in 1926. Brown 3:201.
12. Edward Le Roy Rice. Monarchs of Minstrelsy. New York City: Kenny Publishing Company 1911. 24. The play was The Free Nigger of New York.
13. Edward Harper and John N. Smith. "Jim Along Josey." New York: Firth and Hall, 1840. Available on Connecticut College website. The original line was: "A Bullfrog died wid de hooping cough."
14. White [24] found it was reprinted in the Negro Singer’s Own Book in 1846 [25] and in a Christy Minstrels songbook the next year. [26]
15. A version with patterned gestures was discussed in Camp Songs, Folk Songs.
16. Dr. Herrington manuscript. 1909. Reprinted by as "The Jaybird Died." 133 in E. C. Perrow. "Songs and Rhymes from the South." The Journal of American Folklore 26:123–173:1915.
17. "Jaybird Died With the Whooping Cough." 45 in Ray B. Browne. The Alabama Folk Lyric. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Press, 1979.
18. Robert Duncan Bass. "Negro Songs from the Pedee Country." The Journal of American Folklore 44:418–436:1931. 425. He also noted African Americans in Marion County, where he graduated from high school, [27] did not speak Gullah.
19. Bass. 418. Labor recruiters for West Virginia coal mines were mentioned in the post for 4 August 2019.
20. Bass. 419.
21. Ray Credle. "From Hyde County To Pamlico County." Ancestry website.
22. Sonny William Smith. "In Search Of Rodger 1710-2004." Genealogy website. 28 July 2004. Smith was mentioned in the posts for 8 December 2019 and 24 May 2020.
23. Mark V. Wetherington. The New South Comes to Wiregrass Georgia, 1860-1910. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1994. 131–132.
24. White. 242–243.
25. The Negro Singer’s Own Book. Philadelphia: Turner and Fisher, 1846.
26. Christy’s Nigga Songster. New York: T. W. Strong, 1847.
27. W. Eric Emerson. "Bass, Robert Duncan." South Carolina Encyclopedia website. 2 August 2016.
Sunday, June 7, 2020
Pamlico County Industrial Logging
Topic: Early Versions - Performers
Levi Branson’s survey of Pamlico County, North Carolina, which was discussed in the post for 31 May 2020, was conducted during the depression that followed the Panic of 1893. The state agriculture department did another in 1900, a few years after the national economy revived. [1] Two changes had occurred, beyond the usual ones in small businesses.
In 1896, Arthur Midyett made barrels; in 1900 there were four barrel makers. One consequence of rail and steamer lines was the shipping time between Pamlico Sound and New York had dropped dramatically. Local farmers were able to grow produce for urban markets that required shipping containers.
The more important change was the appearance of Blades Lumber Company in Oriental. James Blades had begun, like the men in Pamlico County, with a general store. In 1877, he, his uncle, and brother bought grist and saw mills. Next, they acquired timber land. [2]
Once involved in the lumber industry, Blades made the transition to the next level of organization. In 1879 he traveled through the South looking for likely locations, and settled on Bath, North Carolina, where he bought timber land and leased a mill site. [3]
After he exhausted that timber, [4] Blades leased a mill south of New Bern at Cherry Point, and bought timber land to the east in 1886. Two years later, he moved his headquarters to Elizabeth City, [5] mentioned in the post for 31 May 2020.
By 1890, Blades had seven saw mills in the New Bern area, [6] and the city had become the center of North Carolina’s lumber trade. [7]
During the panic of 1893, Blades reincorporated, [8] while James Bryan evicted African Americans living on the waterfront in James City, with the aid of the state militia. [9] Bryan forced the others to sign three-year leases that impoverished the farmers. [10] He then rented waterfront lots to Blades and others. [11]
In 1903, Blades moved his headquarters to New Bern, and three years later sold the business to John L. Roper. [12] In the interim, Pamlico County’s economy expanded. In 1904, it had two barrel manufacturers, one box company, one shingles mill, eight small independent saw mills, and a cannery. [13] Blades had been joined by the Bayboro Land and Lumber Company of Wilmington, North Carolina. [14]
Bryan’s father and uncle had been lawyers who specialized in collecting debts. [15] In 1850, his father owned real estate valued at $8,000 [16] and 13 slaves, but declared no agricultural or industrial products to census takers. [17] That suggests he mainly had domestic servants, and perhaps rented slaves out to others.
Bryan spent the Civil War on the staffs of several generals and North Carolina’s Confederate governor. [18] After he returned to civilian life in 1865, he became involved with a sawmill between New Bern and Vanceboro, but during the depression following the Panic of 1873, Eileen Parris said, he decided he could earn more with less risk by leasing the mill to others. [19]
He joined the board of directors of the state-owned Atlantic and North Carolina railroad in 1881. During his tenure as president from1899 to 1904, he fired the African-American employees. [20]
The Norfolk and Southern, mentioned in the post for 31 May 2020, was the main rival for New Bern’s rail traffic through its shipping line. In 1901, Bryan began promoting an alternative line across the Pamlico peninsula to link New Bern with an Atlantic terminal, [21] and thus bypass the Norfolk.
Construction was slow, and financing problematic. When it finally reached Alliance in 1906, the Norfolk bought it and built a branch line down to Oriental. [22] It purchased Roper’s lumber company the same year. [23]
Railroad 17 is the Atlantic Coast Line to Weldon.
Railroad 135 is the Norfolk Southern north to Elizabeth City and west to Raleigh.
It didn’t take long for industrial logging to clear the timber. Roper’s Oriental mill burned in 1912. No repairs were made after a 1913 hurricane destroyed the town’s wharf and the harbor improvements [24] made by the federal government in 1879. [25]
At least some of the men who worked for Blades, and later Roper, were local. In 1890, Alonza Dixon went from Vanceboro to New Bern to work as a sawyer for Blades. Once he had the skills he worked for other mills in New Bern and Dover, North Carolina. [26]
Local African Americans must also have found jobs in the logging camps and mills. Charles Lorenzo Credle moved from Hyde County to Pamlico County where he was a day laborer in 1900. In 1910, he was "a wood cutter in the woods." In 1920, he was a farmer, and in 1930 a farm laborer. [27]
Family cemeteries began appearing the year Norfolk became active in Pamlico County. Burials were made in Oriental in 1906 [28] and 1908, [29] in Bayboro in 1910, [30] in Stonewall in 1911, [31] in Grantsboro in 1912, [32] and in Vandemere in 1914. [33]
Except for Oriental, these were all in areas with arable land. The land to the east of the pocosin, which lay north and west of Oriental, was below the escarpment mentioned in the post for 19 January 2020. The soil was too thin for farming. At best it supported potatoes, which first were introduced in 1889. [34]
The existence of surviving burials indicates some African-American men were able to amass enough hard currency to acquire clear titles. Others, Black and white, were less fortunate. They could only begin with rented land. In 1916, Anthony Avery signed a contract with Lupton Company to grow potatoes with seed and fertilizer provided by the company, in return for half the proceeds. After the potatoes were packed in barrels provided by Lupton and taken to the rail station, Samuel Ferebee seized the lot to cover the rent Avery owed him for the land. [35]
The local labor pool, even after Bryan’s evictions, probably wasn’t enough to support the demands of Blades in New Bern. Part of the labor force, including its most skilled men, may have been migratory, coming for a few years from some other lumber town, then moving on before they were captured by the census.
In 1904, two mills, Blades and Munger and Bennett, paid the bond for nine African Americans arrested in New Bern, because they "were needed as operatives at the mills." The cost was set at $2,400. [36] In September 2019, that would have been $69,184.18. [37] One has to assume the men were skilled laborers to be worth that much money.
The judge was Bryan’s first cousin, [38] Henry Ravenscroft Bryan. [39] When the case was heard, the state didn’t send a representative for the prosecution. Since representatives from the lumber companies said they would pay the charges, only skeletal information was provided, certainly not enough to explain why twenty men would have attacked a white watchman with an axe and iron pipe, and not been prosecuted.
Information on Pamlico County’s labor force is even scarcer than New Bern. The distribution of churches suggested the commercial center at Oriental attracted AME Zion Methodists, perhaps from James City, while the agricultural area to the north was settled by Missionary Baptists, probably from Hyde County.
Red = Missionary Baptist
Black = AME Zion
Blue = Disciples of Christ
All that’s known for sure is the population increased by 23.9% between 1900 and 1910, when the logging camps and saw mills were busy, and fell by 9.1% before 1920, when they had reduced operations. The population returned to its pre-logging levels when it increased by 13% between 1880 and 1890, 12.6% between 1890 and 1900, and 12.6% between 1900 and 1920. [40]
Roper closed all its operations in 1921. [41] The Oriental mill was sold to M. J. Connolly, who had worked for Oriental Lumber [42] before it closed in 1920. [43] He said he would "continue to handle the output of several small mills." [44] Roper’s timber land eventually was acquired by Weyerhaeuser. [45]
Map
1. Selection from "North Carolina." Hammond’s Illustrated Library World Atlas. New York: C. S. Hammond and Company, 1948. 78.
2. Distribution of churches in Pamlico County. Base map from United States Census. Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Ruhrfisch on 4 July 2007.
End Notes
Cemetery information is from Find a Grave website.
1. North Carolina. Commissioner of Agriculture. Report for 1900. Raleigh: Edwards and Broughton, 1901. 430–431.
2. Gertrude S. Carraway. "Blades, James Bishop." NC Pedia website. 1979.
3. Carraway, Blades.
4. Louis G. May. "The Story of Beaufort County’s Lumber Industry." 329–352 in Washington and the Pamlico. Edited by Ursula Fogleman Loy and Pauline Marion Worthy. Raleigh: Edwards and Broughton, 1976. 332.
5. Carraway, Blades.
6. Alan D. Watson. A History of New Bern and Craven County. New Bern: Tyron Palace Commission, 1987. 524.
7. Wikipedia. "New Bern."
8. Vina Hutchinson Farmer. New Bern. Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2014. 110.
9. Joe A. Mobley. James City. Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, Division of Archives and History, 1981. 81. James City and the eviction were mentioned in post for 15 March 2020.
10. Mobley, James City. 84.
11. Mobley, James City. 85.
12. Carraway, Blades.
13. "Miscellaneous Mills." North Carolina State Board of Agriculture. The Bulletin 26:9–35:8 August 1905. 27.
14. Item in "Business Pointers." The New York Lumber Trade Journal 36:27:15 February 1904.
15. L. Eileen Parris. "Bryan Family Papers, 1704-1940." University of North Carolina, Wilson Library website. August 1991.
16. On 13 September 2019, that real estate was worth $263,136.41. [46]
17. United States Census. 1850. Abstracted by R. Allen Humphrey. 2001.
18. Clement Anselm Evans. Confederate Military History. Atlanta: Confederate Publishing Company, 1899. 407–409. 408. He was on the staff of Lawrence Branch from August 1861 until he was killed 17 September 1862, and then on the staff of his successor, James B. Lane. After the surrender, he joined the staff of Zebulon Vance. Vanceboro was named for him years later.
19. Parris.
20. Parris.
21. Parris.
22. Joe A. Mobley. Pamlico County. Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1991. 79.
23. May. 346.
24. Mobley, Pamlico. 80.
25. Watson. 530. The government worked on the Neuse and Trent rivers.
26. "Alonza S. Dixon." The [Kinston, North Carolina] Free Press, 1906 Industrial issue. Uploaded to US Gen Web website as "Lenoir County, NC - Industrial Issue - 1906" by Allen Barwick.
27. J.D. Larimore. "Charles Lorenzo Credle." Find a Grave website. 8 April 2017.
28. The earliest burial in the Harper Family Cemetery was Laura C. Harper Sanders. Her husband was born in Hyde County. [47]
29. The earliest burial in the Perkins Cemetery was Edward Ocie Hudson.
30. The earliest burial in the McKinley Dudley Family Cemetery was Ellen N. Davis Dudley. She was born in Lenoir County. [48] In 1880, her husband was a farm hand. In 1900 he was a farmer and their son was working in a barrel factory. [49]
31. The earliest burial in the Stonewall Cemetery was Harriett McCallison Dunbar. Her husband was born in Tyrrell County, [50] joined the Union army in New Bern in 1863, and was granted land in Bayboro for his military service. [51]
32. The earliest burial in the Keystown Cemetery was John Keys. His father was from Edenton in Chowan County. [52] W. A. Keys was mentioned in the post for 31 May 2020.
33. The earliest burial in the Mesic Community Memorial Cemetery was Alonzo Harrell Credle, infant son of Charles Lorenzo Credle and Pauline Kenyon. [53]
34. John T. Miller and Arthur E. Taylor. United States Department of Agriculture. Bureau of Chemistry and Soils. Soil Survey of Pamlico County, North Carolina. Washington: Government Printing Office, August 1937. 5. In Michigan, lumber companies also sold off cutover pine land for farms; most could only grow potatoes on the thin soil, and many failed at that. [54]
35. North Carolina. "Upton v. Ferebee" 1 October 1919. Case Text website. The name was given as L. J. Upton Co. I could find no trace of Uptons in Pamlico County, but Oriental Lumber Company acquired its land from E. W. Lupton. [55] This was the same Ferebee who was mentioned in the post for 31 May 2020 as the agent for Pamlico Lumber in Stonewell. Joshua Dean’s foreclosures were mentioned in the post for 24 May 2020.
36. "Nine Negroes Appear Before Judge Bryan on Charge of Riot and Assault." New Berne Weekly Journal. 5 April 1904. 1. Uploaded to the web by bwspruill on 9 April 2015. The headline said nine; twenty names appeared in the arrest warrant. I have no idea if this event was unusual or typical. The person who posted the news story may have been more interested in the identity of one of the men than in the implications of the incident for understanding race relations in the city at the time.
37. Alioth Finance. 13 September 2019.
38. Gertrude S. Carraway. "Bryan, Henry Ravenscroft." NC Pedia website. 1979.
39. The newspaper simply said Judge Bryan. Henry Ravenscroft Bryan was the judge for New Bern in 1904. [56]
40. United States Census. Reprinted by Wikipedia. "Pamlico County, North Carolina."
41. May. 346.
42. "New Carolina Operation." The Southern Lumberman 104:45:31 December 1921. Someone named Michael J. Connelly, not Connolly, was living in New Bern in 1940. He had been born about 1886 in Massachusetts. [57]
43. Item. The Beaufort [North Carolina] News. 15 July 1920. 1.
44. Southern Lumberman.
45. Jack Temple Kirby. Poquosin. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995. 209.
46. "Inflation Calculator" provided online by Alioth Finance of Dehradun, Uttarakhand in India with data valid for 13 September 2019.
47. David A. French. "William M. Sanders." Find a Grave website. 8 February 2018.
48. J.D. Larimore. "Ellen N. Davis Dudley." Find a Grave website. 31 March 2017.
49. J.D. Larimore. "Daniel Dudley, Sr." Find a Grave website. 31 March 2017.
50. Ray Credle. "Robert Dunbar." Find a Grave website. 18 December 2013.
51. Ray Credle. "From Hyde County To Pamlico County." Ancestry website. "Robert Dunbar" page.
52. Sandi Danielle. "John Keys." Find a Grave website. 4 August 2017.
Find a Grave website. 8 April 2017.
54. "Agriculture: Early Beginnings." Michigan State University. Department of Geography website.
55. North Carolina. General Assembly. "An Act To Incorporate the Town of Oriental in Pamlico County." 1899.
56. New Bern, N. C. Directory 1904-1905. Richmond, Virginia: Hill Directory Company, 1904.
57. "Michael J Connelly in the 1940 Census." Ancestry website.
Levi Branson’s survey of Pamlico County, North Carolina, which was discussed in the post for 31 May 2020, was conducted during the depression that followed the Panic of 1893. The state agriculture department did another in 1900, a few years after the national economy revived. [1] Two changes had occurred, beyond the usual ones in small businesses.
In 1896, Arthur Midyett made barrels; in 1900 there were four barrel makers. One consequence of rail and steamer lines was the shipping time between Pamlico Sound and New York had dropped dramatically. Local farmers were able to grow produce for urban markets that required shipping containers.
The more important change was the appearance of Blades Lumber Company in Oriental. James Blades had begun, like the men in Pamlico County, with a general store. In 1877, he, his uncle, and brother bought grist and saw mills. Next, they acquired timber land. [2]
Once involved in the lumber industry, Blades made the transition to the next level of organization. In 1879 he traveled through the South looking for likely locations, and settled on Bath, North Carolina, where he bought timber land and leased a mill site. [3]
After he exhausted that timber, [4] Blades leased a mill south of New Bern at Cherry Point, and bought timber land to the east in 1886. Two years later, he moved his headquarters to Elizabeth City, [5] mentioned in the post for 31 May 2020.
By 1890, Blades had seven saw mills in the New Bern area, [6] and the city had become the center of North Carolina’s lumber trade. [7]
During the panic of 1893, Blades reincorporated, [8] while James Bryan evicted African Americans living on the waterfront in James City, with the aid of the state militia. [9] Bryan forced the others to sign three-year leases that impoverished the farmers. [10] He then rented waterfront lots to Blades and others. [11]
In 1903, Blades moved his headquarters to New Bern, and three years later sold the business to John L. Roper. [12] In the interim, Pamlico County’s economy expanded. In 1904, it had two barrel manufacturers, one box company, one shingles mill, eight small independent saw mills, and a cannery. [13] Blades had been joined by the Bayboro Land and Lumber Company of Wilmington, North Carolina. [14]
Bryan’s father and uncle had been lawyers who specialized in collecting debts. [15] In 1850, his father owned real estate valued at $8,000 [16] and 13 slaves, but declared no agricultural or industrial products to census takers. [17] That suggests he mainly had domestic servants, and perhaps rented slaves out to others.
Bryan spent the Civil War on the staffs of several generals and North Carolina’s Confederate governor. [18] After he returned to civilian life in 1865, he became involved with a sawmill between New Bern and Vanceboro, but during the depression following the Panic of 1873, Eileen Parris said, he decided he could earn more with less risk by leasing the mill to others. [19]
He joined the board of directors of the state-owned Atlantic and North Carolina railroad in 1881. During his tenure as president from1899 to 1904, he fired the African-American employees. [20]
The Norfolk and Southern, mentioned in the post for 31 May 2020, was the main rival for New Bern’s rail traffic through its shipping line. In 1901, Bryan began promoting an alternative line across the Pamlico peninsula to link New Bern with an Atlantic terminal, [21] and thus bypass the Norfolk.
Construction was slow, and financing problematic. When it finally reached Alliance in 1906, the Norfolk bought it and built a branch line down to Oriental. [22] It purchased Roper’s lumber company the same year. [23]
Railroad 135 is the Norfolk Southern north to Elizabeth City and west to Raleigh.
It didn’t take long for industrial logging to clear the timber. Roper’s Oriental mill burned in 1912. No repairs were made after a 1913 hurricane destroyed the town’s wharf and the harbor improvements [24] made by the federal government in 1879. [25]
At least some of the men who worked for Blades, and later Roper, were local. In 1890, Alonza Dixon went from Vanceboro to New Bern to work as a sawyer for Blades. Once he had the skills he worked for other mills in New Bern and Dover, North Carolina. [26]
Local African Americans must also have found jobs in the logging camps and mills. Charles Lorenzo Credle moved from Hyde County to Pamlico County where he was a day laborer in 1900. In 1910, he was "a wood cutter in the woods." In 1920, he was a farmer, and in 1930 a farm laborer. [27]
Family cemeteries began appearing the year Norfolk became active in Pamlico County. Burials were made in Oriental in 1906 [28] and 1908, [29] in Bayboro in 1910, [30] in Stonewall in 1911, [31] in Grantsboro in 1912, [32] and in Vandemere in 1914. [33]
Except for Oriental, these were all in areas with arable land. The land to the east of the pocosin, which lay north and west of Oriental, was below the escarpment mentioned in the post for 19 January 2020. The soil was too thin for farming. At best it supported potatoes, which first were introduced in 1889. [34]
The existence of surviving burials indicates some African-American men were able to amass enough hard currency to acquire clear titles. Others, Black and white, were less fortunate. They could only begin with rented land. In 1916, Anthony Avery signed a contract with Lupton Company to grow potatoes with seed and fertilizer provided by the company, in return for half the proceeds. After the potatoes were packed in barrels provided by Lupton and taken to the rail station, Samuel Ferebee seized the lot to cover the rent Avery owed him for the land. [35]
The local labor pool, even after Bryan’s evictions, probably wasn’t enough to support the demands of Blades in New Bern. Part of the labor force, including its most skilled men, may have been migratory, coming for a few years from some other lumber town, then moving on before they were captured by the census.
In 1904, two mills, Blades and Munger and Bennett, paid the bond for nine African Americans arrested in New Bern, because they "were needed as operatives at the mills." The cost was set at $2,400. [36] In September 2019, that would have been $69,184.18. [37] One has to assume the men were skilled laborers to be worth that much money.
The judge was Bryan’s first cousin, [38] Henry Ravenscroft Bryan. [39] When the case was heard, the state didn’t send a representative for the prosecution. Since representatives from the lumber companies said they would pay the charges, only skeletal information was provided, certainly not enough to explain why twenty men would have attacked a white watchman with an axe and iron pipe, and not been prosecuted.
Information on Pamlico County’s labor force is even scarcer than New Bern. The distribution of churches suggested the commercial center at Oriental attracted AME Zion Methodists, perhaps from James City, while the agricultural area to the north was settled by Missionary Baptists, probably from Hyde County.
Black = AME Zion
Blue = Disciples of Christ
All that’s known for sure is the population increased by 23.9% between 1900 and 1910, when the logging camps and saw mills were busy, and fell by 9.1% before 1920, when they had reduced operations. The population returned to its pre-logging levels when it increased by 13% between 1880 and 1890, 12.6% between 1890 and 1900, and 12.6% between 1900 and 1920. [40]
Roper closed all its operations in 1921. [41] The Oriental mill was sold to M. J. Connolly, who had worked for Oriental Lumber [42] before it closed in 1920. [43] He said he would "continue to handle the output of several small mills." [44] Roper’s timber land eventually was acquired by Weyerhaeuser. [45]
Map
1. Selection from "North Carolina." Hammond’s Illustrated Library World Atlas. New York: C. S. Hammond and Company, 1948. 78.
2. Distribution of churches in Pamlico County. Base map from United States Census. Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Ruhrfisch on 4 July 2007.
End Notes
Cemetery information is from Find a Grave website.
1. North Carolina. Commissioner of Agriculture. Report for 1900. Raleigh: Edwards and Broughton, 1901. 430–431.
2. Gertrude S. Carraway. "Blades, James Bishop." NC Pedia website. 1979.
3. Carraway, Blades.
4. Louis G. May. "The Story of Beaufort County’s Lumber Industry." 329–352 in Washington and the Pamlico. Edited by Ursula Fogleman Loy and Pauline Marion Worthy. Raleigh: Edwards and Broughton, 1976. 332.
5. Carraway, Blades.
6. Alan D. Watson. A History of New Bern and Craven County. New Bern: Tyron Palace Commission, 1987. 524.
7. Wikipedia. "New Bern."
8. Vina Hutchinson Farmer. New Bern. Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2014. 110.
9. Joe A. Mobley. James City. Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, Division of Archives and History, 1981. 81. James City and the eviction were mentioned in post for 15 March 2020.
10. Mobley, James City. 84.
11. Mobley, James City. 85.
12. Carraway, Blades.
13. "Miscellaneous Mills." North Carolina State Board of Agriculture. The Bulletin 26:9–35:8 August 1905. 27.
14. Item in "Business Pointers." The New York Lumber Trade Journal 36:27:15 February 1904.
15. L. Eileen Parris. "Bryan Family Papers, 1704-1940." University of North Carolina, Wilson Library website. August 1991.
16. On 13 September 2019, that real estate was worth $263,136.41. [46]
17. United States Census. 1850. Abstracted by R. Allen Humphrey. 2001.
18. Clement Anselm Evans. Confederate Military History. Atlanta: Confederate Publishing Company, 1899. 407–409. 408. He was on the staff of Lawrence Branch from August 1861 until he was killed 17 September 1862, and then on the staff of his successor, James B. Lane. After the surrender, he joined the staff of Zebulon Vance. Vanceboro was named for him years later.
19. Parris.
20. Parris.
21. Parris.
22. Joe A. Mobley. Pamlico County. Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1991. 79.
23. May. 346.
24. Mobley, Pamlico. 80.
25. Watson. 530. The government worked on the Neuse and Trent rivers.
26. "Alonza S. Dixon." The [Kinston, North Carolina] Free Press, 1906 Industrial issue. Uploaded to US Gen Web website as "Lenoir County, NC - Industrial Issue - 1906" by Allen Barwick.
27. J.D. Larimore. "Charles Lorenzo Credle." Find a Grave website. 8 April 2017.
28. The earliest burial in the Harper Family Cemetery was Laura C. Harper Sanders. Her husband was born in Hyde County. [47]
29. The earliest burial in the Perkins Cemetery was Edward Ocie Hudson.
30. The earliest burial in the McKinley Dudley Family Cemetery was Ellen N. Davis Dudley. She was born in Lenoir County. [48] In 1880, her husband was a farm hand. In 1900 he was a farmer and their son was working in a barrel factory. [49]
31. The earliest burial in the Stonewall Cemetery was Harriett McCallison Dunbar. Her husband was born in Tyrrell County, [50] joined the Union army in New Bern in 1863, and was granted land in Bayboro for his military service. [51]
32. The earliest burial in the Keystown Cemetery was John Keys. His father was from Edenton in Chowan County. [52] W. A. Keys was mentioned in the post for 31 May 2020.
33. The earliest burial in the Mesic Community Memorial Cemetery was Alonzo Harrell Credle, infant son of Charles Lorenzo Credle and Pauline Kenyon. [53]
34. John T. Miller and Arthur E. Taylor. United States Department of Agriculture. Bureau of Chemistry and Soils. Soil Survey of Pamlico County, North Carolina. Washington: Government Printing Office, August 1937. 5. In Michigan, lumber companies also sold off cutover pine land for farms; most could only grow potatoes on the thin soil, and many failed at that. [54]
35. North Carolina. "Upton v. Ferebee" 1 October 1919. Case Text website. The name was given as L. J. Upton Co. I could find no trace of Uptons in Pamlico County, but Oriental Lumber Company acquired its land from E. W. Lupton. [55] This was the same Ferebee who was mentioned in the post for 31 May 2020 as the agent for Pamlico Lumber in Stonewell. Joshua Dean’s foreclosures were mentioned in the post for 24 May 2020.
36. "Nine Negroes Appear Before Judge Bryan on Charge of Riot and Assault." New Berne Weekly Journal. 5 April 1904. 1. Uploaded to the web by bwspruill on 9 April 2015. The headline said nine; twenty names appeared in the arrest warrant. I have no idea if this event was unusual or typical. The person who posted the news story may have been more interested in the identity of one of the men than in the implications of the incident for understanding race relations in the city at the time.
37. Alioth Finance. 13 September 2019.
38. Gertrude S. Carraway. "Bryan, Henry Ravenscroft." NC Pedia website. 1979.
39. The newspaper simply said Judge Bryan. Henry Ravenscroft Bryan was the judge for New Bern in 1904. [56]
40. United States Census. Reprinted by Wikipedia. "Pamlico County, North Carolina."
41. May. 346.
42. "New Carolina Operation." The Southern Lumberman 104:45:31 December 1921. Someone named Michael J. Connelly, not Connolly, was living in New Bern in 1940. He had been born about 1886 in Massachusetts. [57]
43. Item. The Beaufort [North Carolina] News. 15 July 1920. 1.
44. Southern Lumberman.
45. Jack Temple Kirby. Poquosin. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995. 209.
46. "Inflation Calculator" provided online by Alioth Finance of Dehradun, Uttarakhand in India with data valid for 13 September 2019.
47. David A. French. "William M. Sanders." Find a Grave website. 8 February 2018.
48. J.D. Larimore. "Ellen N. Davis Dudley." Find a Grave website. 31 March 2017.
49. J.D. Larimore. "Daniel Dudley, Sr." Find a Grave website. 31 March 2017.
50. Ray Credle. "Robert Dunbar." Find a Grave website. 18 December 2013.
51. Ray Credle. "From Hyde County To Pamlico County." Ancestry website. "Robert Dunbar" page.
52. Sandi Danielle. "John Keys." Find a Grave website. 4 August 2017.
Find a Grave website. 8 April 2017.
54. "Agriculture: Early Beginnings." Michigan State University. Department of Geography website.
55. North Carolina. General Assembly. "An Act To Incorporate the Town of Oriental in Pamlico County." 1899.
56. New Bern, N. C. Directory 1904-1905. Richmond, Virginia: Hill Directory Company, 1904.
57. "Michael J Connelly in the 1940 Census." Ancestry website.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)