Bethel Jubilee Quartet Style

Topic: Early Versions
The Bethel Jubilee Quartet recorded 12 songs for Victor Talking Machine.  The Wiseman Quartet and Wiseman Sextet recorded 21 for Homer Rodeheaver’s Rainbow Records, of which fourteen were not recorded by Victor.  In addition, Thomas Wiseman provided versions of an additional 33 songs for the collection of spirituals issued by Rodeheaver’s publishing company.  The total of 59 songs is a large slice of any individual or community’s repertoire.

Lives of African Americans were changing in the years before World War I, and the Bethel AME church reflected the mixture of old and new that existed in every community.  Horace Boyer noted jubilee quartet singers did exchange their religious roots for European sensibilities, and “it was not long before these [jubilee] quartets began borrowing from the singing style of the Pentecostal/Holiness singers.” [1]

Rhythmic accents persisted, especially with spirituals, according to Boyer.  The Silver Leaf Quartet of Norfolk, Virginia, included harmonies found in popular music, and converted the upper voice into a falsetto. [2]

Recordings by the Bethel groups varied in content and style.  Most of the recordings made for Victor by the all-male quartet were influenced by popular music.  Most featured soloists, some in the familiar call-response pattern. [3]  Many featured hummed backgrounds. [4]  Although it was an a capella group, Thomas Wiseman incorporated elements of accompanied songs by singing a bass connecting line in the pauses between verses. [5]

The sextet who recorded for Rainbow Records used a female soloist.  Chris Smith noted she was a trained singer, [6] who did not use the falsetto embellishments that later would be associated with quartet singing.  However, she did sing a much higher line on “I Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray.”

The general perception that jubilee quartets favored slow tempos may have been a matter of technology. [7]  Both the recording and playback speeds varied before the use of electricity.  When Richard Martin was preparing to reissue recordings by the Fisk quartet, he found “the recommended speeds as they applied made this material sound like it was funeral music.”  That did not accord with “what we knew about what the group was supposed to sound like,” and so he experimented with the old recordings to reproduce what he thought was the intended sound. [8]

The tempos on the Wiseman CD produced by Johnny Parth generally were moderate, with a few that were more rhythmic. [9]  The groups usually sang the last line more slowly, with gave them a chance to display their harmonic abilities.  The chords were broader on “Hush! Somebody’s Calling My Name.”  The quartet moved from note to note on a syllable in “You Must Come In At The Door.”  The slower last line also allowed the group to alter the length of a familiar arrangement to fit the demands of the matrix size.

Four of the six songs released by Victor [10] were associated with singers from Fisk University, [11] Tuskegee Institute, [12] or Utica Institute. [13]  Six of the songs recorded only for Rainbow came from the same nationalized repertoire. [14]  Similarly, the Columbia, South Carolina, group shared four of their recorded songs with Virginia’s Hampton Institute, [15] which drew some of its students from South Carolina and Georgia. [16]

Rodeheaver and Wiseman shared an interest in documenting the older religious music of the South, so Rodeheaver illustrated lining out with “Shine on Me.”  He introduced another, “Stay Away,” by telling listeners “you will hear it here with its quaint minor and all the peculiar turns, just as you would hear it from one of the most primitive congregations of the real South.” [17]

Rodeheaver did more than introduce songs; he sang with the group, and released some he released with himself listed as soloist.  Uncle Dave Lewis has posted their versions of “Walk in Jerusalem, Just like John” and “The Gospel Train” on YouTube.

Like most artifacts of the border between races, these recordings showed the deference African Americans gave whites who provided them with opportunities.  With him they used slower tempos and more hummed accompaniments. [18]  Rodeheaver was so well-known that he risked little in breaking the taboo against Black and whites working in the same studio at the same time, especially since he owned the studio.

Rodeheaver’s published collection of Wiseman’s songs reflects a different filter.  The man who did the transcriptions was no Béla Bartók intent on recording the exact tones and rhythms of traditional music.  John Bunyan Herbert was a homeopathic physician [19] who learned his music theory from George Root, and specialized in temperance songs. [20]

No matter his intentions, Herbert only would have been able to recognize tones in the western scale; if he did hear something else, he would have noted its nearest equivalent.  Whenever possible, he arranged four parts that changed with each syllable.

However, Herbert was not dogmatic.  When songs used a call-response or solo-group form, he only showed parts where appropriate.  He indicated interjections in some, [21] and transcribed Wiseman’s connecting bass line on “Somebody’s Buried in the Graveyard” and “Hush! Somebody’s Calling My Name.”  Incidentally, they also are the only songs that use the pronoun “somebody.”

The published texts were relatively free of dialect: there was only the occasional use of /d/ for /t/ as in “de” for “the.”  “Gwine” sometimes was used for “going” and terminal consonants were inconsistently omitted. [22]

Once one looks beyond Herbert’s presentation, one sees the songs fit within a Christian context, but few address Methodists’ concerns with our sinful condition and the significance of Christ’s death.  In fact, the word “Christ” does not appear, and a deity is named in only 22 of the 45 songs.  Then, it is “Lord” (11), “Jesus” (9), or “God” (2).

The lyrics do not support the popular view that African Americans retold Bible stories in simplified ways, a stereotype reinforced a few years later with the Broadway play The Green Pastures. [23]  Daniel is mentioned in “Where is Good Ole Daniel?,” “On Dere Knees,” and “Peter on the Sea.”  Jonah appears in “I Know I Have Another Building” with Moses and Sampson, and in “Peter on the Sea.”

For that matter, few of the songs published by Rodeheaver have any narrative content.  Repetition of phrases appears in verses and choruses that use refrains at the end of each line, while entire lines are repeated in songs that use the AAAB or AAB line-repetition format.  Incremental repetition between verses is used in eight: two use the family, two list different types of proscribed behavior, one does both, and one itemizes actions in heaven.

The most common topic is Heaven.  For someone like Rodeheaver, who had listened to Billy Sunday’s describe it in figurative language, this would have sounded familiar.  However, one suspects that “going to heaven” became a conventional expression that referred to joining the spirit world or realm of the ancestors.  While the imagery was the similar enough to cross the color line, the emotional appeal was different.

The nagging question is why Wiseman did not include all the songs the Bethel Jubilee Quartet recorded for Victor that were not released.  “Ride Up in the Chariot” had been published by the Fisk Quartet in the 1881, [24] but “He Got Away to Heaven” and “Now Is the Needy Time” were unique.  It is possible they knew when they left Camden that Victor would not release them, and took that as some kind of judgement of what was acceptable.  One wonders if the group became more reserved after the encounter with the Victor technicians, and decided some songs simply should not be revealed to whites.

Availability
CD: Wiseman Sextette/Quartet.  Vienna: Document Records DOCD-5520.  1997.  Compiled and produced by Johnny Parth.

Book: Rodeheaver’s Negro Spirituals.  Chicago: The Rodeheaver Company, no date; everything was copyrighted in 1923.  It has been reprinted many times, including after the copyrights were renewed in 1951, but no changes have been made to the content.

Video: “Uncle Dave Lewis presents Rainbow 1092: Homer Rodeheaver & and the Wiseman Sextet.”  Uploaded to YouTube 2 January 2014.

Graphics
Wiseman’s picture appears on the Photos C tab.

End Notes
1.  Horace Clarence Boyer.  How Sweet the Sound.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.  30.

2.  Boyer.  31.

3.  Call-response relationships appear in “You Must Come In At The Door” and “Golden Slippers.”  They recorded the latter as “What Kind of Shoes Are You Going to Wear” for Rainbow.  It had been popularized by the Fisk Quartet.

4.  Examples on humming include “Witness” and “You Better Run.”

5.  Examples of connecting lines include “You Better Run” and “Ain’t It a Shame To Work On Sunday.”

6.  Chris Smith.  Liner notes Wiseman Sextette/Quartet.

7.  Sergio Daniel Ospina Romero.  “Recording Studios on Tour: the Expeditions of the Victor Talking Machine Company Through Latin America, 1903-1926.”  PhD dissertation.  Cornell University, May 2019.  150.  His sources were:

George Brock-Nannestad.  “The Objective Basis for the Production of High Quality Transfers from Pre-1925 Sound Recordings.”  Audio Engineering Society, 1997, 1–29.

Daniel Leech-Wilkinson.  The Changing Sound of Music: Approaches to Studying Recorded Musical Performance.  London: CHARM, 2009, chapter 3, paragraph 14.

8.  Jeff Bossert.  “At Fisk University, A Tradition Of Spirituals.”  National Public Radio website, 25 February 2011.

9.  Examples of rhythmic singing include “Lord, I Can’t Stay Away,” “Do You Think I’ll Make a Soldier” and “Hush, Somebody’s Calling My Name.”  The existing recording technology could not handle drums, [25] but hand claps were used on “Old Time Religion.”

10.  “Hard Trials” (F, T),  “Hush!  Somebody’s Calling My Name” (U), “I Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray” (F, T, U), and “What Kind of Shoes Are You Going to Wear” (F).

11.  J. B. T. Marsh.  The Story of the Jubilee Singers with Their Songs.  Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1881 revised edition.

Discography of American Historical Recordings on-line database.  University of California, Santa Barbara website.  Search on “Fisk University Jubilee Singers.”

Fisk is discussed in the post for 1 August 2021.

12.  Discography of American Historical Recordings search on “Tuskegee.”

13.  J. Rosamund Johnson.  Utica Jubilee Singers Spirituals.  Philadelphia: Oliver Ditson Company, 1930.  Utica Institute is discussed in the post for 1 August 2021.

14.  “Do You Think I’ll Make a Soldier?” (U), “Give Me Old Time Religion” (F, T), “The Gospel Train Is Coming” (F), “The Great Camp Meeting” (F),  “Walk in Jerusalem Just Like John” (F, T, U), and “Witness” (F).

15. “Do You Think I’ll Make a Soldier?,” “Hard Trials,” “I Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray,” and “Walk in Jerusalem Just Like John.” [26]
 
16.  Hampton managed the Penn School on Saint Helena Island, [27] and had Gullah-speaking students.  A white woman who was Dean of Women at Hampton from 1922 to 1925 remembered Gullah-speaking African Americans “from the South Carolina coast.  And they could really hardly be understood.  They were very black and their speech was difficult.  And they were so shy that it would be that they would have to be on the campus six months or so before they got over the strangeness and we got over the strangeness of their speech.” [28]
17.  Transcriptions by Smith.

18.  A clear example of humming is “The Gospel Train Is Coming.”  Whites, with their hymn tradition. may have deemed slow songs more appropriate for religious songs, and played recordings at slower speeds.  Herbert only indicated tempo on two songs.  “Get Right, Stay Right” was identified as an “imitation of Spiritual.”  “Lord, I Can’t Stay Away” was “rather slow and solemn.”

19.  He graduated from Chicago’s Hahnemann Medical College in 1872. [29]  Samuel Hahnemann pioneered the field of homeopathy. [30]

20.  Jeff Rankin.  “The Wildly Popular Composer You’ve Never Heard Of.”  Monmouth College Magazine 20–22:Winter 2018.

21.  Examples of songs with interjections include “Play On Yo’ Harp” and “Somebody’s Buried in the Graveyard.”

22.  I have been using the titles as given on the Wiseman CD.  The notes changed Victor’s “You Must Come in At de Door” to “the.”

23.  Marc Connelly.  The Green Pastures.  Mansfield Theatre, 26 February 1930 to 29 August 1931.  Based on Roark Bradford’s Ol Adam and His Chullun.  New York: Grossett and Dunlap, 1928.  Hall Johnson was responsible for the music for the Broadway production that featured spirituals sung by his choir. [31]  Bradford was raised in western Tennessee and worked in New Orleans. [32]

24.  Marsh.  138.

25.  Ospina Romero.  145.  His source was Andre J.  Millard.  America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005 edition.  80.

26.  R. Nathaniel Dett.  Religious Folk-Songs of the Negro as Sung at Hampton Institute.  Hampton, Virginia: The Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, 1927.

27.  For more on their involvement with the Penn School, see the post for 20 September 2018.

28.  Louise Young.  Interview by Jacquelyn Hall, 14 February 1972.  University of North Carolina Southern Oral History Program Collection.

29.  Rankin.  20.
30.  Wikipedia.  “Samuel Hahnemann.”
31.  Wikipedia.  “The Green Pastures.”
32.  Wikipedia.  “Roark Bradford.”