Homer Rodeheaver

Topic: Early Versions
Homer Rodeheaver’s name has appeared in several posts, usually as the song leader for Billy Sunday.  The entry for 29 March 2020 described their activities in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1917; the one for 4 August 2019 mentioned them in Charleston, West Virginia, in 1922.

Much changed between Atlanta and the Columbia revival of February 1923.  In 1917, Sunday was at the height of his popularity, preaching prohibition and a rosy view of the afterlife in a city whose business leaders had accepted the call for a “New South.”  In 1923, prohibition was the law, and the unintended consequences were visible everywhere.  Sunday preached instead against evolution [1] and promoted the “Lost Cause.” [2]

As in Atlanta, Sunday proposed separate sessions with African Americans, but left the arrangements to the local committee. [3]  They scheduled the three services for 11 am on Sundays.  Quite naturally, the Black ministers refused to cancel their own sermons.  They finally agreed to attend one meeting. [4]

Again, Rodeheaver “urged the organization of a great choir.” [5]  In the years before Rodeheaver met Sunday, he was working as an evangelist.  He discovered “neither his voice nor the piano were loud enough to carry all the way through the crowds and he looked around for something more powerful.”  He said this was why he bought his first trombone. [6]  It probably is also why he used large choirs in the temporary buildings where Sunday preached to thousands.

In the segregated South, Rodeheaver had to have a separate choir for the Black service.  Thomas Wiseman was asked to organize the group.  He remembered: “Mr. Rodeheaver became so impressed that he invited us back to sing for the white services on following Wednesday.”  At the end of the revival, the organizing committee let Wiseman’s group use the tabernacle and keep the proceeds from the concert. [7]

Rodeheaver’s greater ability at manipulating Southern mores may have come from his early childhood spend in the Cumberland mountains of eastern Tennessee.  Sunday was from Iowa.

His immigrant ancestors originally lived in Bavaria, but moved to the Shenandoah valley of Virginia before the American Revolution. [8]  Hans Rodeheffer’s grandson followed the Cumberland Road to Preston County, [9] where they stayed until Homer’s father left to fight for the Union in the Civil War.

When Homer was born, his father was operating a sawmill in Hocking County, Ohio.  Within six months, Thurman Hall Rodeheaver moved to Newcomb, in Campbell County, Tennessee. [10]  It was there Homer first heard spirituals.  He recalled: “It was a common occurrence for different groups of negro boys to serenade mother with negro spirituals.”  He added: “Then too the negro boys would sing spirituals to me while I, in turn, would sing to them the gospel songs.” [11]

The Black population of Campbell County was small in 1880: 431, of which maybe 100 were adult men. [12]  It is not clear if they worked for his father, or elsewhere in the area.

The mill burned in 1891, and Thruman rebuilt on the other side of the nearest town, Jellico. [13]  The entrepreneurial spirit ran in the family.  Homer started a delivery service when he was nine in Newcomb. [14]  His oldest brother Yumbert opened a music store in Jellico.  He was the one who taught Homer to sing and play wind instruments. [15]

Rodeheaver began working with Sunday in 1910, and also established a music publishing company in Chicago to supply songbooks for the revivals. [16]  During World War I, before he went to Atlanta, he published his first collection of “Modern, Popular and Old-time Negro Songs of the Southland.” [17]  It included most of the best known religious songs including “Down by the River-side,” “Go Down Moses,” and “Steal Away.”

By the time Rodeheaver met Wiseman in Columbia, he probably had heard much of the common traditional African-American religious repertoire.  This background probably is why he recognized the uniqueness of the South Carolina songs. [18]  As Wiseman noted in the post for 8 August 2021, Rodeheaver had one of his associates transcribe many of their songs for Rodeheaver’s Negro Spirituals. [19]

The early anthologies of gospel songs published by his company did not include spirituals.  However, in 1926, his brother, Joseph Newton Rodeheaver, and Daniel Protheroe edited a collection of Quartets for Men that included Negro Spirituals along with Gospel Songs and Secular Songs.  Some were from the Wiseman collection. [20]

Rodeheaver’s next venture occurred in 1936 when he was preparing to go to Africa with the bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church South.  He accepted Arthur Moore’s invitation because he wanted “to find out the source of the negro spirituals.” [21]  He believed “the rhythm of African” had been brought to the South where it was “given melody and harmony through Christian influence.” [22]

Rodeheaver did not realize how different African Americans were from Africans.  His attempts to teach spirituals were met kindly, but probably were not as effective as his trombone.

When he died in 1955, Rodeheaver’s obituary said he “contributed to the popularization of many of the old Negro spirituals during his late years.”  It did not specify what he had done in the 1940s and 1950s. [23]  One thing I know he did do is keep the Wiseman collection in print.  I have copies that were published in 1946 and in 1951, when the copyrights were renewed.

End Notes
1.  Jonathan Newell.  “Billy Sunday’s 1923 Evangelistic Campaign in Columbia, South Carolina”  The South Carolina Historical Association, 2008 annual meeting.  Proceedings.  45–54.  49.

2.  Newell.  47.  He noted the irony of Sunday listening to these paeans to the Confederacy when his father had died fighting for the Union.

3.  Newell.  46.

4.  T. H. Wiseman.  Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois, 26 August 1923.  Held by Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, and reproduced on its website.

5.  Wiseman.

6.  Roger Butterfield.  “Homer Rodeheaver.”  Life 19:59, 61–62, 65–66: 3 September 1945. 66.  Douglas Yeo indicated Rodeheaver owned his first trombone in 1897. [24]

7.  Wiseman.  The choir included 250 from the Baptist’s Benedict College, 275 from AME’s Allen University, and 375 from local churches.

8.  Reilly S White.  “Hans David Rodeheffer.”  Geni website, last updated 25 June 2020.

9.  “John ‘Sadler John’ Rodehaver.”  Geni website, last updated 26 January 2021.  Preston was one of the counties that seceded from Virginia in the Civil War to form West Virginia.

10.  “Homer A. Rodeheaver Dies.”  Warsaw Times-Union, Warsaw, Indiana, 19 December 1955.

11.  Homer Rodeheaver.  Singing Black.  Chicago: The Rodeheaver Company, 1936.  9.  His mother died when he was eight years old. [25]

12.  United States Census.  1880.  “Table V.—Population by Race and by Counties: 1880, 1870, 1860.”  407.  The African-American population remained stable during the Civil War and Reconstruction, while the number of whites dropped.

13.  Douglas Yeo.  “Homer Rodeheaver: Reverend Trombone.”  Historic Brass Society Journal 27:1–32:2015.  1.

14.  Rodeheaver, obituary.

15.  Yeo.  1.  I found little about Yumbert.  A eulogy said “he was one of those retiring, behind-the-scenes individuals, who never go on stage but who are absolutely necessary to the success of the show.” [26]

16.  W. K. McNeil.  “Rodeheaver, Homer Alvan.”  320–322 in Encyclopedia of American Gospel Music.  Edited by McNeil.  New York: Routledge, 2005.

17.  Rodeheaver’s Plantation Melodies.  Chicago: The Rodeheaver Company, 1918.

18.  Rodeheaver’s Negro Spirituals.  Chicago: The Rodeheaver Company, no date; everything was copyrighted in 1923.  The inside cover advised “most of them have never been set to music notation of printed before.”

19.  Wiseman.  The transcriptions were done by J. B. Herbert.  See the post for 8 August 2021 for more on him.

20.  Daniel Protheroe and J. N. Rodeheaver.  Quartets for Men.  1926.  My copy was printed after the company purchased Hall-Mack in 1936 and moved its headquarters to Winona Lake in 1941, [27] where it became the largest employer. [28]

21.  Rodeheaver, Singing Black.  10.
22.  Rodeheaver, Singing Black.  26.
23.  Rodeheaver, obituary.
24.  Yeo.  16.
25.  Rodeheaver, obituary.
26.  Item.  Athens Messenger, Athens, Ohio, 1 September 1950.  6.
27.  McNeil.  322.
28.  Butterfield.  65.