Topic: Early Versions
How the Bethel Jubilee Quartet made its recordings for Victor Talking Machine can be deduced. It is harder to know why Victor asked them to come to Camden.
Jubilee quartet singing has been traced back to John Wesley Work, Jr, [1] who organized the Fisk Jubilee Quartet in 1909 to raise money for the school. [2] He was reviving the singing troup that toured during Reconstruction. The quartet made its first records for the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1909. [3] When the group did not return after 1911, Victor experimented with groups from Tuskegee Institute in 1914. [4]
The audience was perceived to be primarily white. [5] Victor had made the phonograph respectable to the middle class with its stylish cabinets and emphasis on opera. [6] Its 1923 catalog said it had obtained the “services of the genuine Fisk Quartet, and now presents a number of their unique songs. These being correct and authentic, renditions given by the Quartet are doubly interesting.” [7]
Early Jubilee Singers had the same cultural aspirations as Victor’s customers. Horace Boyer said they adopted European concert norms of formal dress and stood “upright and tall in one location with little use of the arms in gesturing.” They used western harmonies that emphasized the melody. He believe many were Baptists and like “their denominational leaders, sought to “elevate the musical standards of the denomination.” [8]
Victor gave the Bethel Jubilee Quartet less attention in its 1924 catalog. This may have been simple laziness by the editors, who took the previous catalog, with Fisk and Tuskegee entries that may have dated back years, and added new artists. A simple heading, in the alphabetized list of offerings, mentioned four songs on three records. [9]
The first advertisements I have found on the internet were placed by local retailers after Victor completed its conversion to two-sided records. [10] A notice in the Abilene, Texas, newspaper extolled the American negro’s ability to “‘raise a spiritual,’ before offering “Hush, Somebody’s Calling My Name” and “You Must Come In at the Door” as “two good examples.” [11] A few days later a dealer in Harrisburg claimed “Hush” was a thrilling example of the American Negro’s ability to “‘raise a spiritual,’ or extemporize a hymn on the inspiration of the moment.” [12]
Victor released another record in 1924. This time its promotion department felt the need to provide dealers with more information. A trade publication wrote:
“The Bethel Jubilee Quartet, a body of colored singers, hailing from Columbia, S. C, attained prominence during a religious revival. Reverend Wiseman, who leads the quartet and sings the bass parts, conducted a choir of eight hundred voices at revivals and it was from this number that the present quartet was selected. ‘Negro spirituals’ are admirably sung by this body.” [13]
The last advertisements I found were from May 1924, [14] which may only reflect the eccentricities of digitizing old newspapers. Victor still listed six songs for the group in its 1925 catalog. [15]
Changes in audiences and their tastes were soon to overtake Victor. The first was generational. In 1910, a student at Howard University protested singing spirituals, “since they are painful reminiscences of the sad days of slavery.” The songs there had moved from voluntary performances by African Americans to displays for visiting whites commanded by the school’s white president. [16] They had been turned into the modern equivalent of dance tunes on plantations that were performed for the amusement of the owners.
Anyone entering college in 1910 was born about 1890. They were the grandchildren of slaves who had grown up when Jim Crow laws were being enacted, and their access to education was being limited.
Work apparently faced similar criticisms at Fisk. As already mentioned, the quartet made its last recordings for Victor in 1911, and Work dissolved the group in 1916. In its place, he organized a “three-hundred-voice chorus that gave annual concerts devoted solely to Negro spirituals.” [17] Before its demise, the quartet worked for Columbia in 1915. Columbia also recorded the Fisk University Jubilee Singers. [18]
The second change came with World War I, when jobs became available for African Americans in the North. The most important destinations, shown in the map below were Chicago, Detroit, New York City, and Philadelphia. Cities that lost population, the gray and black circles, included Columbia, South Carolina.
Victor was slow to detect the change, but smaller, newer companies recognized a new group of customers, many young couples or single men, who suddenly had cash to spend. OKeh Records was the first to record Black artists like Mamie Smith in 1920. [22]
The new urban residents quickly altered their dress and speech to avoid ridicule from Blacks who had preceded them. They were willing to exchange the music they knew, including the spirituals, for something new. It was in this period that Lydia Parrish noted African Americans on Saint Simons island, who mingled with servants of wealthy white vacationers, began to disparage their own musical heritage. [23]
Work was forced to leave Fisk in 1923 “because of negative feelings toward Black folk music.” [24] Thomas Wiseman, who took the Bethel Jubilee Quartet to Camden, New Jersey, may have faced similar problems. In August of 1923 he wrote to W. E. B. Du Bois for advice. In his letter, he explained how the group had been discovered during the Billy Sunday crusade in Columbia in the spring.
After the group recorded for Victor, the quartet and two women went to Winona Lake, Indiana, to record for Sunday’s music director, Homer Rodeheaver. Wiseman told Du Boise:
“I left my pastorate. My Vision became for the time a singer for this reason. Hundreds of old, old! tunes [?] Harmonies will soon be lost with the death of Old Colored men & women. These Songs born Out of Souls in Bondage & under oppression should not be entirely lost. They represent the night of horror from which Our Race passed & is passing. Hence to preserve them I took these six voices & placed there 30 or more unwritten (& many unknown out of certain localities) placed them upon wax for records & they will last for a long time. Then too Dr. Herburt (white) is arranging melodies suggested by Dr. T. H. Wiseman. This book will soon be upon the market. This is the first time in America that a noted white Singer has recorded his voice with a Negro sextet. Mr Rodeheaver sang the verse to a dozen songs.” [25]
By the time Rodeheaver’s Negro Spirituals was published, Wiseman had moved to Detroit. [26] In 1925, he was the presiding elder of the Detroit District for the AME church. [27] He was still in that position in 1927, which is the last reference I have found to him on the web. [28]
Recordings by Fisk and the Bethel Jubilee Quartet do not appear in the 1928 Victor catalog. [29] Their place has been taken by a new Tuskegee Quartet and by the Utica Jubilee Singers, who were heard on NBC radio broadcasts. [30] The taste for spirituals had not disappeared but a market saturation had occurred. Customers, who heard or owned the older records, wanted newer versions by more familiar performers. The transition from traditional to popular music was complete. [31]
The recordings for Rodeheaver may have lasted longer. Faced with new technological challenges in producing acceptable audio quality, Rodeheaver began working with one of the companies that challenged Victor’s hegemony, Gennett Records of Richmond, Indiana. [32] As a result of the partnership, Gennett released some of the Wiseman groups’ songs on its labels. [33]
Graphics
1. “The First Great Migration: 1910–1940.” United States Census Bureau. 13 September 2012. The darker the color, orange or gray, the greater the increase or decrease. This is based on changes in the percentage of African Americans in a city’s population, not absolute numbers. Thus, places like Chicago and Detroit, which had few Blacks in 1910, had greater increases than Philadelphia, which already had a Black population. Similarly, New York City has a smaller percentage simply because of the size of the metropolitan area. The number of African Americans in Columbia did not decrease, but it dropped relative to the number of whites.
2. 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. 29–30.
2. Eileen Southern. The Music of Black Americans. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971. 293.
3. Discography of American Historical Recordings on-line database. University of California, Santa Barbara website. Search on “Fisk University Jubilee Singers.”
4. Tim Brooks. Lost Sounds. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. 323.
5. Kyle Stewart Barnett. “Cultural Production and Genre Formation in the U.S. Recording Industry, 1920-1935.” PhD dissertation. The University of Texas at Austin, August 2006. 115. One of his sources was Ilpo Saunio and Pekka Gronow. An International History of the Recording Industry. London: Cassell, 1998. 47.
6. Barnett. 32–33, 61.
7. “Fisk University Jubilee Quartet.” 1923 Catalogue of Victor Records. Camden, New Jersey: Victor Talking Machine Company, 1922.
8. Boyer. 30.
9. 1924 Catalog of Victor Records. Camden, New Jersey: Victor Talking Machine Company, 1924.
10. 1923 was the year Victor converted from single-sided to double-sided disks. [34]
11. Advertisement. The Abilene Daily Reporter, Abilene, Texas, 8 November 1923. 2.
12. Advertisement. The Evening News, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 13 November 1923. 10.
13. “New Artists Added to Victor Catalog Last Year.” The Music Trade Review, 5 January 1924. 54.
14. Advertisement. Rockingham Post-Dispatch, Rockingham, North Carolina, 15 May 1924. 4.
Advertisement. Seymour Daily Tribune, Seymour, Indiana, 19 May 1924.
15. 1925 Catalog of Victor Records. Camden, New Jersey: Victor Talking Machine Company, 1925.
16. John Lovell, Jr. Black Song: The Forge and the Flame. New York: Macmillan, 1972; 1986 paperback edition. 416. He was quoting an editorial by B. J. Lock that appeared in the Howard University Journal on 17 December 1909.
17. Southern. 293.
18. University of California, Santa Barbara.
19. Gene Smiley. “The U.S. Economy in the 1920s.” The Economic History Association website. The depression, which lasted from 1920 to 1921, was more severe in rural areas. Smiley has charts show the drop in the Gross National Product and the Wholesale Price indices by year for the decade.
20. Wikipedia. “Emergency Quota Act.”
21. Fredric Miller. “The Black Migration to Philadelphia: a 1924 Profile.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 108:315–350:1984. 335.
22. Robert M. Marovich. A City Called Heaven. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 34.
23. Lydia Parrish. Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. New York: Creative Age Press, 1942. Reprint edition, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992. Parrish. 9. This is discussed in the post for 2 October 2018.
24. “John Wesley Work, Jr.” Hymns and Carols of Christmas website. The website was established by Douglas D. Anderson. Richard Jordan took over in 2014.
25. 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.
26. Rodeheaver’s Negro Spirituals. Chicago: The Rodeheaver Company. No date; everything was copyrighted in 1923, but Rodeheaver was out of the country from September 1923 until May 1924 with his brother Joseph, [35] who worked for the publication company. [36] The book was republished several times. This is the earliest copy I could locate. Information on Wiseman appears on the inside front cover.
27. Annetta Louise Gomez-Jefferson. In darkness with God: The life of Joseph Gomez, a Bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Kent: The Kent State University Press, 1998. 93.
28. “African Ministers Choose Delegates.” Detroit Free Press, Detroit, Michigan, 17 September 1927. 4.
29. Catalog of Victor Records 1928. Camden, New Jersey: Victor Talking Machine Company, 1928.
30. C. W. Hyne. “Introduction.” v–xvi in J. Rosamund Johnson. Utica Jubilee Singers Spirituals. Philadelphia: Oliver Ditson Company, 1930. xv.
31. Except for the Bethel group, the jubilee quartets recorded by Victor were all from the South, west of the Appalachians: Fisk, who set the form, was from Tennessee; Tuskegee was from Alabama, and Utica was from Mississippi. There were other groups, from all parts of the South, but these were the ones who were recorded more than once by Victor. I do not know how much differences in style and pronunciation, if they existed, affected audience’s responses
32. “Homer Rodeheaver (1880-1955).” StarrGennett website.
33. Chris Smith. Liner notes for Johnny Parth. Wiseman Sextette/Quartet. Vienna: Document Records DOCD-5520. CD. 1997.
34. Harry O. Sooy. “Memoir of My Career.” Unpublished manuscript in collection of Hagley Museum and on their website. 101.
35. Douglas Yeo. “Homer Rodeheaver: Reverend Trombone.” Historic Brass Society Journal 27:1–32:2015. 15.
36. Joseph Newton Rodeheaver. Obituary. The Kokomo Tribune, Kokomo, Indiana, 29 January 1946. 20.
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