Topic: Movement - Clap Origins
When one attempts to trace the origins of gestures used with "Come by Here," one needs to map versions and establish connections between geographic points. As an example, I knew William Averell moved from Chipping Norton, England, to Ipswich, Massachusetts, some time before 1637. [1] That information gave me starting points for tracing the cultural history of my immigrant ancestor.
African Americans were not as fortunate as I. The founder of the Boys Choir of Harlem wrote: "Like that of most blacks, our family history can be traced back two or three generations through slavery. Go back any further and our roots vanish into the Atlantic Ocean." [2]
Embarkation and debarkation ports are conjecture. If one knows which part of the South an individual’s ancestors lived, one can make guesses based on the fact that slavery moved west when new land was opened for cultivation. Dates exist for white settlement, and they can be related to the fact the slave trade also had a temporal-geographic dimension.
For example, when Charleston, South Carolina, first was importing slaves, they came from the area marked Senegambia on the map at the lower right. When they began growing rice with flood irrigation in 1741, they tended to come from Sierra Leone. [3] Cotton did not become profitable until 1793. At that time, slaves were coming from the Bights of Benin and Biafra. [4]
However, if like Walter Turnbull, one’s ancestors were in the Mississippi Delta, one knows much less. The area was settled after the end of the trans-Atlantic trade when slaves were purchased from the upper south. Much of the area was not cultivated until after the Civil War when freedman moved there voluntarily from other parts of the South.
Willie Mae Ford Smith was born in Mississippi in 1904 and knew her grandmother came from South Carolina, but did not say what part. She knew her grandfather, and knew he was born in Africa. That means he probably was imported by a smuggler after 1807 when slaves were coming from Portuguese areas in Angola and the southern Congo. [5]
These generic starting points in Africa are not as useful as they appear. In 1884, agents of the European powers met in Berlin to divide control of Africa among themselves. [6] As shown on the map at the right, many of the areas of greatest interest to African Americans went to the French, and whatever research exists today was done in that language.
The English gained control of modern day Ghana, whose slaves went to Jamaica, and Nigeria, whose Yoruba primarily went to Cuba, Haiti and Brazil. Most of the research has been done in eastern Africa colonized by Englishmen after the discoveries of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1884. [7]
The Soweto Gospel Choir was drawn from an area that suffered from forced labor in the mines, not from the external slave trade. The Voices of Zimbabwe and the Windhoek Adventist Choir Anglicized Lucas Deon Bok’s arrangement of "Kumbaya." They did not use drums or hand claps. In contrast, the Kanjélé Choir of Dakar, Sénégal, modernized it with a synthesizer and movements closer to those described by Bessie Jones in the Georgia Sea Islands. [8]
The men and women stood with their arms at their sides during an instrumental introduction that set the pace, rhythm, and key. They sang the first "somebody’s crying Lord" standing still, then began moving on the first "kumbaya." They turned slightly to the diagonal, then bent their outside arms to their waists and pushed them forward twice while bending their weightless knees twice and raising their heels. [9] They repeated the pattern turning from one diagonal to the other. Even when lifted, their feet remained flat.
The individuals in the front two rows introduced lexical gestures when they reached the "Lord hear my" phrase. The singers in the first two rows put their hands into the standard prayer position with flat hands, palm to palm, and bent over at the waists, with their weight on both feet. The tall men in back stood still.
When they reached the word "prayer" the ones in the first two rows straightened their backs and separated their hands. As they stood, they continued raising their arms with their hands pointed upward. The men in back resumed stepping to the left and right.
On the words "as I raise" they brought their arms back down toward their chests, then raised their left arms high on "I need you Lord today." They lowered the arms again on "I need you right away," then stood still for the "somebody’s" that introduced the next section. With the word "kumbaya" they began stepping.
They did not attempt any more lexical variations: the harmonies became more complex and the verse with "in despair" had fewer words that could be dramatized with conventional gestures. [10] Instead, when they reached the "Oh Lord kumbaya" refrain, they began clapping once, like the Soweto Choir, instead of pulsing their forearms twice.
The men and women in the first two rows clapped by bringing their flattened hands together side to side in front of their chests, and dropped their arms to their sides as they turned. The men in the last row clapped over their heads. They all continued bending their knees twice, so their hands and feet were making different patterns. On the last line, they stopped, stood facing front, and held the last note.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: seven women in the front row; six women in the second; six men in the back row. It was hard to identify people in middle row, and my numbers may be wrong.
Vocal Director: none visible.
Instrumental Accompaniment: synthesizer. Men, seen from the back, were holding a hollow-bodied guitar and an electric bass, but their arms were not in playing positions.
Rhythm Accompaniment: drum, rattle. It could have been a shaker, but the man using it was only seen from the back.
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: kum BYE yah
Verses: crying/praying, I need you, despair/care, kumbaya
Vocabulary
Pronoun: somebody
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none
Basic Form: Lucas Deon Bok
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: Lucas Deon Bok
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: harmonies that increased in complexity
Singing Style: unornamented, one syllable to one note
Notes on Performance
Occasion: rehearsal
Location: long, narrow room
Microphones: none
Clothing: casual. Some women in the front row were wearing slacks or knee-length skirts that made it possible to see their leg and foot movements.
Photographs on its Facebook page showed the choir usually performed in robes. In one, the women were wearing tangerine floor-length evening gowns and the men were in brown suits with tangerine shirts. [11]
Notes on Movement
The singers stood at the far end of the room with open space between them and the musicians. A man playing synthesizer stood at the right side of the video, and the man playing the drum sat on the opposite side of the room where everyone could see him. The man using the rattle had his back to the camera, but his head was turned toward the drummer. The guitar and base player sat to his left and right. The camera was behind the man with the rattle.
Concert videos on YouTube showed the singers spread apart with a floor microphone for each one in the first row. Their arm and torso movements were more obvious that the ones with their feet. [12]
Notes on Performers
Music in Africa said the choir was "founded by Bruno d’Erneville, a politician passionate about gospel." [13] I could not determine if he was Bruno Victor Louis d’Erneville, the man who was one of more than a dozen candidates who ran for president of Sénégal in 2012. The choir began posting videos to YouTube in 2012, but Bruno Victor never mentioned any interest in music, not even on his Facebook or LinkedIn pages. [14] The man who founded Kanjele indicated he "performs on stage every Friday at the Dakar calabash restaurant." [15]
If they were two men, they shared a common ancestor. Pierre Henri d’Erneville was born in Normandy in 1714 and went to New Orleans as a soldier. He married a woman who was born in New Orleans in 1731 and who died in 1758, thirty years before he died in 1788. [16] More than likely he fathered Charles Jean Baptiste d’Erneville with a slave woman.
Charles moved to France where he spent time in debtor’s prison. Like his father, he became a soldier and moved to what is now Sénégal in 1785. He married into a prominent Métis family, and also contracted a second marriage. Métis women, the children of French men and native women, had become the wholesalers in the slave trade, sending parties out to capture slaves, then keeping them until European ships arrived to buy them. They, and Charles’ descendants, maintained contacts with Bordeaux merchants and rose to political power in the nineteenth century. [17]
The costumes worn by the Kanjélé choir suggested a continuing commitment to the symbols of the French church and its social elite. However, a concert televised by Dunyaa Télévision in 2016 showed the group had incorporated traditional artists into their programs. [18]
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by kanjele choir on 28 March 2012.
End Notes
1. Clara A. Avery. The Averell-Averill-Avery Family. 1922 supplement.
2. Walter Turnbull. Lift Every Voice. With Howard Manly. New York: Hyperion, 1995. 2.
3. Daniel Heyward introduced flood irrigation at Beaufort, South Carolina. The primary slave trader in Charleston from 1748 to 1762 was Henry Laurens. He worked with Grant, Oswald, who controlled the slave trade in modern-day Sierra Leone from Bunce Island. (David Duncan Wallace. The Life of Henry Laurens. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915.) As mentioned in the post for 10 November 2017, Sierra Leone became the center of the Poro and Sande societies who rituals were transferred and transformed in lowland South Carolina.
4. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and Michael A. Gomez each have chronicled the slave trade by African area. Her emphasis was on Louisiana, the Caribbean, and Brazil in Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). His focus was on the United States in Exchanging Our Country Marks (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
5. Willie Mae Ford Smith was discussed in the post for 10 November 2017.
6. Wikipedia. "Berlin Conference."
7. Wikipedia. "South Africa."
8. Bessie Jones was discussed in the post for 27 October 2017.
9. Bessie Jones also used an analogous "double offbeat clap pattern." (Bessie Jones and Bess Lomax Hawes. Step it Down: Games, Plays, Songs, and Stories from the Afro-American Heritage. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987 edition. 21.)
10. The ability to create a gesture when no convention existed was one of the defining traits of camps where lexical movement songs were important in the repertoire. This was discussed in the post for 25 October 2017.
11. Kanjele. Home and About tabs. Facebook.
12. They were wearing purple robes with lilac insets in "Prestation du Groupe Gospel Kanjele au Grand Théâtre de Dakar," uploaded to YouTube by SnlTV, 30 October2016. They wore cream robes with rust-colored stoles in "Kanjele Gospel Choir - Ke na le modisa," uploaded to YouTube by Jeff Mvondo, 2 January 2013.
13. "Kanjele." Music in Africa website.
14. Bruno d’Erneville, About tab, Facebook, and Bruno d’Erneville, LinkedIn.
15. Music in Africa.
16. Jacob Neu. "Pierre Henri Henry d’ Erneville" and "Perinne Pelagie Fleuriau" (his wife). Geni website. 11 December 2014. Neu’s primary interest seemed to be a sister of Charles. The information on Charles and his other sister did not include birth dates.
17. Hilary Jones. The Métis of Senegal: Urban Life and Politics in French West Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. 193. The French also used the word Métis for the children of French traders and Native American women in what is now Canada.
18. "CONCERT Chœur Kanjele." Uploaded by Dtv Sénégal on 13 November 2016. More than two hours in length.
Showing posts with label Jones Bessie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jones Bessie. Show all posts
Thursday, November 23, 2017
Saturday, November 18, 2017
Thompson Family - A Needed Time
Topic: Movement - Hand Claps
Keeping time in music is a relatively recent western concept that only arose after clocks existed to introduce the concept of precise intervals, and after bars were introduced in music transcription. [1] Classical composers began to define tempo as the number of beats per minute and musicians used mechanical devices like metronomes set to those specifications to regulate their playing.
Speed is only one aspect of rhythm, which may include the standard view of a dominant beat followed one or two equally long offbeats represented by the time signature, patterns of long and short beats, or several different beat motifs played simultaneously.
Whites in this country tend to use their hands to keep time the same way they use their feet. They flatten them and bring the palms and fingers together in an upright prayer position, moving both hands to and from the center to make contact on the downbeats.
In contrast, Bess Lomax Hawes found African Americans used their hands to complement the rhythms set by stepping. She observed:
"To clap well, then, you must start with your feet, since the claps come after the weight changes (or ‘steps’) and thus occur on the normally unaccented beats of the measure (the second and fourth). The movement Mrs. Jones calls ‘stepping it down’ (putting the foot down without changing weight) coincides with the claps." [2]
More important, and contrary to the western assumption that rhythm reinforces the time signature, Hawes added:
"The footfalls, however, are light; the claps are loud, so the sounded emphasis falls on the "weak" beats, or offbeats, of the measure. Most of the time you cannot hear the "strong" beats at all, the feet step so quietly." [3]
Bessie Jones used the term "music" when she was "talking about the hand-clapping," [4] in part because she varied the pitch of the clap. She produced a low tone by cupping her hands slightly and striking the palms and right angles to each other. She created a higher tone by using the slightly bent fingers of one hand against the cupped palm of the other. Straightening the fingers and flattening the palm produced still higher pitches. [5]
The differences in sound can be heard in a video of Inez Andrews’ "It’s a Needed Time" made at the Thompson family reunion in 2008. Apparently, Jeff and his siblings or cousins were gathered in one corner of a hall while the women were preparing the meal and the men were seated at separate tables defining the spaces required by their family units. The intermingling of adults had not yet started, and the children were either with their mothers or off together somewhere. It was the prelude to the reunion.
Jeff was dressed more formally than the others in a shirt and tie, and may have been a preacher or church leader. He was holding a mike, but the camera did not pick up his voice. It was obvious at least some of them, primarily four women, had sung together, and others, especially two men, were drawn to the circle of music.
The song progressed from the prelude through a transition to the denouement. When they began singing the one verse they knew, the women began patting their thighs or moving one of their hands in a finger-snapping motion that produced no sound. One woman also was shifting her weight from foot to foot.
When they repeated the verse, they switched to clapping with flexed hands. The woman in an orange top had extended hands, while a woman in gray brought one hand down onto the other. Another woman in white also brought one hand down on the other and continued the downward motion. The claps grew louder when they entered the transition phase.
The woman in the singing group with a small boy used her free hand to pat her thigh. When he asked to picked up, she began shifting her weight from foot and rotating slightly to diagonals. When she was able to move him to one hip, she again used her freed hand to pat her thigh.
A small group of participants gathered a distance from the singers. One of the women was clapping very softly with cupped hands, and an older man seated between her and another clapping woman was bending his torso back and forth. A woman seated directly in front of the group held a young child and used a fan rhythmically as she leaned from side to side.
Two men slouched against the wall behind Jeff. The younger one kept time with his fingers close to his chest and moved his torso back and forth while bending one knee. The other one, partially hidden, was bending his knees.
The group probably had talked among themselves on how they would perform this song. The video began with Jeff singing the first line. He stepped forward onto his left foot. When the group began echoing his line, he stepped back and began sliding one foot to the other, then repeating the movement in the other direction. He did not raise his feet, and sometimes made the move by rotating his heels into a dancers’ open fifth position.
After two verses the group changed to repeating one line, "you don’t know what tomorrow may bring." They probably got this far from past experience or the preliminary conference, but it was unlikely they decided on repeating the phrase twelve times. Unfortunately, the camera was panning the audience when they changed from the long line to "we need him."
They repeated the shorter line twenty times. Again, they did not need to keep count. Jeff raised his right arm when he wanted them to change to the final line, a repetition of "you don’t know what tomorrow will bring" with the last note extended.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Jeff T.
Vocal Group: four women
Vocal Director: Jeff made signs for transitions
Instrumental Accompaniment: a guitar was playing rhythm softly; the player was not shown in the video.
Rhythm Accompaniment: hand claps
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Verses: it’s a needed time/tell your son/you don’t know
Vocabulary
Pronoun: you, we
Term for Deity: Him
Special Terms: father was used to tell both the daughter and the son it was a needed time.
Basic Form: three phases
Prelude: repeated verse two times
Transition: the group sang "you don’t know what tomorrow may bring" twelve times while Jeff spoke. He either was repeating part of the line or mentioning Jesus.
Denouement: the group sang "we need Him" twenty times while Jeff spoke. One line was "you know about Jesus."
Ending: repeated "you don’t know what tomorrow may bring"
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: Inez Andrews
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: group, with soloist embellishing the text
Singing Style: unornamented, one syllable to one note except for the word "time." Only the last note was sustained. They sang in unison in voices with distinctive timbres. This was what I called timbraic harmony in Camp Songs. [6]
Solo-Group Dynamics: in the prelude Jeff sang a line and they repeated it; it was not a strict call-response, since they would have sung their lines even if he did not sing his part. In the transition and denouement, the group sang and Jeff spoke while they were singing.
Notes on Performance
Occasion: Thompson Family Reunion, 2008
Location: large hall
Microphones: Jeff was holding a hand mike connected by a cord
Clothing: Jeff was wearing taupe slacks, with an orange shirt and tie. The rest were dressed more casually: the women in skirts or slacks and tops, the men in slacks and long-sleeved shirts.
Notes on Movement
Four movements were used by the group of singers: stepping, clapping, patting the thigh, and a silent finger snap.
Notes on Audience
The men at the tables were quiet and watching, but did not participate in any way. There was applause at the end. The women in the group who had held their hands at waist or chest height raised them to their faces, lengthened their hands, and clapped side to side.
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by NikkiNacole01on 28 July 2008.
End Notes
1. A. M. Jones noted a transcription of drumming "would be manageable if African music was susceptible to our divisive system of regular time-bars, 3/8, 4/4 time and so on: but it is not." He added that, after spending 21 years in Northern Rhodesia, "we shall not be able to draw bar-lines right down the score as in our Western custom. To do so would be to produce a score showing accents and rhythms which would be a travesty of what the African played." (Studies in African Music. London: Oxford University Press, 1959. 1:8 and 1:14.)
William Francis Allen transcribed songs he heard around Beaufort, South Carolina, during the Civil War. He wrote: "the difficulty experienced in obtaining absolute correctness is greater than might be supposed." (iv) Even though "The negros keep exquisite time in singing," (iv) their variations produced "apparent irregularities in the time, which it is no less difficult to express accurately." (vi) He did fit the tunes to standard measures, but despaired of providing a tempo, and only said "most of the tunes are in 2–4, and in most of these a quarter note equals 100–(say) 100-120." (William Francis Allen. "Introduction." The Slave Songs of the United States. Edited by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison. New York: A. Simpson and Company, 1867. xliv)
2. Bessie Jones and Bess Lomax Hawes. Step it Down: Games, Plays, Songs, and Stories from the Afro-American Heritage. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987 edition. 20. Bessie Jones was first mentioned in the post for 27 October 2017.
3. Jones. 21.
4. Jones. 19.
5. Jones. 22-23.
6. Camp Songs. 196-198.
Keeping time in music is a relatively recent western concept that only arose after clocks existed to introduce the concept of precise intervals, and after bars were introduced in music transcription. [1] Classical composers began to define tempo as the number of beats per minute and musicians used mechanical devices like metronomes set to those specifications to regulate their playing.
Speed is only one aspect of rhythm, which may include the standard view of a dominant beat followed one or two equally long offbeats represented by the time signature, patterns of long and short beats, or several different beat motifs played simultaneously.
Whites in this country tend to use their hands to keep time the same way they use their feet. They flatten them and bring the palms and fingers together in an upright prayer position, moving both hands to and from the center to make contact on the downbeats.
In contrast, Bess Lomax Hawes found African Americans used their hands to complement the rhythms set by stepping. She observed:
"To clap well, then, you must start with your feet, since the claps come after the weight changes (or ‘steps’) and thus occur on the normally unaccented beats of the measure (the second and fourth). The movement Mrs. Jones calls ‘stepping it down’ (putting the foot down without changing weight) coincides with the claps." [2]
More important, and contrary to the western assumption that rhythm reinforces the time signature, Hawes added:
"The footfalls, however, are light; the claps are loud, so the sounded emphasis falls on the "weak" beats, or offbeats, of the measure. Most of the time you cannot hear the "strong" beats at all, the feet step so quietly." [3]
Bessie Jones used the term "music" when she was "talking about the hand-clapping," [4] in part because she varied the pitch of the clap. She produced a low tone by cupping her hands slightly and striking the palms and right angles to each other. She created a higher tone by using the slightly bent fingers of one hand against the cupped palm of the other. Straightening the fingers and flattening the palm produced still higher pitches. [5]
The differences in sound can be heard in a video of Inez Andrews’ "It’s a Needed Time" made at the Thompson family reunion in 2008. Apparently, Jeff and his siblings or cousins were gathered in one corner of a hall while the women were preparing the meal and the men were seated at separate tables defining the spaces required by their family units. The intermingling of adults had not yet started, and the children were either with their mothers or off together somewhere. It was the prelude to the reunion.
Jeff was dressed more formally than the others in a shirt and tie, and may have been a preacher or church leader. He was holding a mike, but the camera did not pick up his voice. It was obvious at least some of them, primarily four women, had sung together, and others, especially two men, were drawn to the circle of music.
The song progressed from the prelude through a transition to the denouement. When they began singing the one verse they knew, the women began patting their thighs or moving one of their hands in a finger-snapping motion that produced no sound. One woman also was shifting her weight from foot to foot.
When they repeated the verse, they switched to clapping with flexed hands. The woman in an orange top had extended hands, while a woman in gray brought one hand down onto the other. Another woman in white also brought one hand down on the other and continued the downward motion. The claps grew louder when they entered the transition phase.
The woman in the singing group with a small boy used her free hand to pat her thigh. When he asked to picked up, she began shifting her weight from foot and rotating slightly to diagonals. When she was able to move him to one hip, she again used her freed hand to pat her thigh.
A small group of participants gathered a distance from the singers. One of the women was clapping very softly with cupped hands, and an older man seated between her and another clapping woman was bending his torso back and forth. A woman seated directly in front of the group held a young child and used a fan rhythmically as she leaned from side to side.
Two men slouched against the wall behind Jeff. The younger one kept time with his fingers close to his chest and moved his torso back and forth while bending one knee. The other one, partially hidden, was bending his knees.
The group probably had talked among themselves on how they would perform this song. The video began with Jeff singing the first line. He stepped forward onto his left foot. When the group began echoing his line, he stepped back and began sliding one foot to the other, then repeating the movement in the other direction. He did not raise his feet, and sometimes made the move by rotating his heels into a dancers’ open fifth position.
After two verses the group changed to repeating one line, "you don’t know what tomorrow may bring." They probably got this far from past experience or the preliminary conference, but it was unlikely they decided on repeating the phrase twelve times. Unfortunately, the camera was panning the audience when they changed from the long line to "we need him."
They repeated the shorter line twenty times. Again, they did not need to keep count. Jeff raised his right arm when he wanted them to change to the final line, a repetition of "you don’t know what tomorrow will bring" with the last note extended.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Jeff T.
Vocal Group: four women
Vocal Director: Jeff made signs for transitions
Instrumental Accompaniment: a guitar was playing rhythm softly; the player was not shown in the video.
Rhythm Accompaniment: hand claps
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Verses: it’s a needed time/tell your son/you don’t know
Vocabulary
Pronoun: you, we
Term for Deity: Him
Special Terms: father was used to tell both the daughter and the son it was a needed time.
Basic Form: three phases
Prelude: repeated verse two times
Transition: the group sang "you don’t know what tomorrow may bring" twelve times while Jeff spoke. He either was repeating part of the line or mentioning Jesus.
Denouement: the group sang "we need Him" twenty times while Jeff spoke. One line was "you know about Jesus."
Ending: repeated "you don’t know what tomorrow may bring"
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: Inez Andrews
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: group, with soloist embellishing the text
Singing Style: unornamented, one syllable to one note except for the word "time." Only the last note was sustained. They sang in unison in voices with distinctive timbres. This was what I called timbraic harmony in Camp Songs. [6]
Solo-Group Dynamics: in the prelude Jeff sang a line and they repeated it; it was not a strict call-response, since they would have sung their lines even if he did not sing his part. In the transition and denouement, the group sang and Jeff spoke while they were singing.
Notes on Performance
Occasion: Thompson Family Reunion, 2008
Location: large hall
Microphones: Jeff was holding a hand mike connected by a cord
Clothing: Jeff was wearing taupe slacks, with an orange shirt and tie. The rest were dressed more casually: the women in skirts or slacks and tops, the men in slacks and long-sleeved shirts.
Notes on Movement
Four movements were used by the group of singers: stepping, clapping, patting the thigh, and a silent finger snap.
Notes on Audience
The men at the tables were quiet and watching, but did not participate in any way. There was applause at the end. The women in the group who had held their hands at waist or chest height raised them to their faces, lengthened their hands, and clapped side to side.
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by NikkiNacole01on 28 July 2008.
End Notes
1. A. M. Jones noted a transcription of drumming "would be manageable if African music was susceptible to our divisive system of regular time-bars, 3/8, 4/4 time and so on: but it is not." He added that, after spending 21 years in Northern Rhodesia, "we shall not be able to draw bar-lines right down the score as in our Western custom. To do so would be to produce a score showing accents and rhythms which would be a travesty of what the African played." (Studies in African Music. London: Oxford University Press, 1959. 1:8 and 1:14.)
William Francis Allen transcribed songs he heard around Beaufort, South Carolina, during the Civil War. He wrote: "the difficulty experienced in obtaining absolute correctness is greater than might be supposed." (iv) Even though "The negros keep exquisite time in singing," (iv) their variations produced "apparent irregularities in the time, which it is no less difficult to express accurately." (vi) He did fit the tunes to standard measures, but despaired of providing a tempo, and only said "most of the tunes are in 2–4, and in most of these a quarter note equals 100–(say) 100-120." (William Francis Allen. "Introduction." The Slave Songs of the United States. Edited by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison. New York: A. Simpson and Company, 1867. xliv)
2. Bessie Jones and Bess Lomax Hawes. Step it Down: Games, Plays, Songs, and Stories from the Afro-American Heritage. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987 edition. 20. Bessie Jones was first mentioned in the post for 27 October 2017.
3. Jones. 21.
4. Jones. 19.
5. Jones. 22-23.
6. Camp Songs. 196-198.
Tuesday, October 31, 2017
Voices Of Zimbabwe - Kumbaya
Topic: Movement - Origins
Hypothesizing African origins for the movements used with "Come by Here" is easier than finding evidence. Alan Lomax’s cross-cultural research team suggested the trait that separated Africans from Europeans was the use of the torso. The group observed whites treated the trunk as a single unit, while Africans divided it at the waist. [1] Peggy Harper noted:
"There are three characteristic dance postures. An upright posture with a straight back is used as an expression of authority in the dance of chiefs and priests. In the second posture the dancer inclines forward from the hips, moving his attention and gestures toward the ground. In the third posture the dancer holds the torso nearly parallel to the ground, taking the body weight onto the balls of the feet." [2]
Both Lomax and Harper attributed the differences in placement to economics. Lomax thought mobility at the waist resulted from the twisting movements used in planting millet. [3] The cultural divergence in the use of the spine may have followed the adoption of the plow and domestication of draft animals elsewhere that allowed farmers to plant and cultivate standing erect. In parts of Africa where crops like rice were grown, farmers needed to work low to transplant and harvest.
Harper paid more attention to the ways Africans used their feet and suggested they were related to the terrain: people who lived in savannah grasslands "place their feet firmly on the sunbaked earth"; the Ijo, who lived in mangrove swamps, "use a precision of light, rapid foot beats, moving their weight from heel to toe to side of foot in a variety of rhythmic patterns, as though balancing on an unsteady canoe or picking their way through the swamp"; and the Yoruba altered their foot patterns in ways that suggested the need to find "a way through forest undergrowth, which necessitates reactions ever alert to the unexpected." [4]
The human body has at least 320 pairs of muscles [5] that are developed through use rather than deliberate exercises by children copying the adults around them, and by adults as they walk and work. The resulting musculature reflects cultural values and necessities. In this country, football players strengthen their leg muscles, while ballet dancers stretch the very same ones to maintain flexibility and long extended lines. Once trained, neither can do the routine actions of the other without some soreness. [6]
During the years of slavery, some Africans were shipped to familiar climatic zones in the American South to do analogous work. The ones taken from the upper Niger river to South Carolina rice plantations were the most obvious example. Others, especially those purchased for cotton plantations, encountered different work environments and the appropriate muscles were strengthened. These changes occurred without altering what parents perceived to be the proper posture to be learned by their infants and toddlers.
The remigration of African Americans to urban areas further altered kinesic habits without completely obliterating certain ways of using the feet and torso that had survived from Africa. Thus, Jerome and Fred Williams of the Evereadys bent their torsos forward or arched back from the hips in Detroit and Jerome executed rapid combinations with his feet. [7] Similarly, the man at the far end of the line of men in Skylar Patterson’s backup group sometimes bent forward but treated his feet as rigid units in Alabama. [8]
Some of the patterns mentioned by Lomax and Harper, and exhibited by the Williams brothers and Predestined, were clear in a video made the Voices of Zimbabwe. The students at the girls’ private boarding school were barefoot when they performed a variant of the Soweto Gospel Choir’s arrangement [9] of "Kumbaya" on the parquette floor [10] of an English church in 2011. Even though they had the potential to arch or flex their feet, they keep them flat in the same way Bessie Jones had learned in Georgia. [11]
The group retained Lucas Deon Bok’s tripartite division of "Kumbaya," but changed each section. The Soweto choir stood still during the first part. The Arundel girls began with their heads bent down and their hands in the conventional western prayer position for the opening verse, "somebody’s crying/praying." When they reached the phrase "Oh Lord, hear my prayer" they raised their heads, and lowered the hands, keeping them in the prayer position until their arms were down. Then, they fell to their sides. They stayed in that position for the remainder of the first section, standing still and facing straight ahead.
In Bok’s second section, the Soweto choir began turning to the right and left and clapping when they reached the forty-five-degree diagonals. One Zimbabwe group sang "Oh Lord" while the other repeated a native phrase. They stepped to thirty-degree diagonals, but kept their heads facing front, so their torsos were divided into two parts at the neck.
Soweto’s third part included a Zulu phrase. Voices of Zimbabwe changed to "Zita Rake Guru Ndiye Mutsvene," a traditional hymn. A young woman began playing a four-foot-high, cylindrical, floor drum. One group sang hosanna against a Shona phrase. The girls bent their knees in unison; their shoulders rose and fell slightly.
The lyrics changed to all Shona ones, and the girl sometimes stopped playing the drum with her hands. The chorus members moved their shoulders and feet to the diagonals, but kept their waists facing front. Most bent at the waist, and their arms were bent at the elbows with their forearms in front of their bodies.
Toward the finale they stood facing front and raised their bent arms upward, with their fingers extended together and introduced a different musical phrase. They brought their arms down into the prayer position, then dropped their arms with their palms facing outward. They repeated this pattern, then resumed the second native melody and movement pattern without the drum. They ended by sustaining a tone and raising their arms again.
While the girls’ movements varied by melodic section, the director’s were tied only to the rhythm. Her role was essentially a western one that had been Africanized. She used her arms, often in rolling sorts of motions, to signal the different groups, but she maintained the beat by stepping. Thus, even when the girls were standing still, she was stepping the rhythm for them. Her footwork became progressively more pronounced as the chorus moved from the partly Christianized beginning to the completely native text.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: looked like eight women in the first row and five in the second
Vocal Group Director: woman
Instrumental Accompaniment: none
Rhythm Accompaniment: cylindrical floor drum
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English and Shona
Pronunciation: coom BY yah with long "ba"; this differed from Soweto who made each syllable longer than the previous one
Verses: crying/praying, in despair, local ones
Bok verses
Vocabulary:
Pronoun: somebody
Term for Deity: Lord
Format: Lucas Deon Bok
Verse Repetition Pattern: AABCBC
Zita Rake Guru Ndiye Mutsvene
Vocabulary: the hymn means "his greatest name is holy" according to YouTube notes.
Repetition: phrases repeated
Notes on Music
Singing Style: one syllable to one note with little ornamentation. The variations came from two or more groups singing different parts.
Notes on Performance
Occasion: the school was named for Arundel Farm, which was purchased in 1954 for the school’s Harare campus. [12] In 2011, the chorus was in England and visited the town of Arundel in West Sussex on 12 February. The relationship between the Simpsons, who owned the farm, and Arundel was not mentioned.
Location: Saint Nicholas Church was built in 1380. [13] The acoustics of the stone building reinforced the group’s harmony.
Microphones: none
Clothing: ankle-length brown print skirts with turquoise trim; turquoise bodices or corsets over brown tops. Their hair was pulled back and their feet were bare.
Notes on Movement
Some girls moved their torsos more than others. The one second from the left was the most flexible.
The motions using the gesture for praying were inspired by the word, but not directly tied to it as they were in the Wyandot County 4-H version mentioned in the post for 25 October 2017. The girls changed their positions when verses changed; the smallest unit of text associated with a movement was a phrase.
The director did not stay in one place, but stood directly in front of and close to the group that began the first verse. She then moved to a central location from which she rotated or moved toward groups when they had key parts. It was possible to see her step down like Bessie Jones without shifting her weight.
Notes on Performers
Arundel School opened in 1956 for girls 12 to 18 years of age. One alumna wrote in 2012:
"Deportment – a term most teenagers go through high school not knowing how to spell, let alone use – was the mark of a true Arundel girl. It symbolised a manner of personal conduct synonymous with Austenesque behaviour: ladylike, well-groomed and intelligent." [14]
Most of the boarding houses were named after English female authors, including Jane Austen. [15]
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by KiasuKiasuKiasuKiasu on 16 February 2011.
End Notes
1. Alan Lomax, Irmagard Bartenieff, and Forrestine Paulay. "Dance Style and Culture." 222-247 in Folk Song Style and Culture. Edited by Alan Lomax. Washington: American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, 1968. 237.
2. Peggy Harper. "African Dance." Encyclopædia Britannica. 18 January 2002; last updated 26 July 2017.
3. Lomax. 237.
4. Harper.
5. Wikipedia. "List of Skeletal Muscles of the Human Body."
6. In 1972 I took a beginner’s ballet class at a small college in Ohio. Some professional football team apparently had brought in a dance specialist to help its players with flexibility, and so some of the school’s players decided to take this class. They came back surprised at how many of their muscles had ached from what seemed so simple. And, the class really was basic, what I remember doing when I was in elementary school. They simply had never used those muscles in those ways.
7. The Evereadys’ live performance was described in the post for 3 August 2017.
8. Skylar Patterson was discussed in the post for 27 October 2017.
9. The Soweto Gospel Choir performance was described in the posts for 28 August 2017 and 29 August 2017.
10. Wooden floors laid on wooden beams have some give and are easier on dancers’ ankles, calves, and knees that solid concrete or stone ones. They might be softer than bare dirt, but have a different feel: at a minimum they are level. If the women in Voices of Zimbabwe wanted to flex or arch their feet, nothing inhibited them.
11. Bessie Jones was discussed in the post for 27 October 2017.
12. "History" tab on school website.
13. "Welcome to St Nicholas’ Church Arundel." Church’s website.
14. Fadzayi Mahere. "Does the Colour Pink Imprison Women? The Case of Arundel School." Her website. 15 August 2012. She was a lawyer and running for the parliamentary seat that included the school in the 2018 elections.
15. Wikipedia. "Arundel School."
Hypothesizing African origins for the movements used with "Come by Here" is easier than finding evidence. Alan Lomax’s cross-cultural research team suggested the trait that separated Africans from Europeans was the use of the torso. The group observed whites treated the trunk as a single unit, while Africans divided it at the waist. [1] Peggy Harper noted:
"There are three characteristic dance postures. An upright posture with a straight back is used as an expression of authority in the dance of chiefs and priests. In the second posture the dancer inclines forward from the hips, moving his attention and gestures toward the ground. In the third posture the dancer holds the torso nearly parallel to the ground, taking the body weight onto the balls of the feet." [2]
Both Lomax and Harper attributed the differences in placement to economics. Lomax thought mobility at the waist resulted from the twisting movements used in planting millet. [3] The cultural divergence in the use of the spine may have followed the adoption of the plow and domestication of draft animals elsewhere that allowed farmers to plant and cultivate standing erect. In parts of Africa where crops like rice were grown, farmers needed to work low to transplant and harvest.
Harper paid more attention to the ways Africans used their feet and suggested they were related to the terrain: people who lived in savannah grasslands "place their feet firmly on the sunbaked earth"; the Ijo, who lived in mangrove swamps, "use a precision of light, rapid foot beats, moving their weight from heel to toe to side of foot in a variety of rhythmic patterns, as though balancing on an unsteady canoe or picking their way through the swamp"; and the Yoruba altered their foot patterns in ways that suggested the need to find "a way through forest undergrowth, which necessitates reactions ever alert to the unexpected." [4]
The human body has at least 320 pairs of muscles [5] that are developed through use rather than deliberate exercises by children copying the adults around them, and by adults as they walk and work. The resulting musculature reflects cultural values and necessities. In this country, football players strengthen their leg muscles, while ballet dancers stretch the very same ones to maintain flexibility and long extended lines. Once trained, neither can do the routine actions of the other without some soreness. [6]
During the years of slavery, some Africans were shipped to familiar climatic zones in the American South to do analogous work. The ones taken from the upper Niger river to South Carolina rice plantations were the most obvious example. Others, especially those purchased for cotton plantations, encountered different work environments and the appropriate muscles were strengthened. These changes occurred without altering what parents perceived to be the proper posture to be learned by their infants and toddlers.
The remigration of African Americans to urban areas further altered kinesic habits without completely obliterating certain ways of using the feet and torso that had survived from Africa. Thus, Jerome and Fred Williams of the Evereadys bent their torsos forward or arched back from the hips in Detroit and Jerome executed rapid combinations with his feet. [7] Similarly, the man at the far end of the line of men in Skylar Patterson’s backup group sometimes bent forward but treated his feet as rigid units in Alabama. [8]
Some of the patterns mentioned by Lomax and Harper, and exhibited by the Williams brothers and Predestined, were clear in a video made the Voices of Zimbabwe. The students at the girls’ private boarding school were barefoot when they performed a variant of the Soweto Gospel Choir’s arrangement [9] of "Kumbaya" on the parquette floor [10] of an English church in 2011. Even though they had the potential to arch or flex their feet, they keep them flat in the same way Bessie Jones had learned in Georgia. [11]
The group retained Lucas Deon Bok’s tripartite division of "Kumbaya," but changed each section. The Soweto choir stood still during the first part. The Arundel girls began with their heads bent down and their hands in the conventional western prayer position for the opening verse, "somebody’s crying/praying." When they reached the phrase "Oh Lord, hear my prayer" they raised their heads, and lowered the hands, keeping them in the prayer position until their arms were down. Then, they fell to their sides. They stayed in that position for the remainder of the first section, standing still and facing straight ahead.
In Bok’s second section, the Soweto choir began turning to the right and left and clapping when they reached the forty-five-degree diagonals. One Zimbabwe group sang "Oh Lord" while the other repeated a native phrase. They stepped to thirty-degree diagonals, but kept their heads facing front, so their torsos were divided into two parts at the neck.
Soweto’s third part included a Zulu phrase. Voices of Zimbabwe changed to "Zita Rake Guru Ndiye Mutsvene," a traditional hymn. A young woman began playing a four-foot-high, cylindrical, floor drum. One group sang hosanna against a Shona phrase. The girls bent their knees in unison; their shoulders rose and fell slightly.
The lyrics changed to all Shona ones, and the girl sometimes stopped playing the drum with her hands. The chorus members moved their shoulders and feet to the diagonals, but kept their waists facing front. Most bent at the waist, and their arms were bent at the elbows with their forearms in front of their bodies.
Toward the finale they stood facing front and raised their bent arms upward, with their fingers extended together and introduced a different musical phrase. They brought their arms down into the prayer position, then dropped their arms with their palms facing outward. They repeated this pattern, then resumed the second native melody and movement pattern without the drum. They ended by sustaining a tone and raising their arms again.
While the girls’ movements varied by melodic section, the director’s were tied only to the rhythm. Her role was essentially a western one that had been Africanized. She used her arms, often in rolling sorts of motions, to signal the different groups, but she maintained the beat by stepping. Thus, even when the girls were standing still, she was stepping the rhythm for them. Her footwork became progressively more pronounced as the chorus moved from the partly Christianized beginning to the completely native text.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: looked like eight women in the first row and five in the second
Vocal Group Director: woman
Instrumental Accompaniment: none
Rhythm Accompaniment: cylindrical floor drum
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English and Shona
Pronunciation: coom BY yah with long "ba"; this differed from Soweto who made each syllable longer than the previous one
Verses: crying/praying, in despair, local ones
Bok verses
Vocabulary:
Pronoun: somebody
Term for Deity: Lord
Format: Lucas Deon Bok
Verse Repetition Pattern: AABCBC
Zita Rake Guru Ndiye Mutsvene
Vocabulary: the hymn means "his greatest name is holy" according to YouTube notes.
Repetition: phrases repeated
Notes on Music
Singing Style: one syllable to one note with little ornamentation. The variations came from two or more groups singing different parts.
Notes on Performance
Occasion: the school was named for Arundel Farm, which was purchased in 1954 for the school’s Harare campus. [12] In 2011, the chorus was in England and visited the town of Arundel in West Sussex on 12 February. The relationship between the Simpsons, who owned the farm, and Arundel was not mentioned.
Location: Saint Nicholas Church was built in 1380. [13] The acoustics of the stone building reinforced the group’s harmony.
Microphones: none
Clothing: ankle-length brown print skirts with turquoise trim; turquoise bodices or corsets over brown tops. Their hair was pulled back and their feet were bare.
Notes on Movement
Some girls moved their torsos more than others. The one second from the left was the most flexible.
The motions using the gesture for praying were inspired by the word, but not directly tied to it as they were in the Wyandot County 4-H version mentioned in the post for 25 October 2017. The girls changed their positions when verses changed; the smallest unit of text associated with a movement was a phrase.
The director did not stay in one place, but stood directly in front of and close to the group that began the first verse. She then moved to a central location from which she rotated or moved toward groups when they had key parts. It was possible to see her step down like Bessie Jones without shifting her weight.
Notes on Performers
Arundel School opened in 1956 for girls 12 to 18 years of age. One alumna wrote in 2012:
"Deportment – a term most teenagers go through high school not knowing how to spell, let alone use – was the mark of a true Arundel girl. It symbolised a manner of personal conduct synonymous with Austenesque behaviour: ladylike, well-groomed and intelligent." [14]
Most of the boarding houses were named after English female authors, including Jane Austen. [15]
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by KiasuKiasuKiasuKiasu on 16 February 2011.
End Notes
1. Alan Lomax, Irmagard Bartenieff, and Forrestine Paulay. "Dance Style and Culture." 222-247 in Folk Song Style and Culture. Edited by Alan Lomax. Washington: American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, 1968. 237.
2. Peggy Harper. "African Dance." Encyclopædia Britannica. 18 January 2002; last updated 26 July 2017.
3. Lomax. 237.
4. Harper.
5. Wikipedia. "List of Skeletal Muscles of the Human Body."
6. In 1972 I took a beginner’s ballet class at a small college in Ohio. Some professional football team apparently had brought in a dance specialist to help its players with flexibility, and so some of the school’s players decided to take this class. They came back surprised at how many of their muscles had ached from what seemed so simple. And, the class really was basic, what I remember doing when I was in elementary school. They simply had never used those muscles in those ways.
7. The Evereadys’ live performance was described in the post for 3 August 2017.
8. Skylar Patterson was discussed in the post for 27 October 2017.
9. The Soweto Gospel Choir performance was described in the posts for 28 August 2017 and 29 August 2017.
10. Wooden floors laid on wooden beams have some give and are easier on dancers’ ankles, calves, and knees that solid concrete or stone ones. They might be softer than bare dirt, but have a different feel: at a minimum they are level. If the women in Voices of Zimbabwe wanted to flex or arch their feet, nothing inhibited them.
11. Bessie Jones was discussed in the post for 27 October 2017.
12. "History" tab on school website.
13. "Welcome to St Nicholas’ Church Arundel." Church’s website.
14. Fadzayi Mahere. "Does the Colour Pink Imprison Women? The Case of Arundel School." Her website. 15 August 2012. She was a lawyer and running for the parliamentary seat that included the school in the 2018 elections.
15. Wikipedia. "Arundel School."
Friday, October 27, 2017
Skylar Patterson - Come by Here
Topic: Movement - Rhythm
Most of the movements accompanying the videos of "Come by Here," which so far have been discussed, used forms of stepping. Bess Lomax Hawes described the technique used by Bessie Jones.
"she would step on her right foot, bring her left foot close to her right, and "step it down" without a weight change, repeating the pattern to the left. Though each movement was done flat-footed, as though stamping, she normally kept her footfalls quiet, except when she wanted an extra drumming effect.
"As I watched, it seemed to me that this was basically a dance movement. Though restrained, it is strong; the body swings slightly with it. The movements are on the first and third beats of the measure, at the points where the dancer would probably take his strong steps." [1]
At one time regional variations no doubt existed, but mobility since World War I led to marriages and church congregations that diminished the effects of geographical barriers. Jones was born in 1902 in a southwestern Georgia county next to that of Beatrice Johnson Reagon, [2] but lived on Saint Simon in the Georgia Sea Islands when she was interviewed by Hawes in the 1960s. In between she had lived in Florida, probably Alachua County during the Depression or World War II when it had a tung-oil processing plant. [3]
Individual styles now exist, some arising from the idiosyncratic developments of bodies and some from the adoption of coordinated choreography. The women in Evelyn Turrentine-Agee’s Detroit backup group wore stable heels that still limited their movement. Their feet were spaced in what dancers called a parallel second position. They shifted their weight from side to side, but did not move their feet. Occasionally the woman on the left in the video lifted her left foot an inch, but rarely moved her right one; toward the end she began to lift the left foot higher. [4]
The backup group for the Evereadys in Detroit came closest to following the pattern described by Jones, but the two soloists walked about, lifting their feet from the knees. [5] The Bolton Brothers from southern Mississippi also used their knees: they kept their feet close together in a dancers’ parallel first position and bent both knees together rather than stepping. [6]
Hawes described a more complex foot pattern called chugging:
"The nonreligious shout step appears in several traditional children’s plays as follows: with weight on the active foot, give a little shove backward as though hopping without the foot leaving the floor; dancers sometimes call this movement a ‘chug.’ While ‘chugging’ back on the right foot, swing the left foot forward. Step on the left foot and ‘chug’ it backward while swinging the right foot forward. This is done to a count of two: step, chug. The ultimate result, by the way, is that you stay in the same place." [7]
The backup group for Skylar Patterson used a variant of this in a video posted in late August of this year, 2017. The men had their feet slightly apart, and at least the one on the right had them slightly turned out. While Patterson was talking, the four men in Predestined flexed their knees in unison, one knee at a time. When they sang, they kicked one foot out in a arc keeping the heel on the floor, brought it back, and kicked out the other. They, or at least the most visible man on the right of the screen, wore boots that constrained the feet so they remained flat while the boot tips pointed up.
Patterson was described as a pastor, probably in the Union Baptist church in Columbiana, Mississippi, [8] just south of Birmingham. Most of the performance was directed at the audience, asking if they needed the Holy Ghost to appear and asking It to do so. Verses were sung only at the beginning and end.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Skylar Patterson
Vocal Accompaniment: four men
Instrumental Accompaniment: keyboard; two strummed instruments, probably an electric guitar and electric bass; one instrument resembling a steel guitar without the pedals
Rhythm Accompaniment: drum set
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Verses: down here praying, needs you
Theme: supplication to the Holy Ghost
Vocabulary:
Pronoun: somebody
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: down here praying
Format: recitative
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Line Meter: dactyl
Line Length: 9 syllables
Ending: none
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: Patterson sang most of it on one note
Time Signature: strong Xx
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: soloist supported by group. Patterson sang the statements in the verses and Predestined sang the refrains. When Patterson was speaking, they repeated "Oh Lord."
Singing Style:
Solo: Patterson sustained the first syllables of the Xxx dactylic feet, which aligned them with the contrasting Xx beat.
Group: chordal harmony
Notes on Performance
Occasion: no details provided
Location: stage, possibly in a high school, church hall, or gymnasium
Microphones: each had a wireless handheld mike; amplifiers or speakers were placed at the front of the stage
Clothing: the singers were wearing brown boots, black slacks, light-yellow sports jackets with black boutonnieres, white shirts, and no ties. The band members wore white shirts and light-colored tan slacks.
Notes on Movement
The men in Predestined stood still while Patterson was speaking in the beginning. As soon as the instruments began playing, they began bending their knees together. The man at the far left end sometimes bent his body forward as he moved.
Predestined members bent their arms that were not holding microphones at the elbows with their forearms extended. Their hands moved from left to right in no particular pattern.
Notes on Audience
One woman in the front row stood throughout. The rest were below the view of the camera; its microphones did not pick up any audience response.
When Patterson was introducing "Come by Here," he referred to the previous number before he started the group singing "we’re down here praying." He then said, "you remember that kind of church, don’t you?" He pointed at the standing woman and said, "You like that kinda church? I like you already." The group resumed singing, and the rest of his comments were directed to the audience in general.
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by Aj Jordan on 28 August 2017.
End Notes
1. Bessie Jones and Bess Lomax Hawes. Step it Down: Games, Plays, Songs, and Stories from the Afro-American Heritage. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987 edition. 20.
2. Reagon was discussed in the post for 14 October 2016.
3. Wikipedia. "Bessie Jones." She once told an interviewer she was born in Alachua, Florida, but that may have resulted from a misunderstanding. According to G. H. Blackmon, the first tung-oil processing plant was built in Alachua in 1928, and commercial interest began developing after 1930. It became a critical crop in 1938 when supplies from China were cut by war. ("Tung Oil Production in Florida." Florida State Horticultural Society. Proceedings 58:136-143:1945.)
4. Turrentine-Agee was discussed in the post for 6 August 2017. The shoes’ heels looked to be an inch thick at the floor and no more than two-inches high. The differences in how the one woman treated her left and right feet were typical for individuals who were not trained in dance classes to overcome the body’s natural inclination to favor one side.
5. The Evereadys’ live video was discussed in the post for 3 August 2017.
6. The Bolton Brothers were discussed in the post for 12 August 2017.
7. Jones. 46.
8. The obituary for Thelma Marie Lamb said her funeral service was held at Union Baptist Church in Columbiana and that Patterson presided at the burial service. (Tributes website). On Facebook, Patterson said he came from Columbiana.
Most of the movements accompanying the videos of "Come by Here," which so far have been discussed, used forms of stepping. Bess Lomax Hawes described the technique used by Bessie Jones.
"she would step on her right foot, bring her left foot close to her right, and "step it down" without a weight change, repeating the pattern to the left. Though each movement was done flat-footed, as though stamping, she normally kept her footfalls quiet, except when she wanted an extra drumming effect.
"As I watched, it seemed to me that this was basically a dance movement. Though restrained, it is strong; the body swings slightly with it. The movements are on the first and third beats of the measure, at the points where the dancer would probably take his strong steps." [1]
At one time regional variations no doubt existed, but mobility since World War I led to marriages and church congregations that diminished the effects of geographical barriers. Jones was born in 1902 in a southwestern Georgia county next to that of Beatrice Johnson Reagon, [2] but lived on Saint Simon in the Georgia Sea Islands when she was interviewed by Hawes in the 1960s. In between she had lived in Florida, probably Alachua County during the Depression or World War II when it had a tung-oil processing plant. [3]
Individual styles now exist, some arising from the idiosyncratic developments of bodies and some from the adoption of coordinated choreography. The women in Evelyn Turrentine-Agee’s Detroit backup group wore stable heels that still limited their movement. Their feet were spaced in what dancers called a parallel second position. They shifted their weight from side to side, but did not move their feet. Occasionally the woman on the left in the video lifted her left foot an inch, but rarely moved her right one; toward the end she began to lift the left foot higher. [4]
The backup group for the Evereadys in Detroit came closest to following the pattern described by Jones, but the two soloists walked about, lifting their feet from the knees. [5] The Bolton Brothers from southern Mississippi also used their knees: they kept their feet close together in a dancers’ parallel first position and bent both knees together rather than stepping. [6]
Hawes described a more complex foot pattern called chugging:
"The nonreligious shout step appears in several traditional children’s plays as follows: with weight on the active foot, give a little shove backward as though hopping without the foot leaving the floor; dancers sometimes call this movement a ‘chug.’ While ‘chugging’ back on the right foot, swing the left foot forward. Step on the left foot and ‘chug’ it backward while swinging the right foot forward. This is done to a count of two: step, chug. The ultimate result, by the way, is that you stay in the same place." [7]
The backup group for Skylar Patterson used a variant of this in a video posted in late August of this year, 2017. The men had their feet slightly apart, and at least the one on the right had them slightly turned out. While Patterson was talking, the four men in Predestined flexed their knees in unison, one knee at a time. When they sang, they kicked one foot out in a arc keeping the heel on the floor, brought it back, and kicked out the other. They, or at least the most visible man on the right of the screen, wore boots that constrained the feet so they remained flat while the boot tips pointed up.
Patterson was described as a pastor, probably in the Union Baptist church in Columbiana, Mississippi, [8] just south of Birmingham. Most of the performance was directed at the audience, asking if they needed the Holy Ghost to appear and asking It to do so. Verses were sung only at the beginning and end.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Skylar Patterson
Vocal Accompaniment: four men
Instrumental Accompaniment: keyboard; two strummed instruments, probably an electric guitar and electric bass; one instrument resembling a steel guitar without the pedals
Rhythm Accompaniment: drum set
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Verses: down here praying, needs you
Theme: supplication to the Holy Ghost
Vocabulary:
Pronoun: somebody
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: down here praying
Format: recitative
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Line Meter: dactyl
Line Length: 9 syllables
Ending: none
Unique Features: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: Patterson sang most of it on one note
Time Signature: strong Xx
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: soloist supported by group. Patterson sang the statements in the verses and Predestined sang the refrains. When Patterson was speaking, they repeated "Oh Lord."
Singing Style:
Solo: Patterson sustained the first syllables of the Xxx dactylic feet, which aligned them with the contrasting Xx beat.
Group: chordal harmony
Notes on Performance
Occasion: no details provided
Location: stage, possibly in a high school, church hall, or gymnasium
Microphones: each had a wireless handheld mike; amplifiers or speakers were placed at the front of the stage
Clothing: the singers were wearing brown boots, black slacks, light-yellow sports jackets with black boutonnieres, white shirts, and no ties. The band members wore white shirts and light-colored tan slacks.
Notes on Movement
The men in Predestined stood still while Patterson was speaking in the beginning. As soon as the instruments began playing, they began bending their knees together. The man at the far left end sometimes bent his body forward as he moved.
Predestined members bent their arms that were not holding microphones at the elbows with their forearms extended. Their hands moved from left to right in no particular pattern.
Notes on Audience
One woman in the front row stood throughout. The rest were below the view of the camera; its microphones did not pick up any audience response.
When Patterson was introducing "Come by Here," he referred to the previous number before he started the group singing "we’re down here praying." He then said, "you remember that kind of church, don’t you?" He pointed at the standing woman and said, "You like that kinda church? I like you already." The group resumed singing, and the rest of his comments were directed to the audience in general.
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by Aj Jordan on 28 August 2017.
End Notes
1. Bessie Jones and Bess Lomax Hawes. Step it Down: Games, Plays, Songs, and Stories from the Afro-American Heritage. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987 edition. 20.
2. Reagon was discussed in the post for 14 October 2016.
3. Wikipedia. "Bessie Jones." She once told an interviewer she was born in Alachua, Florida, but that may have resulted from a misunderstanding. According to G. H. Blackmon, the first tung-oil processing plant was built in Alachua in 1928, and commercial interest began developing after 1930. It became a critical crop in 1938 when supplies from China were cut by war. ("Tung Oil Production in Florida." Florida State Horticultural Society. Proceedings 58:136-143:1945.)
4. Turrentine-Agee was discussed in the post for 6 August 2017. The shoes’ heels looked to be an inch thick at the floor and no more than two-inches high. The differences in how the one woman treated her left and right feet were typical for individuals who were not trained in dance classes to overcome the body’s natural inclination to favor one side.
5. The Evereadys’ live video was discussed in the post for 3 August 2017.
6. The Bolton Brothers were discussed in the post for 12 August 2017.
7. Jones. 46.
8. The obituary for Thelma Marie Lamb said her funeral service was held at Union Baptist Church in Columbiana and that Patterson presided at the burial service. (Tributes website). On Facebook, Patterson said he came from Columbiana.
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