Columbia, South Carolina

Topic: Early Versions
The Bethel Jubilee Quartet was part of an AME church in Columbia, South Carolina.  The state capitol was located at the head of navigation for the Santee River in Richland County.  While the lowlands depended of rice as their commercial crop, Wade Hampton introduced short-staple cotton to the Piedmont county in 1799. [1]  The antebellum economy combined the agriculture of the nearby plantations with the port activities of an entrepôt where goods were transferred from upriver to downriver craft. [2]  Most of the slaves who lived in the city probably lived in the households of merchants, lawyers and other professionals who served the county and state governments, or politicians and merchants who came on business.  Many of the men may have worked as draymen, hostlers, or stevedores.

Columbia differed from Charleston and Beaufort where the Gullah language survived into the twentieth century.  Hampton brought his first slaves from the coast, [3] but after the close of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, most came from natural increase, local purchases, or Virginia. [4] David Stowell noted that in Columbia in 1860, more than 98% of the freed individuals were born in the state. [5]

The African-American population in both Columbia and the surrounding county increased in the 1860s, though not as much as Charleston.  This probably came in two phases.  During the Civil War, Columbia was seen as the safest place in the state. [6]  At first planters came with their household slaves; [7] as the war reached its climax, the “city’s population more than doubled with war refugees and their families and slaves.” [8]

After the war, freedmen moved to Charleston [9] or Savannah, where Union troops were stationed. [10]  Columbia was destroyed during Sherman’s march, [11]  and, while there were opportunities for carpenters and others, there was little food or safety.  Many who had come to the area during the war probably left after Sherman, living a city with no nascent middle class among those who were free before the war. [12]

As the chart below shows, Columbia’s Black population slowly grew through the 1920s, while that of Charleston remained stagnant.  The counties that had had the great rice plantations, Beaufort and Charleston, waned, while Anderson, northwest of Columbia waxed with the introduction of textile mills.

Immediately after the Civil War, missionaries arrived to initiate freedmen into Protestant churches.  The American Baptist Home Mission Society founded Benedict College in Columbia in 1870. [13]  Daniel Payne, head of the AME church, arrived with some assistants in Charleston in May of 1865. [14]  Their recruits were mainly former members of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, [15] which had separate buildings for slaves before the war, [16] and sloughed its Black members into a separate denomination afterward. [17]

Columbia’s Bethel Church was organized in the remains of a sword factory in 1866. [18]  One would guess many members were former house slaves who would have been forming a post-war middle class.  In the early 1920s, when Wiseman was pastor, it built a large brick edifice. [19]

So far I’ve found nothing about its leader, Thomas H. Wiseman.  The photograph that appears on the Photos C tab suggests he probably was in his fifties, which means he was born during Reconstruction.  In those turbulent years, that could have been anywhere.

The first record of his existence is a sermon he gave in 1920, when he already was in Columbia.  While the thrust was finding ways to oppose lynching and the Klan, he began by defining the soul.

“We conceive the Soul to be that essential, indestructible part of man.  That which we cannot conceive of as subject to death; that which we are sure cannot pass out of existence; the first cause of individual being, because it stands as the immediate cause of that which we know as individuality.  It is that which we conceive to be the core, the unseen life, causing all physical phenomens that we are capable of comprehending as taking place.  In fact, we can go farther and say that the soul is that somewhat of life that stands between material man and his Creator, related to both, necessary to both.” [20]

This view is orthodox enough to be published by a Black leader in Columbus.  But, within that language, there lurks the relationships with the spirit world that connect African Americans back to Africa.  As mentioned in the post for 13 March 2019, a number of African groups, which were sources of Southern slaves, believed a human was composed of the material, which died, and the spiritual, which returned to the land of the ancestors. [21]

Most believed the spirits maintained contact with their kin for some time after their deaths.  In Africa, that connection was available to any individual, although many ethnic groups recognized some had special powers of divination like the Igbo or communication like the Akan.  Wiseman suggested ministers have “the secret of mental telepathy” that allows them to communicate with God.  He added:

“Daniel had it. Three times a day Daniel opened his window and himself becoming the sending station, with the throne of the Most High God as the receiving station he communed with God always.  Paul and Silas had it.  Away in the still watch of the night they called up heaven, told God all about their troubles, and to show that the message was received, God sent an angel to deliver them from the stocks.” [22]

Graphics
1.  Data drawn from:
United States Census.  1930.  Composition and Characteristics.  South Carolina.  
Table 11.—Population by Age, Color, Nativity, and Sex, for Counties: 1930.  784–787.
Table 12.—Population by Age, Color, Nativity, and Sex for Cities of 10,000 or More: 1930.  788.

United States Census.  1920.  South Carolina.
South Carolina
Table 9.—Composition and Characteristics of the Population, for Counties: 1920.  930–933.
Table 10.—Composition and Characteristics of the Population, for Cities of 10,000 or More: 1920.  934.

United States Census.  1910. Statistics for South Carolina.
Table I.—Composition and Characteristics of the Population for the State and for Counties.  590–597.  Includes 1890 and 1900.
Table II.—Composition and Characteristics of the Population for Cities of 25,000 or More.  598.  Includes 1890 and 1900.

United States Census.  1880.
Table V.—Population, by Race and by Counties: 1880,1870, 1860.  407– 33
Table VI.—Population, by Race, of Cities and Towns of 4,000 Inhabitants and Upward: 1880 and 1870.  424.

United States Census.  1860.  State of South Carolina (1860)
Table No. 3.—Population of Cities, Towns, &c.  452, for Charleston.

Stowell.  Figures for Columbia in 1860.

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

End Notes
1.  Walter Edgar.  South Carolina.  Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998.  271.

2.  David O. Stowell.  “The Free Black Population of Columbia, South Carolina in 1860: A Snapshot of Occupation and Personal Wealth.”  The South Carolina Historical Magazine 104:6–24:2003.  9.

3.  Ulrich Bonnell Phillips.  American Negro Slavery.  New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1929 edition.  160.

4.  Edgar.  323.
5.   Stowell.  10.

6.  Alexia Jones Helsley.  Columbia, South Carolina: A History.  Charleston, South Carolina: History Press, 2015.  52.

7.  Helsey.  55.
8.  Helsey.  56.
9.  Edgar.  379.
10.  Edgar.  378.
11.  Helsey.  60–66.

12.  Stowell.  16.  “The occupations found within the 1860 census indicate there was no professional class or group within Columbia's free black population — there were no physicians, ministers or teachers, for example, although there were undoubtedly free blacks (as well as slaves) who performed at least some of these functions.”

13.  Helsey.  67.

14.  Dennis C. Dickerson.  The African Methodist Episcopal Church: A History.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.  125.  Payne is discussed in the posts for 9 August 2017 and 6 November 2017.

15.  Dickerson.  125.
16.  Edgar.  289.

17.  The Colored Methodist Episcopal Church is discussed in the post for 15 November 2020.

18.  “Historic Bethel A.M.E. Church.”  United States Department of the Interior.  National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form.

19.  “New Bethel Church.”  The Southern Indicator, Columbia, South Carolina, 3 September 1921.  1.  “Within a very few days Dr. T. H. Wiseman and the members of Bethel A. M. E. Church will be able to worship in the basement of their new church. [. . .] At present services are being held in the chapel of Allen University.”

20.  T. H. Wiseman.  “The Fruit of a Thought.”  Delivered 14 October 1920 at Sidney Park C. M. E. Church, Columbia, South Carolina.  12–22 in Richard Carroll and T. H. Wiseman.  Thoughts.  Columbia, South Carolina: Lewie Printing Company.  12.

21.  Among those mentioned in the post for 13 March 2019 are the Akan, Bambara, Ewe, Igbo, and Mende.

22.  Wiseman.  20.  As I noted in the post for 13 March 2019, Michael Gomez believed it was these commonalities in world views that allowed slaves to form communities, first on plantations, then again under the aegis of Christianity.

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.”

Jubilee Quartets

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.

 Movement slowed during the depression that followed the war, [19] then surged in the fall of 1922.  Congress had passed a restrictive immigration law in 1921 that limited the number who could come form Italy and the former Russian Empire. [20]  Companies in cities like Philadelphia, which had relied on immigrants for low-paid, unskilled immigrant labor, turned to African Americans.  In 1923, Blacks comprised 14.6% of the work force of ten large companies in the city. [21]

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.

Bethel Jubilee Quartet - Now Is the Needy Time

Topic: Early Versions
The first commercial recording of what would become “Kumbaya” was made 13 July 1923 in Camden, New Jersey, by the Bethel Jubilee Quartet of Columbia, South Carolina.  While the Victor Talking Machine Company had been recording for more than two decades, [1] it was a strange experience for the four men.

The challenges began when they planned their journey to New Jersey from the Jim Crow South.  It is possible they had access to an automobile, [2] but a train would have been the safest transportation.

More than likely they stayed with friends or relatives in Philadelphia, across the Delaware river from Camden.  Willa Ward-Royster recalled it was known as a “‘friendly city’ to blacks” [3] when her parents left Anderson, South Carolina, in 1920, to stay with relatives who already had migrated. [4]

The technician who recorded the four men would not have been the one who contacted them. [5] Harry Sooy said Victor employed nine men in 1922 to handle recording sessions [6] in one of two studios in Camden. [7]  Since the number of performers was small, they probably used Studio A, the second floor of a converted church. [8]

Recording still was done acoustically.  Musicians stood in front of horns that transmitted sound waves to wooden boxes where the vibrations of a glass diaphragm moved a stylus that cut grooves into wax platters called matrices.  The horn was in the room with the performers, and everything else in a separate room where the technician watched the physical movement of the stylus. [9]

Sergio Ospina Romero indicated that, while publicity photographs showed groups huddled in front of single large horns, by the 1920s recorders had a choice of horns and diaphragms that were selected to best capture the timbres of different types of sounds.  They could, when necessary, use several horns that were connected by rubber hoses to the one sound box. [10]

Probably whoever [11] recorded the Bethel Quartet began by having them sing.  After hearing their sound, he would have made technical decisions and told them where to stand and how to hold their bodies.  Then, he would have disappeared into the other room to direct the recording. [12]

Artists had to be adaptable when patterns of non-verbal communication were disrupted.  Sooy remembered problems with the “green” musicians in the La Scala orchestra who could not comprehend what they were expected to do. [13]  They had similar problems in China. [14]

The quartet must have done well enough.  They recorded eight songs on Thursday, July 12, then returned on Friday to record four more.  If the first recordings were poor, one suspects they second session would have been cancelled. [15]

Engineers could tell from looking at the wax if a recording was usable.  They could not control street noises, and so many factors could affect the quality of a matrix.  Of the twelve songs recorded by the quartet, half only required two recordings.  One took seven tries, and another eight. [16]

The best matrix for each song was sent to the electroplating department that made a metal overlay.  Ten recordings made it to step two.  The ones that did not happened to be the last recorded each day. [17]  Anything could have been a factor, including increased street noises later in the day or deteriorating wax conditions as temperatures rose above those required for recording.

Sooy said the staff met every morning to listen to the masters from the day before to select those that met their quality standards.  He recalled:

“There is always a lot of competition on every date, that is, with the Recording Staff, as each member has his own recordings and the anxiety creeps in to know whose recorders are making the best records, and which one will be chosen for a master record.” [18]

Six of Bethel’s songs were released.  Unfortunately, “Now Is the Needy Time” was not one of them.  Victor had so many masters to manage, any that were not released were destroyed.  The matrices, of course, probably did not survive the plating process.

Performers
A. C. Brogdon, lead tenor
Henry S. Allen, second tenor [19]
J. C. Eubanks, baritone
Thomas H. Wiseman, bass

Notes on Lyrics
We do not know anything more about the Bethel Jubilee Quartet version than the song was known in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1923, and was using the “needed time” verse.

Notes on Music
Sung a capella

Availability
Unused matrix, take 1.  Bethel Jubilee Quartet. “Now is the needy time.”  Camden, New Jersey, 13 July 1923.  Not survive.

Unused master B-28188.  Bethel Jubilee Quartet. “Now is the needy time.”  Camden, New Jersey, 13 July 1923.  Destroyed.

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

End Notes
1.  Eldridge Reeves Johnson began producing recordings using wax matices in 1900.  After settling a copyright lawsuit, he reorganized as Victor Talking Machine in 1901. [20]

2.  A local newspaper reported in 1921 that Wiseman and others “drove” to “Union, S. C. where he (Dr. Wiseman) delivered a telling address.  On returning they stopped at Newberry and other towns.” [21]

3.  Willa Ward-Royster.  How I Got Over: Clara Ward and the World-Famous Ward Singers.  Told to Toni Rose.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997.  9.  I use Ward-Royster as an illustration because her sister, Clara Ward, recorded “Come by Here” in 1962.

4.  Ward-Royster.  11.

5.  Victor did not yet have a formal Artists and Repertoire (A&R) department.  Calvin George handled the function until 1923.  He seems to have relied on reports and requests from retailers to identify new markets and artists. [22]

6.  Harry O. Sooy.  “Memoir of My Career.”  Unpublished manuscript in collection of Hagley Museum and on their website.  86.

7.  Sooy.  91.  Not all nine were in Camden.  Victor also had a studio in New York, and constantly was sending men to foreign countries to make recordings.

8.  The company had purchased the Trinity Baptist Church building in 1918. [23]  According to the Victor Records website, Studio B, the ground floor was used for symphonies and other large groups.

9.  The clearest discussion of the technology is by 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.  143–144.

10.  Ospina Romero.  145.

11.  Recorders kept meticulous records; however such minutia either was not recorded in the Camden ledgers, or was not transcribed by The University of California, Santa Barbara, for its Discography of American Historical Recordings on-line database. [24]  Today, of course, such information routinely is included with the credits.

12.  Ospina Romero.  151–152.
13.  Sooy.  85.
14.  Sooy.  31–32.

15.  Recording dates and song lists from UCSB.  The liner notes for the Wiseman anthology [25] differ slightly.

16.  “Hush, somebody’s calling my name” took seven tries; “I couldn’t hear nobody pray” took eight according to UCSB.

17.  The songs that did not survive the first review are “Oh rocks dont fall on me” and “Were you there when they crucified my Lord.” [UCSB]

18.  Sooy.  86.

19.  His complete name is from 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.

20.  Wikipedia.  “Eldridge R. Johnson.”
21.  Item.  The Southern Indicator, Columbia, South Carolina, 9 July 1921.  3.
22.  Sooy.  103.
23.  Phil Cohen.  “Trinity Baptist Church.”  DVRBS website.
24. The initial work on Victor recordings was done by Ted Fagan.

25.  Chris Smith.  Liner notes for Johnny Parth.  Wiseman Sextette/Quartet.  Vienna: Document Records DOCD-5520.  CD.  1997.