A. C. A. Song Book

Topic: Kumbaya 1955-1961
The next Cooperative Recreation Service publication that contributed to the spread of “Kumbaya” was issued by the American Camping Association in 1958.  It came ten years after CRS published the A. C. A. Song Book. [1]

The organization then was beginning its transition from a small group of private camp directors to a professional organization.  The ACA president in 1948 was Carol Gulick Hulbert, [2] whose uncle founded the Camp Fire Girls [3] and whose parents opened a private girls’ camp in Vermont in 1905. [4]  In 1922, Edward Gulick opened Lanakila for boys.  It was run by Carol’s husband, Chauncey Hulbert.  She took over in 1924. [5]

Hulbert was succeeded as ACA president by Reynold Carlson. [6]  He had joined by faculty of Indiana University’s Health, Physical Education and Recreation school in 1947.  Previously, he had worked for the National Recreation Association. [7]

Under Hulbert, the organization changed the name of its periodical from the Camp Directors Bulletin to Camping Magazine in 1946. [8]  The ACA began accrediting camps in 1948. [9]  It was countering Porter Sargent’s A Handbook of Summer Camps, which he had begun publishing in 1924 [10]  This complemented his Handbook of Private Schools that first appeared in 1915. [11]

Of the 68 camps, which existed in 1948 in Michigan and still were accredited by the ACA in 1974, half were sponsored by five youth groups: the YMCA (16), Girl Scouts (9), Camp Fire Girls (4), YWCA (4), and Boy Scouts (1).  Less than a quarter were private, and those of the Camp Fire Girls, YWCA, and Kings’ Daughters emulated their programs, bringing their influence to 36%.  The remaining 25% were religious, settlement houses, or special interest. [12]

No one is credited with editing the ACA songbook, but songs are included from three private camps: Wabukani and Winona in Maine, and Severance in New York.  Emily Welch, the owner of Wabukani, was the ACA president in 1932. [13]

The one thing that distinguished private camps from others was the length of time children and adolescents spent in them.  Private camps before 1950 tended to have one session that lasted all summer, while the others catered to groups that changed every week.  This had a strong impact of their repertoires. [14]

Private camps often developed traditions that included a number of songs written in the camps, which had been passed on for years.  New campers learned them as part of their initiation into the mores of camps.  Few spread beyond a camp’s boundaries.  The exceptions in the A. C. A. Song Book are: “My Paddle’s Keen and Bright” from the Gulick’s camp Sebago, [15] and “Whipporwill.”  The last was written by Anne Chapin at a Girl Scout training camp in 1921. [16]  Both spread through organization channels.

Camps that emulated private ones, like the CFG camp I attended in 1951, still assumed returning campers would learn the local repertoire a bit at a time, some songs each year.  Camp owners, who ran camps for profit, could not assume community prestige would move young children to accept such demands.  They realized they needed songs children could learn quickly, and something more was needed than “Row, Row Your Boat.”

The 1948 A. C. A Song Book was an attempt to fill the gap.  It still included many of the songs that had been sung in camps since the 1920s, like “The Border Trail,” [17] “Each Campfire Lights Anew” [18] and “Father Time.” [19]  It had a few from English and American folk tradition, like “The Keeper” [20] and “Old Smoky,” [21] and a few cowboy songs like “Night Herding Song” [22] and “Round-Up Lullaby” [23] that came from the popular view of folk music derived from collections published by Carl Sandburg and John Lomax. [24]

Many of the European folk songs were popularized by the National Recreation Association, or its music specialist, Augustus D. Zanzig. [25]   Seven came from their Singing America, [26] three from Folk Songs and Ballads published by Zanzig’s earlier employer, [27] and “Toviska” from an NRA publication from 1938. [28]

Lynn Rohrbough had not yet begun amassing a collection of international songs.  The ones in the A. C. A. Song Book that came from the CRS repertoire were from Bliss Wiant’s The Pagoda of 1946, [29] Olcutt Sanders’ Amigos Cantando of 1948, [30] and UNESCO’s Work and Sing of 1948. [31]

A large number of songs in the A. C. A. Song Book were religious, including three graces, [32] and eight spirituals. [33]  Except for the “Hannukah Hymn,” [34] they were from the Protestant tradition.  Two, “Day Is Dying in the West” [35] and “Now the Day Is Over” [36] came from the Chautauqua strain of camp meetings.

It is difficult to judge the impact of this songbook.  I remember 15 of the 94 songs at Kitanniwa.  Most were available from other sources and I know some were introduced after my first summer.

Notes on Performers
Wabunaki was founded in 1910 by Amy Dunlap.  At the time, she was working for the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, New York.  The camp apparently closed and the site “on an island in Hancock Lake, near Hillside,” Maine, [37] was purchased by Welch in 1921. [38]  It did not survive into the 1970s.

Welch graduated from Vassar in 1904, and worked as a teacher.  In 1914, she became principal of the Charlton  School in New York. [39]  She left for Richmond, Virginia, in 1917 where she was headmistress of Saint Catherine’s School.  The school said “her early retirement was influenced by the precarious state of the School’s finances as well as the increased family responsibilities which she faced following the death of her sister.” [40]  Her nephew recalls she started the camp because her teacher’s salary was insufficient to raise him and his two brothers. [41]

The two songs in the ACA collection from Wabunaki [42] were written by Isabel Grimes Booth and Ethel Wilcox.  Booth was writing music [43] when she was a senior at Vassar College in 1921. [44]  Wilcox had to leave Vassar when her father died. [45]  Thereafter, she lived in Poughkeepsie where she sang at programs sponsored by the Methodist Episcopal Church. [46]  One assumes both worked at Wabunaki.

Winona was founded in 1908 by Charles Cobb in Denmark, Maine, as the brother camp to Wyonegonic.  In the 1940s, it was managed by his grandson, Roland. [47]  In 1973, an eight-week session for boys cost $1,075. [48]  In comparison, Kitanniwa charged $39 for a one-week session.  The total income, per camper for the summer, was $241. [49]

One song appeared in the A. C. A. Songbook from Winona by F. E. Jones: “Off to the Hills.” [50]

Severance was found in 1917 on Paradox Lake in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. [51]  Carrie Sinn was the owner in the 1940s. [52]  The girls’ camp closed in 1972. [53]  At that time, an eight-week session cost $1,400. [54]

No author was given for “We Think of Camping.” [55]  Like many camp songs before CRS began publishing custom songsters, it was written to a popular song.  The melody for “The Old Refrain” was composed for a Viennese operetta in 1887 by Johann Bundle and popularized in this country by Fritz Kreisler. [56]

End Notes
1.  American Camping Association, Inc., Chicago, Illinois.  A. C. A. Song Book.  Delaware, Ohio: Cooperative Song Service, Cooperative Recreation Service.  Undated; the most recent songs in the book are from 1948.

2.  “A History of ACA Presidents and Board Chairs.”  American Camp Association website; based on Eleanor Fell’s History of Organized Camping: The First 100 Years.  Martinsville, Indiana: American Camping Association, 1986.

3.  Luther Halsey Gulick is discussed in note 35 in the entry for 5 September 2021.  He also is discussed in Camp Songs, Folk Songs.  12.

4.  Hulbert’s parents, Edward Leeds Gulick and the former Harriet Marie Farnsworth, are discussed in Camp Songs, Folk Songs.  341.  The first camp was Aloha.

5.  “Who We Are.”  Aloha Foundation website; accessed 26 May 2023.
6.  “History of ACA Presidents.”

7.  Joel Meier.  “Reynold E. Carlson: A Distinguished Pioneer in Outdoor Education.”  Research in Outdoor Education  6:article 4:2002.  3.

8.  “Timeline of ACA and Summer Camp.”  American Camp Association website.
9.  “American Camp Association.”  Wikipedia website; accessed 23 April 2023.
10.  A Handbook of Summer Camps.  Boston: Porter Sargent, 1924.

11.  “Porter Sargent.”  Wikipedia website; accessed 20 Mary 2023.

The Handbook of Private Schools.  Boston: P. Sargent, 1915.

12.  National Directory of Accredited Camps for Boys and Girls.  Martinsville, Indiana: American Camping Association, 14th edition, 1974.  I chose Michigan as my sample because I am from Michigan and have some sense of the camps listed.  Beyond that pragmatic reason, the state was typical of camps in the 1970s.  Camps not only had a variety of owners, but the sponsors were based in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.  This was because cities like Chicago and Toledo did not have the same types of small lakes and big lake waterfronts that are found in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

13.  “History of ACA Presidents.”

14.  The following discussion is based on a more detailed analysis in Camp Songs, Folk Songs.

15.  “My Paddle’s Keen and Bright” is discussed in the post for 5 December 371 (note 46) and on pages 445 and 565 in Camp Songs, Folk Songs.

16.  “Whipporwill” and Chapin are discussed on pages 445 and 571 in Camp Songs, Folk Songs.

17.  Carol Peterson.  “The Border Trail.”  Written to “Road to the Isles” as transcribed by Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser in Songs of the Hebrides.  London: Boosey and Company, 1917. [57]

18.  “Each Campfire Lights Anew” is reproduced in the posts for 28 November 2021 and 13 March 2020, and is mentioned in posts for 5 December 2021 and 20 February 2022.

19.  “Father Time” is mentioned in the post for 13 March 2022.  Camp Songs, Folk Songs quotes a woman who believed it was from Vassar (page 341).

20.  “The Keeper” is discussed in the post for 5 December 2021.

21.  “Old Smoky,” is identified in the A. C. A.  Song Book as an  American folk song recorded by Greta Biddle Kaylor in Knox County, Tennessee.  This was before the song was popularized by The Weavers in 1951. [58]  By then, it had been collected by a number of folklorists. [59]

22.  “Night Herding Song.”   Published by Ina Sires in Songs of the Open Range.  Boston: C. C. Birchard and Company, 1928.  Ellen Ina Sires grew up in Navarro County, Texas, [60] about 40 miles south of Dallas. [61]  She taught school [62] and lectured on cowboy culture. [63]

23.  “Round-Up Lullaby” is discussed in note 32 of the post for 20 March 2022.

24.  Camp Songs, Folk Songs describes the music that developed from the publications of Carl Sandburg and John Lomax as “consensus folk music  [64]  Sandburg is discussed in the post for 5 May 2019.  Lomax is discussed in the post for 12 May 2019.

25.  For more on Zanzig, see the column at the right of the screen.

26.  “America the Beautiful,” “At the Gate of Heaven,” “Down in the Valley,” “Over the Meadows,” “Prayer” from Engelbert Humperdinck’s  Hansel and Gretel, “Våsång,” and “Walking at Night.”

27.  “Morning Comes Early,” “The Silver Moon Is Shining,” and “Tiritomba.”

28.  “Toviska.”  Songs for Informal Singing.  New York: National Recreation Association, 1938. [WorldCat entry]  The A. C. A. Song Book identifies it as a Moravian folk song arranged by Max V. Exner.

29.  “After School” and “Yangtze Boatman’s Chantey” appear in The Pagoda, arranged by Bliss Wiant.  Cooperative Recreation Service Inc, © 1946.  This is mentioned in the post for 2 October 2022.

30.  “The Carpenters” and “My Farm” appear in Amigos Candando, edited by Phyllis Aden Sanders and Olcutt Sanders.  Delaware, Ohio: Cooperative Recreation Service; copyrighted 15 October 1948.  This is mentioned briefly in the post for 13 February 2022.

31.  “Ahrirang,” “Holla Hi, Holla Ho!,” “Mill on the Rhine,” “My Bela Bimba,” and “Tamo Daleko” appear in UNESCO, Coordinating Committee for International Voluntary Service.  Work and Sing: An International Songbook.  Delaware, Ohio: Cooperative Recreation Service, Inc.  It was copyrighted in 1948, but the earliest edition I own was edited by Patricia Dunham Hunt.

32.  “Chimes Grace,” “Round of Thanks,” and “Praise for Bread.”

33.  “Jacob’s Ladder,” “Nobody Knows,” “Steal Away,” “Study War No More,” “Trampin’,” and “Won’t You Sit Down.”  James Weldon Johnson’s “Life Every Voice and Sing” is not a spiritual but often is treated as one.

34.  “Hannukah Hymn,” which begins “Rock of Ages, let our song.”   It was copyrighted in 1932 by the Central Conference of American Rabbis.  The group represented the Reformed Jewish tradition. [65]

35.  Mary A. Lathbury and William F Sherwin.  “Day Is Dying in the West.”  It was written in 1877 for the Chautauqua Assembly. [66]

36.  Sabine Baring-Gould wrote “Now the Day Is Over” in 1865, and Joseph Barnby composed the melody in 1869.  It appeared in the 1868 edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern edited by William Henry Monk.  London: J. Alfred Novello. [67]

37.  Handbook of Private Schools.  1915.
38.  Handbook of Summer Camps.  1935.  262.
39.  Handbook of Private Schools.  1915.
40.  “School Leadership.”  Saint Catherine’s School, Richmond, Virginia, website.

41.  Ralph Hubbell.  “As It Was at the Beginning!”  Living Prime Time website, August 1997.

42.  “Come All You Campers” and “When a Breezy Morning.”  A. C. A. Song Book.  36–37.

43.  “Jadda Bird” was published by Isabel Grimes in 1921. [68]
44.  Item.  Vassar Quarterly 25(1):1 October 1939.
45.  Item.  Kappa Kappa Gamma’s The Key 29(2):154:May 1912.

46.  Item.  Pokeepsie Evening Enterprise, Poughkeepsie, New York, 20 February 1915.  6.

“Sunday School Association Convention, Oct 31.”  Poughkeepsie Eagle, Poughkeepsie, New York, 30 October 1914.  7.

Vassar is in Poughkeepsie.

47.  “Camp Wyonegonic.”  Sensagent website reproduces a Wikipedia post that no longer exists.

48.  National Directory.  96.

49.  National Directory.  39.  This included six one-week sessions, and two five-day sessions.

50.   F. E. Jones.  “Off to the Hills.”  A. C. A. Song Book.  34.  Nothing could be found about Jones.

51.  A. C. A. Song Book.  186.
52.  Item.  Ticonderoga Sentinel, Ticondergoa, New York, 6 June 1940.  3.

53.  “Sleepaway: Two Chances to Go Back to Summer Camp.”  American Heritage 43(3):June/July 2003.

54.  National Directory.  186.
55.  “We Think of Camping.”  A. C. A. Song Book.  35.

56.  James J.  Fuld.  The Book of World-Famous Music.  New York: Dover Publications, 2000 edition.  414–415.

57.  Camp Songs, Folk Songs.  282.

58.  The Weavers And Terry Gilkyson.  “Across The Wide Missouri / On Top Of Old Smoky.”  Decca 9-27515; issued 1951. [Discogs entry]

59.  “On Top of Old Smokey.”  The Traditional Ballad Index.  Robert B. Waltz and David G. Engle, Ballad Index website, 2023.

60.  “Obe Hoy Sires.”  Mormon’s Family Search website.  He was her father.

61.  Julie G. Miller.  “Navarro County.”  Handbook of Texas Online website.  1976; last updated 28 May 2021.

62.  Ina Sires, Dallas, Texas.  Letter to Erwin E. Smith, 9 July 1926.  Reproduced on Amon Carter Museum of American Art website.

63.  Guy Logsdon.  “The Whorehouse Bells Were Ringing” and Other Songs Cowboys Sing.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.  Quoted in a review by George W. Lyon.  Ethnologies 17(2):168–171:1995.  169–170.

64.  Camp Songs, Folk Songs.  54–55.

65.  “Central Conference of American Rabbis.”  Wikipedia website; accessed 27 May 2023.

66.  Donald P.  Hustad.  Dictionary-Handbook to Hymns for the Living Church.  Carol Stream, Illinois: Hope Publishing, 1978.  184.

67.  Hustad.  184.
68.  Item on Picclick website selling sheet music.

Florida Ring Shouts

Topic: Origins - Ring Shout
James Weldon Jackson discussed ring shouts in his 1933 autobiography, Along This Way, [1] and in the preface to The Book of American Negro Spirituals, which he compiled with his brother J. Rosamund Johnson in 1925. [2]  In the post for 12 February 2023, I suggested it is difficult to identify the sections of his descriptions that are based on first-hand experiences.  I devoted more space in that post to his discussions of the accompanying music.

Joe Richardson uncovered a ring shout description from Lake City, Florida, in 1870.  It would be useful to compare a letter from Ambrose Hart to Johnson’s recollections.

Lake City is located on the banks of the Suwannee River near the border with Georgia.  Land to the north was devoted to cotton; land to the west was considered central Florida. [3]  The town itself was primarily a transit point.  The largest taxpayers in 1845 were five whiskey merchants [4] who owned twenty to thirty slaves. [5]

In 1854, an Englishman described it as “a collection of log cabins, occupying a cheerless sandy clearing in the midst of pine woods.” [6]  Charles Lanman could not see what supported the settlement “unless it be the fact that it is a sort of resting place for the teamsters and travellers, who have occasion to pass from Jacksonville to Middle Florida.” [7]

The railroad transformed the frontier community.  Before it arrived in 1858, cotton was shipped down the Suwannee “to Cedar Key and from there by boat on the long voyage around the peninsula to the east coast of Florida.”  Now it could go directly to Jacksonville or Fernandina. [8]

In 1850, surrounding Columbia County had a population of 4,808, of whom 26.3% were slaves. [9]  A decade later, the population had dropped to 4,646, and the percentage of slaves had increased to 44.4%. [10]  In 1845, whiskey merchant Thomas Dexter owned twenty slaves. [11] Claude Augusta Wilson was born on his plantation in 1857.  He remembered there were “about 100 slaves including children.” [12]

When Union troops were advancing on Jacksonville in 1862, residents fled to Lake City on the railroad. [13]  When Thomas Wentworth Higginson arrived in Jacksonville in 1863, he sent the remaining women and children to Lake City. [14]  Once there, they began growing more cattle to feed Confederate troops. [15]  This not only increased the white population, but imported a new group of slaves with different origins than those in the central part of the state.

Hart served in the Union Army in Louisiana in 1862. [16]  After the war, he headed for Florida, where he landed in Fernandina in late 1866. [17]  In Jacksonville he met S. B. Thompson, who made him a partner in his logging business in Clay County. [18]  In 1868, Hart moved on to Lake City where he grew cotton. [19]  It was there that he wrote his description of a ring shout in a letter to his sister:

“the Negroes began ‘screeching, dancing, stamping and jumping . . . . They got to tearing around in a circle with two old preachers bobbing up and down in the center . . . . They broke the flooring all to pieces, cracked the still’ and finally the chimney began to show signs of crumbling before the demonstration was stopped.” [20]

The only Christianization that had occurred was the substitution of preachers for the men in the middle. [21]  Johnson described a ritual that was resisting being westernized.  When he was fifty-four years old, he wrote:

“I can remember seeing this dance many times when I was a boy.  A space is cleared by moving the benches, and the men and women arrange themselves, generally alternately, in a ring, their bodies quite close.  The music starts and the ring begins to move.  Around it goes, at first slowly, then with quickening pace.  Around and around it moves on shuffling feet that do not leave the floor, one foot beating with the heel a decided accent in strict two-four time.  The music is supplemented by the clapping of hands.  As the ring goes around it begins to take on signs of frenzy.  The music, starting, perhaps, with a Spiritual, becomes a wild, monotonous chant.  The same musical phrase is repeated over and over one, two, three, four, five hours.  The words become a repetition of an incoherent cry.  The very monotony of sound and motion produces an ecstatic state.  Women, screaming, fall to the ground prone and quivering.  Men, exhausted, drop out of the shout.  But the ring closes up and moves around and around.

“I remember, too, that even then the ‘ring shout’ was looked upon as a very questionable form of worship.  It was distinctly frowned upon by a great many colored people.  Indeed, I do not recall ever seeing a ‘ring shout’ except after the regular services.  Almost whispered invitations would go around, ‘Stay after church; there’s going to be a “ring shout”.’” [22]

He could have been describing something he saw at his father’s Baptist church, either in Fernandina or in Jacksonville, or in his grandmother’s Methodist church in Jacksonville.  When he was sixty-two, he described the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church in LaVilla:

“The shouters formed in a ring, men and women alternative, their bodies close together, moved round and round of shuffling feet that never left the floor.  With the heel of the right foot they pounded out the fundamental beat of the dance and with their hands clapped out the varying rhythmical accents of the chant; for the music was, in fact, African chant and the shout an African dance, the whole pagan rite transplanted and adapted to Christian worship.  Round and round the ring would go; one, two, three, four, five hours, the very monotony of sound and motion indusing an ecstatic frenzy.” [23]

End Notes
1.  James Weldon Johnson.  Along This Way.  New York: The Viking Press, 1933.  129–604 in James Weldon Johnson, edited by William L. Andrews.  New York: Library Classics of the United States, 2004.

2.  James Weldon Johnson.  The Book of American Negro Spirituals.  New York: The Viking Press, 1925.

3.  “History of Slavery in Florida.”  Wikipedia website; accessed 23 April 2023.

4.  Edward F. Keuchel.  A History of Columbia County, Florida.  Tallahassee, Florida: Sentry Press, 1981.  82.

5.  Keuchel.  83.

6.  Charles Lanman.  Adventures in the Wilds of the United States and British American Provinces.  Philadelphia: John W. Moore, 1856.  2:133.  Quoted by Keuchel.  87.

7.  Lanman.  2:133.  Quoted by Keuchel.  88.
8.  Keuchel.  91.

9.  United States Census.  1850.  Florida.  Table 1.  “Population by Counties—Age, Color, and Condition—Aggregates.”

10.  United States Census.  1860.  State of Florida.  Table 1.  “Population by Age and Sex.”

11.  Keuchel.  83.  Dexter may have understated his holdings to keep his taxes low.

12.  Claude Augusta Wilson.  Interviewed in Lake City, Florida, by James Johnson on 6 November 1936.  In George Rawick.  A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume 3, Florida Narratives.  Compiled by The Library of Congress from interviews by the Works Projects Administration, Federal Writers’ Project.  Washington: Library of Congress, 1941.  Wilson may have generalized the number of slaves; 100 may mean a large number.

13.  Thomas Frederick Davis.  History of Early Jacksonville.  Jacksonville, Florida: The H. and W. B. Drew Company, 1911.  160.

14.  Davis.  177.
15.  “Lake City, Florida.”  Wikipedia website; accessed 22 February 2023.

16.  “Lieutenant Ambrose B. Hart, 128th New York.”  National Park Services, Monocacy National Battlefield website, Frederick, Maryland.

17.  Keuchel.  128.

18.  Mary Jo McTammany.  “Rich Timber Resources Sparked Clay County’s Recovery after Civil War.”  Clay Today On Line website, Clay County, Florida, 18 April 2018.

19.  Keuchel.  128.

20.  A. B. Hart.  Letter to Mary Hart, 31 July 1870.  Quoted by Joe M. Richardson.  The Negro in the Reconstruction of Florida, 1865-1877.  Tallahassee: The Florida State University, 1965.  89.  Richardson, comments before and after quotation; ellipsis in Richardson.

21.  More descriptions of ring shouts can be found in the posts for September and October, 2018.  These have been collected into “Ring Shouts: Historic Descriptions and Contemporary Examples,” which is available on the Academia.com website.  The one seen by Harriet Beecher Stowe in Jacksonville is quoted in the post for 30 September 2018.

22.  Johnson, 1925.  33.
23.  Johnson, 1933.  158.

LaVilla Reconstruction Religion

Topic: Origins - Early Versions
One obstacle to understanding religious beliefs in LaVilla when James Weldon Johnson was a child is the lack of resources.  A great many African Americans are Baptists [1] but, because the denomination lacks the centralized structure of Methodists, it lacks the latter’s archives and central reports.  As mentioned in the post for 5 March 2023, James Bryant found details in popular religious publications like The Christian Index.

Joe Richardson found another source in reports by agents for the Freedmen’s Bureau.  C. M. Hamilton noted “freed slaves were strictly, and peculiarly, a religious people” who attended “services in churches and brush arbors on Sundays and Wednesday evenings.” [2]  Jacob Remley thought “this faculty of veneration appears to be such that it is a hard matter to engage their minds in any other direction.” [3]  In Jacksonville, one man told Edward L’Engle he needed a cook who was “not partial to all night prayer meetings.” [4]

Revivals periodically swept through the town.  In 1871, whites complained the services were noisy and lasted all night. [5]  Two years later, Jonathon Gibbs admitted African Americans “still preach and pray, sing and shout all night long,” but noted “many of the things that shock good taste and good morals, which a few years ago were so prevalent, have passed away.” [6]

Gibbs was raised free in Philadelphia, and became a Presbyterian minister in 1856.  The Black was active in Abolitionist activities during the Civil War, which led him to Charleston, South Carolina in 1865.  Two years later he moved to Jacksonville where he opened a school for Freedmen, and became active in Reconstruction politics.  By 1868 he was holding office in Tallahassee. [7]

Johnson’s grandmother affiliated with a Methodist church that had been organized by a northern white missionary in 1866. [8]  It followed the standard protocols of the white denomination, including love feasts [9] and weekly prayer meetings [10].  In 1880, a traveling evangelist descended on the church.

Years later, Johnson recalled:

“In these revival meetings the decorum of the regular Sunday services gave way to something primitive.  It was hard to realize that this was the same congregation which on Sunday mornings sat listening to the preacher’s exegesis of this text and joining in singing conventional hymns and anthems led by a choir.  Now the scene is changed.  The revivalist rants and roars, he exhorts and implores, he warns and threatens.  The air is charged.  Overlaid emotions come to the surface.  A woman gives a piercing scream and begins to ‘shout’; then another, and another.  The more hysterical ones must be held to be kept from ‘shouting’ out of their clothes.” [11]

Willis Williams arrived in Jacksonville in 1879 as a mail clerk for the Florida Central and Peninsular Railroad.  At some time, he joined Johnson’s grandmother’s church.  In 1937, he told Viola Muse:

“The manner of worship was very much in keeping with present day modes.  Preachers appealed to the emotions of the ‘flock’ and the congregation responded with ‘amens,’ ‘halleluia,’ clapping of hands, shouting and screaming.” [12]

Saint Paul’s African Methodist Episcopal Church erected a building in LaVilla in 1883 [13] that was  between the homes of Johnson’s parents and his grandmother.  He remembered that, as a young adolescent, he often heard “the weird music and the sound of thudding feet” when he “woke suddenly.” [14]

Francis Asbury turned camp meetings into sites for annual conferences of Methodists before the Civil War. [15]  The AME church continued the practice.  In 1875, it held its annual meeting near Jacksonville for eleven days. [16]

Camp meetings continued beyond the purview of the press and neighbors who had to work every day and so could not be kept awake by noisy services.  Edward Lycurgis was born in 1872 in Saint Augustine.  He recalled that “all work ceased in a vicinity where a camp meeting was held. Farmers flocked to the meeting from all parts of Saint Johns County.”  They lasted for several days, and the “the stirring sermons and spirituals that rang through the woods and could be heard for several miles on a clear day.”  The meetings culminated in river baptisms where the preferred song was “Take Me to the River To Be Baptized. [17]

End Notes
1.  More than half the African Americans, who attended church in Florida in the late 1930s, were Baptists.  The “African Methodist” church was second. [18]  The current percentage of Baptist is 49.08%.  Methodist churches attract 5.88% of the Black population, and Pentecostal groups 8.62%. [19]

2.  C. M. Hamilton.  Report to J. G. Foster, 31 May 1867.  Bureau Records for Florida.  Quoted by Joe M. Richardson.  The Negro in the Reconstruction of Florida, 1865-1877.  Tallahassee: The Florida State University, 1965.  86-87.

3.  Jacob A. Remley.  Report to A. H. Jackson, 1 October 1868.  Bureau Records for Florida.  Quoted by Richardson.  87.

4.  S. D. McConnell.  Letter to E. M. L’Engle, 1 December 1869.  Quoted by Richardson.  87.  L’Engle, the brother of the man who established LaVilla, is discussed in the post for 19 March 2023.  Emphasis in the original.

5.  Courier, Jacksonville, Florida, October 1871.  Quoted by Richardson.  89.

6.  Jonathon Gibbs.  The Florida Agriculturalist 1:23:17 January 1874.  Quoted by Richardson.  89.

7.  “Jonathan Clarkson Gibbs.”  Wikipedia website; accessed 21 April 2023.

8.  For more on the history of Ebenezer Methodist Church, see the post for 12 February 2023.

9.  James Weldon Johnson.  Along This Way.  New York: The Viking Press, 1933.  129–604 in James Weldon Johnson, edited by William L. Andrews.  New York: Library Classics of the United States, 2004.  166.

10.  Johnson.  165.
11.  Johnson.  161.

12.  Willis Williams.  Interviewed in Jacksonville, Florida, by Viola B. Muse on 20 March 1937.  In George Rawick.  A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume 3, Florida Narratives.  Compiled by The Library of Congress from interviews by the Works Projects Administration, Federal Writers’ Project.  Washington: Library of Congress, 1941.  Reprinted by Greenwood Press of Westport, Connecticut, in 1972.  Williams was born in 1856 in Tallahassee, and lived in the city where his mother was the cook for a local merchant.

13.  Saint Paul’s AME church is discussed in the post for 12 February 2023.
14.  Johnson.  158.

15.  See the post for 8 November 2020 for more on Asbury’s use of camp meetings following the Cane Ridge Revival.

16.  Sentinel, Tallahassee, Florida, 11 September 1875.  Cited by Richardson.  89-90.  Black camp meetings are discussed in the post for 15 March 2020 on the area surrounding New Bern, North Carolina.

17.  Edward Lycurgis.  Interviewed in Jacksonville, Florida, by Pearl Randolph on 5 December 1936.  In Rawick.  He moved to Jacksonville’s Clara White Mission in his old age.

18.  The Florida Negro, edited by Gary W. McDonogh.  Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.  109.  Based on unpublished work by the WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project in Florida, which is discussed in the post for 30 April 2023.  The manuscript did not use the terms African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the white Methodist Episcopal Church that sponsored the church Johnson attended, and the Black offshoot of the ME church.  I assume their ranking is based on the sum of some of these groups.

19.  Robert Joseph Taylor, Linda M. Chatters, and R. Khari Brown.  “African American Religious Participation.”  Review of Religious Research 56:513-38:2014.

LaVilla Antebellum Religion

Topic: Origins - Early Versions
The Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers Project recorded memoirs from former slaves in the 1930s.  Most of the collectors, like Ruby Pickens Tartt in Alabama [1] and Genevieve Willcox Chandler in South Carolina, [2] were white.  In Jacksonville, Florida, all the WPA workers were African Americans. [3]

This mattered.  Criticisms of slave masters were removed by state administrators before documents were sent to the Library of Congress. [4]  In many cases, whites may not have asked or been told.  When George Rawick published the interviews in 1972, he included these comments.  If one wants to know about beatings, women kept as breeders, and slave sales the Florida transcriptions are the ones to read, especially those collected outside Jacksonville. [5]  As historian C. Vann Woodward noted, “the distinctiveness of the interviews where the interviewers and the interviewed were of the same race is readily apparent.” [6]

As mentioned in the post on the population in the Jacksonville suburb of LaVilla directly after the Civil War, few people were from the city or its county.  Slaves were removed during the war by owners, and new people moved in during reconstruction. [7]  Squires Jackson was the only one to speak to the WPA who grew up in antebellum Jacksonville.  Five were in the city when James Weldon Johnson was a child. [8]  Many moved there were they old to live with children or other relatives.

Nine of the twenty-one people in Jacksonville were born before 1850, which means they were at least ten years old when the Civil War began.  These are the ones who would have the clearest memories of antebellum conditions.

Their recollections about religion before the war are similar: they heard white preachers tell them to obey their masters. [9]  Clayborn Gantling added: “they never mentioned God” in Georgia. [10]  Charles Coates was a carriage driver in Georgia.  He remembered that “they learned more about God when they sat outside the church waiting to drive their masters and family back home” than in services designed for slaves. [11]

No one mentioned anything resembling a ring shout.  Only one Black, Eli Boyd of Miami, had grandparents who spoke Geechee, the form of Gullah used along the Georgia coast where rice and sea island cotton were grown. [12]  When the African Americans in Jacksonville mentioned a cash crop it was upland cotton.  As mentioned in the post for 25 August 2019, it was grown in different areas.

None mentioned the use of iron pots in services.  As noted in the post for 29 September 2019, most of the reports in the WPA narratives were from North Carolina and Tennessee, and the states that bordered them to the west and south.

Only Harriett Gresham mentioned private services.  She recalled a Black preacher held services on the plantation near Barnwell, South Carolina, owned by Edward Bellinger.  “But,” she added, “the slaves held secret meetings and had praying grounds where they met a few at a time to pray for better things.” [13]

Anna Scott recalled that, in South Carolina, slaves could attend white services, but any “who ‘felt the sperrit’ during a service must keep silence until after the service, when they could ‘tell it to the deacon’, a colored man who would listen to the confessions or professions of religion of the slaves until late into the night.  The Negro deacon would relay his converts to the white minister of the church, who would meet them in the vestry room at some specified time.” [14]

William Sherman bought his freedom from Jack Davis, a nephew of Jefferson Davis, and lived on adjacent land.  He remembered that at Black Swamp, near Robertsville, South Carolina, [15] a white man would preach to them.  Once the war began, “they held ‘meetings’ among themselves in their cabins.” [16]

The scarcity of comments on antebellum slave practices may be caused by several reasons.  First, they may have taken questions about religion to mean Christianity, and so only talked about their exposure to Protestantism.  Luke Towns said his mother in Tolberton County, Georgia “believed in prayer; one day as she traveled from her patch home, just as she was about to let the ‘gap’ (this was a fence built to keep the hogs and horses shut in) down, she knelt to pray and a light appeared before her and from that time on she did not believe in any fogyism, but in God.” [17]

The nature of the WPA sample also may be a factor.  Many mentioned that they or their parents had been house servants.  While this may imply individuals who had been raised closer to whites were more comfortable talking to outsiders, it also may have been a consequence of better food when they were children.

Before the Civil War, children, Black and white, were lucky to survive past the age of five.  As a result, Douglas Ewbank estimates the average life expectancy for a slave at birth was thirty years.  If they lived to be ten-years old, half would be dead by age thirty-five. [18]  If they were born in 1860, that would mean half were alive in 1895.

Frank A. Sloan’s team examined the records of Black Civil War veterans.  They found that more than half (54.1%)  of those who were alive in 1900 were dead by 1914.  Of those who died, the mean age was 70.4 years. [19]

Those who lived longest with their wits in tack were the ones who could be interviewed by the WPA.  By the 1930s, the ones in Jacksonville were urbanized or living with children who were.  Their current church membership was more important than their childhood experiences.

Some glimpse of those older views may be found in their comments on those who passed before them.  Squires Jackson, who began preaching  in 1868 and ordained in 1874, said he was “waiting now to hear the call of God to the promise land.” [20]

Acie Thomas, who was born just before the war in 1857, said his wife had died he several years before.  He reflected: “All done left me now.  Everything I got done gone—all ’cept Keziah.  She comes and visits me and we talk and walk over there where we uster and set on the porch.  She low she gwine steal ole Acie some of dese days in the near future, and I’ll be mighty glad to go ever yonder where all I got is at.” [21]

Shack Thomas’ father was from the west coast of Africa.  He and his first wife planted three oak trees when they moved to Jacksonville.  He told Martin Richardson that “‘Right after my first wife died, one of them trees withered,’ the old man tells you.  ‘I did all I could to save the other one, but pretty soon it was gone too.  I guess this other one is waiting for me,’ he laughs, and points to the remaining oak.” [22]

They may have become Protestants, but they retained an intimacy with the world of spirits and a universe suffused with sacred powers that came from their African ancestors.

End Notes
1.  Ruby Pickens Tartt is discussed in the post for 23 January 2019.
2.  Genevieve Willcox Chandler is discussed in the post for 25 December 2022.

3.  Pamela G. Bordelon.  The Federal Writers’ Project’s Mirror to America: The Florida Reflection.  PhD dissertation.  The Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, 1991.  146.  The collectors were: Rachel A. Austin (6), James M. Johnson (5), Samuel Johnson (1), Viola B. Muse (4), Martin Richardson (1), and Pearl Randolph (4).

4.  Boredelon.  160.

5.  George Rawick.  A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume 3, Florida Narratives.  Compiled by The Library of Congress from interviews by the Works Projects Administration, Federal Writers’ Project.  Washington: Library of Congress, 1941.  Reprinted by Greenwood Press of Westport, Connecticut in 1972.

6.  C. Vann Woodward. “History From Slave Sources.”  American Historical Review 79:480:1974.  Quoted by Bordelon.  146.

7.  The population of LaVilla is discussed in the post for 23 April 2023.

8.  Mark Mullen, Anna Scott, William Sherman, Willis Williams, and Claude Augusta Wilson.  Wilson returned to Lake City late in life.

9.  Samuel Simeon Andrews, Charles Coates, Douglas Doursey, Clayborn Gantling, Harriett Gresham, Margaret Nickerson, and William Sherman.

10.  Clayborn Gantling.  Interviewed in Jacksonville, Florida, by Rachel Austin, on 16 April 1937.  In Ranwick.

11.  “Father” Charles Coates.  Interviewed in Jacksonville, Florida, by Viola B. Muse on 3 December 1936.  In Rawick.

12.  Rev. Eli Boyd.  Interviewed in Dade County, Florida, by unnamed person.  In Rawick.  Dave Taylor’s speech was described as Geechee.  He was raised in Norfolk, Virginia, and lived in the Bahamas. [23]

13.  Harriett Gresham.  Interviewed in Jacksonville, Florida, by Pearl Randolph on 18 December 1936.  In Rawick.

14.  Anna Scott.  Interviewed in Jacksonville, Florida, by Viola B. Muse on 11 January 1937.  In Rawick.  Scott said she lived near Dove City, South Carolina, but no such town appears on the internet.  The closest is Dovesville in Darlington County.

15.  Black Swamp and Robertsville, South Carolina, are mentioned in the post for 5 March 2023 in connection with the deacon of the first Baptist church in LaVilla, Elias Jaudon.

16.  William Sherman.  Interviewed in Chaseville, Florida, by J. M. Johnson on 28 August 1936.  In Rawick.

17.  Luke Towns.  Interviewed in Jacksonville, Florida, by Rachel A. Austin on 30 November 1936.  In Rawick.

18.  Douglas C. Ewbank.  “History of Black Mortality and Health before 1940.”  The Milbank Quarterly 65:Supplement 1, Part 1:100-128:1987.  104.

19.  Frank A. Sloan, Padmaja Ayyagari, Martin Salm, and Daniel Grossman.  “The Longevity Gap Between Black and White Men in the United States at the Beginning and End of the 20th Century.”  American Journal of Public Health 100(2):357-363:February 2010.  359.

20.  Rev. Squires Jackson.  Interviewed in Jacksonville, Florida,  by Samuel Johnson on 11 September 1937.  In Rawick.

21.  Acie Thomas.  Interviewed in Jacksonville, Florida, by Pearl Randolph on 35 November 1936.  In Rawick.

22.  Shack Thomas.  Interviewed in South Jacksonville, Florida, by Martin Richardson on 8 December 1936.  In Rawick.

23.  Dave Taylor.  Interviewed in Tampa, Florida, by Jules A. Frost on 9 July 1937.  In Rawick.

LaVilla Demographics

Topic: Origins - Early Versions
James Weldon Johnson’s parents moved to LaVilla, in 1869. [1]  Patricia Drozd Kenney searched census and military records to identify the other individuals who bought or rented land from Francis L’Engle and his wife, the former Charlotte Johnston Porcher, in the suburb of Jacksonville, Florida, during Reconstruction. [2]

She noted that Freedmen gravitated to the Jacksonville area because Union troops still were present. [3]  Claude Augusta Wilson remembered a Black soldier drove up to the plantation where his parents were living near Lake City and drove them to Jacksonville.  His father got a job with the Florida Central Railroad, and a year or so later “bought a piece of land in town and built a house of straight boards.” [4]

More than half the individuals who leased land from the L’Engles were born in Florida, “frequently from the outlying counties in northeast Florida.” The rest were from South Carolina or Georgia. [5]  Nine of the seventeen who were living in Jacksonville in the 1930s when they were interviewed by the WPA were from Florida, with six from Tallahassee.  More were from Georgia than South Carolina. [6]

All the ones Kenney happened to profile were from the Fernandina area, mentioned in the post for 19 February 2023.  Union troops had landed at the port in March 1862.  In December, Thomas Wentworth Higginson sent agents there to recruit men for the Black regiment he was organizing near Beaufort, South Carolina. [7]

Kenney mentioned Hamilton, who lived in Fernandina’s Nassau County.  He enlisted in 1862, and lived in Beaufort.  After the war, Hamilton leased land from Charlotte.  More important, four men he knew in the army also moved to LaVilla and “maintained contact through friendship, work, church, and leisure.” [8]

Another, Thomas Holzendorff, was born in Fernandina and escaped there with his wife when Union troops took control.  He enlisted, and was in Jacksonville at the end of the war.  He “leased a lot from L’Engle, began preaching, and remained in LaVilla with his family until 1872.” [9]

Hamilton and Holzendorf were not unique.  Kenney found:

“Of the fortynine black males who leased lots from L’Engle following the war, nine have been identified as having served in the U.S. Colored Troops.  In all, thirty-five LaVilla residents have
been identified as former soldiers.” [10]

Johnson’s family was wealthier than those of the veterans.  His father, James Johnson, had accumulated some capital during the Civil War when he was head waiter at the Royal Victoria Hotel in Nassau.  The Bahamas were then thriving on money from Confederate blockade runners. [11]  The end of the war, and an 1866 hurricane ended the good times. [12]

Guests at the Nassau hotel told him about possibilities that were developing in Jacksonville. [13]  The Saint James Hotel had opened in January 1869, [14] and he was hired as head waiter. [15]

LaVilla initially was a racially mixed neighborhood.  Johnson recalled his family lived near a man named McCleary who “was the foreman at Clark’s sawmill in the eastern end of the town, a large plant that employed a big force of Negroes.” [16]

William Alsop and Henry Clark bought land originally granted to the Florida Railroad in 1870 for a sawmill. [17]  Kenney noted seven men worked in the timber industry that year, and [18] the majority of Black lived near the hotels or sawmills. [19]  Barbara Richardson found most of the Blacks were working for mills or as porters. [20]

Alsop and Clark later bought nearby timberlands, [21] and the number of Blacks working in timber grew to 44 by 1880. [22]  Pay was poor and laborers unsuccessfully stuck for higher wages. [23]  There had been an earlier strike in 1873 that failed. [24]

The most important skilled trades in LaVilla were carpentry and brick making.  Jackson’s grandmother’s husband, John Barton, was a carpenter, [25] while Mack Mullen arrived in 1875 from Tampa to oversee construction of the Windsor Hotel.  He was born in Georgia. [26]

Kenney mentioned Smart Tillman who had been a fieldhand near Fernandina when he enlisted.  He began as a woodchopper and was working for a brick maker in 1880. [27]  Squires Jackson, who had lived in Jacksonville before the war, was a brick layer. [28]

Most of the men in LaVilla were day laborers, and most of the women were domestics. [29] Johnson’s grandmother, Mary, did laundry for the hotels. [30]  His mother was one of the few women to have a job with prestige.  She was the first Black teacher in Jacksonville [31] at the Stanton School built by the Freemen’s Bureau. [32]

The quality of life changed in LaVilla as people aged.  Kenney noted that in 1870, nuclear families were strong and no woman over the age of twenty-five worked.  In 1880, more than half the working women were older, and, by 1885, 73% of all of Black “working women were over twenty-five years of age.” [33]

One reason was women lived longer than their husbands.  John Barton died in 1878, [34] while Mary lived until 1901.  After Barton’s death, Johnson spent most of his time with his grandmother. [35]

A second problem was desertion, [36] probably because individuals had a difficult time adjusting to life away from plantations.

The third reason women were working more was that jobs for men were scarce and wages low.  Many were forced to work elsewhere part of the year. [37]  Hotel work was seasonal.  Johnson’s father spent the summers working “at some mountain or seaside hotel in the North.” [38]  Then, in 1881, Johnson became a preacher who commuted from Fernandina until 1886. [39]

Even when James Johnson was working in Jacksonville, he seldom was home.  His son recalled his father’s “work at the St. James took him from home early in the mornings to see breakfast served, and he remained at the hotel until dinner was finished, by which time I had been put away in the little bed in which I slept.” [40]

Hotel and resort workers were a special community bound by the status of their work.  Johnson remembered the Cuban Giants baseball team of New York city had been organized by the “waiters at the Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine.”  They played professionally in the summers, and worked in the hotel in winters. [41]

He also recalled that each hotel had at least two vocal quartets.  When he was fifteen, he was in one that competed with others. [42]  These rehearsals, concerts, and competitions were one way songs could move from one location, either through individuals in the same group from different areas or through competitions.

End Notes
1.  The creation of LaVilla by Francis L’Engle, and the elder James Johnson’s purchase of land there is discussed in the post for 19 March 2023.

2.  Patricia Drozd Kenney.  “LaVilla, Florida, 1866-1887: Reconstruction Dreams and the Formation of a Black Community.”  Masters thesis.  The University of Florida, 1990.  This land is mentioned in the post for 12 March 2023.

3.  Kenney.  10.  As mentioned in the post for 19 February 2023, troops were stationed in Jacksonville to protect the port and rail facilities, and support the government’s Freedmen’s Bureau.

4.  Claude Augusta Wilson.  Interviewed in Lake City, Florida, by James Johnson on 6 November 1936.  In George Rawick.  A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume 3, Florida Narratives.  Compiled by The Library of Congress from interviews by the Works Projects Administration, Federal Writers’ Project.  Washington: Library of Congress, 1941.  Wilson did not mention the location of the family’s land.  Jacksonville’s railroads are mentioned in the post for 19 March 2023.

5.  Kenney.  14.
6.  Rawick.
7.  Higginson is discussed in the post for 19 February 2023.
8.  Kenney.  20.
9.  Kenney.  18.

10.  Kenney.  7-18.  None of the WPA interviewees were soldiers; most were too young during the Civil War.  Most encountered Union troops when they raided plantations for food or, later, when they visited plantations to announce Emancipation.  The exceptions include Harriett Gresham, who married a soldier near Beaufort, [43] and Amanda McCray, who was commandeered as a cook. [44]

William Sherman remembered he had joined the party following Union troops in Robertsville, South Carolina.  When they headed for Savannah, Sherman opted to go to Beaufort. [45]  Many who planned to continue to Savannah were killed when a Union commander destroyed the bridge over a river, leaving the Blacks trapped between the river and advancing Confederate soldiers. [46]

Squires Jackson first went to a Confederate camp, and ran away when the commander there tried to enslave him.  He then went to a Union camp, and was appalled by the medical treatment given wounded Black soldiers in the 54th Massachusetts regiment.  “In the silent hours of the evening he stole away to Tallahassee, throughly convinced that War wasn’t the place for him.” [47]

11.  James Weldon Johnson.  Along This Way.  New York: The Viking Press, 1933.  129–604 in James Weldon Johnson, edited by William L. Andrews.  New York: Library Classics of the United States, 2004.  137.

12.  Johnson, 1933.  138.
13.  Johnson, 1933.  138.
14.  Kenney.  12.
15.  Johnson, 1933.  138.
16.  Johnson, 1933.  140.

17.  Joel McEachin.  “Designation Application and Report Planning and Development Department of the City of Jacksonville regarding: Proposed Designation of NAS Cecil Field Chapel.”  Jacksonville Historic Preservation Commission, 26 September 2018.  32.  The railroad sold the land to trustees of the railroad, James Soulter and John McRae.  They, in turn, sold land to a New York banker, Richard T. Wilson, who sold it to Alsop and Clark.  They had established a sawmill business in Jacksonville in 1849. [48]

18.  Kenney.  33.

19.  Kathleen Ann Francis Cohen.  “Immigrant Jacksonville: A Profile of Immigrant Groups in Jacksonville, Florida, 1890-1920.”  Master’s thesis.  University of Florida, 1986.  27.

20.  Barbara Richardson.  A History of Blacks in Jacksonville, Florida, 1860–1895.  PhD dissertation.  Carnegie Melon University, 1975.  68, 87.  Cited by Cohen.  31-32.

21.  McEachin.  32.
22.  Kenney.  33.

13.  Thomas Frederick Davis.  History of Early Jacksonville.  Jacksonville, Florida: The H. and W. B. Drew Company, 1911.  162.

24.  “History: Timbering in North Florida.”  Florida Natural Areas Inventory website, Tallahassee, Florida.

25.  Johnson, 1933.  139.

26.  Mack Mullen.  Interviewed in Jacksonville, Florida, by J. M. Johnson on 18 September 1936.  In Rawick.

27.  Kenney.  36.

28.  Rev. Squires Jackson.  Interviewed in Jacksonville, Florida, by Samuel Johnson on 11 September 1937.  In Rawick.

29.  Kenney.  31, 36.

30.  Johnson, 1933.  152.  The division of labor between Black men who held visible positions at resorts and Black women who did laundry for hotel guests is mentioned in the post for 21 October 2020.  Claire Lovejoy Lennon’s grandmother did laundry for visitors to a Georgia resort near what became Warm Springs.

31.  Johnson, 1933.  144.
32.  Johnson, 1933.  171.
33.  Kenney.  38.
34.  Johnson, 1933.  155.
35.  Johnson, 1933.  161.
36.  Kenney.  41.
37.  Kenney.  41.
38.  Johnson, 1933.  149.

39.  James Johnson’s life as a minister is discussed in the post for 12 February 2023.  Kenney suspected the change in occupation was not voluntary.  She noted that in Cleveland, Ohio, “whites began to replace black waiters in the better hotels and restaurants” in the 1880s. [49]

40.  Johnson, 1933.  149.
41.  Johnson, 1933.  175.

42.  James Weldon Johnson.  The Book of American Negro Spirituals.  New York: The Viking Press, 1925.  35.

43.  Harriett Gresham.  Interviewed in Jacksonville, Florida, by Pearl Randolph on 18 December 1936.  In Rawick.

44.  Amanda McCray.  Interviewed in Jacksonville, Florida, by Pearl Randolph on 13 November 1936.  In Rawick.

45.  William Sherman.  Interviewed in Chaseville, Florida, by J. M. Johnson on 28 August 1936.  In Rawick.

46.  “Betrayal at Ebenezer Creek.”  Civil War Times Magazine, October 1998.  Republished on History Net website, 12 June 2006.

47.  Jackson.

48.  M. T. Webb and Wanton S. Webb.  Webb’s Jacksonville Directory.  Jacksonville, Florida: Wanton S. Webb, 1890.

49.  Kenney.  42.  Her source is Kenneth L. Kusmer.  A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870–1930.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976.  75.

Folksmiths - The Musicians

Topic: Kumbaya 1955-1961
Four of the Folksmiths who introduced “Kumbaya” to twenty New England residential camps in the summer of 1957 primarily were interested in music when they were students at Oberlin College.

Ruth Weiss
Ruth Weiss was the granddaughter of Otto Loewi, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1936.  He fled to Brussels in 1938 when the Germans invaded Austria that year.  From there he made his way to New York City in 1940. [1]

Her father, Ulrich Weiss, was a chemist in Austria.  In 1939, she and her mother moved to Brussels, then to France after Ulrich’s company opened a branch in Paris.  They began fleeing the Germans in 1940.  After short stays in England, Martinique, and the Dominican Republic, they were able to settle in New York City with the Loewis. [2]

By the time Ruth was a French student at Oberlin, the family had moved to Maryland where Ulrich worked for the National Institutes of Health.  They had hidden their Jewish roots.  Weiss recalled that “her father was an atheist, her mother an agnostic. They celebrated Christmas and observed no Jewish holidays.” [3]

Her activism was confined to singing Christmas carols at a Cleveland hospital for the campus Christian Science Organization. [4]  She played recorder with the Folksmiths and sang the soprano parts. [5]  Her voice is the most recognizable on their recording of “Kumbaya.”

After graduation in 1959, she spent time in a work camp in Vienna, Austria, sponsored by the World Council of Churches. [6]  When she returned to this country, she became a case worker for the Cuyahoga County Welfare Agency’s Division of Child Welfare. [7]

Weiss moved to Portland, Oregon in 1975 where she is active with Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. [8]

Joe Hickerson
Joseph Charles Hickerson was born in Highland Park, Illinois, [9] where his father was a mathematics teachers. [10]  Teaching jobs were precarious in the Depression, and they moved several times before James Allen Hickerson was hired by New Haven State Teacher’s College in Connecticut. [11]

Hickerson’s older brother, Jay Allen, showed musical talents when he was young.  He earned a degree in music theory in 1956, and later became a music teacher in the schools in Bethany, Connecticut.  He also appeared as the piano soloist with orchestras, starting when he was in high school. [12]

Their mother, the former Elizabeth Hogg, often played piano and sang with the young boys.  Joe remembered she bought a plastic ukulele to peak his interest when he was about 14 years old.  This led to some lessons on guitar.  He already had sung with the church choir from “5th grade until my voice changed.” [13]

Hickerson majored in physics at Oberlin, but became more interested in folk music after Pete Seeger began appearing in concerts.  He became friends with the individual who had a program on the college radio station, and took over his place when he left. [14]  He played banjo and guitar, and led singing with the Folksmiths the summer he graduated. [15]

Joe spent the next few years studying folklore at Indiana University where he had a folk music program on the local college radio station. [16]  He spent a few summers working as a counselor at Camp Woodland, where he revised “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.” [17]

Hickerson was hired by the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Song in 1963, and began performing in the Washington DC area. [18]  He also made some records for Folk Legacy.  He retired to Portland, Oregon, where he still performs. [19]

Sarah Newcomb
Sarah Robinson Newcomb was born in Fairfax, Virginia, [20] where her father was a government economist.  He was chased out of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, when he began researching Negro businesses for his PhD from Brookings Institute.  When she was young, he was on Harry Truman’s Council of Economic Advisors. [21]  By the time that she was a psychology major at Oberlin, [22] he was working for the Urban Land Institute. [23]

Newcomb’s mother, the former Carolyn Jones, was involved with Bluebird and Camp Fire Girls’ groups when Sarah was young. [24]  She may be the only member of the Folksmiths who participated in a middle-class youth group in the 1950s.  Newcomb spent her teen years at Oakwoods Friends School, a boarding school in New York state. [25]

Hickerson remembers that, while she was in high school, she visited the Archives of American Folk Song.  She was the one who took him there for his first interview. [26]

Newcomb played banjo and guitar with the Folksmiths. [27]  In the 1960s, she was writing songs with Susie Dean, an Oakwoods classmate. [28]  Around 1972, met Shari Ajemian Craig through The Folk Song Society of Greater Boston.  They began writing parodies at Pinewoods Music Camp, and, by 1986, had expanded to musical comedies. [29]

Newcomb still lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, and is writing songs with Dean. [30]

Chuck Crawford
Charles Raymond Crawford played banjo and guitar with the Folksmiths. [31]  One of his classmates, Neil Rosenberg, remembered Crawford was living in Mansfield, Ohio, and had “a neat record collection that included jazz greats Django Reinhart and Fats Waller.” [32]  Rosenberg also remembered a group of guys would gather before and after meals to figured out how to play what was then the new Bluegrass genre. [33]

This group was beginning to move away from Pete Seeger.  Rosenberg recalled: “The Pete Seeger manual, in the second edition that Mayne [34] had, didn’t have anything useful for learning Scruggs picking.  There was a page devoted to it, but it wasn’t accurate.  So we learned from other musicians.” [35]

Crawford went to the University of Michigan where he earned a PhD in mathematics in 1970. [36]  From there, he was the first computer professor at the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus. [37]  Throughout this time he played in local Bluegrass bands. [38]  He still lives in Toronto and has joined sacred harp singing groups. [39]

End Notes
1.  “Otto Loewi.”  Nobel Prize website.

2.  Ulrich Weiss interview.  The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website, 1993.

3.  Melissa Binder.  “Holocaust Remembrance Day: Survivor Recalls Her Own Early Escape, Honors Those Who Died.”  The Oregonian, Portland, Oregon, 16 April 2015.

4.  Hi-O-Hi.  Oberlin College yearbook, 1958.  87.

5.  Liner notes for Folksmiths.  “Kum Ba Yah (Come by Here).”  We’ve Got Some Singing To Do: The Folksmiths Travelling Folk Workshop.  Folkways Records FA 2407, released 1958.

6.  Dorothy M. Smith.  “Class of 1959 Directory.”  Oberlin Alumni Magazine, Oberlin College, December 1959.  2.

7.  Item.  Oberlin Alumni Magazine, Oberlin College, 56(7):28:November 1960.
8.  Binder.
9.  “Joe Hickerson.”  Wikipedia website; accessed 26 March 2023.

10.  The elder Hickerson wrote the article “Similarities Between Teaching Language and Arithmetic.”  The Arithmetic Teacher 6(5):241-244:November 1959.

11.  Joe Hickerson.  Liner notes.  Joe Hickerson with a Gathering of Friends.  Folk Legacy FSI-39.  Released 1970.  1.

12.  “Jay Allen Hickerson.”  Leesburg News, Leesburg, Florida, 9 August 2022.
13.  Joe Hickerson, 1970.  1.
14.  Joe Hickerson, 1970.  2.
15.  Liner notes, Folksmiths.
16.  Joe Hickerson, 1970.  3.

17.  “Joe Hickerson (Special Event).”  Folklore Society of Greater Washington website, 13 July 2014.

18.  Joe Hickerson, 1970.  4.
19.  Joe Hickerson, 2014.
20.  “Sarah Newcomb in the 1940 Census.”  Ancestry website.

21.  James R. Fuchs.  “Oral History Interview with Dr. Robinson Newcomb,” 6 August 1977.  Harry S. Truman Library website.

22.  Line notes, Folksmiths.
23.  Internet references to his publications.
24.  “Carolyn Jones Newcomb.”  Washington Post, 29 January 1989.

25.  “Class of 1956” reunion photograph.  Oak Leaves, Oakwood Friends School newsletter, Poughkeepsie, New York, Summer 2016.  8.

26.  Joe Hickerson.  “Folk Music, Archives & Performing: Experiences, Adventures & Great Stories.”  Interviewed by Jennifer Cutting for Library of Congress webcast, 15 July 2014; posted to YouTube on 26 January 2015.

27.  Liner notes, Folksmiths.

28.  Newcomb told her Oakwood classmates that a parody of a sea chantey she had written with Susan Dean Miller was being performed by groups in Britain in 2009. [40]

29.  “Ajemian & Newcomb’s Artistic Resume.”  Ajemian and Newcomb website, 2011.

30.  Item.  Oak Leaves, Oakwood Friends School newsletter, Summer 2020.  5.
31.  Liner notes, Folksmiths.

32.  Neil V. Rosenberg.  Bluegrass Generation.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018.  No page numbers in on-line edition.

33.  Neil Rosenberg.  Interviewed by George Lyon in “Wherein George Lyon Talks to Neil Rosenberg and We Get To Listen!”  The Canadian Folk Music Bulletin 35:1-10:2001.  3.  Rosenberg earned a PhD in Folklore from Indiana University, and became the academic expert on Bluegrass music, as well as an accomplished musician.

34.  Pete Seeger.  How To Play the 5-String Banjo.  Beacon, New York: Pete Seeger, 1954.  Mayne Smith was a friend of Rosenberg’s from California who also attended Oberlin.

35.  Rosenberg, 2001.  3.  Earl Scruggs began playing banjo for Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass group in 1945.  In 1948, he and Lester Flatt formed their own group. [41]

36.  “Charles Raymond Crawford.”  Mathematics Genealogy Project, North Dakota State University website.  For more information on the importance of his dissertation, see Frank Uhlig.  “On Computing the Generalized Crawford Number of a Matrix.”  Linear Algebra and Its Applications 438:1923-1935:2013.

37.  G. Scott Graham.  “Computer Science at 25.”  61 in Celebrating 40 Years of History at the University of Toronto Mississauga, edited by John Percy and Sabeen Abbas.  University of Toronto Mississauga, 2007.

38.  Rosenberg, 2001.  3.

39.  “Directory and Minutes of Sacred Harp Singings 2009 & 2010.”  Sacred Harp Musical Heritage Association, Huntsville, Alabama, website.

40.  Item.  Oak Leaves, Oakwood Friends School newsletter, Summer 2009.  13.
41.  “Flatt and Scruggs.”  Wikipedia website; accessed 15 April 2023.

Folksmiths - The Activists

Topic: Kumbaya 1955-1961
The Folksmiths, mentioned in the post for 2 April 2023 were eight Oberlin College students who introduced “Kum Ba Yah” to twenty New England residential camps in the summer of 1957.  Four became activists in later life while three became more involved with music and one supported charitable work.

David Sweet
David Sweet, who suggested the summer tour, majored in far-eastern history at Oberlin, and played bongo drums. [1]  His father, Frederick Beaver Sweet, was from Michigan [2] and married Mary Ellen Funk in Columbus, Ohio, in 1935. [3]  In the 1930s, they published the Union Register.  During World War II, the family lived in Detroit were Fred worked for the United Auto Workers. [4]  By the 1950s, he was editing Catering Industry Employee, [5] and she was active with the Girl Scouts.  She later taught school and was active with the ACLU and Camp Joy, [5] a camp for the disadvantaged. [7]

David’s brother, John, was five years younger.  His obituary indicated that John went to “a communist summer camp” as a child and that he sang, played guitar, and collected songs, “the more radical the song the better.” [8]  In 1959, an informant told the FBI that:

“Pete Seeger had been a house guest of Frederick B.  Sweet and his wife, Mary Ellen Sweet [. . .] during the previous weekend when Seeger had given a concert in Cincinnati.  He further stated that Mary Ellen and her daughter, Marni, a student at the University of Cincinnati, reportedly sold 200  tickets at $2.00 per ticket to the concert of Seeger.” [9]

David went to Mexico in 1962 where he “learned Spanish on the street, studied Mexican history at the National University, figured a way to make a living in NGO work, married and had kids.” [10]  Twelve years later he earned a PhD in history from the University of Wisconsin and was teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz. [11]  Sweet still lives in Santa Cruz and remains active in community affairs. [12]

Joani Blank
Joan E. Blank [13] chaired the 1958 Oberlin folk festival. [14]  She graduated from high school in Belmont, Massachusetts, where she sang in the choir and played recorder. [15]  Her mother was a teacher and her father a research scientist. [16]

At Oberlin she majored in sociology.  When she was with the Folksmiths she played recorder and taught folk dancing. [17]  After she graduated in 1959, she toured Europe and Asia where she spent six months in India. [18]  During her last months, she taught folk songs for the International Recreation Association. [19]

Blank considered the Peace Corps, but then started another long trip that landed her to Hawaii.  She earned a master’s degree in Asian Studies with an emphasis on public health, and learned to play the koto and jamisen.  From there she earned another master’s in public health from the University of North Carolina and worked with family planning groups in Detroit; Concord, New Hampshire, and Morgantown, West Virginia. [20]

Blank moved to San Francisco in 1971, where her interest in family planning expanded to sexuality.  She found Down There Press in 1974, and opened a store that sold sexual toys to women.  She also sang with the Masterworks Chorale of College of San Mateo. [21]

After she retired in 1992, the Jew joined the Unitarian Church where she sang in the choir and learned to play handbells. [22]  She died in 2016. [23]

Ricky Sherover
Erica Reed Sherover [24] was the daughter of émigrés from the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.  Her grandfather arrived in New York City in 1903 and became an agent for a company selling insurance policies to immigrants. [25]  Before she was born, her father Miles worked in Russia on a project to build a steel mill. [26]

During the Spanish Civil War, he formed Hanover Sales Corporation to export aircraft to the Communist-backed Republican army. [27]  The war ended before the planes were delivered, and a contest developed over them in México. [28]  The family lived in Mexico from 1943 to 1946 where Ricky remembered her governess was a German communist refugee. [29]

The Sherovers returned to the United States where her father became treasurer of the American Russian Institute.  Soon after it was denounced as a Communist front in 1948, [30] Miles organized a steel corporation in Venezuela.  He later became an active supporter of Israel. [31]

At Oberlin, Sherover majored in history and literature, and played guitar. [32]  During the summer of 1958 she attended a folklore institute at Indiana University. [33]  She spent the next summers at a Kibbutz in Israel where she “played on her guitar by the fire at nights, the songs of that period, songs by Joan Baez.” [34]  In 1964, Sherover was one of the folk singers who participated in the Mississippi Caravan of Music that taught freedom songs during the efforts to educate Blacks and register them to vote. [35]

Interest in folk music faded with the rise of the Beatles, and politics became more radical.  Sherover went to study Marxism with Herbert Marcuse at the University of California, San Diego.  They were married from 1976 until his death in 1979.  She carried on his work with workshops combating racism.  She died in 1988. [36]

Bo Israel
Mark Israel was born in Cincinnati.  His grandfather migrated from Russia to Birmingham, Alabama, where he had a tailor’s shop. [37]  When his father Mike graduated from high school in 1918, he said he wanted “to leave the world a little better than I found it.” [38]

Mike graduated from Purdue with a degree in agriculture in 1922.  While in Indiana, he played football and was in the glee club. [39]  He moved to Cincinnati in the early 1930s, where he worked for Fashion Frocks. [40]  His wife’s father was a partner in the Universal Skirt Company. [31]  In 1932, the elder Israel founded The Forum lecture series under the auspices of the Jewish Community Center. [42]

Bo inherited many of his father’s interests.  At the 1957 Oberlin Folk Festival, he played “Hana-ava Babanot” on a mandolin-banjo. [43]  During the summer with the Folksmiths, he played mandolin and washtub base. [44]  Israel was a member of Students for Democratic Action, [45] and, in his senior year, was active in promoting a Youth March on Integrated Schools. [46]

The summer of 1959, after his graduation, Israel trained to be an organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in Arkansas. [47]  He earned a law degree from Columbia Law School, and was hired by the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights in 1963.  Israel eventually moved to the Washington, DC, area where he as a “public sector legislative consultant.” [48]

As a child, Israel remembered his family raised food.  To begin his return to the land, he rented some acreage from the brother of Sarah Newcomb, another member of the Folksmiths.  In 1978, he bought his own farm in Maryland and has been selling produce to farmers’ markets since he retired. [49]

End Notes
1.  Liner notes for Folksmiths.  “Kum Ba Yah (Come by Here).”  We’ve Got Some Singing To Do: The Folksmiths Travelling Folk Workshop.  Folkways Records FA 2407, released 1958.

2.  “Fred Sweet in the 1940 Census.”  Ancestry website.
3.  Item.  Granville Times, Granville, Ohio, 15 August 1935.  3.

4.  “Mary Ellen Sweet, Teacher, Activist.”  Ohio Obituary and Death Notice Archive on Gen Lookups website, 1 June 2012.

5.  Matthew C. Bates.  A History of the International Labor Communications Association.  PhD dissertation.  University of Maryland, 2012.  138.

6.  Gen Lookups.

7.  National Directory of Accredited Camps for Boys and Girls.  Martinsville, Indiana: American Camping Association, 1974.  202-203.

8.  Bill Banks.  “John Sweet, Activist and Lawyer, Dies at 77.”  Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Atlanta, Georgia, 22 June 2020.  Quotation about songs is from John’s wife, Midge.

9.  Federal Bureau of Investigation.  Domestic Security.  Declassified documents.  The Archive website has no more details.  The informant was M. G. Lowman.  He got his information from a girl friend who was a student at the University of Cincinnati.

10.  David Sweet.  “Learning from Mexicans.”  Uploaded to his website on 4 July 2012.

11.  University of Wisconsin - Madison History Newsletter 8(1):9:1979.

12.  Cathy Kelly.  “Santa Cruz Style: Holiday Art Fair Showcases Work of Tannery Arts Center Artists, Others.”  Santa Cruz Sentinel, Santa Cruz, California, 8 December 2012.

13.  Dorothy M. Smith.  “Class of 1959 Directory.”  Oberlin Alumni Magazine, Oberlin College, December 1959.  2.

14.  Sarah Newcomb.  “Marathon Folk Festival Features Singing, Dancing.”  The Oberlin Review, Oberlin College, 14 May 1957.  The festival is discussed in the post for 2 April 2023.

15.  Joani Blank.  “Personal Stuff.”  Her website.

16.  Lynn Comella.  “Remembering Good Vibrations Founder Joani Blank, 1937 - 2016.”  Bitch Media website, 12 August 2016.

17.  Liner notes.
18.  Blank.

19.  Smith. 2.  The International Recreation Association is mentioned in the post for 26 March 2023.

20.  Blank.
21.  Blank.
22.  Blank.
23.  Comella.

24.  Andreas Keller.  “Erica Sherover-Marcuse.”  Geni website; last updated 28 April 2022.

25.  “Edler, Fisher, Redsecker, Wald and Related Families.”  Edlers website, page 220, entries for “Erica Reed ‘Ricky’ Sherover PhD,” “Miles (Meyer) Sherover,” and “Moris Sherower.”  Her father was born in Kraków, then part of Galicia.

26.  Miles M. Sherover.  “Magnitogorsk: Epic of Soviet Labor.”  Current History 36(4):405-410:July 1932.

27.  Cordell Hull, Secretary of State.  Letter to the Chargé in France ( Wilson ), 9 March 1937.  United States Department of State website.

28.  Santiago Flores.  “Those Mexican Bellancas.”  Latin American Aviation Historical Society website, 14 September 2018.

29.  “Erica Sherover-Marcuse (1938-1988).”  Marcuse website.
30.  American Business Consultants, Inc.  Counterattack, 20 August 1948.
31.  “Miles Sherover, Industrialist, 80.”  The New York Times, 4 March 1976.
32.  Liner Notes.

33.  Richard M. Dorson.  “The 1958 Folklore Institute of America.”  Midwest Folklore 9(1):39-48:Spring 1959.

34.  Elisha Porat, 27 December 2010.  Anecdote reprinted on Marcuse website.  He was a Hebrew poet. [50]

35.  Bob Cohen.  “The Mississippi Caravan of Music.”  Broadside (51):7-9:20 October 1964.  7.

36.  Marcuse website.
37.  Debbie.  “Mayer A Israel.”  Find a Grave website, 1 May 2017.

38.  Mirror.  Birmingham, Alabama, Central High School yearbook, 1918.  93.  His father was Clarence Elbert Israel.

39.  Debris.  Purdue University yearbook, 1922.  99.

40.  “A Finding Aid to the Clarence E. Israel Papers.”  The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives website.

41.  Department Reports of the State of Ohio, 1922.  Mark’s mother was born Clare Sapadin, and her father was Philip Sapadin. [51]

42.  Marcus Center.
43.  Newcomb.
44.  Liner notes.

45.  “Oberlin Politics.”  Hi-O-Hi.  Oberlin College yearbook, 1958.  81.  SDA was the youth branch of Americans for Democratic Action.

46.  “Sixty To Join March in Capital Saturday.”  Oberlin Review, Oberlin College, 87(48):1:14 April 1959.

47.  David Zeigler.  “Bo Israel Tells of Union Work In Ozark Hills.”  Oberlin Review, Oberlin College, 88(20):1:4 December 1959.

48.  “Getting to Know...Mark Israel and Judith Lesser.”  The Connections Newspapers, Alexandria Virginia, website,  20 June 2007.  Sarah Newcomb’s brother was Tony Newcomb.

49.  The Connections.
50.  “Elisha Porat.”  Wikipedia website; accessed 29 March 2023.
51.  Debbie.  “Clare Sapadin Israel.”  Find a Grave website, 1 Mary 2017.