The DNA of Spirituals and the Rehabilitation of George Pullen Jackson by Nancy L.

Graham, DSM PhD Candidate, Foundation House Oxford University/The Graduate Theological Foundation Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness to God in your hearts. Colossians 3:16-17. The phrase psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs has been translated thusly in every English Biblical translation since the Geneva Bible in 1560. Congregations and denominations have been arguing about their definition and presentation for the ensuing years. In the United States a peculiarly sensitive genre of singing came to light in the mid-1800s, referred to as Negro spiritual, slave song, southern spiritual, sorrow song, African-American spiritual, or Sea Island songs. There are other names as well, but in this document, the style will be simply known as spirituals. The first spirituals to appear in print are in the volume, Slave Songs of the United States.1 During the American Civil War the Yankees captured the string of islands off the coast of South Carolina by November of 1861. Upon news of the imminent take-over, the plantation owners on the islands fled to the mainland, leaving their plantations to ruin and their slaves to fend for themselves. The Union Army sent a call north for teachers and agriculturalists to help these new freedmen become self-supportive. The result established the Port Royal Experiment. One Charles Pickard Ware (1849-1921), of Cambridge, Massachusetts, was stationed on St. Helena Island. He was a civil administrator during the war, and an educator and musician back home. a strong abolitionist, Ware appreciated the unique opportunity at hand to observe and record the songs and dances of these former slaves. One of his friends, William Francis Allen (1830-1889) a Harvard-educated classics scholar and his wife Mary Lambert Allen came to St. Helena to run the school. Lucy McKim Garrison, Philadelphia musician and daughter-in-law of William Lloyd Garrison and another friend of Wares, also responded to the call. Together, they collected, transcribed and notated full songs and segments of songs. In the final volume prepared for publication, 136 spirituals are introduced, many with annotations and alliterated with the dialect of the island. The reception history of the spirituals begins in Tennessee. Thanks to the efforts of the first teachers and administrators of what is now Fisk University, The Jubilee Singers took the spirituals to the white folk. Concert halls and public venues in the United States and Europe were packed with admirers in the early years, from 1871 through the 1880s. Former slaves and children of former slaves added their cultural affectation to the carefully edited arrangements of their music directors. Amidst criticism or support garnered during the next one hundred plus years, the spiritual became a solid part of Americana.2 When modernist nationalism emerged in the early 1800s, writers and composers began to search the folklore of their traditions for colorful narratives and tunes to insert into the world of literature and drama, thereby expressing their love for country. In North America, the lore from all of the colonists and slaves mixed with that of the natives, not surprisingly. As universities grew

and developed departmental studies devoted to folk lore and anthropology, several collectors realized the rich ground in the prisons, churches, mountains, hills and valleys of the isolated rural American south. In the early 1900s, research and preservation technology had advanced to include not only photography, but devices capable of recording sound. Often crude and cumbersome, these early machines proved invaluable. John A. Lomax (1867-1948), though born in Mississippi, considered himself a Texan.3 His early years were accompanied by the songs of white and black cowboys that often labored on the neighborhood farms. A spotty and varied early education led Lomax to pursue a college degree at the University of Texas (Austin) Finishing in two years, and still embarrassed by his academic hodge-podge, he enrolled in a masters program at Harvard. Upon his return to Texas, Lomax founded the Texas Folklore Society and published his definitive book of cowboy songs, 4 making him a national figure. In the early 1900s, acadmes opined the the best examples of folk music, particularly black music, would be found in prisons, and were thus largely unavailable. Lomax, the hustler, called their racist bluff and made his renowned trip to the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. Dragging his aluminum coils and cones, and tossing out the scientific method, he captured the first of thousands of recordings that are stored in the Lomax Collection at the Library of Congress. During the First World War, an Englishman, Cecil Sharp (1850-1924) came to the U.S. on an extended lecture tour. One evening, Sharp was introduced to folklorist and educator Olive Dame Campbell (1882-1954). He was astonished with her collection of distinctly British tunes and texts amassed from the mountain communities and outposts of the Blue Ridge and Smokies. Sharp soon ventured into these comparably remote regions of the Appalachians with Campbell and Maude Karpeles (1885-1924), an expert on English folk dancing. The results were transcribed and preserved as English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians.5 George Pullen Jackson (1874-1953), a professor of German at Vanderbilt, had an insatiable interest in hymnody of the American South. He owned an impressive collection of English and Scottish hymnals, as well as the many volumes of hymns, spirituals and Sunday School songs published in the American hymnal-publication explosion of the late 1800s.6 Jackson made many trips to England and Scotland to study the music relative to the waves of immigration from colonial times into the twentieth century. He also frequented religious camp grounds, meeting houses, community sings, churches, individuals and any other venue, black or white, to further his research. He soon found unmistakeable connections between the folk cultures of Great Britain and the United States,7 and lightly acknowledged an African and Caribbean influence, and their derivatives, as well. Jackson found lines of music and texts between the two continents too similar and frequent to be coincidence. Many of the spirituals and Sunday School songs are extracts or recognizable paraphrases from 18th century British hymnody. He published several volumes of examples, songs, and interpretation and coined the phrase white spiritual. The racism here, both blatant and subtle, is not the term nor Jacksons meticulous and copious research, but his apparent ignorance of the ownership of the term by the American black community, only a generation or two away from slavery. In White and Negro Spirituals, Their Lifespan and Kinship: Tracing 200 Years of Untrammeled Song Making and Singing Among Our Country Folk, with 116

Songs as Sung by Both Races8 Jackson declares the songs cousins and never denies the African heritage or the effects of the Middle Passage. Don Yoder, an expert on the folklore of Pennsylvania and the German spirituals of the Mennonites and Amish, supports Jacksons conclusions. Yoders colloquial, but firm, opinion is that spirituals changed color once they crossed the mountains.9 We all want to know where we come from, says literary critic and teacher, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.10 Over the past decade, Gates has conducted many case studies of prominent Americans as to their familiar roots by using DNA samples and filtering them through the Human Genome Project, a thirteen year project coordinated by the US Department of Energy and the National Institute of Health.11 Gatess results are revealed in a rather lively PBS series, now entitled Finding Your Roots, that is both entertaining and fascinating.12 Even Gates, whose family considers themselves African-American, was surprised to find his roots are 50% Northern European. The first segment of the program features an almost comical, unlikely reunion with Gates and his newfound relatives in a small village in Ireland! Several of the guests in this series who bear the physical characteristics of blacks, whites, and Asians harbored family information proved false by this new research tool. After each airing, the viewer is left pondering the possible myths within the treasured accounts of his own background. I grew up in a small mill town north of Pittsburgh. The tin and steel mills and porcelain factories attracted many immigrant laborers from the early 1900s through the 1950s. We were all quite adept at identifying nationalities by last names, would even question someone whose name didnt conform to ethnic idiosyncrasies. The immigrants, Italian, German, Russian, Scottish, Jewish, Hungarian, and many more, brought their culture along. Food, music, festivals, and religion of all the groups co-mingled into a local ethnicity, now difficult to distinguish. Blatant, yet subtle, racism flourished, but cracks began to appear. Melville J. Herskovits (1895-1963), an Ohio native, attended the University of Chicago and then graduate school at Columbia. His dissertation investigated the power and authority theories of contemporary East Africa. He noted the links between aspects of African culture and traditions within the African descendants of twentieth century United States. Having earned his PhD, he began a long career at Northwestern University. There, in 1938, he established the department of anthropology. This was followed in 1948 by Herskovits forming the first department of African studies at an American university.13 In 1941, Herskovits published The Myth of the Negro Past,14 now a classic in American studies. This book and Herskovits reputation and visibility opened the study of African culture in general, and African American history in particular. The Myth promotes the notion that blacks retained traces of their culture when they were taken into slavery and that racial classifications are only a sociological concept with no basis in biological or historic fact.15 Published at the same time as the folklore giants were producing their work, Herskovits proposed that Lomax, Sharp and most egregiously, Jackson, stopped short, and proved racist, elitist and dismissive of African roots. He spurned Jacksons term white spirituals as an attempt to downplay the significance of the slave songs and cement white supremacy even in simple song.

During the last third of the twentieth century much was written about the origins and purpose of these spirituals. The songs had captured global attention in the Civil Rights Movement. After the 60s, many newly enfranchised scholars of black history, James H Cone (b.1938), Eileen Southern (1920-2002), John Lovell, Jr (1907-1974), and Dena Epstein (b. 1916), to name a few, produced historical accounts of African American music.16 Much of this seems to be stacked with an understandable longing for possession of space in the elusive records and story of slavery. The musical evidence presented by Jackson is ignored, as are the ubiquitous characteristics of folk music in general. The public perception of spirituals is not necessarily accurate. Attention has been given to coded messages and signals in these songs. Though possible, just as lovers have their own special songs, secret instructions woven into the music are most probably revisionary.17 Jackson died in 1953 and by the 1980s, his work on spirituals was dismissed as too racist to be factual. But his comprehensive research on hymnody of the South is too extensive and important. His work is now presented on the premier study of the Sacred Harp tradition, the benchmark of Southern white church music. But this, also, is racist. The range of human emotion, often temporarily captured in song, is too fluid to be contained by the boundaries of politics, sentimentality, or territorial assumption, and too inclusive to be segregated. In his younger days, Wille Ruff (b. 1931), a jazz musician, travelled with the distinguished Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993) throughout Europe. Both Ruff and Gillespie spent their formative years in rural, primarily black, Southern towns that were generally Primitive Baptist in religious authority. Once, while in Scotland, Gillespie insisted that Ruff accompany him to a Gaelic-speaking church to hear the singing. Ruff discovered, first hand, what Gillespie had already heard: the singing style and hymns were identical to the ones sung by the little unsophisticated congregations in their hometowns. Gillespie told Ruff that his great-grandparents talked about former slaves from the Cape Fear area in North Carolina who spoke only Gaelic.18 Long after Gillespies death and after much consideration, research, observation and organization, Ruff coordinated a conference at Yale in 2005. He brought together the members of congregations from the Hebrides, western Alabama and Appalachian Kentucky. The Scots spoke Gaelic, the Alabamians were black, and the choir from Kentucky was white. The opening lining out, Dr. Watts style, contributed from each choir was indistinguishable from the next group. The devotion and prayerfulness of the participants was obvious. They then sang together with respect and understanding of one another. The program was simultaneously broadcast on NPR and a woman of Muscogee Creek background was listening in Tulsa. She heard the sound of the older members in her congregation when they sang together, Dr. Watts style in Creek!19 At this news, Ruff organized another conference in 2007 this time bringing members of a native American Baptist church in Oklahoma to sing with the Alabama and Kentucky groups. British theologian, Robert Beckford, currently at Canterbury Christ Church University, followed up on Ruffs claims and invited Ruff to England where, together, they produced a program for BBC4 entitled The Gospel Truth.20 In this award-winning documentary, they travel to Back, on the Isle of Lewis, and to the US, seeking answers and examples. Beckford, of Jamaican African decent, questions people in the US and the UK as to their opinions on the shared histories of the music, and no one on the street supports the possibility that spirituals can be traced to Scotland!

Through my career as a hymnologist and church musician, I have learned to tread lightly when it comes to psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Hymns and tunes often hold personal and emotional places in the hearts of the singer and listener. I dont know why I am drawn to spirituals. When someone suggests that I shouldnt sing or program them, I am deeply affected--and this happens more often than not. Racism and the repercussions of slavery are still very heated issues in the United States. The the contention is accompanied by myth and urban legend, that for some reason, people are afraid to correct. A companion phenomenon in popular music of the 21st century is that no formal music training is better than a lot. There seems to be a distinct disdain for white academic musicologists who research traditionally black music with the writers and critics in the media. Marybeth Hamilton, a reader of American History at the University of London, published In Search of the Blues.21 Widely acclaimed in the UK22 as a seminal work, American rock critic, Dave Marsh in the New York Times, dismisses the work as a mythic past revealed only to a studious elite.23 What is easily misunderstood about books like this one, and White and Negro Spirituals is that they are actually about the music, and not technique, setting, performance practice or ownership. Music is temporal, and like secrets, once its out...its out. In 2006, I participated in a theological seminar at Oxford University of an international invitation. A Canadian colleague referred to, and complimented, my work that coordinated spirituals to the Revised Common Lectionary...a tool for worship-planners. Later, on the crowded High, an African-American attendee ran after me shouting, How dare you revise the music of my people!! Shocked, I suggested that we get off the street and talk somewhere, but she would have none of it, and continued loudly venting her rage. Another time, a professor at Candler Theological Seminary encouraged me to discuss my work, but when I began, he warned me off with, Dont you touch the Jubilee Singers!! Objectivity is tough to maintain when confronted with unfounded accusations.24 For their spring concert in 2010, the director of an all-white community chorus in Brooklyn programmed some spirituals arranged by William Dawson.25 These works have been standard choral repertoire for nearly 100 years, both in the US and abroad. A member questioned the appropriate nature of the choices. Should a white, elite chorus sing spirituals? One singer requested that the director seek permission. From whom? In the spring of 2011 the same group sang Ein deutches Requiem by Johannes Brahms. No one thought to ask the Jews in the group if they minded, or indeed to ask for consent from the Germans. In a refreshing, if weird, contrast, I once, attended a Christmas concert in a church in St. Andrews, Scotland. A young, white female student from Sheffield soulfully added rather impressive scat singing to In the Bleak Midwinter by Harold Darke! What difference does it make? As a church musician, it is imperative that the spirituals stay in the canon. Some, like Were You There, and Let Us Break Bread Together, are already there. Like it or not, these songs are touched by the Gospel and the challenge should not be about ownership and interpretation, but acknowledgement and liberation. Singing softens the edges of difficult situations, and folk music has spoken gently, yet poignantly, through the struggles of our past. Jubilation, despair, fear, longing, and rapture affect us all with no discrimination to class, race, gender or religion. The slaves brought these songs to the world, and now we must honor that by singing them, so that their story is not forgotten.

Allen, William Francis, Charles Pickard Ware, Lucy McKim Garrison. Slave Songs of the United States. (New York: A. Simpson & Co. ) 1867. 2. Ward, Andrew. Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. (Amistad: 2000). 3. Porterfield, Nolan. Last Cavalier: Life and Times of John A. Lomax. (ChampaignUrbana: Illinois Free Press) 1996. p.9 4. Lomax, John A. Cowboy Songs & Other Frontier Ballads. (New York: Collier Books) 1910. 5. Full title: English folk songs from the southern Appalachians, collected by Cecil J. Sharp; comprising two hundred and seventy-four songs and ballads with nine hundred and sixty-eight tunes, including thirty-nine tunes contributed by Olive Dame Campbell, edited by Maud Karpeles. (Oxford: Oxford University Press) 1932. 6. Finding Aid for the Index to the George Pullen Jackson Collection of Southern Hymnody, 1800-1953. University of Southern California Library Special Collections. 2003. 7. Jackson, George Pullen. White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands: The Story of the Fa-So-La Folk, Their Songs, Singings, and Buckwheat Notes. University of North Carolina Press. 1933. 8. ________.White and Negro Spirituals, Their Lifespan and Kinship: Tracing 200 Years of Untrammeled Song Making and Singing Among Our Country Folk, with 116 Songs as Sung by Both Races. Augustin, 1943. 9. Yoder. Don. Pennsylvania Spirituals. (Lancaster PA: Pennsylvania Folklife Society) 1961. The comment is from an interview on June 17, 2009 at the Schwenkfelder Library and Heritage Center in Pennsburg, PA. 10. African American Lives. Public Broadcasting Service 2006. Literary critic and teacher are Gates self-description. 11. The Wellcome Trust of the United Kingdom became a major partner, with additional contributions from Japan, France, Germany, China, among others. www.ornl.gov./sci/techresources/Human Genome/home.shtml 12. www.PBS.org/wnet/finding-your-roots/about 13. http://www.library.northwestern.edu/libraries-collections/evanston-campus/africanacollection/about-melville-j-herskovits 14. Herskovits, Melville J. The Myth of the Negro Past. (Beacon Press: Unitarian Universalist Association) 1941; 1958. 15. At the Heart of Blackness. Independent Lens, PBS. 2010. Herskovits interview. 16. Cone, James H. The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation. (Maryknoll: Orbis Books) 1972. 1.

Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans: A history. (W.W.Norton: New York) 1971 Lovell, John, Jr. Black Song, The Forge and the Flame: The Story of How the Afro-American Spiritual Was Hammered Out. (New York: Macmillan) 1972. Epstein, Dena. Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War. (Champaign-Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press) 1977. 17. Bordewich, Fergus M. Bound for Canaan. (New York: Harper Collins) 2005. p. iii. 18. http://www.willieruff.com/linesinging.html 19. ibid 20. http://ssa.nls.uk/film.cfm?fid=8150 21. Hamilton, Marybeth. In Search of the Blues. (New York: Basic Books) 2008 22. Smith, Caspar Llewellyn. The Original Delta Force. The Guardian, The Observer. Sunday, January 14, 2007. 23. Marsh, Dave. Out on Highway 61. The New York Times Book Review. February 14, 2008. 24. These are personal experience from 2003-2010. 25. Grace Choral Society, Brooklyn, NY. James R. Busby, Conductor.