Babylon Revisited:

Psalm 137 as American Protest Song

David W. Stowe

The 1973 release of The Harder They Come (dir. Perry Henzell) announced
a new era in the transatlantic flow of African music of the Americas. The
Jamaican film quickly became a campus cult classic, bringing its heady
mix of reggae music, ganja, and gunslinging urban rudeboy style to an
enthusiastic youth audience in North America and Europe. The films
soundtrack, featuring songs by Toots and the Maytals, Jimmy Cliff, and
Desmond Dekker, became a phenomenon in its own right, helping pave
the way for the global success of Bob Marley. For many outside Jamaica,
it was an enticing introduction to reggae music. In addition to launching
the international career of the films star, Jimmy Cliff, the soundtrack was
a boon to a Jamaican group called the Melodians. Heard twice in the film,
their song Rivers of Babylon reworked Psalm 137 over a jaunty bass line.
With its message of defiance amid social dislocation, the song offers a subtle
commentary on an important relationship early in the film: the conflict
between Ivan, a young man recently arrived in Kingston from country
and the autocratic Christian preacher for whom Ivan briefly works and
aggressively challenges before beginning his short career as a songwriter
and ganja trader.
No song text has exerted a more sustained pull on the political imagination of Americans than Psalm 137. Contained in the Hebrew Bible, the psalm
figured in the worship of the English Puritans who settled New England. It
appeared in the first English-language book published in North America.
David W. Stowe teaches English and religious studies at Michigan State University. He is
the author of Swing Changes: Big Band Jazz in New Deal America (Harvard University Press,
1994); How Sweet the Sound: Music in the Spiritual Lives of Americans (Harvard University Press,
2004); and No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American
Evangelicalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

Black Music Research Journal Vol. 32, No. 1, Spring 2012

2012 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

BMRJ 32_1 text.indd 95

4/24/12 9:42 AM

bmr journal

96

Almost a century and a half later, it served as the basis for a patriotic song
of national independence by early Americas first significant composer,
William Billings. The psalm was the centerpiece of Frederick Douglasss
great abolitionist oration, What to a Slave is the Fourth of July. More than
a century later, it reappeared in a completely new musical guise, the protoreggae version first recorded in 1969 by the Melodians. Since then, Psalm
137 has been covered numerous times by groups representing a variety of
musical styles: gospel, disco, country rock, alternative, hip hop.
Why such longevity? Like many stories and passages from the Hebrew
Bible, Psalm 137 is highly adaptable, open to a variety of interpretations. Its
central questionHow shall we sing the Lords song in a strange land?
has been central to the peopling of the Americas. The psalm deals with
cultural dispossession and exile, pervasive experiences for large numbers
of people over the course of American history. It offers a memorable image
of uprooted people languishing beside a river, called to make music but
unsure how to proceed. Its Babylon can stand for any oppressive power
or force of injustice, whether political, cultural, or spiritual. While these
meanings were resonant for early Anglo-Americans, who often perceived
themselves as a persecuted people for religious or political reasons, Psalm
137s more recent history positions it in antiracist and anticolonial movements of African Americans in the circum-Caribbean region.
Charting the evolution of the psalm from restrictive Puritan worship practices to a popular dance-hall hit underscores the challenges African Americans
have spearheaded to boundaries erected by traditional European binaries:
between sacred and secular, spiritual and political, mind and body, high and
low culture. In the case of Psalm 137, this challenge to compartmentalization
has come about through creative readings of the psalms political meanings.
Beginning with the American Revolution but accelerating in movements
against slavery and white domination of black Americans in the circumCaribbean, the struggle against colonial oppression has worked as a solvent
to dissolve the conventional binaries of European Christianity.

I
The biblical psalm contains just nine verses, which fall into three sections of
four, two, and three verses, respectively. The opening section is best known
and most widely used in subsequent musical versions:
1 By the rivers of Babylon,

there we sat down, yea, we wept,

when we remembered Zion.
2 We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

BMRJ 32_1 text.indd 96

4/24/12 9:42 AM

Stowe Babylon Revisited

97

3 For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song;

and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying,

Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
4 How shall we sing the LORDs song in a strange land?

An exiled people, weeping, remembering the homeland and the temple in

Jerusalem, destroyed by Babylonians in 587/6 B.C.E. They have put aside
their musical instrumentsno use for them under the circumstancesand
refuse to perform musical entertainment for their captors, whose motivation
is, after all, to humiliate. Finally, there is the question of cultural survival:
how to sing the Lords song in a foreign place.
This opening voicefirst-person pluralis solidly communal. The
psalms second section shifts to a first-person singular, addressing Jerusalem as a kind of jealous lover:
5 If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,

let my right hand forget her cunning.
6 If I do not remember thee,

let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth;

if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.

The psalmist seems to be offering a challenge to himself: remember Jerusalem, the chosen people of the covenant, or lose valuable abilities to
manipulate and to speak. The danger of forgetting Jerusalem seems to be
real; otherwise, why the threat of harsh sanctions?
The psalms final section also threatens physical harm, not to the psalmist
but to Jerusalems betrayers and destroyers: the Babylonians and Edomites
who sacked Jerusalem. The focus shifts away from the community and the
individual to those who destroyed it:
7 Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom

in the day of Jerusalem;

who said, Rase it, rase it,

even to the foundation thereof.
8 O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed;

happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
9 Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth

thy little ones against the stones.

The spirit of revenge is overpowering, especially in the chilling final verse,

with its images of innocent babies having their brains smashed out on rocks.
Daughter Babylon personifies the empire whose humiliation of Israel
calls forth the violent language. Indeed, the psalms most striking aspect
is the intense contrast between the reverent spirit of the first six verses and
the unbridled malice of the last three. It is the first section of the psalm,

BMRJ 32_1 text.indd 97

4/24/12 9:42 AM

98

bmr journal

verses 14, that have inspired the most interest among its American musical adapters.
The first version of Psalm 137 sung in North America was carried by
the Pilgrims to Plymouth aboard the Mayflower. English Protestants had
first encountered psalm singing in Switzerland, where they fled after the
middle of the sixteenth century to avoid persecution under the Catholic
Queen Mary. For these dissenting Protestants, congregational psalm singing became the sole legitimate form of church music. The millennium-long
tradition of Roman Catholic hymn singing was abruptly abandoned. With
the emigration of English Puritans to North America in the seventeenth
century, metrical psalm singing became the foundation of American sacred
song. Because it laid out the standard and metrical version of the psalms
side by side in parallel columns, Henry Ainsworths 1612 psalter provides
a good introduction to the technique of metrical psalms. On the left column
appear the first three verses of Ainsworths translation of the Hebrew psalm
into English prose; on the right is the rhymed, metrical version created for
congregational singing:
1 By the rivers of Babel, there By Babels rivers, there sate wee,
we sate, yea we wept: when
yea wept: when wee did mind, Sion.
remembred, Sion. The willowes that amidds it bee:
2 Upon the willowes in the
our harps, we hanged, them upon.
mids thereof: we hanged, our harps. For songs of us, there ask did they
3 For there, they that led us
that had us captive led-along,
captive asked of us, the words of and mirth, they that us heaps did lay
a song: and they that threw us on
Sing unto us some Sions song.
heaps, mirth: sing unto us, of the
song of Sion.

The musical setting Ainsworth provides is known as long meter double;

the tune is divided into three eight-line stanzas, each line having eight syllables. The tune recommended by Ainsworth is a stately triple meter in D
minor (Inserra and Hitchcock, 1981, 6465).
Because Ainsworth was willing to subject the poetic flow of his translation to strain now and then rather than to violate the meaning of his
original text, the phrasing is ungainly. The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay
who arrived in Boston in 1630 took an even stricter line toward adapting
psalms for worship. Their psalm collection, known as the Bay Psalm Book
and published by newly founded Harvard College in 1640, contains a
thirteen-page preface laying out an elaborate rationale and criteria for
creating metrical psalms.
Comparing the opening stanzas of the 1640 version with an earlier version
shows the awkward phrasing accepted by Puritans as the cost of their adher-

BMRJ 32_1 text.indd 98

4/24/12 9:42 AM

Stowe Babylon Revisited

99

ence to literal translation of the Hebrew Bible (English Metrical Psalmody

2001):
Sternhold and Hopkins (1562)

Bay Psalm Book (1640)

When we did sit in Babylon,

the rivers round about,
There in remembrance of Sion,
the tears for grief burst out.

The rivers on of Babilon

there when wee did sit downe:
yea even then wee mourned, when
we remembered Sion.

We hanged our harps and instruments

the willow trees upon,
For in that place men for their use
had planted many one.

Our Harps wee did hang it amid,

upon the willow tree.
Because there they that us away
led in captivitee,

Then they to whom we prisners were

said to us tauntingly,
Now let us hear your Hebrew songs
and pleasant melody.

Requird of us a song, & thus

askt mirth: us waste who laid,
sing us among a Sions song,
unto us then they said.

(English metrical psalmody 2001; Bay Psalm Book 1956)

New Englands homegrown psalmists were content to twist syntax and let
verses flow across stanzas. Despite this, the 1640 version dominated Sunday
worship in the New England colonies for generations. It was republished
twenty-six times during the century following its appearance.
Oddly, Isaac Watts, the mostly artful of all creators of metrical psalms, excluded Psalm 137 from his influential 1719 collection. Wattss great contribution to Protestant sacred song was his willingness to go beyond the boundaries specified by the New England Puritans, updating Hebrew psalms for
current conditions (Benson [1915] 1962, 109). Watts also nationalized the
texts, recasting them with England in the role of Israel (Stackhouse 1997,
36). Although Watts himself failed to put his mark on Psalm 137, regarding
it as insufficiently infused with Christian virtue, others did. Connecticut
poet and clergyman Joel Barlow, whose 1785 Psalms became influential in
the young republic, composed a version of Psalm 137 generally set to the
tune Bondage by Timothy Swan, a prolific Massachusetts hymnwriter
(and still performed by shape-note singers): Along the banks where Babels
current flows, / Our captive band in deep despondence strayed, / While
Zions fall in sad remembrance rose,/her friends mingled with the dead.
... But how in heathen chains and lands unknown / Shall Israels sons a
song of Zion raise? / O, hapless Salem, Gods terrestrial throne, / Thou
land of glory sacred mount of praise (Gordon and Barrand 1998, 1819).
Wattss and Barlows nationalizing projects were continued by Americas
first significant homegrown composer, William Billings (McKay and Crawford 1975). A self-taught musician who wrote music on the side of his main

BMRJ 32_1 text.indd 99

4/24/12 9:42 AM

100

bmr journal

work as tanner, Billings was an untiring self-promoter deeply shaped by the

culture of masculine self-fashioning and republican virtue current among
politically active Bostonians (Crist 2003). He was also a die-hard patriot
who counted Samuel Adams and Paul Revere among his friends. Several
of his finest and best-remembered hymns, anthems, and set pieces were
inspired by the American struggle for independence (Stowe 2004, 5061).
His anthem, Lamentation Over Boston, gives Psalm 137 the most topical treatment it ever received. The first section relocates Babylon to Boston,
as though its colonial citizens are in exile, and makes a number of other
innovations to the biblical text. Rather than merely requiring a song of
humiliation, the unnamed Babylonian oppressor (read Britain) forces Bostonians to take up arms against one another. Billings introduces the graphic
imagery of Babylon thirsting both for milk (Bostonian Breasts) and for
American blood:
By the Rivers of Watertown we sat down & wept

when we rememberd thee O Boston.
As for our Friends Lord God of Heaven

preserve them, defend them,

deliver and restore them unto us again;
For they that held them in Bondage
Requird of them to take up Arms Against their Brethren.

Forbid it Lord God that those who have sucked Bostonian Breasts

should thirst for American Blood.

Here Billings intersperses a trope from the Christian Bible, Matthew 2:18,
where Rachel weeps for her children, slain by King Herod:
A voice was heard in Roxbury which echod thro the Continent,

weeping for Boston because of their Danger. . . .

Finally, in adapting verses 56, in which the psalmist calls forth punishment if he forgets Jerusalem, Billings asks that affliction be visited on his
musical powers:
If I forget thee [Boston], if I forget thee, yea, if I do let my numbers cease to flow,

Then be my muse unkind,
Then let my Tongue forget to move and ever be confind;
Let horrid Jargon split the Air and rive my nerves asunder,
Let hateful discord greet my ear as terrible as Thunder.
(Billings 1977, 136147)

The punishment seems deeply personalized, conceived specifically for a

musician like Billings; who but a composer would identify these as the
most fearsome imagined curses?

BMRJ 32_1 text.indd 100

4/24/12 9:42 AM

Stowe Babylon Revisited

101

By asserting a symbolic equivalence between Britain and Babylon, Billings is politicizing Psalm 137 in a new way that would define its meaning
from the nineteenth century to the present. After all, even if Bostonians
wept in Watertown and Roxbury, they hadnt exactly been exiled or held
in captivity in a strange land. Rather, Boston was occupied and besieged
during much of the 1770s. Though the rhetoric of slavery certainly played
a part in mobilizing English Americans in the struggle for independence,
it would find a much surer resonance among African Americans, who had
been kidnapped and exiled to a strange land. This is the direction Psalm 137
would take. First, though, we must attend to further complexities regarding
the Babylonian exile.

II
Despite the significant historical and political distance separating the Hebrew Exodus and Babylonian Exile, the two experiences are frequently
conflated among modern movements that seek a usable past in the Hebrew
Bible. No movement has been more inclined to mingle the two narratives
than Rastafari. Were leaving Babylon goes a line in Bob Marleys song
Exodus, for example. The Exodus model of liberation and mass movement is certainly more dramatic a model than the gradual and partial return
from Babylon, Jonathan Boyarin (1992) points out. Yet the Rastafarians
focus on Babylon as a model of captivity, partly because of its reputation
for corruption and partly because it is more explicitly depicted as a place
of Exile, such as in Psalm 137 (By the rivers of Babylon) (553n60). For
his own part, Marley imagined himself not in the role of Moses but as his
predecessor Joseph, the dreaming son of Jacob, who was sold by his brothers into slavery in Egypt, rose to become chief adviser to Pharaoh, and
eventually rescued his large family from starvation in their famine-struck
homeland of Canaan (Steffens 1998, 259).
Although Psalm 137 presents the Babylonian exile as unmitigated dislocation, many communities for whom the text has power are aware of another
perspective on the exile. Rather than the desperate clinging to memory
advocated by the psalmist, the prophet Jeremiah in chapter 29 advocates
peaceful coexistence, even assimilation, with Babylon:
4 Thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, unto all that are carried
away captives, whom I have caused to be carried away from Jerusalem unto
Babylon;
5 Build ye houses, and dwell in them; and plant gardens, and eat the fruit
of them;
6 Take ye wives, and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons,

BMRJ 32_1 text.indd 101

4/24/12 9:42 AM

102

bmr journal

and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters;
that ye may be increased there, and not diminished.
7 And see the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away
captives, and pray unto the LORD for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have
peace.

On the surface, this seems not to have been an option for the Israelites held
captive in Egypt, for whom Exodus was the only avenue to liberation. This
difference reveals an important distinction in the notion of biblical Israel
as a template for communities seeking liberation in the Americas. As Edward Said (2001) points out, the Hebrews seem to have entered Egypt at
the invitation of the Pharaoh, and to have achieved a degree of power and
wealth due to Josephs elite court connections. Only later did the Hebrews
become scapegoats for the declining fortunes of the Egyptian state. Abject
as they may have been at the time of the Exodus, they had experienced
better times in their adopted land (165).
Jeremiahs passage has the effect of deterritorializing Israel; Zion can
be remembered and honored even in conditions not of its peoples choosing. And this inflection has enhanced the cultural adaptability of the Exile
story. Miguel A. De La Torre (1998) has probed the uncanny relevance of
the Babylonian captivity narrative to contemporary Cubans. Both Cuba
and Judea were vassals of a more powerful Northern neighbor, he writes.
Their strategic importance, Judah as a buffer zone between the powers
of the north and south, and Cuba as a key to the entire hemisphere, made
them desirable prizes. Whereas Judahs exile was triggered by the physical
invasion of Babylon, Cubas revolution was a backlash to the U.S. hegemony. Like Exilic Jews following Jeremiahs advice, many Cuban exiles
have carved out comfortable lives for themselves in the United States.
But what of enslaved Africans, held in bondage and exile from homeland?
Was Jeremiahs exhortation truly an option for persons regarded as less than
human and traded as commodities? In fact, Newport Gardner provides an
uncanny historical analogue to Billings. Born in Africa in 1746, the same
year as Billings, Occramer Marycoo was sold to a Newport, Rhode Island,
sea captain named Gardner. A prodigy, the teenager taught himself to read
and compose music. Gardner helped form the African Union Society in 1780
and served as sexton in a white church before helping establish Newports
first African American church. He also helped found and served as head
teacher at a school for black children. Meanwhile, he obtained freedom for
himself and his family from Gardner. He had retained a lifelong urge to
return to Africa, and late in 1825 he helped establish a new church in Boston
with the express purpose of emigrating to Liberia. The commissioning service closed with an anthem composed by Gardner for the occasion, which

BMRJ 32_1 text.indd 102

4/24/12 9:42 AM

Stowe Babylon Revisited

103

stitches together passages from Jeremiah 30 and the gospels of Matthew

and Mark:
For lo! the days come, saith the Lord, that I will bring again the captivity of my
people Israel and Judah, saith the Lord; and I will cause them to return to the
land that I gave to their fathers, and they shall possess it. ... Hear the words
of the Lord, O ye African race, hear the words of promise. ... O African, trust
in the Lord. Amen. Hallelujah. Praise the Lord.

Five days later, the ship sailed for Monrovia, the eighty-year-old Gardner
serving as deacon. It arrived a month later. Reportedly, Gardners anthem
was still being performed at a Newport church as late as 1940 (Newport
Gardner 1976).
Though Gardners achievements as a composer of sacred music were
unique, there is ample evidence of enslaved Africans singing psalms and
hymns. Little evidence exists of exactly which psalms were favored, though
the texts of Isaac Watts were particularly admired (Dargan 2006). The fact
that Watts chose to exclude Psalm 137 from his psalmbook suggests that
African Americans would rarely have sung the text (Polman 2006). It is
ironic that the poet so beloved among black Christians that Anglo-Protestant hymns were referred to simply as Dr. Watts would have effectively
erased so useful a psalm from the canon of the black church. That Frederick
Douglass, who was among the first to draw substantial attention to the
symbolism and social uses of the spiritual songs of African slaves, chose
Psalm 137 as the organizing frame for his most famous oration is therefore
both surprising and significant. In an uncanny stroke, Douglass created the
psalms modern political valence, whose resonance continues to this day.
At Rochester in 1852, Douglass (1993) asked, What to the slave is the
Fourth of July? The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and
independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me,
he said, addressing his white audience. The sunlight that brought life
and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. Why would an
escaped slave celebrate the birthday of such a nation? Douglass turns to
the Hebrew psalms to complete his analogy, comparing the United States
to another nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown
down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable
ruin! Introducing it as the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten
people, he cites verbatim the first six verses of Psalm 137. Verse 3 would
have been especially poignant: a people being carried away captive and
required by captors to provide amusement in the form of musicSing us
one of the songs of Zion (142).
Requiring enslaved Africans to perform songs had been a notable feature

BMRJ 32_1 text.indd 103

4/24/12 9:42 AM

104

bmr journal

of life under slavery. Many observers were struck by the fact that as slaves
departed for the South they were often singing, writes Walter Johnson
(1999), sometimes because slave traders used whips to make them sing.
According to a narrative published in 1867, these songs were coerced to
prevent among the crowd of Negroes who usually gather on such occasions, any expression of sorrow for those who are being torn away from
them (6869) Exile is doubled here: exile from the homeland and from a
familiar community to an unknown southern destination. When Tom begins
the final trudge to his Deep South plantation in Uncle Toms Cabin, Simon
Legree orders his newly acquired slaves, Strike up a song, boys,come!
When Tom launches into a Protestant hymn, he explodes:
Shut up, you black cuss! roared Legree; did ye think I wanted any oyer
infernal old Methodism? I say, tune up, now, something real rowdy,quick!
One of the other men struck up one of those unmeaning songs, common
among the slaves.

Masr seed me cotch a coon,

High boys, high! . . .
It was sung very boisterously, and with a forced attempt at merriment; but
no wail of despair, no words of impassioned prayer, could have had such a
depth of woe in them as the wild notes of the chorus. ... There was a prayer
in it, which Simon could not hear. He only heard the boys singing noisily, and
was well pleased; he was making them keep up their spirits. (Stowe [1852]
1994, 297)

Such performances foreshadow blackface minstrelsy, which began its

cultural ascent in the 1830s and was well established by the time of Douglasss speech in 1852. Slaves performances were admittedly coerced,
writes Ronald Radano (2003), frequently through degradation, whether
by tossing coins to prompt dancers or when whiskey was handed out by
the overseers, and the slaves becoming very merry, began to caper and sing
more noisily than before. But the slaves also profited from them, not only
monetarily but also in accessing a form of cultural power (152153). It is
to this commodified logic of slave folk performances that Eric Lott (1993,
43) traces the blackface minstrel show.
There is a further ambiguity at the heart of Douglasss address. Who, or
what, is Babylon? By comparing the United States to a nation of towering
crimes that was ultimately thrown down and buried in irrecoverable
ruin by the Almighty, is he comparing the nation to Babylon, that signifier of oppressive evil? Or is Douglass drawing an analogy between white
Americans and the pre-Exilic Jews whose sin brought on the destruction
of Jerusalem? His analogy seems to place African Americans in the role
of the exiled Israelites; but the United States could also be understood as

BMRJ 32_1 text.indd 104

4/24/12 9:42 AM

Stowe Babylon Revisited

105

a chosen people sinning against God through its stubborn attachment to

chattel slavery. Unlike the Babylonian Exile, the Exodus narrative, with
its language of bondage rather than exile, admits no such ambiguity. Like
the Hebrews led by Moses, African Americans were held in bondage; and
like the Jews of Psalm 137, they were exiled to a strange land. But as just
observed, the post-Exilic Jews were not enslaved; indeed, they were treated
fairly well and had the opportunity to establish themselves in their new
location. Their key challenge was to remember Jerusalem, remain mindful of
the homeland and covenant it implied, and withstand the sarcasm of the
captors that would erase the communitys all-important bond of solidarity
with God.
Douglasss complex evocation of Psalm 137 did not exhaust the political
significance of the psalm to the African American freedom movement. For
writers of the New Negro Renaissance, Ben Glaser (2011) has shown, the
psalm served as a focal point for highlighting ironies of African American
vernacular culture. In his preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922),
James Weldon Johnson contrasts the execrable versified version of the
Psalms made by the New England divinesas evidence he adduces the
opening stanza of Psalm 137 from the Bay Psalm Bookwith the unheralded
genius of Phillis Wheatley. The third verse of Johnsons own Lift Every
Voice and Singsometimes dubbed the Negro National Anthemechoes
the psalm:
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee.

A 1925 essay by Sterling Brown explores the irony of white audiences

reaction to opera singer Roland Hayess wild summoning of beautiful
distress in performing the psalm:
The Negroes brood; are stirred by something deep within, something as far
away as all antiquity, as old as human wrong, as tragical as loss of worlds.
What does he meanand why are we so stirred

. . . required of us a song

And they that wasted us

Required of us mirth
And a thousand of our girls prostitute their voices singing jazz for a decadent
white and black craving. (Glaser 2011, 3)

These ambivalent critical responses, mixing pride in the black vernacular

with wariness about racial condescension and commodification, must have
shaped the attitude toward Psalm 137 of another celebrated orator: Rev.

BMRJ 32_1 text.indd 105

4/24/12 9:42 AM

106

bmr journal

C.L. Franklin. Raised in Mississippi, Franklin eventually made his way

to Detroit, where he became pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church. Beginning in the 1950s, Franklins charismatic preaching style became nationally
known through radio broadcasts and recordings for Chess. A confidant of
Martin Luther King Jr. (and father of Aretha), Franklin played a major role
in the civil rights movement in Detroit. Preaching exactly one century after
Douglass, with the civil rights movement beginning to gain traction in the
South, Franklin delivered Without a Song, a sermon on the first four
verses of Psalm 137. The Babylonians asked the Hebrews to sing, Franklins
explains, because their music was something unique; the conquerors had
no need of scholars, scientists, philosophers, or politicians. Thinking the
request a bit disorderly and out of place, the Hebrews refused. But they
were wrong, according to Franklin (1989):
I take the position that they should have sung. Yes, they were in a strange
land; yes, they were among so-called heathens; yes, the situation in which
they found themselves was an unfamiliar situation and possibly was not
conducive to inspire them into spiritual expression. But even under adverse
circumstances, you ought to sing sometimes. And not only sing, sing some
of Zions songs. (90)

The preacher goes on to cite singers whose public performances had historical consequences: opera singer Roland Hayes, who quieted an abusive
audience in Nazi Germany; a slave woman who confronted Charles Wesley in Georgia when she was not admitted to church; anonymous slaves
who sang black spirituals across the American South. As Franklin launches
into the half-sung, half-chanted climax of his sermon, he offers singing as
a metaphor of Christian testimony. It is through song that believers cross
boundaries of social segregation and reach people in all their mortal imperfection by coming close to them. Singing the songs of Zion is Franklins
metaphor for commitment to public witness for the gospel:

I said everywhere

Ohh!

Yes.

Maybe you dont know what Im talking about

Im going to keep on singing,
Yes I am.

Ohh!

I said everywhere I go,

Im going to hold on to my song

And keep on singing it.
(97)

BMRJ 32_1 text.indd 106

4/24/12 9:42 AM

Stowe Babylon Revisited

107

III
There is a substantial gap in the musical development of Psalm 137, as
American Protestants of all races turned from singing eighteenth-century
psalms and hymns to the new evangelical gospel songs that flourished
after the Civil War. It would take a number of social, political, and musical transformations to bring the psalm back into popular consciousness.
In 1964, the American Lutheran Church published a version of Psalm 137,
By the Babylonian Rivers, that made its way into a number of Protestant
hymnals over the succeeding decades; it was set to the Latvian folk tune
Kas Dziedaja, known in English as Captivity. A decade later, the text
reached a mass audience through the 1971 musical (1973 film) Godspell, one
of the few lyrics not drawn directly from the gospel of Matthew. The psalm
is heard while Jesus blesses the disciples after the Last Supper just before
slipping off to pray in the Garden of Gethsemane.
But the modern musical history of Psalm 137 begins not in North America
but in the Caribbean. The sources of the Jamaican musical mix that came
to be called reggae were multiple. The rhythmic underpinnings were laid
by the practitioners of Burru and Kumina drumming, an African-transplanted form based on the cross-rhythms created by a regular beat and a
higher-pitched repeater drum. Reggae also drew on traditions of Jamaican popular music, which developed from mento of the 1930s and 1940s
(influenced by American big-band jazz), ska of the 1950s and early 1960s
(shaped by American R&B), so-called blue beat, and rock steady of the late
1960s. Finally, lyrics and tunes were borrowed from gospel hymns originating mainly in North America. But beginning in 1962, with the cultural
revival led by record producer and eventual prime minister Edward Seaga,
Jamaican musicians began to turn away from North American black music
and create in a more intentionally nationalist vein (Reckord 1998, 231265).
By the early 1970s, the music of Bob Marley and The Harder They Come was
giving both Rastafari religious ideas and Jamaican music global exposure.
The Melodians Rivers of Babylon made a number of significant
changes. Unlike the triple-rhythm Puritan psalm tune recommended by
Ainsworth, Rivers of Babylon is set in 4/4, propelled by a seven-note
reggae G major bass line. The hook features two identical rising phrases
followed by two parallel falling phrases. Like the biblical psalm, Rivers
of Babylon is loosely divided into three sections. But these divisions are
signaled as much by the music as by the text. The songs first two stanzas
condense a stylized version of the first four verses of Psalm 137. But the
first eight lines are divided into two four-bar stanzas, each of which is repeated once. The image of harps hung from willows is dropped. The more

BMRJ 32_1 text.indd 107

4/24/12 9:42 AM

108

bmr journal

pointed term the wicked replaces the neutral they of Psalm 137. More
importantly, the Rastafarian version replaces the Lords song with King
Alphas song, a reference to Ras Tafari, Haile Selasie I, the Rasta messiah
and resurrected Jesus Christ who was crowned emperor of Ethiopia in 1930:
By the rivers of Babylon / Where we sat down / And there we wept /
When we remembered Zion / Cause the wicked carried us away in captivity / Required from us a song / How can we sing King Alphas song / In
a strange land?
With that final question the Melodians version departs from the Bible
altogether. Instead of the calls for remembrance (If I forget thee, O Jerusalem. ... If I do not remember thee. . . .) that characterize the middle
section of Psalm 137, Rivers of Babylon offers an exhortation to struggle
and protest through music. Again, like Billings but unlike earlier metrical
psalms, there is significant repetition of text; within the short six-bar stanza,
both the second and third lines are repeated. As Nathaniel Samuel Murrell
shows, the Rasta version replaces the spirit of resignation and self-pity of
the Exilic Jews with militant defiance. If the psalmists exiles are silenced
by their dislocation and uncertainty, the Rasta community of Rivers gives
voice to its anger and determination through shouts and songs: in Chanting down Babylon, Babylon signifies unjust power, whether colonial
domination, racial subjugation, or economic exploitation (Murrell, 1998;
Murrell and Taylor 1998, 390411; Murrell and Williams 1998, 326348).
Musically, the lyrics are shouted in an exhortatory fashion above the familiar
seven-note bass melody that we first hear in the phrase, By the rivers of
Babylon. .. .:
Sing it out loud
Sing a song of freedom, sister
Sing a song of freedom, brother
We gotta sing and shout it
We gotta talk and shout it
Shout the song of freedom now

Shortly before his death in 2006, Brent Dowe, the lead singer of the Melodians, told Kenneth Bilby that he had adapted Psalm 137 to the new reggae
style because he wanted to increase the publics consciousness of the growing Rastafarian movement and its calls for black liberation and social justice.
Like the Afro-Protestant Revival services, traditional Rastafarian worship
often included psalm singing and hymn singing, and Rastas typically modified the words to fit their own spiritual conceptions; Psalm 137 was among
their sacred chants. When Rivers of Babylon first hit the airwaves, according to Dowe, it was quickly banned by the Jamaican government because its
overt Rastafarian references (King Alpha and O FarI) were considered

BMRJ 32_1 text.indd 108

4/24/12 9:42 AM

Stowe Babylon Revisited

109

subversive and potentially inflammatory. The records producer, Leslie

Kong, responded by publicly criticizing the government, pointing out that
the song came from the Bible and had been sung by Jamaican Christians
since time immemorial. The government then lifted the ban. Dowe recalled
that, once it started being played on radio again, it took the record a mere
three weeks to jump to number one on the local charts (Bilby 2006).
The songs final stanza, repeated once, invokes the historic connection between Rasta and Christianity. Rastafarianism developed in a colonial society
shaped by the ideas and practices of English Christianity, both Anglican and
Baptist, and indigenous African Jamaican forms like Revival (Besson 2002,
239275). As the Rastafari movement began without a distinctive music of
its own, its early practitioners borrowed Baptist church songs as well as
gospel songs known as Sankeys in reference to Ira Sankey (18401908),
the musical sidekick of U.S. evangelist Dwight Moody and prolific composer
of white gospel song in the late nineteenth century (Reckord 1998, 238,
243244; Stowe 2004, 97105). The phrase Let the words of our mouth/
And the meditation of our heart / Be acceptable in Thy sight is a familiar benediction among European American Protestants. (The Melodians
version adds just the tag O FarI to that traditional benediction.) These
evangelical revival accents are especially pronounced in a version of Rivers of Babylon by the Skatalites (2006), a prolific Jamaican band that first
played together in 1964 and defined the ska sound. Rhythmically, the 4/4
meter is goosed by the rhythm sections emphasis of offbeat eighth notes, a
technique that stems from mento. The Skatalites Rivers is the first section
of a four-part medley that segues into three traditional Christian spirituals:
If I had the wings of a dove / I would fly, fly away, fly away and be at
rest; A little more oil in my lamp, keep it burning / Keep it burning til the
break of day; and A-amenA-amenA-amen Amen Amen.
The uncoupling of Psalm 137 from a conventional sacred performance
context culminated in the disco version recorded by Boney M in 1978.
The group comprised four West Indian singers, three of them women and
two from Jamaica, assembled by a German record producer in the 1970s.
Their cover version, with voices soaring over a buoyant disco backbeat,
made two significant changes in the Melodians text. First, it reverted to
the King James language, replacing How can we sing King Alphas song
in a strange land? with How shall we sing the Lords song in a strange
land? Second, it dropped the second section of the songthe part most
clearly marked by a Rasta political sensibility, the call to Sing a song of
freedomand collectively shout down Babylon. The cover did extremely
well in Europe, becoming the second biggest selling single in U.K. chart
history, and was Boney Ms only song to make the Top 40 in the United
States (Erlewine n.d.).

BMRJ 32_1 text.indd 109

4/24/12 9:42 AM

110

bmr journal

Rivers of Babylon has been covered regularly in the years since

BoneyM, with little deviation from the Melodians original. More than
forty different artists have recorded it, ranging from Steve Earle and Linda
Ronstadt to the Neville Brothers, Vulture Culture, and Sublime. A version by Sweet Honey in the Rock links most directly to the songs political heritage. Taking its name from Psalm 82 (with honey out of the rock
should I have satisfied thee), the group was founded in 1973 by Bernice
Johnson Reagon, who first became known nationally through the Albany
Freedom Singers, which helped recruit participants and raise funds for the
Freedom Summer voter-registration drive of 1964. Steve Earles version offers another intriguing crossing of genres. Earle, a hard-living Texan with
outspoken leftist politics, is best known for the controversy over his song
John Walkers Blues (2002), which presented a sympathetic account of
the young American caught with the Taliban after 9/11. Great-grandson
of a Methodist preacher who built a church in Texas that still stands, Earle
recorded Rivers of Babylon for 1995 album Train a Comin.
At the risk of an anachronism, Psalm 137 has become Americas longestrunning political protest song. The psalm clearly fit Puritan assumptions
about their own special covenant with God, their status as political exiles,
and their need to remember Jerusalem. Like the psalmist, they could wish
for divine punishment if they strayed. This investment and identification
with ancient Israel has been one of the constants of American history, never
less so than in the last fifty years (McAlister 2002). The psalm was powerfully adapted to the struggle for the abolition of slavery and subjugation
of African Americans, who likened themselves to the children of Israel,
exiled to a strange land. Its text has had strong resonance for the Rasta liberation movement and various politically charged musics since the 1960s.
Throughout this long development, we see African Americans pressing the
political possibilities of the psalm and, in doing so, undermining a series of
conventions about of the proper domains of musical and religious practice.
The Melodians Rivers of Babylon sounds twice in The Harder They
Come. The first comes in the scene where Ivan, just arrived from country,
tracks down his mother and delivers the news that her own mother has died.
As the song plays in the background, he explains that the family home has
been sold off, the money spent on an elaborate funeral for the matriarch;
Ivan is now an exile in the strange land of Kingston. He does manage
to sing his song (not King Alphas song) for a commercial recording but
is exploited by the music industry and turns to the ganja trade. Rivers of
Babylon sounds for a second time toward the films end, when the injured
Ivan eludes a police manhunt by escaping to Cuba on board a ship. Ultimately, he fails to board the ship and is killed shortly after in a gunfight
with police. Twice exiled, Ivan dies on the coast of Babylon.

BMRJ 32_1 text.indd 110

4/24/12 9:42 AM

Stowe Babylon Revisited

111

references
Ainsworth, Henry. 1622. The booke of psalmes: Englished both in prose and metre with
annotations, opening the words and sentences, by conference with other Scriptures by
H. A. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.882003&res_id=xri
:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:16069:165. Accessed April 1, 2007.
The Bay psalm book: A facsimile reprint of the first edition of 1640. 1956. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Benson, Louis F. [1915] 1962. The English hymn: Its development and use in worship.
Reprint, Richmond, Va.: John Knox.
Besson, Jean. 2002. Martha Braes two histories: European expansion and Caribbean
culture-building in Jamaica. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Bilby, Kenneth. 2006. E-mail to the author, May 12.
Billings, William. 1977. The complete works of William Billings, vol. 2, edited by
Hans Nathan. Boston: American Historical Society and the Colonial Society of
Massachusetts.
Boyarin, Jonathan. 1992. Reading Exodus into history. New Literary History 23, no.
3: 523554.
Crist, Elizabeth B. 2003. Ye songs of harmony: Politics, masculinity, and the
music of William Billings in revolutionary Boston. William and Mary Quarterly
60, no. 2: 333354.
Dahood, Mitchell, 1970. The Anchor Bible: Psalms III: 101150. Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday.
Dargan, William T. 2006. Lining out the word: Dr. Watts hymn singing in the music of
black Americans. Berkeley: University of California Press.
De La Torre, Miguel A. 1998. A Cuban reading of psalm 137. http://alocubano
.com/miguel_a.htm. Accessed February 1, 2012.
Douglass, Frederick. 1993. Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American
slave, written by himself, edited by David W. Blight. Boston: Bedford.
English metrical psalmody. 2001. Nashville, TN: Smith Creek Music.http://www
.smithcreekmusic.com/Hymnology/Metrical.Psalmody/English.psalmody
.intro.html. Accessed April 1, 2007.
Erlewine, Stephen Thomas. n.d. Boney M. http://www.allmusic.com/artist/
boney-m-p15998. Accessed July 15, 2005.
Franklin, C[larence] L[aVaughn] 1989. Give me this mountain: Life history and
selected sermons, edited by Jeff Todd Titon. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Glaser, Ben. 2011. They require(d) of us a song: Psalm 137 and the New Negro
Renaissance. Paper delivered at Imagination, Reparation, Transformation,
annual meeting of the American Studies Association, Baltimore, Maryland,
October 2023, 2011.
Gordon, Larry, and Anthony Barand, eds. 1998. Northern Harmony: Plain tunes,
hymns and anthems from the New England singing school tradition. 4th ed. Plainfield,
Vt.: Northern Harmony.
Henzell, Perry, dir. 1973. The harder they come. International Films. Criterion
Collection, 2000. Cat. no. 15580.

BMRJ 32_1 text.indd 111

4/24/12 9:42 AM

112

bmr journal

Inserra, Lorraine, and H. Wiley Hitchcock. 1981. The music of Henry Ainsworths
psalter. Brooklyn: Institute for Studies in American Music.
Johnson, Walter. 1999. Soul by soul: Life inside the antebellum slave market. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Lott, Eric. 1993. Love and theft: Blackface minstrelsy and the American working class.
New York: Oxford University Press.
McAlister, Melani. 2002. Epic encounters: Culture, media, and U.S. interests in the
Middle East, 19452000. Berkeley: University of California Press.
McKay, David P., and Richard Crawford. 1975. William Billings of Boston: Eighteenthcentury composer. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Murrell, Nathaniel Samuel. 1998. Tuning Hebrew psalms to reggae rhythms:
Rastas revolutionary lamentations for social change. Cross Currents. http://
www.crosscurrents.org/murrell.htm. Accessed June 20, 2005.
Murrell, Nathaniel Samuel, and Burchell K. Taylor. 1998. Rastafaris messianic
ideology and Caribbean theology of liberation. In Chanting down Babylon: The
Rastafari reader, edited by Nathaniel Samuel Murrell, William David Spencer,
and Adrian Anthony McFarlane, 390411. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press.
Murrell, Nathaniel Samuel, and Lewin Williams. 1998. The black biblical hermeneutics of Rastafari. In Chanting down Babylon: The Rastafari reader, edited
by Nathaniel Samuel Murrell, William David Spencer, and Adrian Anthony
McFarlane, 326348. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Newport Gardner (17461826). 1976. Black Perspective in Music 4, no. 2: 202207.
Polman, Bert. 2006. E-mail to the author, October 7.
Radano, Ronald. 2003. Lying up a nation: Race and black music. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Reckord, Verena. 1998. From Burru drums to reggae ridims: The evolution of
Rasta music. In Chanting down Babylon: The Rastafari reader, edited by Nathaniel
Samuel Murrell, William David Spencer, and Adrian Anthony McFarlane,
231252. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Said, Edward. 2001. Michael Walzers Exodus and revolution: A Canaanite reading.
In Blaming the victims: Spurious scholarship and the Palestinian question, edited
by Edward W. Said and Christopher Hitchens, 161178. London: Verso, 2001.
The Skatalites. 2006. Medley: The rivers of babylon, Wings of a dove, A little more
oil, Hey man. In Roots party. Fullfill. XIII Bis Recordings. Cat. no. 6404042.
Stackhouse, Rochelle A. 1997. The language of the psalms in worship: American revisions of Watts psalter. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow.
Steffens, Roger. 1998. Bob Marley: Rasta warrior. In Chanting Down Babylon: The
Rastafari Reader, edited by Nathaniel Samuel Murrell, William David Spencer,
and Adrian Anthony McFarlane, 253265. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press.
Stowe, David W. 2004. How sweet the sound: Music in the spiritual lives of Americans.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. [1852] 1994. Uncle Toms cabin. New York: Norton.

BMRJ 32_1 text.indd 112

4/24/12 9:42 AM

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
permission.