The Impact of Spirituals on Four People–Part One
I have been trying to find a way to share some thoughts with you, but I could find no central theme, around which I could develop four distinct story lines. That is until now. All four stories are about different people, but the theme that is common to them all is how spirituals impacted their lives. Yes, I am talking about an incredibly powerful genre, called in literature, the “Negro Spiritual.” In fact, we are going to focus on one spiritual in particular, “Go Down, Moses.”
The people under discussion are Jess Lee Brooks, Edna Ferber, Paul Robeson and the musical collaborators, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II.
In this post, we are going to start with an exploration of spirituals so that we can understand why they had such a powerful impact on people’s lives; in the second post, we will discuss Jess Lee Brooks, a gifted actor and singer from Montana. In the third post, we will study a novel by Edna Ferber, and in the fourth post we will get to know Paul Robeson, a professional athlete, a lawyer, an actor and a singer. Finally, in the fifth post we will explore how spirituals affected two Broadway collaborators and the American Musical Theatre, itself.
In these posts, I will provide lengthy excerpts from my book on musicals and movies, called appropriately enough A Spiritual Journey Through Musicals and Movies. I will set them out in italics.
Let’s start this post with the first excerpt from my book:
African-American folk music fell into two categories: the music of the church and the music of the outside world. The music of the church was expressed in spirituals and gospel music (separately defined as African-American hymns composed after Emancipation).
Work songs like “Swing Dat Hammer” and the blues that followed were songs of misery and defeat, songs of the helpless and the hopeless.
[Let’s interrupt the quote to provide an audio clip of Harry Belafonte singing this song.]On the other hand, the term “spiritual” may have come from the term “spiritual song” from the King James Bible. Ephesians 5:19 says “Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord;…”
Wikipedia explains: “As Africans were exposed to stories from the Bible, they began to see parallels to their own experiences. The story of the exile of the Jews and their captivity…, resonated with their own captivity.”
In her splendid Lecture-Recital, entitled The Gospel Truth about the Negro Spirituals, Randye Jones stated: “Negro spirituals are songs created by the Africans who were captured and brought to the United States to be sold into slavery. This stolen race was deprived of their languages, families, and cultures; yet, their masters could not take away their music.
“Over the years, these slaves and their descendants adopted Christianity, the religion of their masters. They re-shaped it into a deeply personal way of dealing with the oppression of their enslavement. Their songs, which were to become known as spirituals, reflected the slaves’ need to express their new faith.”
Ms. Jones then directed us to Velma Maia Thomas’ book, No Man Can Hinder Me: The Journey from Slavery to Emancipation through Song, from which she quoted the following:
“My people told stories, from Genesis to Revelation, with God’s faithful as the main characters. They knew about Adam and Eve in the Garden, about Moses and the Red Sea. They sang of the Hebrew children and Joshua at the battle of Jericho. They could tell you about Mary, Jesus, God, and the Devil. If you stood around long enough, you’d hear a song about the blind man seeing, God troubling the water, Ezekiel seeing a wheel, Jesus being crucified and raised from the deal. If slaves couldn’t read the Bible, they would memorize Biblical stories they heard and translate them into songs.”
African-American slaves found refuge in the Judeo-Christian concepts in the Bible and accepted Jesus as their personal savior. One spiritual, more than any other, exemplifies this personalization: “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” As David Ewen says in his book, All the Years of American Popular Music, “The pronoun ‘My’… is significant. To the Negro, Jesus was someone personal to whom he could speak his heavy heart openly, as if to a sympathetic friend, and receive solace.”
Ewen continues this explanation: “The Old Testament also struck a personal note with the Negro, for in the captivity of the Jews in Egypt there was a counterpart to slavery. ‘Let my people go,’ rings out firm and clear in ‘God Down, Moses’ because the Negro was here sounding a plea for his own emancipation.”
The dual nature of the lyrics, both as praise to God and as a plea for release from bondage, is best captured by Frederick Douglass in Chapter VI of his book, My Bondage and My Freedom: “They told a tale which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones, loud, long and deep, breathing the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.”
However, it was also the unique form of the music, as well as its lyrics, that created the power felt in the presence of the spiritual. Wikipedia starts by explaining the origination of the music: “Although spirituals were originally unaccompanied monographic (unison) songs, they are best known today in harmonized choral arrangements. This historic group of uniquely American songs is now recognized as a distinct genre of music.”
Returning to Ms. Jones, we learn that: “Spirituals were created extemporaneously and were passed orally from person to person.”
Ewen addressed the development of the music: “In the New World, the Negro came into contact for the first time with European melody and harmony. Before long, his music making tried to combine European idioms with African rhythms and musical approaches. Still one other powerful New World influence helped give Negro song its personality and character: Christianity.”
“The Negro spiritual employed some techniques that set it sharply apart from other kinds of American folk songs. Generally speaking, the spiritual was at times characterized by mobile changes form major to minor without the benefit of formal modulations; by freedom of rhythm and intonation; by its plangent moods; by the injection of notes, like the flatted third or seventh, foreign to the key; and by the variations of the metric pattern.
“Unlike many other American folk songs, the spiritual was created not by an individual, but by groups; it was meant to be sung chorally, not solo. Consequently—almost unique to American folk music—the interest lies not only in the melody but in the harmony.”
It was this combination of powerful lyrics and unique musical form that led spirituals to stand out as a musical genre; and the type of spiritual that best exemplified this power was the “sorrow song,” which, according to Ewen employed “a slower tempo, a statelier movement and greater majesty.” One of the greatest examples of this type of spiritual is “Go Down Moses.”
In my opinion, the Negro Spiritual sprang from the hearts and souls of slaves and former slaves who sought a spiritual refuge where truth and justice were universal and where salvation lay in the mind of the individual. Love became the universal solvent to dissolve the frustration of human injustice. The slave could only endure slavery if he or she focused on love as the pinnacle of thought. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. later captured this concept in his non-violent movement in the late 1950’s and 1960’s when he sought to counter a less visible form of enslavement.
Moses brought the Hebrew slaves out of bondage by the power of God; and Jesus gave his mortal life to show us the ultimate power of a spiritual world of universal peace and love. In this narrative, the promise of eternal life was assured if we kept his commandments. In terms of mortal sacrifice, the Bible assured the slave that someone had trod this ground centuries earlier. This became a personal belief; for, if Jesus could bear the hatred poured on him in his time on earth, so could the black slave. If Jesus could bear the scourge of the whip, so could the black slave. If Jesus could bear the pain of crucifixion in order to provide us the final proof that God’s law rules triumphant over human laws, then the slave could bear the chains of imprisonment.
The sound of spiritual music contained the sound of triumph, of love overcoming hate, of good conquering evil; they were songs of peace and joy. If ever a people rejected hundreds of years of bondage in favor of salvation, this is the group. If ever the weight of oppression was replaced by the elevation of the soul, this is the occasion. If ever “a joyful noise was made unto the Lord,” this music personifies it.
Perhaps this joy was the essence of the music. An ethnomusicologist named Natalie Curtis Burlin, who died in 1921, described the “Pentecostal character” of the singing: “It was spirited singing and it was devout; but the inspirational quality of the group-feeling made this music seem a lambent, living thing, a bit of ‘divine fire’ that descended upon these black people like the gift of tongues.”
Natalie made this additional observation: “With the Negro, it would seem that the further back one traces the current of musical inspiration that runs through the race, … the nearer does one come to the divine source of the song,—intuition, which is in turn the wellspring of all genius.”
I will certainly try to explain what I feel are the multiple causes for this power; however, the only way to truly understand the power of the genre is to experience it first-hand.
The point of a spiritual is to use one or more symbols to create an entire set of images and allusions that reproduce the full story in our minds, even though the lyrics trace out only a small portion of the entire vision.
The repetition of people, place, captivity and rescue are needed to transfer the historical miracles into present hope in the minds of the listeners; to use the dire nature of oppression in the past and the power of God to “part the waters” as a way to imagine that one day we can go free.
We hear the music match the majestic words, as it swells into our conscious being, washing over us, enveloping us and making us part of the music, not bystanders.
Finally, the deep tones literally “hit” us and make our bodies vibrate in response. While science may tell us that this is part of the long wave theory of low frequency soundwaves, we feel this power long before we understand why.
We have come to the end of the quoted excerpt for this post, and we know that mere words cannot explain the true power of the music. Therefore, in the next post, we will provide the first musical example of the power of the spiritual.