A History of the African-American Spiritual

How the African-American Spiritual has maintained its integrity
in the face of major social and musical challenges

[Based on an article by Thomas Lloyd published in the August 2004 issue of the Choral Journal of the American Choral Directors Association; all rights reserved.]

13. Performing the Spirituals Today

Paul Kwami, director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers rehearsing the combine choirs of the current Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Chamber Singers of Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges

Paul Kwami, director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers rehearsing the combine choirs of the current Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Chamber Singers of Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges

The challenge of building racial justice and understanding in American society is still very much unfinished business today. Though there were many white college students joining their black brothers and sisters in singing freedom songs in the '60s, as a white director of predominantly white choirs, I am frequently approached by my white students with a confession that they don’t feel "right" about singing the spirituals. On one level this expression of unformed "white guilt" reflects an admirable recognition that this music grows out of the suffering of a people who were enslaved by the society of their ancestors.

And yet, to assume that people who are not themselves African-American are categorically unable to connect as performers with the underlying meaning of the spirituals risks taking us back to the very basis of racism: the denial of another people’s common humanity because of racial distinctions. Most great works of art have attained universal status because they are able to articulate ideas and emotions coming out of a very particular time and place in a way which other people can readily understand, even in vastly different cultural and historic situations.

Certainly the origins of the African-American spiritual in the enslavement of one group of people by another make it a special case of its own in significant ways. And yet it is a measure of the achievement of the people who first sang these melodies that their songs not only served to sustain a sense of hope for the slave community through great adversity, but have gone on to speak powerfully of the desire for hope in the face of despair for people all over the world as America’s most recognizable form of vocal music. Many people throughout history have endured suffering, but relatively few have been able to transform that suffering into universally ennobling artistic expression.

As in the performance of any music not composed in our own contemporary community, interpretation requires a meeting of two different cultures. We must first seek to understand the origins of the spiritual – such things as its religious and political meaning for the slave community who first sang them, its layers of symbolic subtext related to seeking escape from slavery, and the nature of the choir the arranger wrote for, even the sound of that choir if recordings are available. All of this is in an effort to seek to understand the music first on its own terms, as close to the full context of its origins as we can. However, the next step is not to try to imitate one of the great Hall Johnson or Tuskegee Institute choirs, but to look honestly at our own choir, our own experience, our own world perspective, and try to find lines of connection. Our goal should be to sing the music honoring both the integrity of the song and its creators and the innate character and identity of our own particular ensemble.

Der is Trouble All Over Dis Worl'

One of the spirituals that I had never allowed myself to consider performing was Hall Johnson’s extraordinary arrangement of I’ve been 'buked, perhaps the most sorrow-filled song ever imagined, and in a major key at that. As one who has by most measures lived a fairly protected life, it had always been hard to identify on a personal level with the first-person text of the opening stanza:

I've been 'buked, an' I've been scorned, Yes!
I've been 'buked, an' I've been scorned, Children!
I've been 'buked, an' I've been scorned,
I've been talked about sho's you' born.


When the Howard University Choir under the direction of J. Weldon Norris came to Haverford two years ago to share a concert with the Haverford/Bryn Mawr Chamber Singers, I was pleased to see this beloved spiritual on their program.[1] I looked forward to hearing it sung by this intergenerational choir of Howard undergraduates, graduate students, and alumni, led by a man who had directed the choir for thirty years. The first thing I wanted to do when the concert was over was to see if we had enough copies of "I've been 'buked" to read through it at the next day’s rehearsal. I don’t know if the immediacy of this direct contact with the great oral tradition of the spiritual made me feel like I somehow now had 'permission' to perform it, as absurd an idea as that would be. All I know is that the music was so compellingly sung and heartfelt, that it was impossible not to want to sing it as soon as possible.

The next day when we brought it out in rehearsal (to students who felt equally inspired by the concert we shared the night before), I saw the second and third stanzas as if for the first time. The second stanza steps out of the self-pity of the first to the realization that the power of evil in this world is beyond the view of any one person or group:

Dere is trouble all over dis worl', Yes!
Dere is trouble all over dis worl', Children!
Dere is trouble all over dis worl', Yes!
Dere is trouble all over dis worl'.


To which the final stanza responds with resolute defiance -- that man’s inhumanity to man will simply not have the last word:

Ain' gwine lay my 'ligion down, No!
Ain' gwine lay my 'ligion down, Children!
Ain' gwine lay my 'ligion down, No!
Ain' gwine lay my 'ligion down.


Going beyond the notation in the printed score, the Howard choir continued by repeating the first stanza, and then ending as they had started, by seamlessly connecting into singing a final stanza without words, as softly as the first Fisk Jubilee Singers must have sung the opening of Steal Away. At that moment it couldn’t have been made more clear how the meaning of all three stanzas, the personal, the universal, and the resolve to overcome, were all contained in that single, haunting melody and the strange harmonies that supported it, all passed on down to us from an earlier time. And the thought came to mind: now we know how this song goes. Amen!

Notes:
[1] For recordings of the Howard University Choir under the direction of J. Weldon Norris and others, contact the music department at Howard University, College of Arts and Sciences, Division of Fine Arts, Department of Music, 2455 6th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20059.

The Chamber Singers of Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges, Thomas Lloyd, director, perform "I've been 'buked" by Hall Johnson. February 21, 2014 in Marshall Auditorium, inspired by the interpretation of J. Weldon Norris with the Howard University Choir.