One of the richest contributions to church music in America has undoubtedly come from the heritage of the African-Americans who came to America as slaves. Their hymns and spirituals, which are sung today across the world, give evidence of both the extreme hardships and the fervent faith that was a part of their experience in America.
Africans in America
A glance down the “for sale” columns of eighteenth-century American newspapers would reveal dozens of small ads such as this: TO BE SOLD a valuable young handsome Negro Fellow about 18 or 20 years of age; has every qualification of a genteel and sensible servant and has been in many different parts of the world.… He lately came from London, and has with him two suits of new clothes, and his French horn, which the purchaser may have with him.
Slavery had begun two centuries earlier—the first slaves were brought to America by Sir John Hawkins in 1563. The plantations that developed in America’s middle colonies in the eighteenth century increased the demands for slaves enormously, bringing the number by the 1750s to 300,000. By the end of that century this figure had tripled. One estimate suggests that altogether 15 million black slaves were brought to the continent (including the West Indies and South America) before Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
The Music of Africa
The wonderful musicality of Africa came with the slaves. It could be heard even in the appalling and life-threatening conditions of the slave ship: The slaves on the ship] sang songs of sad lamentation.… They sang songs expressive of their fears of being beat, of their want of victuals, particularly the want of their native food, and of their never returning to their own country. (Ecroyd Claxton, Minutes of the Evidence … Respecting the Slave Trade, 34, pp. 14–36, House of Commons, quoted in D. J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War [Urbana, Illinois, 1987].)
The slaves on board had to make music whether they liked it or not, being forced to dance for the entertainment of the sailors: and if they do not, they had each of them [the boatswain and his mate] a cat to flog them and make them do it. (Ibid., p. 8)
The many musical traditions brought over from Africa were transformed by the conditions of slavery and by the arbitrary mixing of peoples of differing cultures (this was a specific policy believed to make the slaves less rebellious) but they were not eradicated. On the contrary, music and dance remained, as in Africa, far more than a diversion from the hardship and injustice of slavery. They were vital expressions of identity occasionally permitted in a life of almost unremitting labor.
Dancing and music-making using traditional instruments were celebrated at festivals such as Pinkster Dagh (a corruption of “Pentecost Day”) when white spectators could look on at a great carnival of ecstatic dancing and music lasting several days.
It was also possible to hear the musical expression—the hollers—of black slave-workers in the fields and open spaces: Suddenly one raised such a sound as I never heard before, a long, loud, musical shout, rising and falling, and breaking into falsetto, his voice ringing through the woods in the clear, frosty night air, like a bugle call. As he finished, the melody was caught up by another, then by several in chorus. (F. L. Olmstead, Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, vol. 2 [New York, 1856], 19, and quoted in E. Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 2d ed. [New York, 1983], 156.)
The conversion of the blacks to the Christian faith went ahead slowly, for not all whites felt it appropriate for their slaves to know for themselves the privileges of their faith. But in such scraps, as the slaves could pick up, they discovered the God who ignores human barriers, who delivers people from oppression, and in whose sight everyone is equal. These were messages of hope and eventual liberation that came to be celebrated in music and dance of great power: it was musicking and dancing … with their unique power to weld into a higher unity the contradictory experiences of sorrow, pain, joy, hope, and despair, that were at the center of their religious expression. (C. Small, Music of the Common Tongue [London, 1987], 87)
Hymns
So when the slaves adopted Christianity and began to sing the Psalms and hymns in the white churches (albeit segregated) they brought a life and vigor to the music which the whites could not fail to notice: … all breaking out in a torrent of sacred harmony, enough to bear away the whole congregation to heaven. (S. Davies, Letters from the Reverend Samuel Davies and Others … , quoted in C. Hamm, Music in the New World [New York, 1983], 128.)
The skill and passionate sincerity in Christian music-making was brought into the homes of white Christians. In 1755 the Rev. Samuel Davies described the slaves singing from their Psalters and hymnbooks:
Sundry of them have lodged all night in my kitchen, and sometimes when I have awaked about two or three o’clock in the morning, a torrent of sacred harmony has poured into my chamber and carried my mind away to heaven.… I cannot but observe that the Negroes, above all the Human species that I ever knew, have an Ear for Musicke, and a kind of ecstatic Delight in Psalmody … (S. Davies, quoted in C. Hamm, Music in the New World, 128.)
By now it will be evident how significant are those last few words, for through their continued celebration of “ecstatic delight,” the black community in America has proferred a great gift to the legacy of Christian music.
It was not until the 1770s that blacks were permitted to form their own churches. The first hymnal for black churches was published in 1801, the Collection of Spiritual Songs and Hymns Selected from Various Authors. The hymns, with texts by Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, and others, were selected by Richard Allen, minister of one of the first independent black denominations, the African Methodist Episcopal Church (his church was in Philadelphia). The many editions of this influential hymnbook (even up to recent times) have been a touchstone for the changing tastes of hymn singing in many black congregations. The early editions, for instance, contain simple, folklike tunes popular at the revival meetings of the late eighteenth century. Subsequent editions contained the most popular contemporary spirituals.
The folk tunes of the early editions were not to everyone’s taste. A Methodist Minister, J. F. Watson, wrote in 1819 of a growing evil, in the practice of singing in our places of public and society worship, merry airs, adapted from old songs, to hymns of our (the whites’) composing: often miserable as poetry, and senseless as matter … most frequently composed and first sung by the illiterate blacks of the society. (J. F. Watson, Methodist Error [Trenton, 1819])
Spirituals
Camp meetings were an important basis for the growth of what are now known as spirituals. These songs, whether sung by blacks or whites, were essentially the music of the countryside. The blacks brought special qualities to their spirituals, namely, a background of field hollers (see above) and the ecstatic character of their African musical heritage.
The words of the spirituals were directly biblical, drawn especially from passages which speak of liberation (Moses, Daniel, and the Book of Revelation were favorites) and perhaps adapted from popular English hymns, for example, the popular hymn by Isaac Watts:
When I can read my title clear
To mansions in the skies,
I’ll bid farewell to ev’ry fear,
And wipe my weeping eyes.
This became the basis for several spirituals, such as the following:
Good Lord, in the mansions above,
Good Lord, in the mansions above,
My Lord, I hope to meet my Jesus
In the mansions above.
My Lord, I’ve had many crosses, and trials here below;
My Lord, I hope to meet you,
In the mansions above.
The music tended to be of the call-and-response type. This simple structure, so common in African traditional music, allows great freedom: no books are needed, for the chorus is easy to pick up and the solo calls can be improvised on the spot. All this was accompanied by hand-clapping and foot-stamping, creating Christian protest music of distilled and concentrated ecstasy.
White spirituals of the same period often adapted the texts of hymns in the same kind of way, perhaps repeating lines or adding a short refrain (like “Glory, hallelujah!”) between them, just like the black spirituals. The music was often borrowed or adapted from well-known folk-melodies.
Conversely, black Christians were well aware of the songs that the whites were singing in the camp meetings and were happy to sing tunes from white traditions. There were more pragmatic reasons for white ministers’ disapproval of the wild conduct of black worship in the South. The words of their songs had layers of meaning which could be as temporal as they were spiritual, such as the following lines from the spiritual “Dere’s No Rain,”: “no more slavery in de kingdom/no evil-doers in de kingdom/all is gladness in de kingdom.” (Quoted in E. Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 159.) Besides being a spiritual home in “the heavens above,” “de kingdom” could have also meant the North, where an escape from the bondage of slavery was possible.
One organization to assist slaves to flee their masters was called the Underground Railroad. A black slave, Frederick Douglass, became involved with it in 1835 in an attempted escape and later explained the coded messages embedded in spirituals: We were, at times, remarkably buoyant, singing hymns and making joyous exclamations, almost as triumphant in their tone as if we had reached a land of freedom and safety. A keen observer might have detected in our repeated singing of “O Canaan, sweet Canaan,” something more than a hope of reaching heaven. We meant to reach the North—and the North was our Canaan. (F. Douglas, My Bondage and My Freedom [New York, 1855], 87, quoted in E. Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 143.)
Many whites felt that the preaching of the Christian gospel of justice and liberty for all men was dangerous. It seems they were right.
The Period of the Civil War
The population of the industrial areas of North American grew rapidly during the nineteenth century. With the inexorable move towards the abolition of slavery, more and more black churches were established that did not have to suffer the strict control of the white Episcopal church. They reflected a number of traditions, from an orderliness that emulated the atmosphere of many white congregations, to an ecstatic and physical abandon characteristic of African tradition.
African Worship
Frederika Bremer visited some black churches in Cincinnati in 1850. The Episcopal church there left her with the impression of a service that was “quiet, proper and a little tedious.” But the African Methodist church was quite a different matter: I found in the African Church African ardor and African life. The church was full to overflowing, and the congregation sang their own hymns. The singing ascended and poured forth like a melodious torrent, and the heads, feet, and elbows of the congregation moved all in unison with it, amid evident enchantment and delight in the singing.… (A. B. Benson, ed., American of the Fifties: Letters of Frederika Bremer [New York, 1924])
Another report comes from William Faux who visited a black church in Philadelphia in 1820:
After the sermon, they began singing merrily, and continued, without stopping, for one hour, till they became exhausted and breathless.… While all the time they were clapping hands, shouting and jumping and exclaiming, “Ah Lord! Good Lord! Give me Jesus! Amen.” (W. Faux, Memorable Days in America … [London, 1823], 420)
Such descriptions are evidence that informal dance was a central part of much black worship. Paradoxically, it was the suppression of dance by influential Puritan whites in the eighteenth century that encouraged its development when the black churches became independent.
The Abolition of Slavery
By the 1840s the ideological split between the Northern and Southern states was affecting every aspect of life. The white Southerners no longer holidayed in the North, nor sent their sons to be educated in the famous Northern universities of Yale, Princeton, and Harvard. The issue that polarized North and South was slavery. The Northern states, better educated and more liberal than the South, had long accepted its abolition as inevitable, but the Southern states refused to comply. The issue split the church: in 1840 the Methodists in the South were unable to agree with those in the North over the morality of slavery; Baptists divided on the same issue a year later. (The rift between the Methodists was not formally settled until 1936.)
The issue was finally settled in the Civil War, where the eventual defeat of the Southern forces allowed Congress to bestow freedom on slaves in all states in 1865. Tragically, this victory did not necessarily improve the lot of the ex-slaves, many of whom found themselves worse off than before. In an atmosphere of vengeance, the South established Black Codes and Jim Crow laws that made segregation almost universal. Blacks were still dependent on whites for their livelihood and given no chance to improve their position. The deprivation and suffering of ex-slaves were made worse still by the activities of white gangs such as the Ku Klux Klan, which attempted to preserve white supremacy by merciless terrorism.
The exodus of liberated slaves from the South, therefore, continued for the rest of the century. Gradually the spirituals of the countryside were replaced in the minds of migrant freedmen by the music of the growing city churches. A schoolteacher in Tennessee noted this change after the Civil War: How I wish you could hear my children sing their strange, wild melodies, that bring back so vividly the old slave life with its toil and servile ignorance. Yet their old plantation songs are falling into disuse, and in their stead, we hear chanted daily the hymns and psalms so familiar to Northern ears. (L. W. Slaughter, The Freedmen of the South [Cincinnati, 1869], 134)
But the spirituals were preserved in invaluable collections, the first and most important of which was Slave Songs of the United States. They were also popularized worldwide by black singing groups, such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers, at a time when the slave culture that produced their music was rapidly disappearing.
But true folk music (like the original spirituals) is a delicate plant. Its transportation away from its natural surroundings and the popular acclaim that follows inevitably changes and probably diminishes it. It seems that the essential qualities of the slave spiritual cannot be sensed from even the earliest collections of the music, let alone from more recently published versions. Its clearest evocation may only lie in the recorded eyewitness accounts of the culture that produced it.