Singing in My Soul

Black Gospel Music in a Secular Age

Jerma A. Jackson

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780807863619
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Black gospel music grew from obscure nineteenth-century beginnings to become the leading style of sacred music in black American communities after World War II. Jerma A. Jackson traces the music's unique history, profiling the careers of several singers--particularly Sister Rosetta Tharpe--and demonstrating the important role women played in popularizing gospel. Female gospel singers initially developed their musical abilities in churches where gospel prevailed as a mode of worship. Few, however, stayed exclusively in the religious realm. As recordings and sheet music pushed gospel into the commercial arena, gospel began to develop a life beyond the church, spreading first among a broad spectrum of African Americans and then to white middle-class audiences. Retail outlets, recording companies, and booking agencies turned gospel into big business, and local church singers emerged as national and international celebrities. Amid these changes, the music acquired increasing significance as a source of black identity. These successes, however, generated fierce controversy. As gospel gained public visibility and broad commercial appeal, debates broke out over the meaning of the music and its message, raising questions about the virtues of commercialism and material values, the contours of racial identity, and the nature of the sacred. Jackson engages these debates to explore how race, faith, and identity became central questions in twentieth-century African American life.

Chapter 1
Exuberance or Restraint

Music and Religion after Reconstruction

In 1909 the renowned Fisk Jubilee Singers gathered in front of a recording company microphone to render the well-known spiritual “There Is a Balm in Gilead.” The singers had gained worldwide acclaim with their performances of classically arranged versions of slave spirituals, and power in their performance rang clear from the first note. A lone male voice began the song by singing out the first line, enunciating each word, “There is a balm in Gilead.” Immediately, the remaining members of the group joined in the singing to complete the first line, “to make the wounded whole.” Almost instantly a single voice became a mosaic of rich harmonies. The a cappella singing gave added emphasis to the lyrical quality of these trained voices. Each voice was so carefully modulated that even as the group delivered the chorus in unison, no single voice dominated. They paid tribute to enslaved African Americans with an orchestrated precision that matched the highest standards of Western classical tradition and melded each voice into a seamless whole.¹

Almost two decades later, in 1927, sanctified singer Bessie Johnson gave voice to her spiritual convictions in a far different fashion. While Johnson recorded her songs with an ensemble, her voice dominated each record. In “He’s Got Better Things for You,” Johnson called attention to the depth of her religious beliefs by bringing an intense passion to her singing. “My friends I want to tell you because I love your soul,” she sang almost plaintively into the microphone, “I have no doubt you’ve been converted, but the other half ain’t never been told.” As she began to inform her listeners about the divine gifts that would make their lives whole, the volume of her singing increased and her vocals assumed a rough, gravel-like quality. The slow tempo in which she began the song gained momentum once her singing group joined in the performance. The quickening tempo and the uneven singing that sometimes elapsed into shouting made for an impassioned recording.²

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the arranged spirituals of the Fisk Jubilee Singers gained recognition as the quintessential African American sacred music. The early date of their recording, at a time when few African Americans had the opportunity to participate in the fledgling recording industry, was testimony to their broad-based reputation. The renown of Bessie Johnson, whose music appealed primarily to a small group of faithful at the margins of black religious life, paled in comparison. But despite her relative obscurity, Johnson’s recording foreshadowed a far different future. The solo singing, upbeat accompaniment, and impassioned delivery captured on the discs she made formed the bedrock of gospel, the form of religious music that would soon rival the spirituals in popularity both among African Americans and in mainstream American culture. The religious communities that nurtured this music thus had meaning beyond their number.

The recordings made by Johnson and by the Fisk Jubilee Singers captured much more than two divergent styles of sacred music. They embodied the competing meanings that African Americans gave to religion in the decades following emancipation as they faced the challenges of freedom, of industrialization, and of the racial prejudice that saturated American life. As African Americans turned to religion to make sense of the changing world around them, they inevitably modified the worship practices and outlooks that enslaved African Americans had found meaningful. The precise renditions and disciplined harmonies of arranged spirituals grew out of a worship tradition grounded in restraint and middle-class respectability. The emotional dynamism displayed by Bessie Johnson and other, similar singers sprang from an alternate tradition governed by emotional expression. As African Americans wrestled with the many dilemmas of the twentieth century, these competing traditions, along with the music they generated, would help define the terms of their struggle.

______ The gradual development of gospel music cannot be separated from the racial politics that erupted during the late nineteenth century, politics that would both nurture the music and keep it at the margins of black religious life. As African Americans worked to secure a place for themselves as equal citizens in the aftermath of slavery, the journey from slavery to freedom became a struggle for fundamental human rights, namely political and economic freedom. Part of the struggle that ensued stemmed from the enormous social and economic change that unfolded during the post-Reconstruction era. With the end of the Civil War came a new industrial order giving rise to new social and economic structures that significantly transformed social relations. Economic production grew on a scale once thought unimaginable, as machines increasingly replaced handcraft production. These economies of scale generated unprecedented wealth for some Americans and gave rise to a new class of elites. The rise of machine production also contributed to a growing class of unskilled laborers, as more and more capital was directed to machinery and away from labor. The many labor strikes that erupted during the 1890s bear testimony to the intense class tension that engulfed Americans during this period.³

Mechanized production transformed daily life for all Americans as more and more people moved to cities, where they found work in the growing number of factories that developed there. Increases in the scale of production fostered enormous demand for labor filled by immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Immigrants and native born, men and women, and rich and poor all tried to secure a footing in the new social and economic order.

In this period of enormous change, race gained newfound significance as it emerged as a vehicle for explaining the social divisions industrialization produced. The growing significance of race can be found in the rise of Social Darwinism and its concept of civilization. In Social Darwinism race emerged as a critical measure of human development. According to this theory, the Anglo-Saxon race stood at the apex of civilized development, as evidenced by the material and cultural accomplishments of Anglo-Saxon societies. African Americans were cast as members of a separate, far less developed race and thus were set outside the bounds of “civilized” society.⁴

With the advent of Social Darwinism, the anxieties and social tensions of industrialization were frequently projected onto the bodies of black men and women, often with horrendous results. The pervasive discrimination, lynchings, and riots that emerged during the 1890s have led historian Rayford Logan to dub the period the nadir of race relations. Racial discrimination kept African Americans locked out of factories and industrial employment so that the vast majority of laboring black men and women were forced to domestic service jobs. Whites turned to physical violence and brutality as they made African Americans the target of their discontent. The period also witnessed the emergence of vicious racial stereotypes in mass circulation magazines, which also reinforced notions of black inferiority. In the South these developments culminated with the emergence of the social and legal caste system known as Jim Crow.⁵

The pervasiveness of racist ideologies led African Americans to build an impressive array of institutions to address their own social, economic, and political needs. These institutions included not only churches and religious institutions but also schools, businesses, and mutual benefit societies. While these institutions failed to dismantle racism, they fostered a sense of community to combat prejudice for African Americans. With the advent of Social Darwinism, the vast majority of non-black Americans looked down on African Americans. As African Americans worked to build new lives and communities, they adopted a range of strategies for confronting these notions of black inferiority, both within individuals and in the world at large.⁶

In the late nineteenth century the most prominent of these strategies was pursued by a growing black middle class eager to convert race from a mark of derision into a source of pride. These men and women, who articulated their racial pride by designating themselves as “race” men and women, poured their energies into schools, clubs, and churches seeking to improve the conditions in which all African Americans lived.⁷ They placed particular emphasis on education, a concept that encompassed much more than learning to read and write. Within the growing number of black educational institutions, education became a vehicle not only for the acquisition of knowledge but also for the proliferation of values such as thrift, refinement, and industriousness.⁸

These new values formed the bedrock of a distinctive middle-class outlook geared toward upward mobility. The professionals and experts who swelled the ranks of the middle class counseled upward mobility as a way to cope with the changes that accompanied industrialization. In a society increasingly governed by intense competition, social strife, and class divisions, self-discipline, hard work, and refined behavior seemed to offer the best possibility for individual advancement. For African American educators eager to advance the race, middle-class values took on added meaning. In their minds these values would facilitate racial progress and help eradicate prejudice and discrimination.⁹

The educational institutions and culture that advanced middle-class visions of education would make serious inroads in the way African Americans practiced religion. Such changes were especially evident in the convention movement that emerged inside the black Baptist church. The movement, which took shape during the final decades of the nineteenth century, culminated in the National Baptist Convention, a denomination of black Baptist churches separate and distinct from white Baptist organizations. Led by individuals trained in southern black schools and colleges, the convention movement identified education with progress and upward mobility. As a result education emerged as both a remedy for prevailing social ills and a vital source of collective empowerment. True to their belief in individual and church autonomy, Baptist churches would always embody a range of outlooks and worship styles. But uplift-minded leaders would wield enormous influence over church practices.¹⁰

The particular version of education advanced by the convention movement led leaders of some Baptist congregations to curb spontaneous forms of worship that had prevailed during slavery. For enslaved African Americans who actively engaged their gods, worship had been a participatory experience that included ecstatic shrieks, moans, and groans as well as energetic hand clapping and foot stomping. In the aftermath of slavery, Baptist leaders increasingly associated such physical and emotional involvement with superstition and ignorance. One minister made the connection explicit by asserting that the conventions involved “the amassing of a force of intelligence that will sweep from our worship the last vestige of superstition and ranting which has characterized it for so many years.” For this minister and many in the convention movement the notion that “emotional religion” amounted to nothing more than ignorance compelled them to direct their attention to the wholesale repression of religious emotion.¹¹

In place of emotion and spontaneity, Baptist leaders stressed education and restraint. The widespread adoption of hymnbooks and the institution of church choirs were two marks of this approach. During slavery most hymns were “lined out.” A leader spoke or sang each line of a song, and congregation members, most of whom could not read, sang the line back, often elaborating on the melody and augmenting the words with the shouts and moans of religious ecstasy. Hymnbooks and choirs removed spontaneous singing from religious fellowship, emphasizing the importance of education and bringing greater structure and restraint to worship. This strategy was aimed at outside observers as well as the faithful themselves. It stemmed from the assumption that supposed evidence of black inferiority resulted from impoverished social conditions rather than any qualities inherent in race, and that evidence of black accomplishments would help alleviate prevailing discrimination and prejudice. Armed with this agenda, these leaders waged an aggressive campaign to advance and uplift the race that included mandating educational requirements for the ministry as well as toning down ecstatic worship.¹²

Strategies of racial pride and uplift assumed their most potent musical form in the arranged spirituals pioneered by singing groups that sprang up at African American colleges in the late nineteenth century. In the 1870s, newly opened Fisk University achieved worldwide renown with the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a group of well-trained performers who toured the Northeast and Great Britain. Their concerts featured temperance songs, operatic arias, and parlor tunes as well as a group of slavery-era spirituals that had been rearranged according to the principles of Western classical music. The concerts proved an enormous success, raising much-needed funds for the struggling university. Music critics and sympathetic clergy expressed particular enthusiasm for the arranged spirituals. The success the group enjoyed stirred a jubilee movement, leading black colleges such as Hampton, Morehouse, Livingstone, and Tuskegee Institute to sponsor similar ensembles. Black newspapers included many references to college jubilee groups between 1870 and 1910.¹³

Arranged spirituals offered a felicitous convergence of African American heritage with the politics of uplift. Performers and arrangers replaced fullthroated singing and frequent melodic turns with the smooth singing, precise tones, and even melodies that demonstrated African American mastery of Western classical forms. But the arrangements used a call-and-response structure that embraced the lining-out tradition, and the spirituals’ origins in slavery highlighted the accomplishments of a distinctly black culture.¹⁴ The enthusiasm the Fisk Jubilee Singers generated, for example, led composer Antonín Dvořák to point specifically to the spirituals as the bedrock for a distinctive American music: “These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil. They are American. They are the folksongs of America, and your composers must turn to them. In the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.”¹⁵

The attention the songs garnered on ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Singing in My Soul
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Exuberance or Restraint
• Chapter 2 I Just Do What the Lord Say
• Chapter 3 Churches and Entrepreneurs
• Chapter 4 With Her Spirituals in Swing
• Chapter 5 Between Religion and Commerce
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index