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Veiled Testimony: Negro Spirituals and the Slave Experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

John White
John White
Affiliation:
John White is Senior Lecturer in American History, Department of American StudiesUniversity of Hull, Hull HU6 7RX.
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Type
Review Essays
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , August 1983 , pp. 251 - 263
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

1 Genovese, Eugene D., Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974)Google Scholar; Blassingame, John W., The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York, 1972)Google Scholar; Owens, Leslie Howard, This Species of Property: Slave Life and Culture in the Old South (New York, 1976)Google Scholar; Huggins, Nathan Irvin, Black Odyssey: The Afro-American Ordeal in Slavery (New York, 1977)Google Scholar.

The first published collection of slave spirituals appeared in 1867: Allen, William Frances, Ware, Charles Pickard and Garrison, Lucy McKim, eds., Slave Songs of the United States (New York, 1867)Google Scholar. For a discussion of this collection see Epstein, Dean J., Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (University of Illinois Press, 1977), pp. 303–58Google Scholar.

Three LP records, produced and annotated by the folklorist Alan Lomax, contain modern performances of black spirituals recorded at various locations in the South: Roots of the Blues (New World Records Recorded Anthology of American Music Inc., NW 252); Georgia Sea Island Songs (New World Records, NW 278); Negro Church Music: Southern Folk Heritage Series, Vol. 6 (Atlantic LTZ-K 15214).

2 Vann Woodward, C., ed., Mary Chesnut's Civil War (Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 213–14Google Scholar. Perhaps still reeling from the experience described, Mrs Chesnut confided to her Diary the following year: ‘The best way to take negroes to your heart is to get as far away from them as possible’ (p. 307).

3 Brown, James Mason, ‘Songs of the Slave’, in Katz, Bernard, ed., The Social Implications of Early Negro Music in the United States (New York, 1969), pp. 25–26et passimGoogle Scholar. For the relationship of the black minstrel tradition to Negro religious music see Toll, Robert C., Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1972)Google Scholar. Toll argues that during the 1870s, ‘The songs that black minstrels introduced had the content of Afro-American religious music as well as the form. With the singers of slave spirituals, they sang of an immediate, concrete religion that contrasted greatly to Euro-Americans' other-worldly, abstract religion.… Both black slaves and black minstrels sang of heaven as a paradise of freedom and plenty’ (p. 239).

4 Du Bois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folk (New York, 1961), pp. 189, 186–87, 141Google Scholar.

5 Johnson, James Weldon, ed., introduction to The Books of American Negro Spirituals: Book I (New York, 1925)Google Scholar, quoted in Katz, pp. xxxvii–viii. See also Brown, Sterling, Negro Poetry and Drama and The Negro in American Fiction (New York, 1969), pp. 15–21Google Scholar. In his discussion of the ‘philosophy’ of the spitituals, Brown (writing in 1935), commended Johnson's work in ‘stirring a twentieth century interest in the spirituals’. However, Brown rejected a totally other-worldly interptetation of the songs: ‘Too many rash critics have stated that the spirituals showed the slave turning his back on this world for the joys of the next. The truth is that he took a good look at this world and told what he saw. Sometimes he was forthright in denouncing slavery, as in “No Mo' Driver's Lash for Me”’ (p. 18).

6 Locke, Alain, ‘The Negro Spirituals’, in The New Negro: An Interpretation (New York, 1925), pp. 201–02Google Scholar. More recently, the anthropologist John F. Szwed, in an analysis of the 1867 collection Slave Songs of the United States, concluded that ‘The church songs and spirituals of the Negroes in the Southern United States closely resemble West African song style, particularly in their strong call-and-response patterns’. Szwed, John F., ‘Musical Adaptation Among Afro-Americans’, Journal of American Folklore, 72 (04–06 1969), 115Google Scholar. For similar statements see Epstein, pp. 73–74, 88–90, 217–18, and Southern, Eileen, The Music of Black Americans: A History (New York, 1971), pp. 16–18Google Scholar.

7 Foner, P. S., ed., Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, Interviews 1918–1974 (New York, 1978)Google Scholar, interview from The Jewish Tribune, 22 July 1927, ‘Paul Robeson, the Famous Baritone, Tells of the Drama in the Old Testament That Has Given Birth to Negro Songs’, pp. 73–74.

8 Robeson, , ‘The Culture of the Negro’, The Spectator (London), 15 06 1934, pp. 916–17Google Scholar. In Foner, p. 86.

9 Mays, Benjamin E., The Negro's God as Reflected in His Literature (Boston, 1938; New York, 1969), pp. 21–25Google Scholar and passim. See also Thurman, Howard, Deep River: Reflections on the Religious Insights of Certain of the Negro Spirituals (New York, 1945)Google Scholar.

The Boston Unitarian Minister and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson observed of the songs sung by his First South Carolina Volunteers during the Civil War, ‘Almost all their songs were throughly religious in tone… The attitude is always the same… Nothing but patience for this life – nothing but triumph in the next. Sometimes, the present predominates. sometimes, the future; but the combination is always implied.’ Higginson, , Army Life in a Black Regiment (New York, 1962), p. 192Google Scholar.

But Mays did concede that not all of the spirituals were ‘compensatory.’ ‘Even in the Spirituals the Negroes did not accept without protest the social ills which they suffered. “Go Down Moses,” “Oh, Freedom,”… are illustrative of…Spirituals that revolt against earthly conditions without seeking relief in Heaven. … Certainly “Joshua Fit De Battle ob Jericho” is an assertion of the belief that fighting your battle with God's help will bring victory. One is not to sit and wait for God alone. Man does his part and God His part. The ideas of God in these Spirituals are not compensatory and they are not other-worldly.’ The Negro's God, pp. 28, 30.

10 John Lovell, Jr, ‘The Social Implications of the Negro Spiritual’, in Katz, pp. 132–36 et passim. See also Lovell, , Black Song: The Forge and the Flame: The Story of How the Afro-American Spiritual Was Hammered Out (New York, 1972)Google Scholar.

11 Fisher, Miles Mark, Negro Slave Songs in the United States (New York, 1953), pp. 137, 183Google Scholar.

12 Frazier, E. Franklin, The Negro Church in America (New York, 1964), pp. 12–13Google Scholar. Cf. Jones, Le Roi: ‘The religious imagery of the Negro's Christianity is full of references to the suffering and hopes of the oppressed Jews in Biblical times. Many of the Negro spirituals reflect this identification… ‘Crossing the river Jordan’ meant not only death but also the entrance into the very real heaven and a release from an earthly bondage. … But at the same time…this freedom was one that could only be reached through death.’ Blues People: Negro Music In White America (New York, 1963), p. 40Google Scholar. See also Roediger, David R., ‘And Die in Dixie: Funerals, Death and Heaven in the Slave Community 1700–1865’, Massachusetts Review, 22 (Spring 1981), pp. 165–83Google Scholar. Roediger comments that ‘In a balanced accounting of slave attitudes towards death and heaven, although the compensatory hope for otherworldly brcakthough constitutes one important theme, it does not begin to exhaust the complexity of the slave's outlook. Since heaven was defined as the very negation of slavery, even otherworldly sentiments had a keen edge of indictment. Those spirituals which reverberated loudest with the glories of heaven also excoriated whether openly or by implication the horrors which the slave encountered in an alien world. A single line of a slave spiritual could combine anguish and deliverance: “Got hard trial in my way, Heaven shall be my home”’ (p. 181).

13 Courlander, Harold, Negro Folk Music, U.S.A. (Jazz Book Club edition: London, 1966), p. 38Google Scholar.

14 Ibid. p. 42.

15 Moore, Le Roy Jr, ‘The Spiritual: Soul of Black Religion’, American Quarterly, 23 (1971), 658–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Cone, James H., The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation (New York, 1972), p. 34Google Scholar.

17 Ibid. p. 95. For similar statements see Wilmore, Gayraud S., Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Examination of the Black Experience in Religion (New York, 1973), pp. 16–17Google Scholar, and Sobel, Meehal, Trabelin' on: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Westport, Conn., 1979), pp. xxiii, 122–25, 234Google Scholar.

18 Cone, pp. 72–73.

19 Ibid. p. 96.

20 Ibid. p. 99.

21 Levine, Lawrence W., Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1977), pp. 32–33Google Scholar.

22 Ibid. p. 35.

23 Ibid. p. 37.

24 Ibid. p. 52.

25 Ibid. p. 23. For a similar interpretation see also Stuckey, Sterling, ‘Through the Prism of Folklore: The Black Ethos in Slavery’, Massachusetts Review, 9 (1968), 417–37Google Scholar.

26 Ibid. p. 43.

27 Raboteau, Albert J., Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution’ in the Antebellum South (New York, 1978), p. 250Google Scholar.

28 Ibid. p. 246.

29 Ibid. p. 249. Mellers, Wilfrid observes that ‘The spiritual may be a song of yearning and is usually a song of protest and oppression; but it is never a song of nostalgia or escape.’ Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History of American Music (London, 1964), p. 265Google Scholar.

30 Berghahn, Marion, Images of Africa in Black American Literature (London, 1977), p. 57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 James Miller McKim, ‘Negro Songs’, in Katz, p. 2.

32 Levine, p. 19.

33 Flusche, Michael, ‘Joel Chandler Harris and the Folklore of Slavery’, Journal of American Studies, 9 (1975), 353–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Cone, p. 108.

35 For the evolution of the blues see Cone and three studies by Oliver, Paul: The Meaning of the Blues (New York, 1963)Google Scholar, The Story of the Blues (New York, 1969)Google Scholar and Savannah Syncopators: African Retentions in the Blues (London, 1970)Google Scholar.

The jazz historian James Lincoln Collier notes in this connection: ‘It has usually been suggested that the blues evolved from the spirituals, because both were “sad”. As a matter of fact, spirituals were often joyous, and the blues, if not generally joyous, are sometimes comic and often filled with sexual innuendo. Clearly, the blues evolved not from the spiritual but from the common musical practice that undergirt the work song, the prison song, the street cry, as well as the spiritual.’ Collier, , The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History (London, 1978), p. 35Google Scholar.

36 Moses, , Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms (Pennsylvania State University Press: University Park and London, 1982), pp. 54–55Google Scholar.

37 DuBois, pp. 182–83 (‘Of the Sorrow Songs’).