Spiritual Songs (10.27.11) Week 10

Spiritual songs reflect the songs of the people who sang them. This weeks focus on Gospel music and spiritualism registers some unfamiliar territory for me, and involves a story of tragedy and triumph of African people. In Leroy Jones novel, he writes really beautifully and sets the stage early on: “This is the history. This is your history, my history, the history of the Negro people.” “The music. The music, this is our history.” (pg 117-146)

“Music was an orchestrated, vocalized hummed, chanted, blown, beaten, scatted, and a corollary confirmation of the history… The music was explaining the history as the history was explaining the music.” The music were a reflection and expression of the people, who were taken from Africa and transformed into a Western people. Leroy states, “Black people did not fall out of the sky but continue to be the most American of Americans.” He goes on to talk about Africanism, and how it isn’t limited to black people, but of African, European, and native cultures, histories, and peoples: people who are incorrectly viewed as the undeveloped peoples. To be at Berkeley, which is a melting pot of every different ethnicity and race, it is hard for me to understand how slavery could even take place. We are all people, all African in a sense. Leroy goes on to explain how strange and unnatural the initial contacts with the western slavery were for Africans, in order to show how the black man was set apart from the New world initially.

What makes African music distinctive?

While the words are difficult to understand, the most apparent survival of the African music are the rhythms and melodic harmonies. The use of drums for communication in Africa allowed them to develop a fine and complex rhythmic sense. Just by simply altering the pitch of the song, gave the song new meaning and melody. The singing technique is also unique and distinctive, with the combination of improvised verses, and the use of folk tales in the lyrics, riddles, and proverbs. The lyrics of the African songs were usually as important or more important than the music, and is the closest imitation of the human voice according to Leroy James. It differed from western music because it was purely functional: songs were used by workers to make their tasks easier, songs were used by old men to prepare the adolescent boys for manhood, songs were used by young men to influence young women.” The stories were passed on from the elders to the young, as the “expression issued from life was beauty.

“ Go on! Go on! Eat enormously! I aint one bit

ashamed-eat outrageously!”

Go On! Go on! Eat prodigiously!

I drink good wine!-Eat ferociously!

Leroy ends with discussing the history of slavery, the conversion of the slaves to Christianity, the slave being seen as the other, and the the beginning of Africa as a foreign place.

Other songs to note and will go into more depth after class:

Blind Willie Johnson: John Revelator

Josephy Spence: coming in on a wing and a prayer

Thomas Dorsey “If you see my savior” “my desire”

Paul Robeson: at a time when social history in the mid 20th century was hectic, left wind political activist for civil rights and justice.

Swing Low Sweet Chariot together with Let Us Break

Bread Together and Balm in Gilead