Speranza
The Negro spiritual
The combination of enthusiasm for sacred song and for
black=face minstrel song prepared the ground for the visit to London of "The
Jubilee Singers", also in 1873.
Although the early camp meetings showed the
influence of black religious practice, an interest in publishing and
disseminating the religious music of Southern slaves only awakens with their
emancipation, the first collection being "Slave Songs of the United States"
(1867).
"The Jubilee Singers" were students of Fisk University, Nashville, an
institution founded in the late 1860s with funds mainly from the American
Missionary Association.
The idea behind its inception was that emancipated
slaves should be given access to a Christian education, or the nation must
suffer far more in the future than in the past from the curse of slavery.
George White, who was indeed white, organizes the Jubilee Singers, who were all
black, to raise funds for the University in 1871.
Lord Shaftesbury, in his
capacity as President of the Freedmen's Mission Aid Society (the English sister
organization of the American Missionary Association) arranges their first
concert in London, in 1873.
The following day "The Jubilee Singers" are invited to
perform in the drawing-room of the London home of the Duke and Duchess of
Argyll.
There, The Jubilee Singers received a visit from Queen Victoria, to whom they sang the
nowadays well-known spirituals 'Steal Away' and 'Go Down, Moses'.
"The Jubilee Singers" went on
to perform in other drawing-rooms, including that of the Prime Minister,
Gladstone.
Yet, like Moody and Sankey, The Jubilee Singers saw their audience as encompassing
the whole of society.
Hence The Jubilee Singers not only perform in the drawing rooms of the
rich and in chapels but also had the idea while in Hull on their tour north of
giving concerts in the open air.
Rather than charge for their concerts, they
took collections.
All money raised was to help pay for the completion of "Jubilee
Hall" at Fisk University.
In Newcastle upon Tyne The Jubilee Singers encounter Moody and
Sankey and immediately joined their efforts to the great work.
Whether in
England or Scotland, the Jubilee Singers are warmly welcomed wherever they
tour, and it is noteworthy that they meet with very little racial
prejudice.
In no way are The Jubilee Singers ever offensively reminded, through look or
word — unless by some rude American who was lugging his caste conceit through a
European tour, or by a vagrant Englishman who had lived long enough in America
to catch its colour prejudices — that they were black.
On their
second visit to Britain, ten strong, in May 1875, The Jubilee Singers again give some joint
performances with Moody and Sankey in various halls, or in tabernacles erected
specially for Moody's meetings.
Sunday School parties would be taken to these
meetings.
In Liverpool, 12,000 children from ninety different schools turned up
(Marsh 84).
After The Jubilee Singers return from a European tour in 1878,
Fisk University disbands them, and the following year they set themselves up as
a joint stock company.
In 1882 they reorganize and embark upon a six-year
world tour, this time under a black musical director, Frederick J. Loudin.
The songs the Jubilee Singers sang, which came to be known as 'negro spirituals',
make much of the contrast between unison and harmony, usually in order to
underline a call and response.
Like the Moody and Sankey repertoire, a
favourite structure is eight-bar verse and eight-bar refrain, except that the
"spiritual" commonly begins with the REFRAIN rather than the verse.
The spirituals are also
distinguished melodically in their use of pentatonicism, syncopation, and cell
structure.
Nevertheless, there are some spirituals with solo verse and choral refrain
which show a close relationship to the Sankey gospel style, for example, 'The
Gospel Train' and 'In the River of Jordan'.
Some spirituals are harmonized throughout, and
others, for example, 'I've Been Redeemed' and 'He Rose from the Dead', have the
typical gospel feature of echo voices.
The Jubilee Singers sometimes
supplemented their Afro-American repertoire with black-face minstrelsy (Stephen Foster's 'De Old
Folks at Home'), patriotic Unionism ('John Brown's Body, Glory Glory Allelluia), and white gospel
(Bliss's 'Grace Before Meat').
Even in their own songs, the influence of
nonconformist preaching is obvious and is pointed to directly in verse 24 of 'Go
Down, Moses':
I'll tell you what I likes de best,
Let my people go;
It
is the shouting Methodist,
Let my people go.
Go down, Moses, etc
Only
a few of the Jubilee Singers' songs were published in separate sheet-music
versions with piano accompaniment.
Like a lot of Afro-American music, it was
difficult to capture on paper what was so thrilling in performance.
Even though
they were self-consciously refined, and sometimes used a piano themselves, the
harmonies they used would have looked very plain in a drawing room of the 1870s.
With the development of impressionistic and 'jazzy' harmonics, the Negro
Spiritual gained access to the twentieth-century drawing room.
Those chosen
last century for publication by John Church & Co. of Cincinnati either
resemble an early minstrel song (though dialect is little used), as does 'Reign,
Master Jesus', or resemble a gospel hymn, as does 'I'm Going To Sing All the
Way'.
Without an understanding of the importance of religion, and
particularly non-conformist religion, in the middle-class home, a full
appreciation of the meaning of drawing-room ballads of the second half of the
nineteenth century is often impossible.
Take Michael Watson's ballad 'Anchored'
(words by S. K. Cowan), for example.
"Anchored" can easily
be read as a conventional tale of a ship-wreck, with a clever twist at the end
when the father's home the sailor thought he was heading for turns out to be the
Heavenly Father's home.
However, the very title of the ballad would have called
to mind the promise of salvation.
Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul,
sure and steadfast.
Hebrews 6:19.
Or perhaps the gospel hymn 'The Anchored
Soul' (words by W. O. Gushing, music by R. Lowry).
The carved anchor and the
quotation from Hebrews was often placed on the tombstone of a wealthy seaman in
a church graveyard or private cemetery.
One of Bliss's best-known sacred songs,
'The Life Boat', makes metaphorical use of the sailor's life.
Here a shipwrecked
sailor jumps into a life-boat, determined to pull for the shore.
Bliss has no
need to explain the metaphor which extends throughout his song, that
the wrecked ship is the body, that the life-boat is Christ, and that the shore
is heaven.
The Rev. E. S. Ufford's 'Throw Out the Life-Line!' plays upon the same theme..
Given the close relationship
between gospel hymns and sailors, it was perhaps fitting that the band of the
Titanic should have chosen to play a Moody and Sankey favourite, 'Nearer, My
God, to Thee', as she went down.
REFERENCES:
E. M. Cravath, 'Fisk University's Great Necessity', preliminary note in
Marsh: 1899.
H. T Burleigh (arranger), "Negro Spirituals" (London: G.
Ricordi, 1917).
This collection consists entirely of arrangements for solo voice
plus piano, whereas "Jubilee Songs: As Sung by the Jubilee Singers: (New York:
Biglow & Main, 1872) contains vocal parts only, for soloists and chorus.
For an extended discussion of the imagery spiritual and other shipwreck,
see George P. Landow, "Shipwrecked in the Sight of God from Images of Crisis."
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