The record changer (Jan-Dec 1944)

Chapter Eight of the Anthropology of Jazz by ERNEST BORNEMAN The manifold variants of religious Xegro folk music in America, which include such widely different forms as spirituals, ring shouts, revival chants, camp meeting songs, and funeral hymns, have their common root in two basic patterns of creation : 1. Songs spontaneously created by a preacher and his congregationHere the natural rise and fall of Negro speech, intensified by the highly rhythmical and dynamic "strain" of Xegro preaching and counterpointed by the antiphonal interlocutions and exclamations of the congregation, yields new words and tunes at almost every church meeting, and though many of the songs thus created are as quickly forgotten as they were created, many of them have survived and have been garnished, pruned, transcribed and arranged until they became part and parcel of the rich store of American folk music. 2. Negro variations on European ecclesiastical tunes. Here the words rather than the music provided the initial attraction to the Negro listener. Christianity, as a Jewish religion, was an ideology of protest against centuries of political and economical oppression. Palestine was under almost constant domination from bellicose neighbors, each one of whom suppressed the Mosaic religion and carried its believers into slavery. The Negroes saw their own fate reflected in these chronicles of faith and patience in exile, and as the slaves of Rome had turned to Judaism, so the slaves of America nowturned to Christianity. But in the process of assimilating Christianity, the Africans infused it with the memories and the ceremonialism of their homelands. Thus the Dahomey River God ceremony was incorporated into Baptism. Spirit possession became possession by the Holy Ghost. The Gods of West Africa became fused with the Trinity and the College of Saints. The bad spirits merged with Lucifer and Sammael. The snake gods of West Africa survived in the snake of Eden and the beasts of the Apocalypse. Gorer, during a visit to the Holy Saints who used to hold their meetings in the backroom of a Harlem beauty parlor, noted especially the congregation's dance motions — an unmistakable wriggling of the spine, the shuffling of feet on the off-beat and finally the onset of trance and "possession" during which the victim's eyes turned up until only the whites showed ; on recovering consciousness all victims claimed to be speaking with tongues and to be possessed by the Holy Ghost. "As I watched," Gorer says, "I found it hard to remember that I was in the United States, for I had seen an almost identical dance with similar effects, in Senegal ; there it was the dance of the M'deup, the witch-finding dance of possessed women."1 And as the Negroes infused their masters' religion with meanings of their own, so they infused their masters' religious music with African structural alterations. The Anglican Hymnal, Wesleyan sources, John Bacchus Dykes — all furnished the raw material for a new ecclesiastical music which preserved little more than a few bars of tune, a basic pattern of harmony and a vague similarity of wording. By 1867, when William Francis Allen and Lucy McKim Garrison published their first spirituals, such white hymns as Climb Jacob's Ladder, Give Me Jesus and I'll Take the Wings of the Morning had already been so profoundly changed that they could rightfully be considered as new Negro creations. This process of assimilation and transformation has caused one of the most absurd controversies in American musicology. White opportunists have attached theories of the special pleading type to their gleeful discovery that the Negro, after all, had to steal the white man's music because, evidently, he lacked the Nordic's talent of creative composition. Negro opportunists, hurt in their racial pride, replied with more special pleading — this time from the other side — trying to prove that the Negro, after all, was the first and the white man the imitator. The only reasonable judgment in the early 5