From Spirituals to Jazz: A Cultural Legacy

From Spirituals to Jazz: a cultural legacy
© Elizabeth Asche Douglas

[Sunday, Oh Come Sunday, That's the Day!]
This song began its musical life as an instrumental passage entitled
Spiritual in the ground-breaking symphonic composition Black, Brown &
Beige; a Musical History of the Black Man in America by Edward Kennedy
("Duke") Ellington. It made history in 1943 when its premiere broke the
color line at New York's Carnegie Hall. In the 1950s, words were added,
and it again made history when sung by acclaimed gospel singer Mahalia
Jackson at the 1958 Newport Jazz and Folk Music Festival, and was praised
by critics around the world. It is a classic example of the relationship
between spirituals and jazz.

This evening we will delve into the storehouse of American music to sketch
part of the story of how a body of under appreciated folk arts has risen to
"high art" standing with academic study and concert hall respect. The
story parallels the journey from slavery to freedom, and jazz, a distinctly
American art form now carries a worldwide association with freedom and
democracy.

A hundred years ago, jazz stood in the same place in American culture that
Hip-hop stands today. 160 years ago, "Negro spirituals" and "Ethiopian
ballads" like Listen to the Mockingbird were in that place. Going back 60
years takes us to the time when Rock 'n' Roll became what the established
culture decried as the ruination and degradation of civilized society. Two
decades ago hip-hop was getting that treatment, but is now a major stream
of pop culture. Jazz now is often referred to as "America's classical
music."

To see how we got here from there, we must look back to the initial
encounter between West African and Western European cultures in the 17th
century when the slave trade began. The first recorded entry of Africans
into the English-speaking colonies occurred in 1619 at Jamestown, VA. They
arrived by way of a Dutch Man O' War that had seized them from a Spanish or
Portuguese frigate off the Virginia coast. They were not slaves, but
indentured servants, a man and wife identified as Negroes ("Negro" simply
meaning "black"). Their names were Pedro and Maria, and historical records
in Virginia show that they worked off their term of servitude and became
part of the first generation of free blacks in America.

But the existence of free blacks in America would not become the order of
that day. As it became apparent that slavery could provide rapid economic
growth and great wealth, the slave trade flourished. Some free blacks were
actually returned to slavery. The large numbers of West African blacks on
these shores, although counting as only 3/5 of a person toward
determination of white voting privileges, led to a full-scale collision of
cultures.

Music plays a central role in any culture, pervading every aspect of life,
as it does. The cultural traditions of West Africa and Western Europe stood
in stark contrast to one another. European art forms usually placed formal
beauty above expressiveness. African arts reversed that relationship and
placed exuberant expressiveness above strict formality. In European music,
melody dominates and simple meter sets the rhythms. [Illus] African music
is dominated by complex, often syncopated rhythms and melody lines are kept
simple. For centuries, European music had made the diatonic (8-tone), "do-
re-me" scale in major and minor modes the standard. African music, like
most music of the non-Western world, is based on the whole-tone scale.
[Demo] The scale blending that took place as black Christians learned the
standard hymns provoked harsh criticism from their white patrons. When
good Christian slaveholders took their slaves to the great camp meetings
associated with the revival movements of the 18th and 19th centuries, they
were astounded by the intensity of slave worship. In 1846, Methodist
Church historian John F. Watson observed "a most exceptional error, which
has the tolerance at least of the rulers of our camp meetings. In the
blacks' quarter, the coloured people get together, and sing for hours,
short scraps of disjointed affirmations, pledges, or prayers, lengthened
out with long repetitious choruses. These are all sung in the merry manner
of the southern harvest field or husking-frolic method, of the slave
blacks." He condemned their "singing tune after tune, scarce one of which
are in our hymn books." He decried the fact that "their example has already
visibly affected the religious manners of some whites." (What would he say
today about the contemporary Christian "praise" music that holds sway in so
many protestant churches?)

"Call and response," a key feature of African performance, was largely
unfamiliar to West European ears. (It has since been absorbed into the
American experience.) In addition, to accommodate the sound of the whole-
tone scale they were accustomed to, blacks often "flatted" or slurred
certain pitches in the diatonic scale, sounding out-of tune" to their white
critics.

In the new world, Africans were denied their drums, which not only were
basic to their musical expression, but also a means of long-distance
communication. African religious traditions were redirected into
Christianity. (The slave masters loved to teach the Scripture "Slaves, obey
your masters." The spiritual was born out of the coming together of native
African spirituality, the slave experience and the Christian hope for
deliverance.

There are many types of spirituals, but they can be broadly divided into
Sorrow Songs and Jubilee Songs. Sorrow songs reflect the pain of loss,
displacement and oppression, while maintaining a sense of hope, however
distant. They foreshadow the blues and melancholy jazz ballads.
[Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child] After the legal slave trade was
ended in 1808, slaveholders depended on the offspring of existing slaves to
replenish and extend their holdings, so black women were often used as
"breeders," and their children sold away. This lament can be identified
not only with an individual orphan, but also with all who are part of the
African Diaspora.

African American Christians related strongly to the biblical stories about
captive Israel. Go Down Moses is a good example of call-and-response
structure and a cry against enslavement. [Go Down Moses]. It also became a
theme song for leaders of the Underground Railroad for runaway slaves.
Harriet Tubman, former slave and abolitionist "conductor" on the U R, came
to be known as "the Moses of her people." Another spiritual that served as
a code for runaways was Steal Away to Jesus [Steal Away].

Another type of 19th century spiritual was the "Freedom Song." Two of
these, We Shall Overcome and Oh Freedom, became famous when they were made
the anthems of the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s. Freedom songs
fall into the "Jubilee Song" category. These are pieces that celebrate the
Old Testament concept of the Year of Jubilee in which slaves are to be
freed and lands given for building a new life. These songs have a lively
beat. The slaves were not allowed to have drums, but they had their own
bodies-- hands, feet, thighs, and found objects with which they could
improvise. They invented juba, rhythmic patterns of hand clapping, foot
stomping, thigh slapping, broomstick thumping, etc. Such songs also belong
to the "Shout" tradition, in which the whole congregation would move around
the interior of the tent or "meetin' house" while singing against the
complicated juba rhythms made by clapping, stomping, slapping and thumping.
(There were no benches or pews). The leader usually sat on a stool in the
center, keeping the basic beat with a broomstick thumping on the floor.
Joshua Fit de Battle of Jericho is a call-and-response shout that utilizes
a common verse treatment that is one of the forerunners of rap. [Joshua Fit
de Battle]

Jubilee songs reflect unrestrained hope and joy to be found in release from
captivity and freedom to live abundantly. One of the things slaves longed
for was the right to wear shoes. Shoes were forbidden because they might
facilitate escape. Bloody footprints often led to the recapture of
runaways. This experience explains the prominence of shoes in the "wish
lists" of Jubilee songs. [When I get to Heaven] Verses can be added or
repeated at will.

One of the favorite Jubilee songs went on to become one of the best known
early jazz compositions, When the Saints Go Marching In. It was one of the
celebratory marches used for the funeral procession from the grave site
back into town after the burial ceremony, contrasting mightily with the
slow mournful dirges that took the grieving mourners to the burial ground.
It was played by a full brass band. (During the course of slavery, many
blacks had become accomplished musicians who provided entertainment and
rental income for their masters.) [When the Saints Go Marching in]

There is no agreement on the origin or meaning of the word "jazz," but
that New Orleans of the 1890s was its birthplace goes undisputed. New
Orleans was the only American city that could be the birthplace of a multi-
racial, multi-ethnic, multi-genre musical art form at that time. As a
great port city, it was a virtual crossroads of the world. Originally
founded by Spain, but first populated by the French, then with immigrants
from Caribbean islands (including many of African descent) and numerous
other places, as well as folks from English-speaking states after the
Louisiana Purchase.

Without the high tech available to Hip-hop, Jazz employed its own kind of
"sampling." It blended spirituals, blues, ragtime, marches and French and
Spanish dance music into a lively, rhythmic, polyphonic form (many tunes)
that emphasized ensemble improvisation and a call-and-response structure.
With New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi, and part of the riverboat
culture, jazz quickly became a traveling music. It moved up river to
Memphis and St. Louis (and across MO to Kansas City) and most prominently
to Chicago and New York. As it moved, it also evolved, incorporating
elements of the local music of each of the places where it took up
residence. In Chicago of the early 20s, the stupendous skills of recently
arrived New Orleans natives, trumpeters King Oliver and Louis Armstrong,
led the move away from the ensemble improvisation of New Orleans jazz to a
performance style in which virtuoso solo improvisation, moving from one
instrument to another with each chorus, became the standard. Riffs and
breaks allowed opportunities for imaginative variations within an otherwise
familiar tune. Performers often insert "quotations" of other songs into
their improvisations—another level of "sampling." Many observers have noted
that jazz performance epitomizes democracy, with its freedom of individual
expression within a harmonious group consensus.

It's impossible to talk about jazz without considering the blues. They are
siblings with common parentage in earlier African American music,
especially spirituals and work songs. Blues generally have a simpler form
and earthier content, reflecting their spontaneous origin among the common
folk. The most familiar of the several structures a blues chorus can use,
is one in which two nearly alike lines, each four bars long, are followed
by a third four-bar line with different content, making 12 bars in all. W.
C. Handy, of Memphis TN became the first great published composer of the
blues. His St. Louis Blues (1914) uses the basic 12-bar structure as its
core, but extends and expands upon it. [St. Louis Blues]

A jazz chorus is usually built on a basic pattern of four lines of four
bars each. A typical chorus is 32 bars long: two similar 8-bar phrases,
followed by a contrasting 8-bar bridge and ending with 8 bars that reprise
the first 8. Jazz harmonies and chord changes are also more complex. Both
jazz and blues, like their musical antecedents, have fixed elements and
variable elements that call on performers' improvisational skills.

The period after World War I came to be known as "the Jazz Age," dubbed so
by young white fans such as novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, who were drawn to
the infectious appeal of jazz. It quickly became the musical symbol of
youthful rebellion. Ragtime and jazz became the music of "dance raves,"
and were denounced as "music for lunatics" by a disapproving cultural
elite. Musical theater quickly drew on the creative energy of African
American performing artists, and the rise of the recording industry, radio
broadcasting and the movies sent jazz on its way.

Many of the songs that have become the enduring standards of the popular
and jazz idioms came from musical theater and the movies. In 1927 the
first "modern" musical, Jerome Kern's Showboat featured a major African-
American story element. I Can't Give You Anything But Love, represents a
now familiar black stereotype, but a jazz stylization, gives it a fun-
loving attitude that pervades much jazz. Our rendering of this jazz
standard will draw on an innovation introduced by Louis Armstrong and
carried to its greatest heights by Ella Fitzgerald, that of "scat" singing.
Scat involves improvisational singing in spontaneous sound bits instead of
words, mimicking instrumental play. [I Can't Give You Anything But Love,
Baby]. If "turn-about is fair play," this is certainly a case in
point—instruments have long sought to emulate the human voice—the "first"
instrument of God's Creation.

During the period between the two world wars, the Harlem Renaissance
flowered, arousing interest in African American arts and letters across the
nation. A decade after Showboat, composer George Gershwin, a New York Jew
and Dubose Heyward, a southern novelist, mounted the folk opera Porgy'n'
Bess with a total commitment to African American life and music. Gershwin
spent more than a year living in Charleston SC to absorb a sense of the
life being lived by the people who would inhabit the fictionalized "Catfish
Row." It was this experience that produced Summertime, something of a
counterfoil to the spiritual Sometimes I feel Like a Motherless Child. Lou
and I are going to do a jazz improvisation on Summertime as a duet between
soprano saxophone and voice. [Summertime]

In the 1930s and 40s, the influence of jazz in American popular music was
intensified. Young white musicians, such as Indianapolis's Hoagie
Carmichael hung out in the black neighborhood to master their music. In
1930 he penned the classic, Georgia on My Mind. [Georgia on My Mind] In
1932 Duke Ellington's catchy It Don't Mean a Thing if It Ain't Got That
Swing introduced a new era. For the next couple of decades "Big Band
Swing" and "torchy" love ballads flourished side by side, energizing
popular culture in many ways. Jazz demonstrated that it could express a
wide range of life experiences.

In every age, the dominant mode of travel makes its way into music. From
the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th, it was the
railway train. The Gospel Train's a'Comin' was a widely sung Jubilee
spiritual. Then in 1940, Take the A Train, written by native Pittsburgher
Billy Strayhorn about a New York subway, became the theme song for one of
the most celebrated bands of the era, that led by composer, conductor,
pianist Duke Ellington. Ellington had heard the young prodigy, Strayhorn,
play when he was on the road in Pittsburgh, and had told him how to get to
his home in the elite neighborhood known as "Sugar Hill" in New York's
Harlem. [Take the A-Train]

Jazz, blues and the musical traditions they stem from, often deal with life
as it is—"keeping it real" so to speak. From its mid-20th century heyday,
jazz continued to influence other musical genres. Its enduring character
has led to its being called "America's Classical Music. It is a music of
many different moods and attitudes. We'll close with a ballad associated
with one of the most influential blues/jazz singers of the mid-20th
century, Billie Holiday, and a song for which she shares writing credit.
It evokes the plaintive quality of a Sorrow song while making a worldly
point. [God Bless the Child]

We haven't time to deal with the last half century, but even a cursory
hearing reveals that while much remains to be settled in the relationship
between African Americans and America as a whole, musically, the conquered
have become the conquerors. With few exceptions, the music of American
popular culture bears the inescapable impress of African American
antecedents in spirituals and jazz.