America witnessed the passing of three leading late-20th century exponents of the African-American spiritual within seven months of each other: William Warfield, solo artist and educator; Eileen Southern, Harvard University African-American musicologist; and Moses Hogan, pianist, conductor and arranger. Their deaths coincided with the centenary anniversary of the publication of the The Souls of Black Folks, by W.E.B. Dubois, the great lover of spirituals who wrote the defining treatise on the meaning of being black in America.
These three dedicated much of their lives to the study and celebration of the African-American spiritual, and its important role in the life of our nation. They each knew that the spiritual provides a means for effective communication across historic racial dividing lines.
With race and spirituals in mind, I wanted to explore the subject for solo singers in two parts: One — why we should sing solo spirituals, although largely we do not, and two —how to make spirituals part of our singing lives. As we learn to share the joys and sorrows of a nation still coming to grips with its racial legacy, African-American spirituals provide a positive means to those ends.
One hundred years after Du Bois raised the veil on his prophetic The Souls of Black Folk (1903), his forethoughtful statement remains a sentinel of American racial history, and again calls the nation to reflection.
A call to reflection on race at the start of the 21st century is easier said than done. America’s history and racial legacy are strangely interconnected. Together they frequently overwhelm our best efforts to transcend their resulting difficulties. Such enormity stymies our collective abilities to know how or where to begin—how to approach race issues that historically bind us together and, at the same time, polarize us. Our struggle just to understand is immensely frustrating, which complicates earnest attempts to start and maintain an effective dialogue on racial affairs.
The esoteric world of musical arts contains considerable racial barriers. It also provides opportunities to address some of America’s persistent and inescapable racial concerns. Such opportunities can touch our lives in profound ways. The mystery of our shared racial legacy is not easily unraveled, yet the resilient power of music provides a path to meaning, understanding and healing—possibly the first appropriate steps to transformation and change in our racial culture.
A primary example of how the legacy of race erects barriers to our shared artistic expression lies within the world of solo-vocal classical music. The current disposition of the solo African-American spiritual clearly illustrates both aspects of the perspective: Our frozen inability to communicate and our need for understanding.
As an outgrowth of African enslavement in America and Protestant Christianity, African-American spirituals are a unique genre unlike any other developed on the African Continent or anywhere else in the entire African Diaspora under slavery. African-American spirituals represent one of our nation’s great cultural gifts to the world. Numbering more than 6,000 examples, they remain one of the largest bodies of American folk songs to reach the 21st century.
Spirituals open an important window of witnessing and understanding into America’s emotional and perplexing racial past. Considering the large number of spirituals and their central role in American music history, however, why are there so very few modern recordings of solo spirituals performed by white artists?
Spirituals occupy an important place in the matrix of American music, and yet, since
World War II it appears whites have chosen not to perform them. Unlike Gershwin’s opera, Porgy and Bess, there is no controlling directive from any composer’s estate suggesting that solo spirituals are only for blacks to sing. Nevertheless it seems that way. The legacy of race may forever interfere with the possibility for all Americans to sing this important solo literature—unless concerned individuals attempt to address it.
In my nearly half-century in music, I have heard hundreds of solo vocal recitals of nearly every type. Except for some of my own students, I have hardly ever heard a white student/professional solo vocalist sing a solo African-American spiritual on the recital stage. This is a breathtaking confession to make and it astounds me utterly to realize it in totality. I am aware of performances by Lawrence Tibbett, Robert Merrill, Marilyn Horne, Eileen Farrell (a moving Deep River), Nelson Eddy, and others from earlier generations and during the civil rights activities of the ‘60s. There is even the very hopeful modern anecdote of Renee Fleming singing This Little Light of Mine as an encore on a recent recital program. Otherwise there is a considerable void.
I looked for spirituals in the beautiful collections of American music recently recorded by America’s leading singers. The fabulous, enormously accomplished and socially responsible American baritone Thomas Hampson, for example, has sung Barber, Copland, Ives, and Adams, but includes hardly any African-American spirituals in his oeuvre. “Go tell it on the Mountain” and “The Virgin Mary Had a Baby Boy” appear to be the only spirituals in the listing of his 95 titles on CDNow’s website, and these two appear on separate Christmas CDs. Hampson has a wonderful collection of Stephen Foster, but virtually no spirituals.
I looked again, reviewing recordings of America’s preeminent bass-baritone, Samuel Ramey, a very astute performer who also has a lovely collection of American music by Barber, Copland, Foster and Gershwin. A summary search of Ramey’s 72 titles listed on CDNow’s website revealed not a single spiritual whatsoever.
I looked for spirituals in the listings of Dawn Upshaw, one of my favorite sopranos. American music is beautifully represented in her recordings—Ives, Copland, Glass, Reich, Harbison, and Bernstein—yet in her 55 recordings listed on CDNow’s website, I found no spirituals. This is not to say there is something wrong with these three singers. All are terrific individuals. With concern, I searched other artists’ collections and found many similar examples. I wondered why?
Central Questions on Race and African-American Spirituals
Is there a subtle racial dynamic in our classical performance tradition? Is a silent cultural movement taking place? Much of the evidence is scattered before us, yet because racial issues are at the core, few are openly talking about it cross culturally.
Do spirituals conjure up only the subject of slavery, to many the third rail of American democracy? Do whites in discomfort choose not to perform solo spirituals in recital due in part to America’s negative racial legacy? Is there a stigma attached to performing with dialect? Do singers feel cultural feelings of inadequacy, guilt or shame when singing spirituals? In deference to African-American artists, do white solo artists abandon this repertoire? Is there a perception that African-Americans discourage whites from singing spirituals? Are spirituals outside the realm of, or an affront to, the dignity of our best white classical artists?
Perhaps whites sing solo spirituals, but such performances seem far below the general cultural radar of the recital stage. Is reluctance to perform solo spirituals attributed to the quality of the music itself? Could that reluctance be due to fear—fear of offending, of not performing with the right reverence or spirit, fear of judgment, or not doing the spirituals justice?
The American Stage and Race:
Blackface Minstrelsy
A central contributing reason that solo spirituals remain a repertoire question for everyone connects with the troubled racial history that is part of most American institutions, including and particularly the American stage. Concerns about racial caricatures on stage are serious and abiding ones, considering the paralyzing and corrosive images created in the offensive history of blackface minstrelsy.
Blackface minstrelsy was the established nationwide 19th century theatrical practice, principally of the urban North. White men (and later some blacks largely managed by whites)—through ridicule and racist lampoon for sport and profit—caricatured blacks longing for the joys of plantation life, while wearing burnt cork-blackened faces, exaggerated red or white lips and white eyes. Wildly in demand, blackface minstrelsy became the most popular form of theatrical entertainment in the United States during much of the 19th century. Harvard University music historian Eileen Southern (The Music of Black Americans: A History, W.W. Norton, 1997) further identifies blackface minstrelsy’s ascent as it “came to represent America’s unique contribution to the world entertainment stage.” Unique and unforgettably ugly.
Blacks portrayed by white actors in blackface were already an established part of stage history in England and America, such as the stock character of the noble black savage dying to save his white master. What was new was that American performers in the 1820s began to specialize in blackface characters and build entire shows around them, not just as theater or circus entr’actes.
Blackface minstrelsy actually began in the Midwest, but Dan Emmett’s Virginia Minstrels developed the first definitive minstrel show in New York during 1843. The Virginia Minstrels spread professional and amateur interest from New England to New Orleans in little over a year. Groups such as the Christy Minstrels, which introduced many of Stephen Foster’s lyric and comic songs—or, after the Civil War, all-black ensembles like the Georgia Minstrels—carried the style to eager audiences everywhere, from converted churches, synagogues, riverboats and salons, to 2,500 seat theaters. Minstrels entertained the great and small, including four U.S. Presidents (Tyler, Polk, Fillmore and Pierce), and Queen Victoria, and won the praises of Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Charles Dickens.
In 1854, the wealthiest and best-educated classes’ efforts to establish an Italian opera in America resulted in bankruptcy, but the Ethiopian opera “flourished in an intriguing fashion.” For the most part, blackface minstrelsy, at times called “Ethiopian delineation,” represented an original and curious variety-entertainment concoction.
In performances lasting just under two hours, the mostly male performers (occasionally cross-dressing as females) assembled in a semi-circle facing a mostly male audience. Early ensembles had as few as four members and as popularity increased grew to well over 20 times as many. Each player wore striking blackface makeup, creating a clownish appearance. Many blackface performers began their careers in circus-life (perhaps even developing blackface out of clowning). The ringmaster-like interlocutor sat in the middle, dressed sharply in formal evening wear, with endmen comedians on both ends of the semi-circle playing tambourine on the left (brudder tambo), and bones or spoons on the right (brudder bones).
Many early minstrels dressed in torn, ragged clothing as slaves, but flamboyantly so. Others later wore long swallow-tailed coats with colorful shirts and pants. Such contrasts in dress corresponded with two of minstrelsy’s main blackface characters: Zip Coon, the pompous strutting, slick black urban dandy, and Jim Crow, the naive, malaprop, persistently happy, plantation ignoramus, slave darkey. By the 1850s, the show’s three-part format—opening, olio, and walk-around—featured racial skits, lyric and comic songs, ballads, instrumental numbers (many with banjo, tambourine, bones, or violin), high-stepped dancing, and improvised edgy banter between the endmen and audience, through the interlocutor.
Three-Part Structure of Blackface Minstrel Shows
The opening part’s deeply sentimental songs reflected the “nostalgic longing for the joyous days of youth among family and friends in the rural South.” It was a crude distortion of the nightmare of the slave experience, with favorite heartrending lyric songs like: Stephen Foster’s “Gentle Annie” (1856), “Old Uncle Ned” (1848), “Suwannee River” or “Old Folks at Home” (1851—first version titled “Way Down Upon de Old Plantation”); “My Old Kentucky Home” (1853); “Massa’s in de Cold Ground” (1853); and “Old Black Joe” (1860). Lost love, loyalty and love for the master were primary themes. Minstrels presented most songs in verse and refrain format, with soloists on verses and the ensemble in harmony during the refrains.
Part two, the olio, introduced in free-fantasy form a parade of comic skits and theatrical parodies that possibly foreshadowed the farce of vaudeville. Presented in front of a drop curtain, the procession of specialty acts possibly included juggling, acrobatics, parodies of high art—perhaps something by Shakespeare—or novelty musical performances, like musical saw. The olio concluded in a featured high point of the evening, the “stump speech,” a political address delivered usually by an endman in broad dialect, or a caricature of it, abounding in non sequiturs, ungrammatical malapropisms and comic stumblings, creating and exploiting the image of the stupid, incompetent, subordinate black trying to imitate the language of his educated white slave master.
“De fust great epitaph was written by Homer … He wrote de ‘Oddity.’ It is de story ob Ulysses. We know Ulysses’ las’ name—it was Grant. De ‘Oddity’ is written in heroic cutlets wid miasmatic feet. Does you know what a miasmatic foot is? Well, dat is de meter. An’ I don’ mean de gas meter. It mean de heavenly meateor what comes shootin’ from de stars.”
—Anonymous minstrel
“Transcendentalism is dat spiritual cognoscence ob psychological irrefragibility, connected wid conscientient ademption ob incolumbient spirituality and etherialized connection—which is deribed from a profound contemplation ob de irregability ob dose incessimable divisions ob de more minute portions ob subdivided particles ob inwisible atoms dat become ana-tom-catically tattalable in de circumambulatin commission ob ambiloquous voluminiousness.”
—A minstrel explanation of the abstract subtleties of transcendentalism
Part three’s walk-around ensemble finale was the climax of the show, with competitive dancing in a semi-circle. This section featured background scenes of cotton fields or rustic log cabins, which foreshadowed the Grand Ole Opry. Players caricatured slave dance movements during vigorous specialty up-tempo offbeat music strung together in medleys of popular tunes, including such songs as “I Wish I Were in Dixie’s Land” (1860—the battle cry of the Confederate army during the Civil War and the de facto Confederate national anthem), or “The Boatman’s Dance” (1843). Other important music created or adapted for the minstrel stage included: “Long Time Ago” (1833), also known as “Shinbone Alley,” made famous by Thomas Rice’s Ethiopian Opera; “Turkey in the Straw” (1834), also known as “Zip Coon”; “Ching-a-Ring Chaw” (1833), also published under the title “Sambo’s Address to his Bred’ren”; “Carry Me Back To Old Virginny” (1878), one of more than 700 songs created by the most noted African-American songwriter of the late 19th century, and the successor to Stephen Foster, James Bland, “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, Zip-a-dee-day” (1946), Disney used the words from Zip Coon’s old minstrel show theme song in the soundtrack of the animated film, Song of the South. Perhaps the most famous early blackface minstrel song was Thomas “Daddy” Rice’s “Jump Jim Crow” (1829), the song title that for later generations of African-Americans became the moniker and synonym of systemic racial oppression. For many, the blackface minstrel show from its inception was America’s unique theater of race, speaking volumes about racial caste politics and social hierarchy in American culture.
Religion was not a part of minstrel portrayals until the mid 1870s, when for the first time, African-American minstrels added religious songs, almost always in dialect. The transfer of African-American religious music to the North revitalized stagnating minstrel traditions. The Fisk Jubilee Singers (organized by George White), and other Southern African-American touring groups, incorporated call-response and antiphonal traditions from southern religious groups into their acts. From that moment, spirituals became a permanent black minstrel feature, indeed, the most popular. Many white minstrels also performed this religious music, with many of the same broad theatrics of the established, heavily stereotyped tradition.
Effects of Blackface Minstrelsy
Ultimately, what blackface minstrelsy was, or means in total, is now coming to light. Several points have become clear. Historically, African-Americans were not the only group subordinated on American stages. Minstrelsy condemned the women’s rights movement, targeted Chinese and Japanese, and maligned Native Americans for interfering with America’s manifest destiny. Practically every immigrant group—Irish, German, Italian, Russian-Jewish—served as the butt of racial/ethnic lampoons for the amusement of those who had arrived earlier.
Something of permanent purpose resonated in minstrel lampooning of African-Americans as unequivocally inferior, however, something of fascination and fear, in addition to perceived abject differences of skin and musicality. It seems it was no coincidence that the incredible popularity of blackface minstrelsy coincided with intimate public concerns about slavery, the coming Civil War, emancipation, Reconstruction, and the proper position of Negroes in America. Historians note that for some white Americans, blackface minstrel shows provided a platform for the ridicule of blacks, serving to reinforce cohesion among whites. Blackface minstrelsy helped poor whites and immigrants assimilate as white men by affirming the inferiority of blacks in a nation obsessed with racial boundaries, at a time when simply being white was not enough.
Blackface minstrelsy became a cultural solution to the threat Negroes posed to the proper social order, especially in the North. Many Northern, poor, working-class whites feared Negroes, runaways or freemen, since they could disrupt the Northern work force and economy.
As an entertainment medium, blackface minstrelsy became a tool of ridicule in the hands of the working class, exploiting the lowest in society against the aristocracy. It epitomized and concentrated the thrust of racism on African-Americans. Yes, blackface minstrel shows provided the first important employment openings for African-American performers and composers on the nation’s stages. They made way for African-American anti-slavery expressions and imagery, and helped develop a mask for resistance and presentation of their hidden culture. But black menstrelsy set the pervasive poisons of minstrelsy’s corrosive characters into motion—tambo, bones, old darkey, mammy, auntie, uncle, sambo, rastas, rufus, pickaninny, zip coon, and jig-a-boo—highly inflammatory historic characters of depredation and denigration etched forever in America’s racial memory.
Blackface minstrelsy faded in popularity at the end of the 19th century, yet it remained an important element of amateur productions and carried its images into the emerging entertainment media of vaudeville, radio, film and television, by renewing, transmitting, and glamorizing its effigies to future generations. Blackface caricatures thoroughly permeated all facets of popular culture and implanted themselves deeply within the American psyche through cinema, circus life, cartoons, popular songs, advertisements, household artifacts, and even children’s rhymes. Younger Americans today are very familiar with racial and ethnic stereotypes, but may be unaware of the popular platform that ultimately gave them voice, helped spread them across the nation, and resonate in our imaginations.
African-American subjugation took many miserable forms, yet none so peculiar as the degradation brought about by way of this particular leisure folly. For many, the caricatures of blackface were a derisive and embarrassing remnant of the excesses of unmitigated racial oppression in the canopy of great American entertainment. Because these racial indignities played with power and intensity over such a long period to the tastes and central values of its overflow audiences, blackface minstrelsy helped shape the national issue and status of African-Americans even 50 years later, after many of the last of these images left the center of American stages. Our failure to sort out the ramifications of this racial legacy contributed to our inability to address it. It rendered us silent in ambivalence, unable to communicate meaningfully and thoughtfully move forward. Racial barriers in music are but a small part of that legacy.
Anxiety over racial misreading in performance or the enmity it could generate in these times is not impossible to understand, particularly in the arts. Eric Lott, author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford University Press, 1993) and a noted historian of the PBS Special The American Experience—Stephen Foster, suggests a fear to address minstrelsy’s central legacy could be “desperately indicative of the way in which this country still hasn’t surmounted the kinds of feelings that gave rise to minstrelsy in the first place.” And so the central question connects with spirituals: Can all Americans sing the deeply held sorrows and joys of her enslaved people in the shadow of blackface minstrelsy and a largely unaddressed racial history? Without a cross-cultural understanding, is this a fearful point of contention? How do we move forward?
I spoke with a retired, white, professional vocal artist who dedicated a significant portion of his career to teaching in the Philadelphia area. He agreed that a number of white solo artists of the generation before and up to World War II sang spirituals occasionally on solo programs. Pressure from the NAACP and the emerging civil rights movement raised consciousness and anxiety levels on the subjects of slavery, discrimination, stereotypes, blackface, and particularly dialect, among other flash points. As a result, quite suddenly solo spirituals disappeared from white artists’ standard concert repertoire. Whether due to pressure, discomfort, guilt, deference, or artistic conscientiousness, fewer white classical artists after the mid-century chose to perform spirituals.
From blackface minstrelsy the vestige of dialect conjures past iniquities and continues to create a barrier for whites who love spirituals but are troubled by the risk of performing them on the solo stage. “Negro dialect” was of great significance since, after the shock and fascination of the visual, much of the illusion that was blackface minstrelsy balanced on pretentiously sung or spoken words. Heavy dialect helped audiences identify different ethnic groups portrayed in minstrelsy.
Frank Sweet, author of A History of the Minstrel Show, suggests that the aspect that most disturbs us today is the troubling focus on invented African-American appearance and customs—mockery made worse by invented dialect and speech mannerisms. Blackface practitioners crudely distorted pronunciations for the highest comic effect. They carefully gauged audience reaction to black ineptitude. Minstrels used heavy dialect to portray African-Americans as foolish, stupid, and compulsively musical. Altogether, the synergy of a mostly-male rowdy atmosphere, comic men in striking makeup, clownish clothing, scratchy syncopated instrumental music, frenetic dancing, populous vocal melodies, with rudely offensive lyrics spouted and sung in a most hyper-extended imaginative racial manner, made the minstrel show the site of an enormous cultural release of superiority at the expense of African-Americans.
Reproach from African-Americans may also contribute to the withdrawal of whites from singing spirituals. Some may feel spirituals represent a time of subservience that is better forgotten, and reject its painful remembrances. Many African-Americans feel empowered to protect the sovereign traditions of the spiritual, and are critically aware of all who come to sing them. The multiple governing purposes of the National Association of Negro Musicians (NANM) promote a generous exchange of musical ideas and a spirit of fellowship for all to live in understanding, overriding our racial legacy. This includes the cautious tone of its fifth governing purpose: “to resist the desecration of Negro spirituals.”
As a precious remnant of the encounter between African and European culture in the American South, spirituals give eternal voice to the righteous hope for freedom, justice and understanding. As such, they require all who choose to sing them to approach in a correct, knowledgeable spirit of humility and truth. Many may feel that America’s grievous denial of her racial heritage creates distrust and antipathy between blacks and whites, especially in the shadow of blackface minstrelsy, so it naturally may generate the wrong atmosphere for spiritual performance by whites, or appreciation by blacks. While these are not universal values, they gain credibility as fewer whites embrace the spiritual in solo performance.
Spirituals Are Central To Our Education
For NANM and for many others, spirituals represent more than a sacred connection to the sufferings of millions of individuals brutally crushed under the weight of systemic oppression. Singing was a vital dimension of the moment and situation of African-American life. Whether in joy, in agony or sorrow, at work and rest, in worship, in defiance, in flight or danger, in death, in remembrance and the ethereal—spirituals illuminate the singing soul at the center of the incomprehensibly stressful lives African-Americans struggled to carve out for themselves under the yoke of slavery. Spirituals rose from a strong, sacred heart—complex, expressive and extemporaneously organic—and as such present a revealing look at the essence of African-Americans, a resilient soul otherwise disfigured by hundreds of years of unrelenting characterizations as savages.
Tied to that soul is a surprisingly hopeful optimism that transcended the wretchedness of the slave experience. This is central to the reasons all solo singers in America should study and learn to sing spirituals. It is an element critical to our transcendence—the act of soulful expression transformed the painful details and episodes of the slave’s experience. In Richard Newman’s article “Spirituals, African American,” he advises that singing from the heart transmutes “these songs of sorrow into songs of resilience and overcoming, and even into affirmations of divine redemption and human triumph.”
Spirituals have so much to teach us about the souls of enslaved African-Americans and who they wanted to be. With these truths felt and sung, an undistorted exchange takes place in the minds and hearts of performers and listeners. This dialogue has power to transform us. It is among several important reasons so many people are deeply emotional and openly moved when they hear or sing spirituals: The truth sets them free. Frederick Douglass thought, “… the mere hearing of these songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do.” Whether this is a certain response for all, it is important to begin at this point, and build on these truths.
Because of their powerful messages, African-American spirituals are certainly suitable solo literature to be sung by all on the concert stage. Some African-American leaders, like folklorist Zora Neale Hurston and writer James Baldwin, believed spirituals were not meant for concert hall stages. They believed there was no separation between singer and audience, creator or performer, that these songs were only authentic when they were by and for the people themselves, of the moment and of the situation—songs whose “truth dies under training like flowers under hot water.” Frederick Douglass, who said the songs of slaves represented the sorrows of the heart, attributed the formation of spirituals to the “soul-killing effects of slavery,” and could not hear them without profound emotion.
“They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds. If anyone wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery … let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul—and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because “there is no flesh in his obdurate heart.” … The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.
—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave
W.E.B. Du Bois and Harry T. Burleigh, also moved by the music of their ancestors, felt that spirituals have something intimate to say to the entire world. Du Bois saw the spiritual as a form of art counterpoint to the debasement of black expression in theatrical minstrelsy and its caricatures. He wrote the classic literary expression of the idea of “sorrow songs,” or spirituals, in his The Souls of Black Folk. His preeminent description of African-American singing revealed to the world the enormous capacity for expression and identity these elemental songs provided for America’s nameless sons and daughters. Burleigh, encouraged by Antonin Dvorak, became an early African-American pioneer of the recital hall spiritual, and created numerous solo arrangements for concert hall performance. He taught the world that successful performance depended on deep spiritual feeling.
“The voice is not nearly so important as the spirit; and then the rhythm … it is an essential characteristic. Through all of these songs there breathes a hope, a faith in the ultimate justice and brotherhood of man. The cadences of sorrow invariably turn to joy, and the message is ever manifest that eventually deliverance from all that hinders and oppresses the soul will come, and man—every man—will be free.”
—Spirituals of Harry T. Burleigh
Spirituals continue to speak, and challenge singers to seek the emotional center of the truth belonging to those whose spirits first gave up their cries in agony and despair. Spirituals urge us to find hope in every phrase and to express it. These remain fitting lessons for all Americans.
Sharing Our Joys and Sorrows
All singers should consider singing spirituals on their programs and use such performances as excellent educational opportunities to bring attention to the current state of racial affairs. Be courageous. Breech the gap separating whites from spirituals, reaching out with the beauty of their truths. A performer prepared with information and understanding can do it. Allow each performance to be part of a conscious effort to reconcile the division in our performing traditions.
Du Bois’ historic foretelling of America’s central color line problem still echoes truth to us from our past. Racism, frustration, fear, injustice, and antipathy have been our history—but they need not forever be our state of being or derail our future. No American should avoid singing solo spirituals; rather we should learn to sing and embrace all they represent, taking them into our minds and hearts.
Our nation persists in the midst of a righteous struggle of the heart to reconcile its past for the sake of its future. Douglass, Burleigh, Du Bois, Gandhi, Marian Anderson and Martin Luther King, Jr. knew well: The heart is the place where true change begins. The path to understanding our racial legacy passes through our shared joys, pains and sorrows, not by painfully forgetting or fearfully ignoring them. Learning to love, teach—and especially, to sing solo spirituals—brings us closer to humbly reconciling the truth of what we are, together.
Dennis Speed wrote a moving article about the spiritual for the Schiller Institute in Fidelio Magazine in 1995. He suggested that the drama of the lowly African-American spiritual possesses the power to greatly impact our hearts and humanity saying, “Not force, but beauty, will change America.” Given an opportunity, the musical arts could again be an important forum for our racial reflection, and the African-American spiritual, even in the shadow of blackface minstrelsy, could be its matrix.
(Part II of “Spirituals, Whose Songs Are They” will identify resources to help make African-American spirituals an active part of our successful performances.)
