Abstract
The major nineteenth-century debate on slave songs, continuing in some quarters into the twentieth century, focused on the issue of originality. “The big guns of the white spiritual theory,” as they are referred to by John Lovell Jr., are the “gentlemen-professors”—Newman I. White, Guy B. Johnson, and George Pullen Jackson—who leveled a series of charges against slave songs as not being “authentic” slave products. Some of their arguments were that there was no tradition of African song for them to have been built on; they were derived from the same revival songs sung by black and white worshippers alike, except they claimed that the white spirituals came first; and slave songs had similar themes and figures of speech mentioned in white European-based Protestant and Methodist hymns, for example, the Promised Land, Egyptian bondage, and freedom.1 Coincidentally, they did mention only the white songs as the slaves’ stolen source materials and failed to speculate on the Bible, church services, sermons and other oral teachings, or the experience of Christianization in Africa as potential influences.
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Notes
John Lovell Jr., Black Song: The Forge and the Flame: The Story of How the Afo-American Spiritual was Hammered Out (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 92–94.
James H. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), 10.
Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 22.
Miles Mark Fisher, Negro Slave Songs in the United States (New York: Citadel, 1990), 182.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 44.
James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson, The Books of American Negro Spirituals, bk. 1 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1925), 14–15.
Charles H. Long, “Perspectives for a Study of African American Religion,” Down by the Riverside: Readings in African American Religion, ed. Larry G. Murphy (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 15.
For detailed treatments of the Exodus myth and its meaning in African American culture, see Albert Raboteau, “African Americans, Exodus, and the American Israel,” in Down by the Riverside: Readings in African American Religion, ed. Larry G. Murphy (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 20–25;
Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000);
Martin Ramey, “‘Dragging in its Rear the Bible’: The ‘Lost Cause’ and the Status of African Americans Before and After the American Civil War,” Humanitas: The Journal of the George Bell Institute 5, no. 1 (October 2003): 43–73;
and Jon Michael Spencer, “Promises and Passages: The Exodus Story Told Through the Spirituals,” in Protest & Praise: Sacred Music of Black Religion (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1990), 3–34.
Extremely helpful background on the Exodus motif itself is provided in Michael Fishbane, “The ‘Exodus’ Motif/The Paradigm of Historical Renewal,” in Biblical Text and Texture (Oxford: Oneworld, 1998), 121–40.
Richard E. Beringer, et al., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1986), 82–102.
Henry Edward Krehbiel, Afro-American Folksongs: A Study in Racial and National Music (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1962), 26.
William E. Barton, Old Plantation Hymns; a collection of hitherto unpub¬lished melodies of the slave and the freeman, with historical and descriptive notes (New York: AMS, 1972), 17.
For examples from Allen’s hymnal, see Eileen Southern, ed., Readings in Black American Music, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), 52–61.
Thomas P. Fenner, Frederic G. Rathbun, and Miss Bessie Cleaveland, Cabin and Plantation Songs as Sung by the Hampton Students (New York: AMS, 1977), 126–27.
R. Nathaniel Dett, ed., Religious Folk-Songs of the Negro As Sung at Hampton Institute (New York: AMS, 1972), 19.
Moses Hogan, ed., The Oxford Book of Spirituals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 123–29.
Bernard Katz, The Social Implications of Early Negro Music in the United States (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969), 71.
Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson, The Negro and His Songs: A Study of Typical Negro Songs in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1925), 36.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment and Other Writings (New York: Penguin, 1997), 168–69.
Rev. Gustavus D. Pike, The Singing Campaign for Ten Thousand Pounds: Jubilee Singers in Great Britain, rev. ed. (New York: American Missionary Association, 1875), 18.
Rev. Marshal W. Taylor, Plantation Melodies (Cincinnati: Marshall W. Taylor and W. C. Echols, 1882), 3.
Irving Sablosky, American Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 277.
John Wesley Work, Folk Song of the American Negro (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 27.
Nancy McGhee, “Portraits in Black: Illustrated Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar,” Stony the Road: Chapters in the History of Hampton Institute, ed. Keith L. Schall (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977), 81.
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© 2008 Lauri Ramey
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Ramey, L. (2008). Slave Songs as American Poetry. In: Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610163_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610163_4
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