Exploring American Folk Music

by Kip Lornell

  Within ten years Brumley had bought out the old Hartford Music Company to form Brumley-Hartford, which his family still operates in southern Missouri. He continued to write songs and run his publishing company until his death in 1977. Groups as diverse as the Chuck Wagon Gang, Elvis Presley, and Hank Williams have recorded his songs, which are firmly in the early-twentieth-century gospel mold. “I’ll Fly Away,” for example, opens with the same melody as the well-known “Prisoner’s Song” and it begins with the catchy line “If I had the wings of an angel.”

  If this music was being exploited by the mass media and reaching millions of people, can it be considered “folk”? In many of these performances we can find folk elements similar to those used by Ernest Stoneman’s version of late-nineteenth-century hymnody, which leads to a qualified yes. These elements include a nasal vocal technique; a repertoire that encompassed not only new compositions but also older gospel hymns and spirituals; simple harmonic structures that were readily accessible to any piano or guitar player; and easily remembered melodies. The message of these songs was equally straightforward: help your neighbors, live a “clean” life, worship God regularly, and then find eternal bliss in heaven.

  FINAL THOUGHTS

  Since the English brought their psalmody tradition across the Atlantic Ocean, sacred music has been part of white American music. But many decades passed before American religious folk songs developed. The last two hundred years, however, have witnessed the gradual evolution of uniquely American styles from the rejuvenating camp meeting songs to the gospel boogie of the late 1940s. Since the middle of the twentieth century, there has been an expanding relationship and interaction between folk and popular forms of religious music. Despite the commercialization of Anglo-American sacred folk songs, the shape note tradition and gospel hymnody remain a part of life in the South and parts of the Midwest.

  KEY FIGURES AND TERMS

  all-night sings

  Bay Psalm Book

  Blackwood Brothers

  Albert E. Brumley

  camp meetings

  Wally Fowler

  gospel song

  Dwight Moody

  psalmody

  sacred harp singing

  Ira D. Sanky

  Shakers

  singing schools

  Stamps-Baxter

  televangelist

  James D. Vaughan

  Singin’ Billy Walker

  SUGGESTED LISTENING

  Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs with the Foggy Mountain Quartet. County 111. Flatt, Scruggs, and their quartet explore a selection of bluegrass gospel numbers.

  Primitive Quartet. 20th Anniversary. PQ CD 362192. A strong concert by one of the best of the southern gospel groups.

  Various. Brighten the Corner Where You Are. New World NW-224. Both black and white hymnody and gospel songs are heard on this collection.

  Various. Classic Southern Gospel from Smithsonian Folkways. SFW40137. This release samples the broad Asch/Folkways catalogue and includes performances of sacred harp, Primitive Baptist, and gospel bluegrass.

  Various. Early Shaker Spirituals. Rounder 0078. Mildred Barker and other members of the United Society of Shakers perform spirituals from the nineteenth and twentieth century.

  Various. Favorite Sacred Songs. King CD 556. A nice sampler of country gospel songs recorded by the Delmore Brothers, Grandpa Jones, Wayne Rainey, and others in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

  Various. The Gospel Ship: Baptist Hymns & White Spirituals from the Southern Mountains. New World 80294. Alan Lomax assembled this fine sample of selections, which focuses on performances recorded after World War II.

  Various. Old Harp Singers. Smithsonian Folkways 2356. This compilation presents some strong examples of sacred harp singing recorded in Tennessee during the 1950s.

  Various. Old Regular Baptists. Smithsonian Folkways 40106. A fine set compiled from field recordings from the 1990s by Jeff Titon. These thirteen tracks contain some outstanding examples of contemporary hymnody. The booklet is equally important.

  Various. Social Harp: American Shape Note Singing. Rounder 0094. The tunes from this recording from Georgia in the 1970s are found in the Social Harp tunebook.

  Various. Southern Journey V. 4: Brethren, We Meet Again—Southern White Spirituals. Rounder CD 011661170421. Culled from his extensive field trips in 1959 and 1960, these Alan Lomax recordings documented a wide range of genres, including selections from sacred harp to the equally a cappella-performing Primitive Baptist, as well as southern gospel.

  Various. True Gospel Bluegrass. Rebel Records REB 8002. Fine and varied performances by stalwarts such as Ralph Stanley, Rhonda Vincent, Larry Sparks, and the Seldom Scene.

  Various. White Dove: The Bluegrass Gospel Collection. Rounder CD 011661052321. A nicely paced collection of the various gospel bluegrass performances found on Rounder’s large bluegrass catalogue.

  Various. White Spirituals From the Sacred Harp. New World 80205. Taken from recordings made during the Alabama Sacred Harp Convention, Alan Lomax captures some powerful examples of the genre.

  SUGGESTED READING

  Dickson Bruce, Jr. And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain-Folk Camp Meeting Religion 1800-1845. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974. A straightforward accounting of the Anglo-American camp meeting movement.

  Bill Gaither (with Jerry B. Jenkins). Homecoming: The Story of Southern Gospel Music Through The Eyes of Its Best Loved Performers. Nashville, TN: Zondervan Publishing, 1997. This longtime gospel music performer provides informal and short sketches of some of the music’s most widely known singers and groups.

  James R. Goff. Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. The best and most balanced study of southern gospel yet written.

  Kay Hively and Albert Brumley, Jr. I’ll Fly Away: The Life Story of Albert E. Brumley. Branson, MO: Mountaineer Books, 1990. An entertaining, insiders view of one of the most important twentieth-century gospel composers.

  Kenneth M. Johnson. The Johnson Family Singers: We Sang For Our Suppers. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. One of the most respected of the family gospel ensembles in the decade following the close of WW II, this book details their story.

  Kiri Miller. Traveling Home: Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. A contemporary, ethnographic study of this music and the complex communities that support it today.

  Lynwood Montell. Singing the Glory Down. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991. A detailed study of amateur gospel singing in south-central Kentucky.

  Beverly Patterson. The Sound of the Dove: Singing in Appalachian Primitive Baptist Churches. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. A contemporary and close examination of the down-home, decidedly noncommercial, world of sacred singing in the highly conservative Primitive Baptist Church.

  Glen Payne and George Younce (with Ace Collins). The Cathedrals: The Story of America’s Best-Loved Gospel Quartet. Nashville, TN: Zondervan Publishing, 1998. Another in a new series, these two insiders relate the story of one of the most popular and long-lived southern gospel quartets.

  Sandra Sizer. Gospel Hymns and Social Religion: The Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century Revivalism. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1978. This book covers the development of gospel hymns and describes its social context during the post-Reconstruction era.

  David Warren Steele with Richard H. Hulan. The Makers of the Sacred Harp. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. Primarily a historical study, this important book takes a hard and close look at the nineteenth-century southern culture that spawned this compelling tradition.

  Jeff Titon. Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988. A historical, musical, and ethnographic study of the Fellowship Independent Baptist Church in the Shenandoah Valley of Virignia.

  SUGGESTED VIEWING

  Masters Five. The Origi
nal Masters Five. Gaither Music Video. A performance video by this all-star group of veteran singers, which includes Jake Hess, Hovie Lister, J. D. Sumner et al.

  Statesmen. An American Classic. Gaither Music Video. Fine live performance by this group, which is now in its fifth decade of singing.

  Various. Chase the Devil: Religious Music of the Appalachians. Shanachie. This BBC documentary was shot in the early 1980s and features holiness singing and preaching, along with other local styles.

  Various. Joy Unspeakable. Indiana University Television/Folkstreams.net. An ethnographic film that examines Pentecostalism through the documentation of three types of Oneness Pentecostal services in southern Indiana: a gospel-rock concert, a regular Sunday service, and a camp meeting.

  Various. I’ll Keep On Singing. Stephen Shearson/Middle Tennessee State University/School of Music. This film documents the contemporary southern gospel convention tradition, an amateur Christian music-making and educational tradition that developed in rural America following the Civil War.

  Various. Powerhouse for God. Documentary Educational Resources/Folkstreams.net. An hour-long film by Jeff Titon, Tom Rankin, and Barry Dornfeld, that compliments the book by the same name.

  Various. The Shakers. Davenport Films/Folkstreams.net. Focused on surviving members of this sect in New England, this 1974 film explores the history, culture, and music of the Shakers.

  Various. Sweet Is the Day: A Sacred Harp Family Portrait. The Alabama Folklife Association/Folkstreams.net. The story of the Wootens, an Alabama family involved with sacred harp singing since the 1850s.

  Chapter 6

  AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGIOUS FOLK MUSIC

  • The Great Awakening and Camp Meetings

  • Spirituals

  • Ring Shouts

  • Gospel

  • Pentecostal Singing and Guitar Evangelists

  • Preachers on Record

  • Gospel Quartets

  • Final Thoughts

  The cliché that churches form the backbone of black American life contains a great deal of truth. This need for social cohesiveness and leadership was particularly pressing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries during the decades of legalized slavery. Even following Reconstruction churches served as social services networks, rallying points for civil rights, and public spokespersons, among other functions. Although the federal government sanctioned full civil and legal rights for African Americans by the mid-1960s, black churches remain at the core of life for many people in the United States.

  It is abundantly true that religious music remains the clear stronghold for traditional music in the African American community. Because the music of most mainstream black churches tends to be conservative, this is not surprising. Technological innovations, such as the adaptation of electric bass guitars or electronic organs, can be heard in many churches. The core framework of black sacred music, however, remains more closely tied to its roots. This is most evident in important elements such as repertoire, training techniques, and vocal styles.

  A strong symbiotic relationship between secular and sacred black music has existed since the beginning of the United States. Some singers and instrumentalists have always been devoted exclusively to their religious calling, but many others have mediated between both worlds. By the early twentieth century rural black musicians with varied musical interests played for Saturday night square dances and then got up the next morning to provide music for their church. Since the “golden age of gospel” music in the late 1940s, the monetary opportunites for sacred music performers have sometimes been raised to extraordinary heights. These enticements have lured traditionally trained sacred singers such as Aretha Franklin and Sam Cooke from their churches to pursue careers on the popular stage. As we shall see in chapter 11, there are many elements of folk music in contemporary African American popular music.

  Dewey Williams, a revered leader of Sacred Harp Singing in Alabama. Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution.

  THE GREAT AWAKENING AND CAMP MEETINGS

  The Great Awakening of the 1730s brought several important changes to American religious life, one of which was the enlivening of the tunes and words sung during services. Hymns based on religiously inspired poems rather than the psalms taken from biblical scripture gained favor. The popularity of Dr. Isaac Watts’s books, Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1707) and The Psalms of David, Imitated in the Language of the New Testament and Apply’d to the Christian State and Worship (1717) was so strong that Protestants soon came to prefer Dr. Watts’s hymns. By the 1740s both whites and blacks who attended church were singing hymns as part of each worship service.

  The Second Great Awakening was the next religious movement to greatly impact America. A frontier revival phenomenon, its greatest force was felt between 1790 and 1830. Camp meetings where great numbers of people lived and worshiped for at least several days in temporary tents became the norm. Methodists slowly came to dominate camp meetings, and Methodist hymns were sung in meetings that by the early nineteenth century had spread across all of the Middle Atlantic states into the Deep South. Unlike most aspects of contemporary American life, camp meetings were not entirely segregated. Groups upward of 3,000 gathered to sing and hear preaching, with blacks and whites keeping separate quarters on the grounds. Whether standing or seated, blacks attended camp meetings, sometimes participating as preachers. Such modest integration resulted in mutual influences and the emergence of spiritual songs that found favor among both black and white singers.

  Camp meeting singing was congregational. Contemporary accounts suggest that blacks often sang louder than whites and that blacks often stayed up singing long after their counterparts had retired for the night. These late-night gatherings provided black singers a forum for experimentation not previously available to them. Away from the watching eyes of their Anglo counterparts, blacks began to shift their singing away from the camp meeting hymns. They improvised by adding lines from biblical verses and prayers to the well-known Watts hymns, which became solidified by the frequent addition of choruses and refrains. The tunes, too, veered from the acceptable European melodies toward the banjo and fiddle dance tunes favored in folk music. These new songs contained enough familiar elements to gain swift and widespread acceptance as a new genre, spiritual songs.

  In New England, where blacks constituted a vastly smaller number and percentage of the population, slaves became part of the worship service held by whites. Seated in segregated pews (a precursor of the “separate but equal” doctrine), blacks were exposed to the religious practices of northern Europeans, an experience steeped in ritual that possibly reminded them of the importance of their own ceremonies. The music itself, however, must have seemed wildly tame by comparison with their own background. The white religious music, usually Dutch Reformed, Congregational, Methodist, or other related sects, lacked the fervor and rhythmic punch of (the increasingly distant) West African music. Drums, often playing improvisational patterns and indispensable to their rituals, were simply not found in these churches.

  But, any black attending a church with strong connections to England would have recognized the lining out performance practice so often found in black African music. Lining out a psalm provided an easy way for white and black churchgoers to learn the song’s text, along with the basic melody, with the song leader providing a line or two and the congregation repeating the line(s). This practice proved to be one of the few early direct links between Anglo and African music and was a common practice among blacks singing work songs. African American antiphony, however, often overlaps, creating a more complex and rhythmically interesting style that resonates in today’s hip-hop culture.

  In the South some whites even became involved with the religious instruction of blacks. On large plantations slaves were kept in relative cultural and social isolation, a practice reflected in the slaves’ religious training. Blacks were allowed to atte
nd all-black weekly religious services and could ocassionally participate at a white church by standing in a separate section in the back of the church. Clergymen were sometimes brought in to lead slaves in their own religious worship. Southern colonies in general were not as strict about the Sabbath as their northern counterparts. Indeed there was far less religious instruction for southern blacks and much greater social and economic segregation.

  SPIRITUALS

  Although their precise origins remain obscure, spirituals are among the earliest sacred folk songs attributable to black culture. “Spiritual” is a general term for nineteenth-century black American religious folk songs that are sometimes called anthems, jubilees, or gospel songs. White origins for African American spirituals have been argued, but the considerable interchange between white and black musical traditions prior to the Civil War makes such discussions moot.

  The term itself was not used in print prior to the 1860s, but descriptions in travel accounts and diaries of songs that sound like spirituals exist as early as 1819. These descriptions by whites speak of traits such as syncopated hand clapping and foot stamping that provided the rhythmic fervor absent from Anglo-American music. Contemporary accounts also list call and response, group participation, and improvised texts as the other notable characteristics of these spirituals. The form of spirituals tended to be similar with an alternating line and refrain that encouraged the textual improvisation that impressed so many eighteenth-century observers. “In That Great Getting-Up Morning” is a traditional song containing many of the textual elements found in nineteenth-century spirituals. Note how its structure encourages the singer to improvise new lines to further the story: