The revival spiritual songs represent a further advance of the song
movement which brought forth the folk-hymns, toward the folk level. As
the eighteenth century expired the post-Wesleyan religious tide was
high and the camp meeting, the significant institution which became
the cradle of the revival spiritual songs, was born. One may therefore
get a clearer insight into this new song development if one recalls
the character of its early environment. One might well remember, for
example, that the camp meetings began and remained in nature
surroundings, in the wilderness; that they were immense holiday
gatherings;[4] that they thus took on the free-and-easy aspects of the
pioneers as a whole rather than of any particular class; and that they
were completely free from denominational and all other authoritarian
control.
Bearing all this in mind it is perhaps easier to understand how the
folk-hymns--grown up in a less boisterous environment--failed to
satisfy the new conditions. At the camp meetings it was not a question
of inducing every one to sing, but of letting every one sing, of
letting them sing songs which were so simple that they became not a
hindrance to general participation but an irresistible temptation to
join in. The tunes of the folk-hymns were adequate. But the texts
(Watts, Wesley and their schools) still demanded a certain exercise of
learning and remembering which excluded many from the singing. The
corrective lay in the progressive simplification of the texts; and it
was in the main this text simplification which brought about and
characterised the type of camp-meeting song which was called, in
contradistinction to all other types, the spiritual song.
The methods of song-text reducing are familiar. When the American
youth sings
Found a horse-shoe, found a horse-shoe,
Found a horse-shoe, just now;
Just now found a horse-shoe,
Found a horse-shoe just now
he is not only following a practice of the early spiritual song makers
and singers--his horse-shoe song itself is a parody of a spiritual in
this collection--but he is singing in the infinitely older manner of
his race. He is singing an organically constructed tune and refusing
to let words interfere with it, a tendency which may be observed from
'Sumer is icumen in' to the nineteenth century songs of sailors and to
other work-songs and children's songs, like that of 'The Big Bad
Wolf', today.
The text simplification in religious folk-songs began modestly. The
variety of spiritual song which is closest to the folk-hymn is that in
which each short stanza of text (four short lines usually) is followed
by a chorus of the same length, as for example:
On Jordan's stormy banks I stand
And cast a wishful eye,
To Canaan's fair and happy land
Where my possessions lie.
_Chorus_
I'm bound for the promised land,
I'm bound for the promised land;
O who will come and go with me?
I'm bound for the promised land.
The verse was mastered probably by comparatively few singers, even
though it may have been "lined out" by the song leader. But the whole
assemblage had its chance to join lustily in singing the chorus.
A simpler form of spiritual song went directly into a refrain after
the first text couplet:
O when shall I see Jesus
And dwell with him above,
_And shall hear the trumpet sound_
_In that morning._
And from the flowing fountain
Drink everlasting love,
_And shall hear the trumpet sound_
_In that morning_.
Then came the chorus:
_Shout O glory_
_For I shall meet above the skies_
_And shall hear the trumpet sound_
_In that morning._
An offspring of this same 'Morning Trumpet' song may serve to
illustrate the next step in simplification, one in which the singers,
instead of using new poetic lines in subsequent stanzas, were
satisfied with slight variations of those already sung:
Oh, brother, in that day
We'll take wings and fly away,
_And we'll hear the trumpet sound_
_In that morning._
Oh, sister, in that day
We'll take _etc._
Oh, preachers, in that day,
and so on, with "leaders," "converts," etc. without end.
The next step is seen in those songs where one short phrase is sung
three times and then followed by a one-phrase refrain:
Where are the Hebrew Children,
Where are the Hebrew Children,
Where are the Hebrew Children?
_Safe in the promised land._
These songs were sometimes called "choruses," for they are often
really nothing else,--detached choruses, the text varied a bit from
verse to verse, functioning as complete songs.
The last word in brevity of text is where simply one short phrase or
sentence, sung over and over, is made to fill out the whole tune frame
as a stanza. 'Death, Ain't You Got No Shame', in this collection is
one example among many. Such songs as this were too meager to be
welcomed warmly into the old song books. They survive therefore
chiefly in oral tradition. But meagerness of text is not, we must
remember, any criterion of the worth of a religious folk-song. 'Hebrew
Children,' for example, the song from which I have just cited a
stanza, is at once extremely chary of words and rich in tonal beauty.
This becomes evident when one sees Annabal Morris Buchanan's
arrangement of it for modern chorus.
It was the _spiritual songs_, rather than the _hymns_ or the
_ballads_, which appealed subsequently most deeply to the negroes and
have reappeared most often among the religious songs of that race. In
_White Spirituals_ I presented twenty different negro songs and traced
them, both tunes and texts, directly to as many early religious songs
of the white people. In the present collection upwards of 60 songs
have been found to be the legitimate tune-and-words forebears of the
same number of negro spirituals. (Incidentally, all of the songs just
used here to illustrate the steps in text simplification have been
borrowed by the black man and made over.) These negro offspring songs
are mentioned by title, and information as to where I found them is
given in the notes under each of the songs concerned.[5]
The _tunes_ of the secular folk-songs came into the religious
environment--into the folk-hymns and spiritual songs--with little
change. What _one_ could sing by himself to secular words _all_ could
sing in a gathering to religious words. The new surroundings made only
one added demand,--that the singers indulge in fewer vocal liberties
than they might have enjoyed when singing the same tunes in their
homes and alone. I refer to those liberties in personal
interpretation, a quaint characteristic of individual folk singing
which has given the collectors their numerous variants of one and the
same song. Group singers had now to agree on one version of a tune and
stick fairly closely to it. I say fairly closely, for the religious
singers allowed but few of their tunes to become completely
standardized. This will become clear when one studies the variants of
certain folk-hymn and spiritual-song tunes in this compilation.