"ORIGINS" CONSIDERATIONS AND TITLING COMPLICATIONS
By Susan Hinton

Originally posted in:
Subject: RE: Origins: So High
From: WYSIWYG
07 Sep 03 - 09:24 AM


"Origins" Considerations

There are several factors that complicate tracing anything back to possible origins as a spiritual.

First, in written form, we have only a very few of the many that existed. These songs were known to spring up spontaneously on every plantation, and only a relatively few were transcribed at the time. But they lived on in memory, growing up and out into other documented songs, after slave times were well over. Therefore, finding documentation of any specific song at any specific time or place cannot tell us when or where the song actually originated.

Second, the attribution "Traditional" for those spirituals we have today in a copy-righted form often means, "It was originally a Negro spiritual learned orally or found in an abscure text now legally in the public domain; but we cleaned it up, restyled it, and arranged it; now we claim artistic credit and all future royalties for it as of such and such date." Therefore, finding published works of the past attributed in that fashion do not establish origin.

Third, when a song enters the documented (published or recorded) gospel tradition by way of an early black gospel recording, it may have been based on a spiritual's melody and complete, fragmented, or recombined spirituals' texts... and people composing later gospel music also often relied heavily on melodies and commonly-used verses from spirituals. We can hear this in early field recordings predating known "gospel" performances, when a song attributed to a later author or composer turns out to have been known much earlier.

Fourth, in everyday usage under slavery as well as in concerts and gospel music in the period following, melodies and texts were reused, incorporated in many songs. Therefore, it's anyone's guess exactly which "original" songs or parts of songs were combined in this way.


Another Way to Think About "Origins"?

In my opinion, as I've studied spirituals and gospel music for use in songleading, what can be understood is the particular stylistic stamp each performer puts on a piece by their arrangement and delivery. In my sound collection, for instance, I can compare many versions of one song. The recording dates point to three or four distinct "grandmothers" to all of the later versions, with each later version obviously imitative of one of those grandmother versions.

When we're talking about music, we can't just look at the text and documentation--- we have to look at the feel of the song, especially in gospel, and especially in early black gospel which by its nature is expressive of a spiritual, religious sensibility.

So for the spirituals, "origin" may mean a narrow set of song evolutions particular to whatever song is in question.


Theological Elements

In my view, the "origins" question for gospel music of any kind has to include its Biblical underpinnings. For instance, the gospel song "So High" (AKA "You Must Come in at the Door") is said to be based on a spiritual. The text is about entering heaven by the strait (narrow way). In Scripture, Jesus describes being the sheepfold gate and the shepherd guarding the door to the sheepfold. In Bible times, some shepherds would sleep across the opening to the sheep pen, keeping the sheep in and predators out by making themselves the gate. There was no need to build a gate. In those days, if there were sheep in the fold, there would be a shepherd present.

Some of the spirituals can be linked to a single Bible passage. More of them tended to be very elegant compilations and integrations of several Biblical images and concepts. These songs used just a few evocative words to cover quite a lot of the reading or preaching the slaves had been exposed to, as well as whatever reflections people had experienced from what they had heard.

We can think of spirituals as the icons or stained glass of their time-- using paperless artistic media to deliver and preserve information and guidance among people who might be assumed not to read the written word.


Titling Complications

Titling of spirituals is arbitrary, and most of them have several "known" titles. Original spirituals were often used as worksongs, with as many verses added each time as workers could dream up. Topics could be shifted and combined in odd ways, and the "title" under which any day's version was documented could have been any recurring line or topical theme.

Even when a spiritual was sung in a strictly religious setting, there would usually have been two contrasting or complementary themes running through it. One would be in the verse(s) and one in the refrain. Sometimes there were three distinct themes-- one in the call part of the verse, one in the response part, and one in the refrain.

A title could emerge from any of these, and a lot of songs are known variously by more than one title.

Finally, the dialect of the titling-- in an effort to be historically faithful to the dialect of whoever a collector got a version from, a title will not necessarily be in today's English.

Given these considerations, "You Must Come in at the Door" could also be:

"Must Come in at the Door"
"Mus' Come in at the Door"
"Mus' Come in at the Do' "
"Yo' Mus' Come in at de Do' "
"Open Door"
"My God Is So High"

... or almost anything else!

For all of these reasons, a text search in researching any spiritual is problematic. It's a good idea to glance through all index entries to pick up on variant titling possibilities.

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A Mudcat thread to continue exploring origins opinions and thoughts is here: History of Spirituals.

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