Much of the following was originally posted here:

Subject: RE: Common Lyric: Jordan's River is Chilly
From: WYSIWYG - PM
Date: 09 Jul 05 - 02:57 PM

But I've done some editing/adding.

I learned some things from African Americans I worked with, and who were members of a close community I was part of in the 80's, that I think pertain to this discussion. The setting was one where people opened up in personal vulnerability-- it was my privilege to be part of an atmosphere where things were shared that were not normally "said outside the Black Community" (their words). Their voices stay with me to this day....

Later, my interest in the spirituals led me to many of the same viewpoints, from AA scholars in the field. I'll try to summarize below.

In addition to the north/south aspect of pronunciation, there's a socio-economic ("class") angle as well-- perhaps a stronger one than the regional angle.

A lot of pronunciation/dialect was "sanitized" (I prefer to think of it as censorship) as the slave-times culture of African Americans moved north, and as individuals began to prosper. For a variety of reasons documented by African American writers then and since, the AA people working hard to gain respect in middle-class America were reluctant to be associated with the times and culture of the slaves, for a long, long time.

It had not been long since free Blacks could be (and often were) picked up by slave hunters under the Fugitive Slave Act, and so they were subject to re-enslavement, "punishment" by death, death under slavery itself, and/or separation from families.

This realtime need to "assimilate" was later enculturated into the succeeding generations, even after slavery itself was abolished. This is understandable, given the treatment poor African Americans continued to receive in most of the USA.... it was thought that one way to protect children from harm was to raise them "mainstream."

Many, many cultures do this "mainstreaming" to one extent or another. A longstanding issue in the Jewish Community, for example, is, "Who is a Jew?" How "Jewish" is one? Who is "entitled" to claim the cultural heritage? It's a way cultures allow oppression, imposed by the surrounding culture, to divide them.


This is one reason why I'm glad to see the work Azizi does to bring ALL African American culture to light. I'm pleased to see how she brings observed customs forward, even though they may not be exactly the customs she participated in, growing up. It tends to reduce the divisions within AA culture, that she embraces it all.


Another factor affecting pronunication and textual content of spirituals-- In common with many cultures, as material moved into hymnals, a lot of these sorts of changes became somewhat set in stone and are now assumed to be "right." In fact, no hymns that began in a folk tradition can ever really be documents as "right," tho they may be "copyrighted."

The floating and zipper verses-- and indeed the spirituals themselves as a genre-- MOST especially defy "right" versioning, as they tended to originate in the creativity and deep feeling of the moment. Songs sprang up in a day's work or a night's lament, and a few-- very few comparatively-- were transcribed. Many more were passed around orally, and folk-processed into "songs" as we would recognize them today. But the folk-processing still continues.

It's just a very, very fluid genre operating in a pluralistic culture that has a lot of difficult and/or unexamined realities. At the end of the day, I think most singers do what they do with these, with some intentionality guiding the interpretive choices they make. And I think there are "good" reasons behind these choices, no matter what the eventual choice may be.

~Susan