Rough draft for a workshop. My humble opinions only.

~S~

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In keeping with our Diocesan commitment to a "Green" convention this year, this is a paperless workshop. Except for the items you can see on display, there are no bibliographies, no songbooks, no hymnals, and no choral arrangements. Just leave me your email address to get a copy of the links to all of the resources, or a recorded CD copy of today's workshop.

I'll be starting with a few comments, and then we'll get to the songs themselves.

I consider myself not an expert on spirituals, but a fascinated student. Our workshop today features several of my own heroes in passing on the spirituals tradition that flowed out of slavery, and that still flows on in our time today.

The opportunity to lead music for an informal Saturday evening service came my away about 10 years ago. The parish decreed that my husband would add a service, but they forgot to line up music for it. I was mortified (and a bit irritated) when our Lord told me that the music I'd been playing at home all that year was to SHARE, and that I was the musician He'd picked out.

I was just voracious for all types of music for what became an unusually informal Saturday Night Service. I'm an acoustic musician, not a pianist..... The congregation that gathered for that service had not had good experiences with Sunday morning formality. My quest for songs led me through so many genres! One of them was spirituals. It's a deep well, and once you start drawing from it you can stay in that depth for a long, long time.

As I planned this workshop, what's come to mind over and over again has been the way spirituals are a wonderful form of "praying without ceasing."

Spirituals, like few other forms of praise music as we know it today, tend to stick in the head, take root, and grow from our own thoughts and feelings. This was intrinsic to their original creation, and they were further molded by the "folk process" into the essential and unforgettable tunes and verses that have come down to us in our time. Whatever the cause for their creation, it's our Lord's grace that has preserved them as they have popped out of individuals' memories and into the stream of culture that we can dip into now.

Some of these-- a precious few of the thousands of powerful songs that circulated among plantations and shipping lanes-- popped into the print culture thanks to musicologists' attempt to collect them during and after slave times. The classic Allen Slave Songs collection is one of these efforts to transcribe a form of music unlike any other its listeners had ever heard.

Some songs were seen as potential sources for financial support for early African American universities. Set into European harmonies for wealthy white audiences, these are some of the songs the Fisk Jubilee Singers still perform today.

Other songs stayed in the hearts and throats of the grandmothers rocking their babies in the years that followed emancipation; a precious few more of these songs were collected along with other southern folk music in the 1920's and 30's when musicologists of that time traveled in the rural south with their wax cylinder recording machines and, later, reel to reel tape recorders.

Some of the songs popped out of memory in the cauldron of colliding cultures that produced the blues. Many of the early bluesmen first sang publicly in churches, lining out songs they might have learned as children from their grandmothers, or through a hymnbook. Many "gospel" songs written out in these hymnbooks actually started as spirituals before they were regularized into the tempos and texts we have in our books today.

Some of the spirituals these bluesmen knew became the bases for their blues songs; the pentatonic tonality certainly sprang from the spirituals and some texts are clearly adaptations of spirituals for worldly entertainment. The "floating" verse (or "zipper" verse) text form of spirituals is found in the blues, too, as is the call/response pattern from the early work songs that make up a large part of the spirituals slaves used to do their work, communicate important news, build community, and preserve African culture right under slaveholders' noses.

Throughout all these time periods, the grace of God was there, too, as the unimaginable horror of slavery and racism were expressed on a daily basis in words of the abiding love of God for His whole creation.

It is the strength of the love and grace our Lord, instilled in His suffering people, as they gave voice to their struggles and their hopes, that give the spirituals the power to carry our thoughts and prayers Heavenward in such a beautiful, raw way.... and that strength is at our disposal today. The spirituals tell the whole range of human experience, in text and in tune-- not just the pretty part, the convenient part, the expected part..... No: the hard parts, the unlovely parts, the painful parts-- all these are held up as they are, brought before the cross, and redeemed when we lift them in song.

These songs have popped out of memory into operatic arrangments and choral arrangements, too, although It's my opinion that the slaves who created them would find our regularizing of them into rigid, "authoratative" versions quite odd, and, I suspect, sad. Because one thing these songs ARE is ALIVE, dynamic, ever-changing, ever-adaptable. That was what lent them strength a whole people could depend upon!

ANY struggle can be expressed in the spirituals, using either the texts we have inherited or texts created on the spot. That's how they were originally created-- they are a living opporutnity for expression, not a dead form to study or imitate.

In a little bit, I'll be playing a few of my heroes' versions from CDs and tapes, and then we'll sing a few, and make up a few verses ourselves.

The melodies will come back on the day each of us needs them, and any words or groanings we need will be there too-- allowing the Spirit to give voice to our deepest prayers is a lovely, interactive way to pray. Or we can just let a loved and remembered tune run on in our heads all day (while we do our work, care for one another, and bear our burdens) is truly to pray without ceasing.

THE SONGS AND THE SINGERS:

(to come)

CLOSING: JOE CARTER'S REMARKS (It's our shared heritage)