Music is magical. Its melodies, its rhythms, its vibrations: quicken weariness, banish loneliness, ease restlessness, regulates behaviors.
Music communicates to the soul.
My newest book, BEST-LOVED NEGRO SPIRITUALS, compiled and edited by Nicole Beaulieu Herder with Ronald Herder (2001) packages the old songs of the souls of our black and blues people which comforted them, affirmed them as beloved of God, and that molded them from distinct tribes, into a wholly new creature, African Americans, a new people, who had survived the fires of hell to sing!
Writes Paul T. Kwami, Director, Fisk Jubilee Singers, in "Foreword," 2001:
"Although I knew about slavery, my understanding of its effect on people was very limited. It was not until my student days at Fisk that I realized the powerful influence of enslavement on people and their music, and how African musical elements traveled from African musical culture to the Americas through the slave trade. Just as Africans in Africa created and performed music to express their feelings, tell stories, entertain one another, accompany their work, and worship God, so did the slaves on colonial America's plantations. While capture and servitude hardened their lives, music and religion remained with them as sources of strength.
"A vast body of songs in the oral tradition was born on the plantation, yet much of this music was lost forever, because no one wrote it down. The realization soon grew that keeping this vital music alive depended on preservation of the spiritual through performance, and on its proper documentation through scholarly study. The pioneering concert tours of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers since 1871 helped accomplish the first goal, so positive was their reception in performance of spirituals world wide, from Edinburgh , London and Berlin, to Ceylon, Melbourne , Hong Kong.
"This activity was later supported by the exemplary preservation work of scholars John Wesley Work , author of 'Folk Songs of the American Negro'--one of the earliest serious treatments of the subject--by his son, John Wesley Work, II, author of 'American Negro Songs and Spirituals' and by Natalie Curtis-Burlin whose 1918 publication 'Negro Folk-Songs' set a new standard for precise musical notation of an entirely oral art form. Today, the significant musical literature represented by the single name 'spiritual' stands as a unique chapter in America's rich cultural heritage."
Friday, April 7, 2017
SPIRITUALS
Music is magical. Its melodies, its rhythms, its vibrations: quicken weariness, banish loneliness, ease restlessness, regulates behaviors.
Music communicates to the soul.
My newest book, BEST-LOVED NEGRO SPIRITUALS, compiled and edited by Nicole Beaulieu Herder with Ronald Herder (2001) packages the old songs of the souls of our black and blues people which comforted them, affirmed them as beloved of God, and that molded them from distinct tribes, into a wholly new creature, African Americans, a new people, who had survived the fires of hell to sing!
Writes Paul T. Kwami, Director, Fisk Jubilee Singers, in "Foreword," 2001:
"Although I knew about slavery, my understanding of its effect on people was very limited. It was not until my student days at Fisk that I realized the powerful influence of enslavement on people and their music, and how African musical elements traveled from African musical culture to the Americas through the slave trade. Just as Africans in Africa created and performed music to express their feelings, tell stories, entertain one another, accompany their work, and worship God, so did the slaves on colonial America's plantations. While capture and servitude hardened their lives, music and religion remained with them as sources of strength.
"A vast body of songs in the oral tradition was born on the plantation, yet much of this music was lost forever, because no one wrote it down. The realization soon grew that keeping this vital music alive depended on preservation of the spiritual through performance, and on its proper documentation through scholarly study. The pioneering concert tours of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers since 1871 helped accomplish the first goal, so positive was their reception in performance of spirituals world wide, from Edinburgh , London and Berlin, to Ceylon, Melbourne , Hong Kong.
"This activity was later supported by the exemplary preservation work of scholars John Wesley Work , author of 'Folk Songs of the American Negro'--one of the earliest serious treatments of the subject--by his son, John Wesley Work, II, author of 'American Negro Songs and Spirituals' and by Natalie Curtis-Burlin whose 1918 publication 'Negro Folk-Songs' set a new standard for precise musical notation of an entirely oral art form. Today, the significant musical literature represented by the single name 'spiritual' stands as a unique chapter in America's rich cultural heritage."
