One way to understand the history of American popular music is to view it as a series of roughly three-decade cycles in which one genre or major stylistic trend stemming from African American musical culture becomes the dominant force for the duration of the cycle, influencing most other popular musical developments. In the first decade the new style or genre emerges, often seemingly “out of nowhere,” as something close to folk music, often controversial, and fighting its way to recognition as the “new thing” while steadily gaining white patronage. In the second decade it becomes “big business” and achieves a kind of classic status and consolidation into one or a few standardized formats, while emphasizing individual virtuosity and creativity in performance and songwriting. In the third and final decade it diversifies into sub-genres, often through fusions with other styles, and begins to become self-conscious and self-reflexive. As the next new style or genre emerges, the old one recedes to a secondary but established status, sometimes revivalistic or even reactionary but maintaining a core of proponents and supporters and a recognizable identity for a good number of years, though mostly among white Americans and internationally. Such cycles could be seen as having been initiated by minstrelsy emerging in roughly the 1830s (in this case only indirectly from African Americans, most of whom were still in bondage and unable to promote and exploit their musical creativity to any significant extent), spirituals in the 1860s, ragtime in the 1890s, jazz in the 1920s, rhythm & blues/rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s, and hip hop in the 1980s. (The fact that no comparable genre has emerged in the present decade might indicate that the cyclic succession has finally come to an end.) In the pattern described here, spirituals have the distinction of being the only non-secular genre to initiate one of these cycles. Maybe that is the case because the cycle began during the decade encompassing the Civil War, whose effects continued to be felt for decades to come. There certainly was plenty of secular music during this cycle, but much of it was pulled toward themes of moralism, tragedy, sentimentality, and either hope or nostalgia for a simpler and more peaceful era.
Perhaps because of the non-secular character of much of its music, the cycle spearheaded by the spirituals is the least studied of all. To be sure, certain individual performers and songwriters, such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers and James Bland, have been written about, and there has been much published research over the years about the spirituals as songs, their meaning, musical characteristics, origins, and degree of European or African influence. But the present study by Sandra Jean Graham is one of the few overviews of the era dealing with the spirituals as popular and commercial music. Therefore, it will contain revelations for many of its readers, who might otherwise view the spirituals merely as folksongs arranged and sung by jubilee groups such as the Fisk singers.
Graham begins her study with an overview of what the book will cover, followed by a chapter dealing with the spirituals as folksongs created by African Americans and their “discovery” by the rest of the country during the 1860s. Because the songs underwent little commercial development during this decade, the discussion is fairly brief and covers familiar ground. It is in the remaining chapters, covering the 1870s and 1880s and going a bit into later decades, where the book takes on its greatest interest and is most original. She shows how the Fisk singers, whose initial success is well known and well documented, were quickly followed by jubilee groups from other black educational institutions, as well as non-affiliated groups, whose careers are much less well known today but were often of equal importance. In doing so, Graham makes a strong case that the Fisk singers themselves were inspired to sing spirituals by the white Hutchinson Family singers, who were some of the first to include these songs in their programs. She shows how George White, T. F. Seward, and the Fisk singers themselves “refined” and formalized the spirituals of the former slaves and made them suitable for commercial exploitation and acceptance by a broader audience, and then shows how the Fisks were quickly followed by the Hampton Institute Singers, the Tennesseans, the Hyers Sisters, Wilmington Jubilee Singers, New Orleans Jubilee Singers, Old Original North Carolinians, and many other groups, each with a distinctive approach to the material. These groups performed variously in churches, auditoriums, theaters, Chautauquas, and open-air spectacles. Almost immediately, minstrel shows, an extension of the dominant popular musical format of the previous cycle but now performed by both black and blackface entertainers, began to incorporate and parody jubilee groups and their spirituals, while jubilee singers in turn adopted more and more secular material into their repertoires. This sacred-secular interplay and juxtaposition was accompanied by the creation of what the author calls “commercial spirituals,” which often contained a mixture of sacred and secular language, material, and performance style (dancing, instrumental accompaniment, humor). These songs had known authors, were composed for financial profit, and typically used some of the stylistic, formal, and thematic conventions of the folk spirituals. Some 270 of them were published between 1873 and 1886, with a few being created as late as the 1940s. Some were so popular that they became more or less traditional in later decades.
The author tries to reconstruct how these songs, particularly the commercial spirituals, were performed, using twentieth-century recordings by the likes of white singer-banjoist Harry C. Browne as evidence. In fact, there are many more such recordings that could have been used as evidence, ones by white mainstream quartets and hillbilly string bands, black secular and gospel quartets, and both black and southern white gospel singers well into the twentieth century. Graham presents case studies of four commercial spirituals, showing their varying relationships and degrees of similarity to folk spirituals, and takes a look at certain individuals of the era who were prominent as songwriters, performers, and/or producers, especially Sam Lucas and his song “Every Day’ll Be Sunday, Bye and Bye.” The study of this song could also be extended into the twentieth century, when it continued to be performed in different versions and styles by hillbilly artists, black folk singers, and both black and white gospel groups, spurred on by Thomas A. Dorsey’s copywriting and publication of a version in 1947.
There is much else of interest in this book, including the incorporation of folk and commercial spirituals and jubilee singers into “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” shows, black cast plays such as Out of Bondage and Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad, and mammoth open-air spectacles like South Before the War, Black America, and Darkest America. While black expressions were largely made to fit the expectations of whites, who after all supplied most of the financial patronage, the jubilee industry increasingly gave support and steady employment opportunities to black performers, composers, producers, and other business men and women, allowing them to gradually extricate black entertainment from the minstrel show format and its associated stereotypes. This book is recommended to anyone with an interest in American folk and popular music, and it should provoke many follow-up studies that explore its themes in even greater depth as well as their extensions into the twentieth century.
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[Review length: 1221 words • Review posted on September 5, 2019]