Southern Harmony: a Book of Tunes and Teachable Moments

In 2017, four Confederate monuments were removed from prominent perches in my home city of New Orleans.  A very contentious issue to be sure, many felt that the statues were a glorification of outrageous oppression.  Indeed, in my trips to the ancient worlds of Greece, Turkey, and Israel, I have seen many statues.  I can't really think of an instance in which they seem to serve any purpose other than veneration or affinity.  Gods, emperors, and even the comical and lascivious Satyr were carved in stone and set in bronze.  If you had a statue made, then these were people, characters, or deities that you wanted around.  When looking at the issue through that lens, how could it be conceivable that an African-American citizen would want to walk past a statue of Robert E. Lee every day, and if it's unfair for African-Americans to share their city with such relics, then why should it be fine for us whites?

Where does that leave Southern Harmony?  The uncomfortable reality is that this tune book (as most tune books of the time) were creations of white, antebellum Southerners.  What implications should this have on our love of the hymns?  What can we learn by resurrecting some of the more problematic hymns?  Can we be proud of the way hymnody has evolved over the last century-and-a-half?  Are all these hymns tainted by the scourge of slavery and the dehumanization of the "Other?"  Through an exploration of who these shape-noters were socio-economically, a look at the pervasive attitude of superiority evident in some of the hymns and how we can use that to gain perspective, a discussion of the overlap of black and white antebellum hymn traditions, and a homage to hymns that are neither explicitly or implicitly advocating bigotry, we find a tune book that can simultaneously warm our senses and convict our spirits.

Antebellum shape-note singers

Typical consumers of Southern Harmony were from the frontier.  Many couldn't read (Foote, 95).  These were not the Southern elite (Bruce, 93) in some sections of the Southeast, where the patrician slave-owners enjoyed sophisticated music; in the more depressed land of the Southern tune book, people had to sing or go without music (Jackson, 23).  Of all such tune books compiled in this era, only one was a slave-owner, and it was not our William Walker.

Their world-view and what it can show us

However, it would be foolish to paint Southern shape-note singers as paradigms of progressivism and tolerance.  Professor Lori Martin of Louisiana State University states that they benefitted directly or indirectly "from a system that refused to see the humanity of an entire group of people based upon a set of arbitrary distinguishing physical and cultural characteristics."  You don't have to dig very far into SH to find cringe-worthy texts.  "I sing a song which doth belong" (AN ADDRESS FOR ALL) contains these lines:

The princes high and beggars die, and mingle with the dust,

The rich, the brave, the negro slave, the wicked and the just:

The whole theme of the hymn is that we are all the same in our need of a savior, yet the poet makes a not at all subtle point to divide us all into very specific hierarchical categories, and "slave" surely is to be counted less than "rich" and "brave."

In  "O'er the gloomy hills of darkness" (MISSIONARY SONG), people of color are used to represent "less than":

Let the Indian, let the Negro,

Let the rude barbarian see

That divine and glorious conquest

Once obtain'd on Calvary.

A particularly outrageous example is "In de dark woods, no Indian nigh" (INDIAN CONVERT).  We hear a Native American's supposed first-person account of salvation.  There is a note on this page of  SH that the hymn was transcribed "almost verbatim" from the Native American himself.  Highly unlikely, since it is in perfect meter and rhyme, and in a shockingly stereotypical dialect:

God send he angel, take um care,

He cum he self and hear um prayer,

(if Indian heart do pray,)

He see me now, he know me here;

He say, Poor Indian, never fear,

Me wid you night and day.

Here is where I start to squirm a little in my seat.  If you were to ask a mid nineteenth-century shape-note singer about these hymns, he or she might tell you that they want to spread the good news to people of color and ask you what's wrong with that.  In other words, this is not overt hate speech used for the purpose of insulting and belittling.  However, it is obvious that the words to these hymns are arguably more sinister than outright racial epithets, because they reflect the "given" that people of color were not in any way equal to the writers of such verse.  Further, ponder the systemic racism perpetuated in this message: I am the superior white man who worships the one true God, and who offers you the religion that is best for you.

Kiri Miller, ethnomusicologist at Brown, having done much field work with Sacred Harp sings, has much perspective about how to address hymns such as INDIAN CONVERT.  Her writings on the subject come from conversations with Sacred Harp singers.  Being aware of songs can give a great history lesson on how far we have come in our shift of perception of people of color (Miller, 193-94).  One can replace Sacred Harp with Southern Harmony when Miller writes:

"Sacred Harp offers white Americans of whatever spiritual orientation the rhetorical means to address marginality, alienation, exile, and community through eighteenth-century Christian poetry, when other folkish repertoires might feel less authentic in their mouths (for example, the slave songs, black vernacular spirituals, and multicultural freedom songs that have become folk-revival staples)." (Miller, 199)

Their music as it relates to that of African-Americans of the time

In discussing the legacy of SH, it is also important to point out the cross-pollination that occurred between black and white hymn traditions of the time.  The jury is out on who borrowed from whom (not that it has to be one or the other), but the rich tradition of the slave song has to be in some part indebted to white spirituals such as the ones contained in Southern Harmony.  Eskew claims that the form of the white revival song (with it's refrains and repetitions) were borrowed in African-American hymns (FWPK).  Jackson asserts the same (244).  After all, before the Civil War, blacks and whites in the South went to the same churches and sang the same hymns (Music, Oxford Music Online).  These two hymn traditions were not divided until after the war, so they are products of the same origin (Sutton, 11).  However, as Professor Lori Martin asserts, just because slaves attended white churches did not mean that they shared the same beliefs and religious practices.

Perhaps not surprisingly, there are phrases that we associate with black spirituals that are present in white spirituals.  In "We have our trials here below" (CHRISTIAN PROSPECT), we find the phrases, "I feel no ways like getting tired," and "...my home is over Jordan."  Also, "How lost was my condition" (THE GOOD PHYSICIAN), refers to a "sin-sick soul."  Both traditions also contain multiple references to Jordan and Canaan.  In the case of the African-American tradition, these are fairly clear metaphors for freedom from slavery.  Likewise, if Stowe's commentary on Shaker hymnody (68-69) is applicable here, references to Canaan and Jordan by whites may allude to freedom from Old World religious oppression.

However, on the topic of who came first with these music and textual devices, African-Americans certainly did not have the same access to notation tools and publishing and, therefore, could not "claim" anything officially.  Further, there was not a flourish of African-American ethnomusicologists lining up to set the record straight.  The author, George Pullen Jackson, comparing the two traditions in 1933, makes this telling statement about "Roll, Jordan, Roll":

"...the Negro has taken liberties."

Attitudes that persist

Jackson's book was written more than 100 years after the first publication of SH.  The tone used to keep people of color in their place seems not to have evolved much in that 100 years.  Hopefully we have made much more progress in the years intervening.

But have we? In some ways, yes.  I believe almost anyone in the US today would be aghast to read some of the verses referenced above.  That means that SH can indeed provide a kind of progress report on how far we've come, right?  People who use racist language publicly face social ruin, just as Roseanne Barr is doing as I'm editing this writing.  That's the good news.  The bad news is that I just got into a Facebook argument with someone defending her.  All tweets aside, though, what about the subtler forms of oppression, such as white privilege? 

And what about the finger-wagging tone of the cautionary tales in Southern Harmony, which is the impetus for the Sacred Nine Project in the first place?  Concerning "Young people all, attention give" (LIVERPOOL), I know people personally who would not be appalled by these lines:

Death's iron gate you must pass through,

Ere long, my dear young friend;

With whom then do you think to go,

With saints or fiery fiends?

I have been on the receiving end of this kind of judgment from other Christians.  In the Sacred Nine Project I want to expose the verses that are not considered sing-worthy anymore, but whose tenets are very much alive and well, and have had a corrosive and suffocating effect on me.  There are still youth pastors who advocate for camps where people can cleanse themselves of their sexual orientation.  There are fathers who to this day believe that men are in authority to women.  There are civic leaders who are convinced that Jesus wouldn't have taken in the Syrian refugees had he lived today.

In short, Southern Harmony has taken the obvious monuments down.  The only way one could run across these shocking texts today would be in a dusty corner of a library, an obscure internet link that contains a facsimile of a yellowed manuscript, or at a Sacred Harp sing in the very unlikely event that someone would request one of these "taboo" tunes.  The only SH "statues" that can be found today are the intrinsically beautiful and moving hymns such as "Amazing Grace;" indeed, this hymn is further redeemed because of the much discussed subtext of the hymn, as explained on the Library of Congress website: John Newton's self-indictment of his grievous role in the slave trade.  "Wondrous Love" is another hymn with a great deal of other-worldly pathos. "Rock of Ages" and "Brethren We Have Met to Worship" all dance out the pages, enticing us to sing along. 

However, let's not forget that simply not singing these archaic selections does not mean we're not subtly harboring and perpetuating their negative energies.  Back to Roseanne, like a New York Times headline reads today, May 30, 2018: "'Rosanne' Is Gone, But the Culture That Gave Her a Show Isn't."  I hope the Sacred Nine Project can celebrate the beauty of these hymns, while shining a light, both on how far we've come, and also how far we have to go.