Revival Spiritual Songs
The revival spiritual songs represent a further advance of the song movement which brought forth the folk-hymns, toward the folk level. As the eighteenth century expired the post-Wesleyan religious tide was high and the camp meeting, the significant institution which became the cradle of the revival spiritual songs, was born. One may therefore get a clearer insight into this new song development if one recalls the character of its early environment. One might well remember, for example, that the camp meetings began and remained in nature surroundings, in the wilderness; that they were immense holiday gatherings;[4] that they thus took on the free-and-easy aspects of the pioneers as a whole rather than of any particular class; and that they were completely free from denominational and all other authoritarian control.
Bearing all this in mind it is perhaps easier to understand how the folk-hymns—grown up in a less boisterous environment—failed to satisfy the new conditions. At the camp meetings it was not a question of inducing every one to sing, but of letting every one sing, of letting them sing songs which were so simple that they became not a hindrance to general participation but an irresistible temptation to join in. The tunes of the folk-hymns were adequate. But the texts (Watts, Wesley and their schools) still demanded a certain exercise of learning and remembering which excluded many from the singing. The corrective lay in the progressive simplification of the texts; and it was in the main this text simplification which brought about and characterised the type of camp-meeting song which was called, in contradistinction to all other types, the spiritual song.
The methods of song-text reducing are familiar. When the American youth sings
Found a horse-shoe, found a horse-shoe,
Found a horse-shoe, just now;
Just now found a horse-shoe,
Found a horse-shoe just now
he is not only following a practice of the early spiritual song makers and singers—his horse-shoe song itself is a parody of a spiritual in this collection—but he is singing in the infinitely older manner of his race. He is singing an organically constructed tune and refusing to let words interfere with it, a tendency which may be observed from ‘Sumer is icumen in’ to the nineteenth century songs of sailors and to other work-songs and children’s songs, like that of ‘The Big Bad Wolf’, today.
The text simplification in religious folk-songs began modestly. The variety of spiritual song which is closest to the folk-hymn is that in which each short stanza of text (four short lines usually) is followed by a chorus of the same length, as for example:
On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand
And cast a wishful eye,
To Canaan’s fair and happy land
Where my possessions lie.
Chorus
I’m bound for the promised land,
I’m bound for the promised land;
O who will come and go with me?
I’m bound for the promised land.
The verse was mastered probably by comparatively few singers, even though it may have been “lined out” by the song leader. But the whole assemblage had its chance to join lustily in singing the chorus.
A simpler form of spiritual song went directly into a refrain after the first text couplet:
O when shall I see Jesus
And dwell with him above,
And shall hear the trumpet sound
In that morning.
And from the flowing fountain
Drink everlasting love,
And shall hear the trumpet sound
In that morning.
Then came the chorus:
Shout O glory
For I shall meet above the skies
And shall hear the trumpet sound
In that morning.
An offspring of this same ‘Morning Trumpet’ song may serve to illustrate the next step in simplification, one in which the singers, instead of using new poetic lines in subsequent stanzas, were satisfied with slight variations of those already sung:
Oh, brother, in that day
We’ll take wings and fly away,
And we’ll hear the trumpet sound
In that morning.
Oh, sister, in that day
We’ll take etc.
Oh, preachers, in that day,
and so on, with “leaders,” “converts,” etc. without end.
The next step is seen in those songs where one short phrase is sung three times and then followed by a one-phrase refrain:
Where are the Hebrew Children,
Where are the Hebrew Children,
Where are the Hebrew Children?
Safe in the promised land.
These songs were sometimes called “choruses,” for they are often really nothing else,—detached choruses, the text varied a bit from verse to verse, functioning as complete songs.
The last word in brevity of text is where simply one short phrase or sentence, sung over and over, is made to fill out the whole tune frame as a stanza. ‘[Death, Ain’t You Got No Shame]’, in this collection is one example among many. Such songs as this were too meager to be welcomed warmly into the old song books. They survive therefore chiefly in oral tradition. But meagerness of text is not, we must remember, any criterion of the worth of a religious folk-song. ‘Hebrew Children,’ for example, the song from which I have just cited a stanza, is at once extremely chary of words and rich in tonal beauty. This becomes evident when one sees Annabal Morris Buchanan’s arrangement of it for modern chorus.
It was the spiritual songs, rather than the hymns or the ballads, which appealed subsequently most deeply to the negroes and have reappeared most often among the religious songs of that race. In White Spirituals I presented twenty different negro songs and traced them, both tunes and texts, directly to as many early religious songs of the white people. In the present collection upwards of 60 songs have been found to be the legitimate tune-and-words forebears of the same number of negro spirituals. (Incidentally, all of the songs just used here to illustrate the steps in text simplification have been borrowed by the black man and made over.) These negro offspring songs are mentioned by title, and information as to where I found them is given in the notes under each of the songs concerned.[5]
The tunes of the secular folk-songs came into the religious environment—into the folk-hymns and spiritual songs—with little change. What one could sing by himself to secular words all could sing in a gathering to religious words. The new surroundings made only one added demand,—that the singers indulge in fewer vocal liberties than they might have enjoyed when singing the same tunes in their homes and alone. I refer to those liberties in personal interpretation, a quaint characteristic of individual folk singing which has given the collectors their numerous variants of one and the same song. Group singers had now to agree on one version of a tune and stick fairly closely to it. I say fairly closely, for the religious singers allowed but few of their tunes to become completely standardized. This will become clear when one studies the variants of certain folk-hymn and spiritual-song tunes in this compilation.