The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience

Chapter 4: Christine and Katherine Shipp: In a Chromatic Light

[ 105 ] 4 Christine and Katherine Shipp In a Chromatic Light D o i remember when christine and katherine made those records?”1 Luella Shipp’s voice, already coursing with a vitality that defied her age, now leaped in volume. “Honey, I was there.” Her radiance matched the front room where we sat, a room ablaze with dozens of Christmas cards propped up among smiling snapshots of nieces and nephews and surrounded by gift boxes still encased in holiday ribbons and bows. Together they formed a glittering, glowing domestic shrine. By contrast, a damp February cold pierced the house. We huddled around a small electric heater. Between us lay a cassette machine, and as it played the Shipp family’s 1939 recording session, Luella sang along to each number. Throughout the morning, the phone rang as friends, aware of this visit, checked in to see if all was OK with her. Later someone stopped over, peering hard through the doorway for signs of danger. Though Luella lived on a near-empty street with just a few shuttered houses, her Byhalia, Mississippi , neighborhood stayed watchful on her behalf. On May 13, 1939, Luella, together with her husband John Shipp, opened the door of this same house to other strangers also in search of musical information : New York–based folklorist Herbert Halpert and his locally appointed colleague and guide, Abbott Ferriss, a member of the Mississippi unit of the “ [ 106 ] Federal Writers’ Project. Earlier that spring, Eri Douglass, state director of the project, and a former music teacher herself, had gotten in touch with Ethyl Bowen, a prominent white Byhalian who brought the Shipp family singers to her office’s attention. Mrs. Bowen knew their singing from their matriarch and director Mary Shipp, who had previously been in her domestic employ. Moreover, for two years, the family sharecropped a farm that Bowen owned. The Shipps’ singing at church services, anniversaries, and school events in that area prompted Douglass to tell Bowen, “We want you to give Mary Shipp a pencil and a paper to write down the names of the songs that she and her family are familiar with . . . we want all kinds of songs, not just the religious songs. Ask her to be thinking up all the old songs she learned when she was a girl.”2 Bowen submitted several lists, and Douglass added the Shipps to Halpert and Ferriss’s schedule of stops. Five days earlier the two researchers had begun working together, starting in northeastern Mississippi. They made some of their first recordings with white singer Theodocia Bonnet Long, born in 1856, who performed nearly two dozen numbers that included several centuries-old British ballads, a playparty piece she learned during the Civil War from a Confederate lieutenant, and a scathing anti-Lincoln polemic her mother had written. Set to the tune of “Barbara Allen,” it sarcastically addressed “Old Honest Abe,” calling him “an arrant fool, a party tool, a traitor and a Tory.”3 That same day, Halpert and Ferriss also recorded Birmah Hill Grissom, who promised—and nearly delivered—“half a wagon bed of songs.”4 Her repertoire ranged from camp meeting spirituals to ring plays, including a piece she learned from an itinerant singing master to practice the notes of the scale. That night, at a nearby African American church, song leader Lula Morris cheered her fellow choristers to “Sing, people, with nothing in front and nothing behind. Just sing from your souls.”5 Later that week, they gathered from singer Laura Clifton a holler for calling cows, followed by one for calling chickens, and finally, a song for calling husbands. They also recorded several old-time fiddlers, including John Alexander Brown. Brown, with his bony fingers encircling his violin, his flowing beard, and wisps of white hair, formed the very picture of a rustic patriarch. Indeed, Brown hurriedly quit the recording session after performing his pieces, for “he had left his oxen out in the field.”6 The following day, Halpert and Ferriss arrived at Luella’s door in Byhalia. The researchers had just come from Miller, Mississippi, a farming community near Byhalia, bringing with them five members of John Shipp’s family whom they planned to record that afternoon: his mother, Mary Shipp, chapter 4 [ 107 ] forty-seven, and four of his siblings, who made up the Shipp family quartet: brothers Isaac (twenty-three) and Allison (fifteen), and their sisters Christine (twenty) and...