James Weldon Johnson's Modern Soundscapes

Chapter 4: Cosmopolitan travels: Diplomacy, Translation, and Performance in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Der weisse Neger, 1928) and God's Trombones

96 tion of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” a commemoration of Emancipation that began modestly, on the Johnson family home’s front porch in Jacksonville, and grew to national prominence through its rehearsal by the voices of Jacksonville children emanating outward, as a process that occurs through the body. He emphasizes his customary practice of walking it out—using the rhythm of his body to inspire and fill the lines of his lyric. There is a second part to the lyric’s completion through the body: of the hundreds of children and students who “kept singing” the song, it is also “fervently sung” (ATW, 156) by some whites, confirming its physical transference through the bodies of its listeners and performers and therefore confirming their alteration through the interracial transfer of song—“every voice.” The “immanence” of the American Negro, it seems, is expressed through whites and blacks; their voices “lift” and “carry” their listeners to this fact through song: I got my first line:—Lift ev’ry voice and sing. Not a startling line; but I worked along grinding out the next five. When, near the end of the first stanza, there came to me the lines: Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us. Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us. the spirit of the poem had taken hold of me. I finished the stanza and turned it over to Rosamond. 4 Cosmopolitan travels diplomacy, translation, and performance in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Der weisse Neger, 1928) and God’s Trombones The jazz that has been brought over to Europe stands in the same relationship to real Negro music as, for example, the jargon of a Polish Jew who has spent but a few years in America and passes himself off as being a hundred per cent American stands to pure English. —Frederick Delius, foreword, Der weisse Neger In Along This Way, Johnson describes his composi- c O S m O P O l I t a N t r a v e l S 97 In composing the other two stanzas I did not use pen and paper. While my brother worked at his musical setting I paced back and forth on the front porch, repeating the lines over and over to myself , going through all the agony and ecstasy of creating. As I worked through the opening and middle lines of the last stanza: God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, Thou who hast brought us thus far on our way, Thou who hast by Thy might Let us into the light, Keep us forever in the path, we pray; Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee, Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee . . . I could not keep back the tears, and made no effort to do so. I was experiencing the transports of the poet’s ecstasy. Feverish ecstasy was followed by that contentment—that sense of serene joy—which makes artistic creation the most complete of all human experiences. When I had put the last stanza down on paper I at once recognized the Kiplingesque touch in the two longer lines quoted above; but I knew that in the stanza the American Negro was, historically and spiritually, immanent; and I decided to let it stand as it was written . (ATW, 154–55) While staging the content of his works on culturally unstable or ambiguous boundaries such as that of black internationalism, Johnson reached for connections through the travel, reinterpretation, and collaboration demanded by his works, developing his reach into a major technique as interpolation. His practice was significant in its innovation because of the limited perception of black culture’s role in America, divided into two contrasting but complementary attitudes. On the one hand, liberal-minded whites were eager to recognize “Africanness” in black artists and acknowledge their own “white inferiority complex” in relation to this perception of black cultural authenticity.1 On the other, white supremacists declared the fundamental, always discernible, difference of white and black. Responding to both of these stances, many black writers felt that working-class cultural forms should be left behind in favor of prior “American” traditions. 98 c h a P t e r f O u r Johnson wanted to convey something more complex about...