To Do This, You Must Know How: Music Pedagogy in the Black Gospel Quartet Tradition

Acknowledgments

[ vii ] We started sharing research back in 1980, based on a mutual interest in the African American gospel quartet tradition. Ray Funk was the third member of our original research team. Between the three of us, we located and interviewed hundreds of quartet veterans and spent hundreds of hours reviewing historical black newspapers on microfilm. In the late 1980s Ray put down his quartet work to concentrate on calypso music. Ray’s early quartet research is an essential component of this book, and we are grateful for his camaraderie and support. To Do This, You Must Know How traces major pathways of quartet music education from the halls of Fisk University to the mining camps of Bessemer, Alabama, and on to Chicago and New Orleans. The signi ficance of pedagogy in the black quartet tradition impressed itself on us early in our research. Primary school voice culture was a recurrent theme in our interviews with older quartet veterans. The fascinating subject of traditional quartet trainers in black communities also captured our attention. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, we addressed some of these themes, individually and collaboratively, in journal articles, record liner notes, monographs, and commemorative booklets. During the 1990s we set aside our quartet research to consider documentation on ragtime, blues, and jazz in minstrelsy and early black vaudeville. This resulted in our two previous book-length collaborations, Out of Sight (2002) and Ragged but Right (2007). The prominence of vocal quartets in the early development and popularization of African American music is clearly documented in both of these books, confirming that quartets were as fundamental to early-twentieth-century black musical culture as were ragtime pianists, blues queens, or brass bands. Acknowledgments [ viii ] Acknowledgments Vintage spiritual and gospel quartet recordings have been chronically ignored and even disparaged by many otherwise avid collectors of black vernacular music. A cult of personal taste, characterized by a predilection for “primitive” and secular recordings, has bled into scholarship . The first two editions of Blues and Gospel Records, published in 1963 and 1969, excluded recordings by the Fisk University Jubilee Quartet and Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet—two of the most influential black religious singing groups of all time—on the notion that they bear “little distinctively Negroid content.” Not until the 1982 third edition were the Golden Gates admitted; and finally, in the 1997 fourth edition, the ban on Fisk was lifted. We welcome these curative measures, as we readily acknowledge our extensive use of Robert M. W. Dixon, John Godrich, and Howard W. Rye’s indispensable discography. We are also grateful for Cedric J. Hayes and Robert Laughton’s Gospel Records 1943–1969. Among the early spiritual and gospel quartet veterans we interviewed , there was a shared notion of having taken part in something of value and significance—and sometimes a sense of relief that someone had finally shown up to acknowledge it. One old singer offered this greeting: “I knew you were coming. I didn’t know who you would be, but I knew you were coming.” These singers accepted us at face value and shared their remarkable stories. We established many lasting relationships with our quartet informants, but in the passing of time, death has claimed the majority of them. While we can no longer thank them in person, we seek to preserve their voices and their memory. We have been associated with the University Press of Mississippi for ten years now, and wish to extend our appreciation to Editor Craig Gill and his staff for their support. From the outset, we have enjoyed the benefit of a great team of readers in David Evans and Wayne D. Shirley. Their critiques have been challenging and helpful. We are indebted to good people at several libraries and archives. For thirty years we have benefited from the cooperation and assistance of the John Hope and Aurelia Elizabeth Franklin Library, Fisk University , Nashville. Special thanks to Dr. Jessie Carney Smith and Special Collections librarians Beth Madison Howse and Vanessa Smith. We have also enjoyed a long, rewarding relationship with the Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans, where curator Bruce Boyd Raeburn has supported our every effort. Through assistant curator Alma Freeman, we were able to join hands with the Microfilm [ ix ] Acknowledgments and Interlibrary Loan divisions of Tulane’s Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, where Hayden Battle, Jeannette Hunter, Patricia Windham, and...