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

Chapter Two. “Time, Harmony, and Articulation”: Quartet Training and the Birmingham Gospel Quartet Style

[ 113 ] “Time, Harmony, and Articulation” Quartet Training and the Birmingham Gospel Quartet Style If you could talk, I could train you, put you to singing! —James Allen Jefferson County, Alabama, incorporating the city of Birmingham and the neighboring towns of Bessemer and Fairfield, was a cradle of black gospel quartet singing. Grassroots music pedagogy, presided over by community-based quartet trainers, was the critical factor behind the intense outbreak of religious harmony singing that took place there after World War I. This traditional music instruction was directly connected to modes of formal education practiced in segregated public schools. Early in the twentieth century, voice culture was a routine part of primary and secondary school curricula in many parts of the South. In the spirit of John Work II, African American teachers wedded lessons in the formalities of harmony singing to the Negro Spirituals and staged musicales and pageants in which spiritual singing was prominently featured. In Birmingham dynamic, enlivening music instruction and heartfelt spiritual singing took place at Industrial High School.1 ChapterTwo “Time, Harmony, and Articulation”: Quartet Training, Birmingham Style [ 114 ] Spiritual Singing at Industrial High School Industrial High was Birmingham’s first African American four-year high school. It was founded in 1900 by an African American, Arthur Harold Parker, who served as its principal for the next forty years.2 Principal Parker cultivated an educational environment conducive to the development of outstanding vocal and instrumental music, both among his students and in Birmingham’s wider black community. Thousands of young people received foundational training in harmony singing at Industrial High School; many more non-students were touched by “community sings” held in the school auditorium. The mainstream Birmingham News took note of Parker’s far-seeing attitudes regarding the value of racial folk music as early as 1903, when it reported that during a visit by the superintendent of public schools, “Principal Parker marshaled the entire school into the largest room” for an informal demonstration of unaccompanied vocal music: “It was natural music sung by note and thoroughly melodious. A number of old plantation songs were rendered to the delight of the visitors. It appears that the idea which has taken hold upon many latter day Negroes of eschewing the old time Negro songs has found no lodging place with the instructors of this school, who insist that the pupils, while they can also sing popular and up-to-date selections, shall not forget the old plantation songs.”3 In 1914 Industrial High School hosted a Summer School for Negro Teachers that included a course titled “Music: Vocal including Public School Methods of Teaching Plantation Melodies.”4 Parker had an expansive, even visionary concept of black musical traditions; “plantation melodies,” especially Negro Spirituals, were central to his efforts to instill pride in the black cultural heritage through music. In later years he was able to claim: The singing of the Negro spirituals by our pupils has brought national fame and the pupils have given coast-to-coast broadcasts of this typical American music. . . . [M]usic has played a large part in building commencement programs. For June 1934, the theme was “Some Achievements of the ‘American Negro’”; a whole section of the program was devoted to Negro music. Various types of music, including the “St. Louis Blues,” were sung by the class, and a critical analysis was given “Time, Harmony, and Articulation”: Quartet Training, Birmingham Style [ 115 ] of each type. . . . In order to show the phases of dramatics taught in the school, the program for January 1932 was made up of a pageant, a one act play and, believe it or not, a miniature blackface minstrel show.5 Industrial High School’s commitment to perpetuating the Negro Spirituals was eloquently expressed in a paper read at commencement exercises in 1914 by R. Ernestine Diffay, one of the school’s locally celebrated student singers: When the High School began its work in music no Negro melodies were sung in the churches of our city and some unfavorable comments were made upon the constant placing of [plantation] melodies on the school program, both at the musicales and at the commencement exercises. But these dear old songs have proven irresistible and every objection has hushed. In hours of trial and temptation what balm can heal so well as, “Lord, I Want to be a Christian.” When our daily burdens grow heavy and we begin to...