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

Chapter Four. The “Alabama Style” and the Birth of Gospel Quartet Singing in New Orleans

[ 273 ] The “Alabama Style” and the Birth of Gospel Quartet Singing in New Orleans Bessemer, Alabama, that’s right on the outskirts of Birmingham. And that’s a singing town, see, all through there. You can get four kids playing marbles under a lamp-post, and they’ll stand up from that marble game and sing you out of town. —Edward“Pastor”Thomas Gilbert Porterfield, he came here with a group, but he decided that he could stay down here. And he stayed down here; he liked New Orleans, and he went on to instruct, to teach other groups a style of singing they called the“Alabama style.” Well, he brought that; Porterfield brought that Alabama style here. —Lawrence“Fat”Nelson New Orleans is a universally celebrated musical homeland with a deep but underestimated heritage of African American vocal quartets . For the better part of a century, a cappella quartets thrived in black New Orleans; more prevalent than brass bands, they were also more directly connected to folk music traditions, and more receptive to evolving vernacular fashions and expressions. A period of heightened ChapterFour The “Alabama Style” and the Birth of Gospel Quartet Singing in New Orleans [ 274 ] religious quartet singing began in New Orleans during the early 1930s under the influence of quartet trainers migrating from Alabama, who introduced a dynamic new style of harmonizing that touched off a “quartet fever” in the city’s black working-class neighborhoods. Successfully integrating Negro Spirituals with standard choral precepts , the Original Fisk University Jubilee Singers established a popular model for perpetuating black sacred harmony traditions. Long before the “Alabama style” arrived in New Orleans, Negro Spirituals were being sung by a broad range of quartets in arrangements that reflected the Fisk ideal. This standardizing methodology was tempered by improvisational “barbershop” harmonizing, a legacy of black recreational quartets. With the infiltration of Jefferson County, Alabama’s community-based quartet training culture, quartets in New Orleans developed a subtler blend of voice culture, vernacular innovation, and religious fervor. Vintage press reports document a vigorous African American church- and community-based quartet tradition in New Orleans by the late 1880s, with groups such as the Sunflower Quartette, White Rose Quartette, and Golden Leaf Quartette appearing at local church entertainments , lodge meetings, and house parties.1 In the fall of 1889, Mount Zion Methodist Episcopal Church on Jackson Avenue was the scene of a “grand vocal quartette contest concert,” and according to the black New Orleans Weekly Pelican, the Golden Leaf Quartette “won the medals in the contest.”2 Barroom Quartets and Barbershop Style The essence of black recreational quartet singing was a spontaneous approach to chording that came to be known as “barbershop,” or, in the New Orleans vernacular, “barroom.” Like the classic repertoire of Negro Spirituals, the “deep-rooted racial groping for instinctive harmonies” that informed the black barbershop phenomenon took shape in plantation slavery.3 Complaining about the persistence of barbershop quartet practices at the dawn of the twentieth century, an African American newspaperman described the characteristic “self-made harmonies, with their oft-recurring ‘minors,’ diminished sevenths and other embellishments . . . . This barber shop harmony . . . is nothing more or less than a musical slang. . . . Their chief aim is to so twist and distort a melody that The “Alabama Style” and the Birth of Gospel Quartet Singing in New Orleans [ 275 ] it can be expressed in so-called ‘minors’ and diminished chords. The melody is literally made to fit their small stock of slang-chords, instead of the chords being built around the melody.”4 During the early decades of the twentieth century, black New Orleans was teeming with recreational quartets, as would-be singers from every social stratum gathered at barrooms, barbershops, schoolyards , church halls, fraternal lodges, and street corners to try themselves at “cracking up a chord.”5 These impromptu quartets, with their improvised harmonies, stood at the portals of jazz. Retrospective accounts of their exploits abound in the memoirs of early New Orleans jazzmen. Jelly Roll Morton reminisced about his boyhood quartet, which “specialized in spirituals . . . with all kinds of crazy ideas in the harmony.”6 Louis Armstrong cited “barroom quartets, who hung around saloons” as a source of inspiration for his own Back-of-Town neighborhood youth quartet: “We used to hear the old timers sing around a bucket of beer—them beautiful chords—and we dug it. We was Little...