If You Don't Go, Don't Hinder Me: The African American Song Tradition (review)

This short but eloquent and pedagogically useful book consists of four essays revised by the author from lectures given at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The first essay, "Twentieth-Century Gospel: As the People Moved They Sang a New Song," traces the evolution of gospel music by briefly visiting the lives of central figures. The first of these, Charles Albert Tindley, wrote music that welcomed the stream of blacks who moved to the city during the Great Migration. A meticulous discussion of Tindley's famous song "Stand by Me" demonstrates how gospel quickly conjoined oral tradition and the Western notion of fixed composed music. Thereafter, Reagon discusses the contributions of Thomas A. Dorsey, Roberta Martin, Pearl Williams-Jones, and Richard Smallwood.

The second essay, "The African American Congregational Song Tradition: Deacon William Reardon Sr., Master Songleader," is the only chapter in which the overt subject matter is explored in more detail than one can find elsewhere. Congregational singing offered migrants from country to city continuity in musical style, and thus helped them face their new lives by being able to vividly recall the past, just as gospel aided adjustment by embodying the new urban realities. In this chapter Reagon alternates between biographic narrative and her memories of Reardon's funeral. In the third essay she moves back in time to discuss "Spirituals: An African American Communal Voice." Her combination of crisp scholarly narrative with passionate opinion in treating this fiercely complicated subject amazed and humbled me. She notes that "once performing spirituals from the concert stage became a commodity, an open dialogue was played out in practice" (p. 87). I know I will quote her persuasive dismissal of G. P. Jackson's carefully researched but ultimately wrong-headed derivation of black tunes from white sources (pp. 77-84).

The last essay deals with gender issues, the intersection of autobiography and biography, and intimate analysis of folk lyrics. Reagon describes how the life work of three African American women of the past became a source of strength in her "development as an African American woman, singer, fighter, and scholar" (p. 100). Bessie Smith, of the Georgia Sea Island Singers, was a "breath of fresh air in a stagnant church-based dialogue on morals with little accounting for the sexually pressured reality of girls' and women's lives" (p. 116). Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman also served as models for Reagon. Her careful and flexible analyses of song lyrics associated with each woman refract on the specific songs, on the subtleties of African American lyric expression, and on traditional poetry in general.

Footnotes are few in this book, the bibliography brief, and musical transcriptions absent. None of this matters, because the real topic is Reagon's personality and spiritual life as revealed in her manifold connections to song. "At this point we are not talking about songs as music. We are talking about what people believed you needed in order to be a whole human being" (p. 66). This short book serves to remind us that no deployment of postmodern theoretical apparatus can measure up to honest and vigorous reflection coupled with clarity concerning whose voice is being heard at a given moment.