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

Introduction: “Say Four Come . . .”

[ 3 ] Early-twentieth-century African American sacred harmony singing, spiritual and gospel, was, in a sense, shaped by the interaction of two historical impulses. The first was to perpetuate folk music traditions, a cornerstone of black cultural identity; the second was to master standard Western musical and cultural conventions, the formalizing principles behind artistic harmony singing. Engagement between the two impulses was never more synchronized than in the early decades of the twentieth century. Accordingly, a robust community-based quartet training culture came forth to breathe new life into black religious harmony singing. Without basic instruction, it is not easy to arrange voices in good, close four-part harmony—certain principles must be observed. As an aging quartet veteran once put it: “To do this, you must know how.” The history of pedagogy in black singing traditions under conditions of slavery remains out of sight; nevertheless, it is clear that fourpart harmony was not suddenly imposed on the songs of slavery at Fisk University in 1871. James Bland’s 1880 “plantation melody” “In the Evening by the Moonlight” preserves a nostalgic image of antebellum southerners enchanted by the “weird” harmonies and arresting syncopations of slave singing. More credible commentary is preserved in Swedish writer Fredrika Bremer’s 1853 travelogue, Homes of the New World, which gathers letters and diary entries from her 1849–51 sojourn in the United States. On southern ventures, Bremer went out of her way to observe slave music and culture, and she concluded that the “peculiar songs” of the slaves constituted “the only original people’s songs which the New World professes.”1 Bremer often heard slaves singing four-part harmony. On May 14, 1850, she described the services at a slave church in Savannah, Georgia: Introduction “Say Four Come . . .” Introduction [ 4 ] “The choir . . . sang quartettes, as correctly and beautifully as can be imagined.”2 Eleven days later she “heard the Negroes singing” in Columbia , South Carolina, and noted: “their hymns sung in quartette were glorious. . . . They had notebooks before them, and seemed to be singing from them; but my friends laughed, doubting they were for actual use.”3 In 1851, at a tobacco factory in Richmond, Virginia, Bremer “heard the slaves, about a hundred in number, singing at their work . . . they sung quartettes, choruses and anthems, and that so purely, and in such perfect harmony and with such exquisite feeling, that it was difficult to believe them self taught. But so they were.”4 The “official” integration of Negro Spirituals with formal choral music disciplines is a legacy of the Original Fisk University Jubilee Singers . The initial push for music training was inspired by their startling commercial success. It was encouraged by Antonin Dvorák in a highly publicized 1893 newspaper interview in which he discussed his convictions about the potential for development in African American folk music.5 The “Dvorák Statement” was a mandate to American composers to cultivate an artistic interpretation of Negro folk music. It helped to engender pride in the Negro Spiritual, and it mobilized efforts to provide quality music training across a broad spectrum of African American society. The variety and abundance of black vocal music training available early in the twentieth century suggests a bold socio-cultural experiment. There were countless initiatives, often conceived as personal commitments , conducted on both national and local levels by music educators of both races. Such efforts were duly noted and appreciated in the press and elsewhere; but there is little commentary about the movement as a whole. The common thread was the dissemination of knowledge of vocal music and four-part harmony singing among the African American masses, in order to raise the standard of musical culture. The surge in black religious quartet singing activity that occurred in the South in the 1920s owed much to this vocal music education movement. This is the story of an outflow of singing instruction that was remodeled and recycled to serve a larger constituency and a rapidly evolving music form. The connection between school-based instruction and community-based training is an underlying theme. Community trainers stressed many of the same principles as the formal voice culture class, embellishing them with innovations discovered over decades of impromptu quartet harmonizing. Introduction [ 5 ] By the 1880s recreational quartets had created a stock of “slang” chords, “slides,” “turns,” and harmonic “tricks” that came to be known as barbershop harmony.6 In...