NEWS FEATURE: Exhibit shows importance of African-American sacred music in American life

c. 1997 Religion News Service CLEVELAND _ A life-size cutout of singer Marian Anderson looms large in a new exhibit at the Western Reserve Historical Society. Rightly so. Even when not listening to her soaring, powerful contralto, Anderson’s story is not only gripping but emblematic of American life. Here was a singer rejected from a […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

CLEVELAND _ A life-size cutout of singer Marian Anderson looms large in a new exhibit at the Western Reserve Historical Society. Rightly so. Even when not listening to her soaring, powerful contralto, Anderson’s story is not only gripping but emblematic of American life.

Here was a singer rejected from a Philadelphia music school simply for being black. And in 1939, after she had educated herself in Europe and gained honors on the concert stage, the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let her sing at their Constitution Hall in Washington.


Things eventually turned out well: Protest against the DAR was so strong _ Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the group _ that Anderson was invited to sing at an Easter concert at the Lincoln Memorial. More than 75,000 people attended.

Revisiting that experience provides a historical perspective. Was this only 57 years ago? Could the seemingly most patriotic of women reject someone who praised the Lord in song?”Wade in the Water: African-American Sacred Music Traditions,”the museum version created by the Smithsonian Institution of the popular, 26-part 1995 National Public Radio series, opens the book on these questions, and on the importance of such music to every facet of the African-American experience.

It tells not only the Anderson story but also those of such performers as Roland Hayes, the lead tenor of the famed Fisk Jubilee Singers, who, like Anderson, went to Europe to study and in the 1920s was the leading African-American singer to perform classical repertoire on the concert stage; and the Roberta Martin Singers, who created the choral sound of classic gospel music that took root in the 1940s.

Sacred music has always been an essential element of each chapter in the African-American story, accompanying the stories told about slavery, bolstering the civil rights movement, and even shaping the early history of secular pop and jazz artists such as Dinah Washington and Aretha Franklin.

But in this exhibit, the music itself is the star of its own moving story, told in a standing scrapbook of 300 photos, dozens of historical accounts and rotating tapes of music.

After Cleveland,”Wade in the Water”is scheduled to travel next to the Miami-Dade Public Library, from Feb. 22 to April 20. Other exhibit sites are under consideration, according to the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibit office.

Exhibit curator Bernice Johnson Reagon, best known as a member of the a cappella quintet Sweet Honey in the Rock, recommends it for everyone who doesn’t know a gospel song from a spiritual. (Spirituals are the songs created during slavery; gospel music is post-slavery).”There’s no way you can understand the culture of this country if you don’t understand the African-American contribution to this culture,”Reagon said. “We’re trying to bring primary research to a wider public. And I do not mean just white people. There’s not the fluency with the culture that we should have as an educated people.” In traditional style, the exhibit sets out historical signposts. It begins with a rare, 1930s silent film of former slaves re-enacting a”ring shout”dance borrowed directly from African traditions.


It reveals songs that chronicled black history when oppressed slaves had to sing what they could not say, and when the mainstream press failed to cover major black events. For example, it took a song by Sojourner Truth to carry word into the community that black soldiers volunteered for duty in the Civil War.

And it tells how a church song went through a short rewrite to become first a labor and then civil rights anthem,”We Shall Overcome.” But it also goes philosophically to the heart of a song-based culture. “How do you survive slavery?”Reagon asks in an introductory section of the exhibit.”They (slaves) created music strong enough, deep enough, rich enough to transform the air they breathed.” Her thoughts echo those of Roland Hayes, who wrote in the 1940s. “The Aframerican could easily have disintegrated, losing self-respect, initiative, hope (but) there was a divine purpose in his singing. “His religion, his song, became a working principle; the promise had to be all around him.” The exhibit also divides sacred music into schools of gospel, spirituals, a cappella quartet traditions and a wide range of contemporary applications. It’s here that gospel can be seen as a powerful form that struggled with approval in its own black churches. Spirituals were choral-style songs that launched Anderson, Paul Robeson and Leontyne Price into concert halls and onto Hollywood sets.

And it shows how quartets such as Kings of Harmony, the Four Great Wonders and the Gospel Soulenaires were a few beats away from the doo wop era of rock ‘n’ roll. Some artists struggled with the idea of singing sacred music outside of church. Others, such as Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, are credited with treating that divide as if it didn’t exist.

Reagon’s definition of sacred music includes words such as”revered,””hallowed”and”a sense of the divine.”But, like the exhibit, she remains flexible. “It is if it is,”she said.

And Duke Ellington’s take on the topic shows a drum is as good as a harp in worship. “Every man prays in his own language and there’s no language that God does not understand,”he once said.

MJP END SNOOK

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