The Routledge History of Social Protest in Popular Music

Jonathan C. Friedman, Jonathan C. Friedman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136447280
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire sociale

The major objective of this collection of 28 essays is to analyze the trends, musical formats, and rhetorical devices used in popular music to illuminate the human condition. By comparing and contrasting musical offerings in a number of countries and in different contexts from the 19th century until today, The Routledge History of Social Protest in Popular Music aims to be a probing introduction to the history of social protest music, ideal for popular music studies and history and sociology of music courses.

Part I Historical Beginnings, War, and Civil Rights

1 Signifying Freedom Protest in Nineteenth-Century African American Music

Burton W. Peretti

DOI: 10.4324/9780203124888-1

Figure 1.1 Slaves dance to music on a Southern plantation.

Two significant artifacts bracket the history of African American music in the nineteenth century: Richard Allen's Collection of Spiritual Songs and Hymns and James Wel-don Johnson's and John Rosamond Johnson's song, Lift Every Voice and Sing.

In 1801, Allen, a former slave and a Methodist minister in Philadelphia, published his hymnal, the first ever compiled by an African American. Blending Allen's own verse with popular lyrics by Isaac Watts and other whites, the hymnal expressed the evangelical Christian dichotomy of good and evil. It did not, however, specifically mention slavery or emancipation. The Collection was a milestone in the founding of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. The AME Church was created by Allen and others in reaction to racial discrimination by white Methodists. In services, the hymnal was utilized in a culturally African American manner. Its contents were “lined out” by deacons, and congregants repeated the lines in response. Allen's hymnal inspired an urban form of the African tradition of call and response. Similarly, the hymns' images of sinners burning in hell and Christians finding salvation informed parishioners' views of slavery, which still flourished south of Pennsylvania. After 1810, Allen grew pessimistic about race relations and helped to plan efforts to colonize free blacks in West Africa. In these ways, the general sentiments of sin and salvation in the hymns took on political meaning within the AME.¹

In 1900, James Weldon Johnson, principal of the Stanton School in Jacksonville, Florida, read his new poem “Lift Every Voice and Sing” at the school's annual Lincoln's Birthday celebration. Slavery now was extinct, and African American churches, schools, and other institutions had proliferated. “Lift Every Voice and Sing” indirectly paid tribute to Booker T. Washington, the guest of honor that day, whose national prominence was unprecedented among African Americans. Five years later, James's brother, John Rosamond Johnson, a successful songwriter and performer, set the poem to music. In 1919 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) proclaimed the Johnsons' song “the Negro National Anthem.”²

The differing circumstances surrounding Allen's hymnal and the Johnsons' anthem encapsulates a century of change for African Americans. As the 1800s dawned, slavery was the norm of black life. Allen witnessed the revolution in Haiti, but also the failure of revolts in the United States and the westward expansion of slavery. After Allen's death in 1831, though, political and military conflict led to the destruction of slavery and a new legal status for all black people. The Johnson brothers in 1900 enjoyed freedoms, wealth, and opportunities that Allen had never known. Nevertheless, despite these changes, the United States in 1900 remained discriminatory and lethally hostile to blacks. After the demise of Reconstruction, segregation, lynching, and unequal justice ruled the South, and discrimination and racism prevailed nationwide.

As a result, the anthem, like Allen's hymnal, became a coded statement of protest. The hymnal couched its concerns in the rhetoric of religion, while the Johnsons' song optimistically stressed social uplift. Black music throughout the 1800s generally is devoid of overt protest. The music cannot be said to illustrate the diverse and articulate activism of black abolitionists, officials, and community leaders in that century.³ Instead of explicitly addressing grievances, music of the 1800s encoded and emboldened black political and social movements for equality.

Music, like religion, both supported and transcended daily struggle, offering less of a diary of protest than a rich cultural and emotional crucible in which the struggle was forged. The struggle altered black life profoundly. Shackles were broken, families migrated from plantations, urban black communities expanded, levels of education grew exponentially, and skilled black professionals multiplied. Music evolved in step with these revolutionary events, but also remained a repository of cultural memory. Still-popular spirituals evoked the miseries of slavery, but also reminded black listeners of the persistence of poverty, limited education, segregation, and backwards rural life as the twentieth century dawned. The double-faced nature of music, looking backward to lingering horrors and forward to a radically improved future, helped to make it a powerful presence in African American culture.

The AME church's story illustrates religion's central role in formulating an articulate black musical voice. As a young slave, Richard Allen became a Methodist because “the plain simple gospel suits best for any people.” Like white Methodists, slaves and free blacks were stirred by the emotional immediacy of the hymns and their message of personal salvation. In Allen's Philadelphia church and in other AME parishes, loud and spirited singing predominated. Parishioners set hymn verses to well-known tunes, but also improvised their own melodies. White observers were struck by their spontaneous vocal response to the deacons' line readings. One noted a “quicker and more animated style of singing,” while another was haunted by verses sung “in a loud, shrill monotone” and the “agonizing, heart-rending moaning” that concluded the readings. Men and women often took turns in singing the responses. Individual singers, moved by the worship, offered their own musical contributions. This emotionalism was the urban equivalent of the spiritual rapture experienced by blacks (as well as whites) in the southern rural revivals of the early 1800s.⁴ In the North, Christianity inspired African Americans to condemn slavery on the basis of Christian values. The hymnal also abetted the rise of literacy among politically-minded African Americans.

The growth the AME church and its music took place within the context of increased white hostility and the expansion of slavery. Racist “scientific” theories of human difference undermined ideals of equality espoused by Enlightenment philosophers. Political parties and working men's associations empowered average white men to the detriment of nonwhites, whom they demonized as unworthy competitors. Slavery was abolished in the North, but black residents lost voting and civil rights and suffered from de facto segregation. In the South, the cotton boom expanded slavery. Prosperous planters no longer bothered to apologize for slavery as a necessary evil. Black leaders, such as Richard Allen, were moved to advocate African colonization, ostensibly to convert natives' souls, but mainly to create havens for refugees from American racism.

Positive developments also shaped black musical expression. Show business emerged as an industry, especially in the North, and talented performers found receptive black and white audiences. Small black economic elites of New York, Philadelphia, and other cities patronized classical performers such as the soprano Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, the tenor Thomas Bowers, and the trumpet player and conductor Frank Johnson. The AME and other churches produced concerts of sacred music, and trained composers wrote classical works. During the 1820s, the African Grove Theater in Manhattan pioneered all-black musical theater that entertained patrons of both races.⁵

The black working class experience also proved significant. Competition for jobs turned northern cities into racial tinderboxes, which often exploded into riots. The southern migrant and civic activist David Walker attacked southern slavery in his Appeal (1829), but its ferocity resulted from the daily indignities Walker endured in Boston.⁶ Black militancy was suppressed violently by working-class whites, and it was also symbolically neutralized by the latter's favorite theatrical genre, blackface minstrelsy. White minstrel performers' crude mimicking of mannerisms, language, and bodily movement ridiculed African Americans, but also paid a curious backhanded compliment to black music and dance. Working-class race relations would continue to shape popular music.

Since overt protest would have been fruitless, black performers instead exploited minstrelsy to advance their careers. The dancer William Henry Lane, who gained fame as Master Juba, was the sole African American performer to conquer the antebellum stage. The amazingly acrobatic Lane helped to invent modern tap dancing, and his high-stepping dance routine, known as “patting Juba,” shaped black dance nationwide. Lane toured Europe and entertained royalty before his premature death in 1852.⁷ Other dancers, musicians, and composers gained some renown, becoming pioneers in African American commercial music. Popular entertainment militated against social activism, but it provided black performers with unprecedented fame and visibility, and it gave them opportunities to communicate in code with a national audience.

In these same years, race relations were aggravated by growing disputes over slavery. Rebellions such as the Denmark Vesey conspiracy of 1822 and Nat Turner's insurrection in 1831 led white masters to fear slave religion. In these rebellions, plots were hatched during religious services and cited the crusading language of hymns and the Bible. Masters suspected that music served as a coded plotters' language. Among the dozens hanged with Denmark Vesey was a man falsely accused of sounding a trumpet to incite revolt. Nat Turner's preaching and reading of the Bible compelled fearful southerners to outlaw literacy, religious gatherings, and hymn singing among slaves.⁸

Slave music had faced repression for centuries. Caribbean masters regulated music-making beginning in the 1600s. After the Stono Rebellion of 1739, South Carolina prohibited slaves' use of “drums, horns, or other loud instruments, which may call together, or give sign or notice to one another of their wicked designs or purposes.”⁹ By the 1800s, all slave states had passed such laws. In the wake of Nat Turner's revolt and the rise of northern abolitionism, southern whites developed paranoia about slave insurrection that, itself, helped to precipitate the Civil War.

Little study of slave music was made before 1861. Nevertheless, eyewitness accounts document African American musical expression in the South. This testimony indicates that slave songs often expressed not rebellion, but simple endurance. People in bondage were forced to work without wages for six long days every week. Work songs alleviated some of the burden of their work in varied settings. At docks, slave stevedores bellowed out improvised verses while handling boat cargo. Most slaves were employed on cotton plantations, and accounts indicate that many of them were forced to sing against their will. Masters and overseers mistrusted silent workers and believed that singing improved their productivity and morale. Due to this coercion, “field hollers” and “shouts” did not merely assist repetitive physical work; they also expressed despair. As Frederick Douglass memorably wrote, “it is a great mistake to suppose [slaves] happy because they sing. The songs of the slave represent the sorrow, rather than the joys, of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by tears.”¹⁰

Though they might have resulted from coercion, field hollers and shouts diverted slaves from drudgery and stoked their creativity. Call and response was widely practiced; a work-gang leader sang lines of verse, and gang members improvised answers. Some field hollers revisited the plots of popular trickster tales—stories about Br'er Rabbit and other animals who outwitted powerful oppressors. Trickster tales might be called secular analogues to the coded messages of salvation found in hymns. Field hollers also made reference to biblical tales of liberation involving Moses, liberator of the Hebrews, and Christ the Savior. Other work songs, though, expressed a loss of hope, enumerating slaves' grievances against God and master. People sold “down the river” sang laments on the way to their new plantations. By telling it like it really was, though, such songs subverted whites' demands that slaves sing cheerfully. As a former slave insisted, these “sorrow songs” “can't be sung without a full heart and a troubled spirit.”¹¹

Seasonal events inspired work song genres such as the celebrated corn shucking songs. In December, slaves would gather to husk mountains of corn ears. White families picnicked on porches and listened to the corn shuckers, who “make the forest ring with their music.” Verbally creative work leaders called out verses that described the event itself:

All them pretty girls will be there …

They will fix it for us rare …

I know that supper will be big …

I think I smell a fine roast pig …

A supper is provided, so they said …

I hope they'll have some nice wheat bread, / Shuck that corn before you eat.¹²

Such light-hearted lyrics suggest what the slaves probably sang to themselves when they did not work. During Sunday r...