Using a conventional Western prosodic pattern rather than the spirituals’ structure suggests that Johnson’s purpose is to incorporate these African American literary jewels into the Western canon by naturalizing the model of the specially anointed poet-singer. We see this motive elsewhere in Johnson of directly comparing African American poetry with Romantic canonical models, such as in his introduction to The Book of American Negro Poetry where he admiringly situates Dunbar among Burns and others in the Romantic tradition while demeaning Wheatley for following the models of Pope and Gray rather than Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, or Shelley (Johnson 1922). We also see Johnson’s employment of the Romantic model of the specially gifted poet-singer as an un-self-conscious natural vessel of poetry. While Johnson describes the spirituals as the voice of a race, he also believed that “the far greater part of them is the work of talented individuals influenced by the pressure and reaction of the group” and consistently utilizes the term “bard” for these “individual talented makers” (Johnson and Johnson 1925, p. 21). This mode of citing the spirituals in modern and postmodern frameworks preserves them as historical references points, living creative material, and sources to cite and preserve within the conventions of the mainstream canon. Johnson formally, thematically, and emphatically inserts African American poetry into the canonical English language tradition. At the same time, he fuses both traditions by honoring the solitary poet as an inspired individual while emphasizing the essential importance of the group in African American culture as integral to social, communicative, and aesthetic processes and life itself.
Spirituals as lyric poetry record the enslaved poets’ ability to overcome adversity and illuminate the strength of pre-Emancipation society in achieving unprecedented cultural production under circumstances of unimaginable hardship. Viewing them mainly as folk music from a misty past disrespects and misrepresents their significance as living cultural artifacts, as records of a historical moment whose sad legacy prevails, as a major body of triumphal poetry resisting oppression, and as timeless expressions of the human capacity to overcome and move on. The finest examples stand up to anything produced in the American poetry tradition. As illustrious American artefacts, Du Bois accurately called them “the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side of the seas.” In the spirituals, Mark Twain believed that “America has produced the perfectest flower of the ages.” If preservation, citation, recreation, and allusion are regarded as hallmarks of literary and cultural canonization, the spirituals have earned their hallowed place.
NOTES
1 1. For early discussion of African music, see for example, the commentary by Prince Henry the Navigator cited in Epstein, p. 3, n. 3; and the report from sea captain Richard Jobson and excerpts of Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa in Southern, Readings in Black American Music, 5–6. For discussion of communication, singing, and dancing during the processes of kidnap and travel on slave ships, see Rediker’s The Slave Ship: A Human History, and Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in American Slavery by Katrina Dyonne Thompson.
2 2. These adjectives are frequently used in the early commentaries on the spirituals such as those cited here. For example, Higginson (1870) refers to them as “barbaric,” “quaint,” and “plaintive.” George MacDonald (1873) calls them “pathetic,” “rude,” and “comic.” T.L. Cuyler cited by J.B.T. Marsh (1875) describes them as “wild melodies.” Seward (1872) calls them “strange” and “childlike”.
3 3. Some major collections of the spirituals from both early and later periods include Slave Songs of the United States, ed. Allen et al. (1867); Christy’s Plantation Melodies: Originator of Ethiopian Minstrelsy and the First to Harmonize Negro Melodies, ed. E.P. Christy (1851); Higginson’s Army Life in a Black Regiment and Other Writings (1870); The Story of the Jubilee Singers; with Their Songs, ed. J.B.T. Marsh (1875); Old Plantation Hymns: A Collection of Hitherto Unpublished Melodies of the Slave and the Freeman, with Historical and Descriptive Notes, ed. William R. Barton (1899); Religious Folk-Songs of the Negro as Sung at Hampton Institute, ed. R. Nathaniel Dett (1927); The Oxford Book of Spirituals, ed. Moses Hogan (2002); The Books of American Negro Spirituals, ed. James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson (1926); Jubilee Songs: As Sung by the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University, ed. Theo. F. Seward (1872); The Carolina Low-Country, ed. Augustine T. Smythe et al. (1931); Freedom’s Lyre: or, Psalms, Hymns, and Sacred Songs, for the Slave and His Friends, ed. Edwin F. Hatfield (1840); and Folk Song of the American Negro, ed. John Wesley Work (1915). With a few exceptions like the volume by Hogan, note the dominant time frames of collecting and publishing the spirituals. Some landmark critical texts (representing widely diverse perspectives coming from multiple periods) on the history and origins of spirituals include The Spirituals and the Blues by James H. Cone (1999); Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of African American Cultural Interpretation by Jon Cruz (1999); Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War by Dena J. Epstein (1977); Negro Slave Songs in the United States by Miles Mark Fisher (1953); Wade in the Water: The Wisdom of the Spirituals by Arthur C. Jones (1993); Afro-American Folksongs: A Study in Racial and National Music by H.D. Krehbiel (1913); The Singing Campaign for Ten Thousand Pounds: Jubilee Singers in Great Britain by Rev. Gustavus D. Pike (1875); Protest and Praise: Sacred Music of Black Religion by Jon Michael Spencer (1990); Deep River and the Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death by Howard Thurman (1975); Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers: How Black Music Changed America and the World by Andrew Ward (2000); Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry (2008) and A History of African American Poetry by Lauri Ramey (2019); extensive writings in numerous books written and edited by Eileen Southern; and the indispensable and comprehensive Black Song: The Forge and the Flame: The Story of How the Afro-American Spiritual was Hammered Out by John Lovell, Jr. (1972). It would also be remiss not to mention the invaluable Chapter XIV, The Sorrow Songs, in The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois (1903).
4 4. Ramey 2008, pp. 102–103.
5 5. Ramey 2008, pp. 48–49.
6 6. Johnson and Johnson 1925, p. 15.
7 7. The editorial apparatus of Slave Songs of the United States (ed. Allen, Ware, and Garrison) acknowledges that these are mere approximations that fail to adequately reproduce the spirituals. In the Introduction, Allen wrote: “The best we can do, however, with paper and types … will convey but a faint shadow of the original…. [T]he intonations and delicate variations of even one singer cannot be reproduced on paper. And I despair of conveying any notion of the effect of a number singing together” (1867, pp. iv–v). In a letter to the editor of Dwight’s Journal of Music, Lucy McKim (Garrison) provides this naturalistic comparison: “[t]he odd turns made in the throat; and the curious rhythmic effect produced by single voices chiming in at different irregular intervals, seem almost as impossible to place on score, as the singing of birds, or the tones of an Æolian Harp” (21 [November 8, 1862]: 254– 255).
8 8. “Come to Jesus” and semantically similar phrases appear often in the spirituals, including “Steal Away” whose refrain contains the phrase “steal away home to Jesus.” The use of “Come to Jesus” in stanza 6, line 2, is followed by “Sinnahs tremblin’” in line 3, which evokes both “Steal Away” and “Were You There?”.