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Spirituals, Freedom Songs, and Lieux de Mémoire: African-American Music and the Routes of Memory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Peter J. Ling
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Extract

In countries where the history has not assumed the same didactic role in forming the national consciousness, the history of history need not burden itself with such polemical content. For example, in the United States, a country of plural memories and diverse traditions, historiographical reflection has long been part of the discipline. Different interpretations of the American Revolution or the Civil War may involve high stakes but do not threaten to undermine the American tradition because, in a sense, there is no such thing, or if there is, it is not primarily a historical construct. In France, by contrast, historiography is iconoclastic and irreverent.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 24 , October 1999 , pp. 213 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

Notes

1. Nora, Pierre, “General Introduction: Between Memory and History,” in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol. 1, Conflicts and Divisions, ed. Kritzman, Lawrence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 4Google Scholar.

2. Kammen, Michael, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991)Google Scholar. This book was the third in a series which began with Kammen, 's Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978)Google Scholar and A Machine That Would Go of Itself (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986)Google Scholar, as well as a collection of essays, Selvages and Biases: The Fabric of History in American Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987)Google Scholar. Given that both Nora and Kammen were at least partly inspired by imminent bicentennials, someone should compare their work.

3. “Lieux de Mémoire in American Culture” conference at the University of Savoy, Chambery,France,April 1997Google Scholar.

4. Nora, , Realms of Memory, 4, 7Google Scholar.

5. Nora, , Realms of Memory, 5–6Google Scholar.

6. Kammen, , Mystic Chords of Memory, 35, 59Google Scholar.

7. For a fuller review of Kammen's work, see Ling, Peter, “Michael Kammen's Commemoration of the Americanist Tradition,” Journal of American Studies 27 (1993): 249–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. The fear was not confined to France. Consider, for instance, the antipathy to American popular culture manifest in the 1930s among the British intellectuals who supported F. R. Leavis's Scrutiny.

9. Shapiro, Henry D., Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

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13. Nora, , Realms, 1–2Google Scholar.

14. Nora, , Realms, 3Google Scholar. Walter Benjamin's comment that the storyteller makes his recollection of experience into “the experience of those who listen to his tale” captures the collective, contingent, interactive nature of this process, in his essay, “The Story Teller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations, trans. Kohn, Harry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968), 77Google Scholar.

15. Nora, , Realms, 7Google Scholar.

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17. Boyes, Georgina, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1993), 15Google Scholar.

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19. Quoted in Harker, Dave, Fakesong: The Manufacture of English “Folk-Song,” 1700 to the Present (Milton Keynes, U.K.: Open University Press, 1985), 180Google Scholar.

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22. See Hunter, James Davidson, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic, 1991)Google Scholar; and Bolton, Richard, ed., Culture Wars: Documents from Recent Controversies in the Arts (New York: New, 1992)Google Scholar.

23. Stuckey, Sterling, “Through the Prism of Folklore: The Black Ethos in Slavery” (first published in Massachusetts Review 9 [1968])Google Scholar, in Going Though the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 18Google Scholar.

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27. Levine, Lawrence W., Black Culture or Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 158Google Scholar.

28. Major older works include Johnson, Guion G., A Social History of the Sea Islands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1930)Google Scholar; Johnson, Guy B., Folk Culture on St. Helena Island, South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1930)Google Scholar; Parrish, Lydia, Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands (1942; rept. Hatboro, Pa.: Folklore Associates, 1965)Google Scholar; and Turner, Lorenzo, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (1949; rept. New York: Arno, 1969)Google Scholar. More recent scholarship includes Jones-Jackson, Patricia, When Roots Die: Endangered Traditions on the Sea Islands (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987)Google Scholar; and Twining, Mary and Baird, Keith, eds., Sea Island Roots: Studies in African Cultural Continuities in Georgia and South Carolina (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

29. Major historical works on African-American culture in this area include Creel, Margaret, A Peculiar People: Slave Religion and Community Culture Among the Gullah (New York: New York University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; and Joyner, Charles, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984)Google Scholar. On singing in particular, see Hawley, Thomas E., “The Slave Tradition of Singing Among the Gullah of Johns' Island, South Carolina” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Maryland–Baltimore, 1993) (DAI ref. 9324164)Google Scholar.

30. Stuckey, , “Prism of Folklore,” 4 n. 6Google Scholar.

31. For accounts of Highlander and of its projects, see Glen, John, Highlander: No Ordinary School, 1932–1962 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Horton, Aimee, The Highlander Folk School: A History of the Development of Its Major Programs Related to Social Movements in the South (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1990)Google Scholar; and Tjerandsen, Carl, Education for Citizenship: A Foundation's Experience (Santa Cruz, Cal.: Emil Schwartzhaupt Foundation, 1980)Google Scholar. For Clark, Septima, see her Echo in My Soul (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1962)Google Scholar, and, with Brown, Cynthia S., Ready Within: A First Person Narrative — Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1990)Google Scholar. I describe the slow development of these classes in Ling, , “Local Leadership in the Early Civil Rights Movement: The South Carolina Citizenship Education Program of the Highlander Folk School,” Journal of American Studies 29 (1995): 399–422CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32. Interview with Guy Carawan, Highlander Educational Center, New Market, Tennessee.

33. I use the concepts of vernacular and official cultures expounded by Bodnar, John in Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. The political use of folk music is discussed in the following: Denisoff, Serge, Great Day Coming: Folk Music and the American Left (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Lieberman, Robbie, “My Song is My Weapon”: People's Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Cantwell, Robert, When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996)Google Scholar. Lomax, 's liner notes to Guy Carawan Sings, Volume 2, Folkways FG 3548 (New York, 1959)Google Scholar, are reprinted as Lomax, Alan, “The ‘Folkniks’ — and the Songs They Sing,” Sing Out! 9 (1959): 30–31Google Scholar.

34. All quotations from an undated report of Guy Carawan (probably late February 1960) in Highlander Folk School Papers, Social Action Collection, State Historical Society of Wisconsin (hereafter cited as HP-SHSW), microfilm reel 34, sheets 2–7. See also Carawan, , Ain't You Got the Right to the Tree of Life: The People of Johns Island, South Carolina — Their Faces, Their Words, and Their Songs (1966; rept. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989)Google Scholar. Thomas Hawley, during his doctoral research on the Johns Island spirituals in 1989 (a year after Carawan's most recent interviews), was similarly told by members of the Senior-Lites that the old way of singing was no longer appreciated in local churches (Hawley, , “Slave Tradition,” 191Google Scholar). It is also worth reflecting that at precisely the time Carawan is decrying the abandonment of tradition by African–American youth, young black musicians were developing via Gospel and rhythm and blues the rock and roll that was to be the dominant popular music of subsequent decades.

35. Cf. Lischer, Richard, The Preacher King: Martin Luther King and the Word that Moved America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 28–32Google Scholar. Lischer compares his Sustainer preacher typology to that of Paris, Peter, “The Bible and the Black Churches,” in The Bible and Social Reform, ed. Sandeen, Ernest (Philadelphia: Scholars Press, 1982), 136–44Google Scholar, and that of Mays, Benjamin, The Negro's God (Boston: Chapman and Grimes, 1938), 14–15Google Scholar.

36. HP-SHSW reel 34, sheet 1.

37. Cantwell, Robert, Ethnomimesis: Folklife and the Representation of Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 7, 16Google Scholar.

38. Burne, Charlotte S., The Handbook of Folklore (London: Sidgewick and Jackson, 1957)Google Scholar, as cited by Boyes, , Imagined Village, 9Google Scholar.

39. Toelken, Barre, The Dynamics of Folklore (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 33, 51Google Scholar.

40. Posen, I. Sheldon, “On Folk Festivals and Kitchens: Questions of Authenticity in the Folksong Revival,” in Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, ed. Rosenberg, Neil (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 130–36Google Scholar; quotation, 135.

41. HP-SHSW, reel 34, sheet 8; see also Southern Regional Council Papers, ser. 6, Voter Education Project, microfilm reel 181, sheets 728–833.

42. Memo, Guy Carawan to Myles (Horton) and Connie (Conrad) on work in the South since 1959 (HFS Papers, reel 7, sheets 347–53). Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations are from this report.

43. The documentary series Eyes on the Prize unwittingly captures this in its episode on the Montgomery Bus Boycott when the Reverend Ralph Abernathy recalls how the congregation at the mass meeting sang “Leaning on the Everlasting Lord,” a mainstream Protestant hymn familiar to most Southerners, black and white. More importantly, the song is rendered in a formal “white” scanned way. See the first episode, “Awakenings,” Blackside Productions (Boston, 1987).

44. Hinman-Smith, Daniel, “‘Does the Word Freedom have a Meaning?’ The Mississippi Freedom Schools, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and the Search for Freedom through Education” (Ph.D. thesis, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, 1993), 45 (DAI 9415322)Google Scholar.

45. Cf. Charles Joyner's recent comment that “Every black southerner has a European heritage as well as an African one, and every white southerner has an African heritage as well as a European one. That shared heritage constitutes the cardinal test of southern identity and the central theme of southern culture” (Joyner, , “African and European Roots of Southern Culture; The ‘Central Theme’ Revisited,” in Dixie Debates: Perspectives on Southern Cultures, ed. King, Richard H. and Taylor, Helen [New York: New York University Press, 1996], 28Google Scholar). The new immigration into France from Francophonic Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Asia, and the recognition by scholars such as Gérard Noiriel of the importance of immigration within 20th-century French history, suggest that Joyner's statement may eventually be transferable to the French experience. See Noiriel, 's essay “French and Foreigners” in Realms of MemoryGoogle Scholar.