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The Preachers’ Blues: Religious Race Records and Claims of Authority on Wax

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Jonathan L. Walton
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Abstract

As one of the first nonessential commodities marketed to African Americans, the race record industry provides historical insight into the cultural ethos and competing ethical values of black communities during the interwar period. Both ethnomusicologists and historians have discussed the ways race records articulate intraracial conflicts that were exacerbated by social factors such as migration and urbanization. But like all forms of mass culture, religious records served multiple purposes and were interpreted by listeners at varying registers. For many, religious recordings were spiritually edifying and liberating, just as they were wildly entertaining. And some may feel that these religious recordings contested the aesthetic values of the black middle class even as they reinforced prescriptive bourgeois behavioral codes. While the purpose of this essay is not to give voice to the listeners of religious race records, this essay does offer an initial attempt to illumine the broader cultural contexts in which these records, namely, recorded sermons, were both produced and consumed toward providing tenable interpretations of these recordings based on resonant religious beliefs and meanings of the historical moment. This essay is concerned with such questions as: What theological and political discourses were these preachers participating in on wax? What cultural symbols, explicit and implicit, did these preachers commonly reference? And what were the possible ideological implications of these cultural significations? Despite the many interpretive possibilities of recorded sermons and even the “folk” aesthetic that defines them, this essay suggests that the religious race record industry served as a productive force in encouraging systems of social control over raced, classed, and gendered bodies during the interwar era. And the industry’s decision to focus on theologically conservative sermons stressing personal piety cast a powerful ballot in the cultural debates concerning the style, content, and purpose of black preaching in the previous century.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , Summer 2010 , pp. 205 - 232
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2010

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References

Notes

1. Oliver, Paul, Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Oliver, Paul, Screening the Blues: Aspects of the Blues Tradition (New York: Da Capo Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Dixon, Robert M. W. and Godrich, John, Recording the Blues (New York: Stein and Day, 1970)Google Scholar; Carby, Hazel, “It Jus Be's Dat Way Sometime: The Sexual Politics of Women's Blues,” in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. O’Meally, Robert G. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, , “Rethinking Vernacular Culture: Black Religion and Race Records in the 1920s and 1930s,” in African-American Religious Thought: An Anthology, ed. West, Cornel and Glaude, Eddie S. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003)Google Scholar; and, to a lesser extent in terms of religious race records yet a very important work addressing the intersections of the chanted sermon, mass culture, and class contestation, Best, Wallace D., Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915–1952 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

2. Higginbotham, “Rethinking Vernacular Culture,” 979.

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4. Higginbotham, “Rethinking Vernacular Culture,” 980. At the center of Higginbotham's essay is an appeal for historians and cultural theorists to see the black public sphere not only as an internally contested terrain but also as pluralized. There are numerous “publics” and “counterpublics” within societies stratified along racial, ethnic, class, and/or gender lines that may or may not overlap. Here, she is extending an argument originally made in response to Jürgen Habermas's conception of a bourgeois public sphere in late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, a public sphere that resides between civil society and the state as a mediated discursive realm. Higginbotham ingeniously applied this conception of competing publics in her earlier work by describing the black Baptist church as a counter-public that stood in opposition to the dominant white society in the post-Reconstruction era. In the particular case of religious race records in the 1920s, she regards the public emergence of the folk orality representative of black working-class churches as an intraracial “counter-public” over against the religious sensibilities of the black middle class as well as the perceived wanton mores of the black poor as represented in the blues.

5. To be sure, this essay operates from the assumption that there are kinetic relationships within mass culture among producers and consumers, cultural production and consumption, as well as hegemony and contestation. There is always a dialogical dance between readers of popular culture and the actual cultural production itself that is based upon the material conditions, collective memory, and associated cultural meanings of the former. This essay, then, seeks to illumine the broader religious and cultural context in which religious race records were produced and distributed in order to substantiate what I consider to be a culturally sustainable interpretation of the phenomenon.

6. Oliver, , Songsters and Saints, 140 Google Scholar; Du Bois, W. E. B., “The Souls of Black Folk,” in W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings, ed. Huggins, Nathan Irvin (1986; New York: Library of America, 1996), 494 Google Scholar.

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8. Winston Holmes unsuccessfully sued Columbia and Burnett for breach of contract. Unfortunately, this was the very sort of oligarchic practice of major recording companies like Columbia, Victor, and Paramount that eventually led to the demise of most black-owned companies. Dixon, and Godrich, , Recording the Blues, 32 Google Scholar.

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17. See chapter 4, “Black Messiahs and Murderous Whites,” in Blum, Edward J., W. E. B. Du Bois: American Prophet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

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19. See the widespread references to train travel in and around the supernatural world by former slaves in Johnson, Clifton H., God Struck Me Dead: Voices of Ex-Slaves (Cleveland, Ohio: Pilgrim Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Baker, Houston A., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 11 Google Scholar.

20. For an expansive and engaging treatment of this topic, see chap. 1, “Train Travel and the Black Religious Imagination,” in Giggie, John Michael, After Redemption: Jim Crow and the Transformation of African American Religion in the Delta, 1875–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 25 Google Scholar.

21. Carby, “It Jus Be's Dat Way Sometime,” 476.

22. A. W. Nix, “The Matchless King” (Beckenham, U.K.: Document Records, 2005).

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25. “Display Ad 42 (No Title),” New York Amsterdam News, September 29, 1926.

26. Oliver, , Songsters and Saints, 160 Google Scholar.

27. Putney, Clifford, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Ladd, Tony and Mathisen, James A., Muscular Christianity: Evangelical Protestants and the Development of American Sport (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999)Google Scholar.

28. J. M. Gates, “The Ball Game of Life” (Beckenham, U.K.: Document Records, 2005).

29. I describe Sister Jordan in this way based upon her being the butt of many jokes in regard to her physical appearance in recordings. For instance, J. M. Gates, “Kinky Hair Is No Disgrace” (Sony Music Entertainment, 1930; rereleased 2004).

30. J. M. Gates, “You Midnight Ramblers” (Beckenham, U.K.: Document Records, 2005).

31. Tampa Red, “Dead Cats on the Line” (Beckenham, U.K.: Document Records, 2005).

32. J. M. Gates, “Dead Cat on the Line” (Beckenham, U.K.: Document Records, 2005).

33. Goff, Philip, “Early Christian Radio and Religious Nostalgia,” in Religions of the United States in Practice, ed. McDannell, Colleen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 309 Google Scholar.

34. J. M. Gates, “Dead Cat on the Line,” Part II (Beckenham, U.K.: Document Records, 2005).

35. Laurence Moore, R., Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 190 Google Scholar.

36. Ibid., 191.

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38. Dixon, and Godrich, , Recording the Blues, 34 Google Scholar.

39. Ibid., 33–35.

40. Oliver, , Songsters and Saints, 146 Google Scholar.

41. Clair Drake, St. and Cayton, Horace R., Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, rev. and enl. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 220 Google Scholar; Frazier, Edward Franklin, The Negro Church in America (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 55 Google Scholar.

42. Folkloric tales of the gluttonous tendencies and the sexual exploits of preachers are legion. One joke rooted in the migration era goes:

The reverend and the deacon was sitting in church. The deacon said, “Reverend, I bet I have did it to more women in this congregation than you have.” And the reverend said, “Shit, that what you think.” He said, “Now I tell you what to do. When the church service starts, all that you did it to, say ‘eeny meeny’ and all that I did it to, I’m gonna say ‘eeny meeny.’” “All right, that's a deal.”

So the congregation started about 8 o’clock, you know. They all started walking in. Reverend came in. The first two sisters come in, the reverend said, “Eeny meeny.” Second two sisters came in, deacon said, “Eeeny meeny.” So then long come ‘round about 10 o’clock, they still coming in, and the deacon's wife walked in. Reverend said, “Eeny meeny.” The deacon said, “Hold it, reverend, I told all that you done did it to, you say ‘eeny meeny.’ But that's my wife.” He said, “That's why I said ‘eeny meeny.’” “And that's my mother in back of her, my four daughters, my granddaughter, my mother-in-law, my three aunts, and my great-great grandmother.” Reverend said, “Well, eeny, meeny, meeny, meeny, meeny, meeny, meeny, meeny.”

Printed in Abrahams, Roger D., Deep Down in the Jungle …; Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia (Hatboro, Pa.: Folklore Associates, 1964), 184 Google Scholar.

43. Du Bois, W. E. B. and Aptheker, Herbert, Writings by W. E. B. Du Bois in Periodicals Edited by Others, 4 vols. (Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus- Thomson Organization, 1982), 1:328 Google Scholar.

44. Oliver, Paul, Screening the Blues: Aspects of the Blues Tradition (London: Cassell, 1968), 75 Google Scholar.

45. Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe, “Preachers Blues” (Beckenham, U.K.: Document Records, 2005). 46. For an amazingly in-depth and entertaining analysis of race films of the interwar era, see Weisenfeld, Judith, Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

47. Dixon, and Godrich, , Recording the Blues, 33 Google Scholar.

48. Harrison, Daphne Duval, Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 10 Google Scholar; Jackson, Buzzy, A Bad Woman Feeling Good: Blues and the Women Who Sing Them (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 17 Google Scholar; Davis, Angela Y., Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 20–26 Google Scholar; and Griffin, Farah Jasmine, “Who Set You Flowin’?” The African-American Migration Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 57 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49. Davis, , Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, 9 Google Scholar.

50. J. M. Gates, “Deacon Board Meeting,” Parts I and II (Beckenham, U.K.: Document Records, 2005).

51. J. M. Gates, “The Woman and the Snake” (Beckenham, U.K.: Document Records, 2005).

52. J. M. Gates, “Smoking Woman in the Street” (Beckenham, U.K.: Document Records, 2005); J. M. Gates, “Women Spend Too Much Money” (Beckenham, U.K.: Document Records, 2005).

53. J. M. Gates, “Mannish Women” (Sony Music Entertainment, 1930; rereleased 2004).

54. Watkins, Mel, Stepin Fetchit: The Life and Times of Lincoln Perry (New York: Vintage Books USA, 2006)Google Scholar.