{"id":7456,"date":"2015-08-06T01:53:43","date_gmt":"2015-08-06T04:53:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/culturedarm.com\/?p=7456"},"modified":"2016-01-05T03:25:41","modified_gmt":"2016-01-05T06:25:41","slug":"culturedarms-songs-of-the-month-july-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/culturedarm.com\/staging\/5793\/culturedarms-songs-of-the-month-july-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"Culturedarm’s Songs of the Month (July 2015)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Tink<\/a><\/p>\n

These few days, taken upon the passage of one month into the next, really serve to consolidate and enhance Culturedarm’s Songs of the Month. What I listened to and thought about\u00a0most musically in July incorporates\u00a0the Georgia Sea Island Singers, MC Brinquedo, Tink, Future, Dolly Parton, Jackie Wilson, Aristophanes, Robyn, Dr. Dre, Schubert, and Fritz Wunderlich.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/em><\/p>\n

Bessie Jones & The Georgia Sea Island Singers – ‘Daniel in the Lion’s Den’<\/strong><\/p>\n

Tying in nicely too with my recent piece on Nina Simone, ‘I Loves You, Porgy’, and the genesis of the opera Porgy and Bess<\/em><\/a>, in the act of preparing for my interview with Jolie Holland<\/a> I came across\u00a0a 2011 piece in\u00a0the creative arts journal Verity LA<\/a>. In a discussion with Alec Patric, on the subject of her ‘feeling for music and poetry’, Jolie offers:<\/p>\n

‘Poetry, in oral culture, has always been on the tongue, and spoken from pulpits. I always remember how one especially ignorant (white) critic of Zora Neale Hurston\u2019s complained that a sermon she\u2019d written into one of her books was too fanciful to have come out of the mouth of an \u2018uneducated\u2019 black preacher. But our Zora, a pioneer anthropologist, had recorded and quoted that sermon verbatim. Let us not forget she was present and influential at many of the great recording sessions Lomax conducted. The Lomax recordings of the Georgia Sea Island Singers contain some of the most important American poetry to me.<\/em>‘<\/em><\/p>\n

Alan Lomax first heard the music of the Georgia Sea Island Singers when, accompanied by Zora Neale Hurston and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle,\u00a0he\u00a0visited St. Simons in 1935. Again travelling\u00a0the American South after ten years recording abroad, between 1959 and 1961 he returned to the Sea Islands, and taped\u00a0songs led by Willis Proctor, Joe Armstrong, John Davis, and Bessie Jones. In the liner notes to a 1977 New World Records collection, bringing together some of these spiritual and secular recordings, Lomax\u00a0provided a history of the Sea Islanders:<\/p>\n

‘Along the east coast of the United States from Maryland to Florida is a chain of low, often wooded\u00a0and fertile islands separated from the mainland by marshes and bays and reachable only by boats\u00a0that thread through shallows. On these islands, remnants of past ways of life have lingered on into\u00a0the present. Old English dialects and ballads survive in Maryland and North Carolina, and the blacks\u00a0of the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia remember the speech, the tales, and the music that\u00a0their ancestors developed on their encounter with Europeans. Through the Sea Island lore runs the\u00a0positive, life-giving current of black style, for in these communities the African cultural heritage was\u00a0least changed.<\/em><\/p>\n

The islands near Charleston, Savannah, and Brunswick (off which St. Simons lies) were the site of\u00a0large, rich plantations, in which slavery reached its peak of productivity. The warm and humid\u00a0marshland, which produced bumper crops of rice, was far more unhealthy for British settlers than\u00a0for their black slaves, who were accustomed to the tropics and relatively immune to its diseases.\u00a0Moreover, the blacks, with their African experience as riverine fishermen, rice growers, and tropical\u00a0gardeners, were prepared for life in the Sea Islands, while the white colonists were not. Even in the\u00a0days of slavery the white population was sparse in the area; it was not uncommon for a plantation\u00a0with six or seven hundred slaves to have no more than one or two whites living on it.<\/em><\/p>\n

In spite of the efforts of reformers and critics, plantation owners were afraid to allow their slaves to\u00a0receive education or religious instruction. Left to themselves, the blacks reconstituted their African\u00a0culture. speaking Creole English, whose style, syntax, and vocabulary show marked ties to Africa,\u00a0and continuing a strongly African nonverbal culture in music, dance, and interaction pattern. Since\u00a0people from various tribes were mixed on the plantations, these nonverbal traditions cannot be\u00a0attributed to any single tribe or area. They are, rather, pan-African or pan-West Central African,\u00a0since these were the zones the slaves were taken from. Melville Herskovits in his book The Myth of\u00a0the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958) has shown how much of the total shape of African\u00a0culture survived in the New World.<\/em><\/p>\n

This pan-African southern-black folklore, the product of the black collective, arose in the squalor\u00a0and isolation of the slave barracks and work gangs. Yet, although the slaves lived under degrading\u00a0conditions, they were neither demoralized nor degraded. Both their reminiscences and their lore\u00a0show them to have been a healthy and positive people in spite of slavery. The reasons, I believe, are\u00a0that they shared a rewarding African cultural heritage, that they faced a common oppressor, and that\u00a0as creative human beings they were constantly inventing and remaking a new lifestyle out of their\u00a0experience in this new environment and in contact with a number of European, African, and Caribbean cultures.<\/em><\/p>\n

Open to naval attack, the Sea Islands were occupied by Union troops early in the Civil War. Black\u00a0regiments were formed, and many island blacks had the opportunity to fight for their own freedom.\u00a0One of their officers, Bostonian Colonel Higginbotham, heard his black recruits sing the hitherto\u00a0unknown spirituals. Through his published account of these songs, the North became aware of the\u00a0profound creativity of the people for whose liberation they were sacrificing treasure and life. In the\u00a0published and arranged spirituals the world could perceive the African soul at work, transmuting the\u00a0values of the Christian tradition into a fresh and touching lyricism. What the printed page could not\u00a0convey was the truly African pattern that shaped the performances of the spirituals, a style\u00a0characterized by constant overlapping, part crossing, and polyrhythms between leader and chorus by\u00a0clapped accompanimeut, by improvisation, syncopation, and shifting vocal qualities, and yet by\u00a0marvelous concert.<\/em><\/p>\n

This style continued to thrive in a remarkably pure form on the Sea Islands because, after the Civil\u00a0War, much of the land was turned over to the ex-slaves. They fished and gathered oysters and\u00a0shrimp in the bayous; they gardened and farmed. Sometimes they went to the mainland to work as\u00a0stevedores, but they preferred to remain in their own comminities, where folk custom adjudicated by\u00a0their own leaders could settle most disputes and where they could develop their own way of life. As\u00a0a consequence, customs tales, and music of the islands represeut black American folklore in its\u00a0pristine state. (The lore closely resembles that of the Bahama Islands. During the American Revolution many Royalist planters from the Sea Islands fled with their slaves to the Bahamas. Bahamian\u00a0folk music is in a very real sense the foster child of the Sea Islands.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Lydia (Mrs. Maxfield) Parrish, wife of the painter, had much to do with the authenticity of the songs\u00a0in this collection. After she settled on St. Simons Island she spent many years collecting the native\u00a0songs and working for their preservation. She sponsored the formation of a\u00a0society of the best singers and dancers, the Spiritual Singers of Georgia, whose members each\u00a0received a button distinguishing him or her as a \u201cStar Chorister\u201d and signified that he or she was a\u00a0folk singer and dancer in the old tradition. The regular meetings and performances of this group\u00a0afforded an opportunity for the best singers on the island to continue their art and to keep alive a\u00a0remarkable body of songs and an even more remarkable musical style, very African in character.’<\/em><\/p>\n

I have been listening frequently\u00a0over the last month to the songs of the Georgia Sea Island Singers. Here’s Bessie Jones leading ‘Daniel in the Lion’s Den’, recorded by Lomax on St. Simons on 5 May 1960:<\/p>\n