African American Sprituals (Response to Negro Spiritual Posting)

On the first day of visual and verbal rhetoric class we watched a portion of the August Wilson Play, The Piano Lesson. We watched, in particular, a scene where the male characters in the play were sitting at a table singing a song. The song that they were singing is called Berta Berta (short for Alberta). Berta Berta is classified as a work or "chain gang" song. The song itself is conceptually about a woman and a man who is away (working on a chain gang) and "singing to her." There was some confusion around it being classified as a Spiritual as well as what a Spiritual actually is. A Spiritual or African American Spiritual (formerly “Negro” or “Old Negro Spirituals”) is, as most people know, a genre of music that originated during the era of enslavement. [1] “Spirituals in their purest form evolved out of the enslavement experience of African Americans.” They were, in a sense, marks of the struggle and they were developed and sung by African Americans while working on plantations and later moved into churches.

I did watch the video Amazing Grace/Whitley Phipps (please find youtube link at bottom of page). Neither the video nor the song that he eventually sang was something that exemplified an African American Spiritual. Although the discourse was somewhat informative it also, in some cases, projected some general ignorance as well. The speaker included some history about enslavement as well as some general background information on the pentatonic scale and how Spirituals were built on them. The song Amazing Grace, however, is not actually a Spiritual. It’s a hymn. Phipps, himself also mentions that. He goes on to state that it was written by a white man – John Newton who was also an enslaver. Newton was actually the captain of a ship and a leading figure in the stealing and transportation of Africans from West Africa ( a pirate). Amazing Grace, as Phipps states, is called, by some musicologist, as a “white spiritual” (which is not an actual known genre or classification of music and if there were they would not, by definition or experience, be the same as an actual Spiritual).

What Phipps did also lend to this is the information that John Newton may have heard it from the enslaved Africans that he transported. According to his research in searched records the credit is given to Newton for the lyrics but the melody is listed as “unknown.” He also states that Amazing Grace mimics a West African “sorrow chant” which would explain why it’s often played at funerals. In general it is a sad song and carries a melancholy tune.

The video and the presentation was really another exercise and discourse on Christian rhetoric, presumptions, and a play on emotions verses ethnomusicology or historical discourse. Also, in the rhetoric of Christianity Phipps pretty much pardons the atrocities of an enslaver and attempts to create a parallel and make comparable Amazing Grace to songs sung by enslaved people when they are, in actuality, two different things created for solely different and distinct purposes - a big contradiction and as sad as Amazing Grace.

Phipps, in the end, added a contemporary spin on Amazing Grace so that it no longer seemed even like a “spiritual” or the hymn that it is.

Some examples of real African American Spirituals are:

• There is a Balm in Gilead
• Sweet Low, Sweet Chariot
• Steal Away
• Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen
• Every Time I Feel The Spirit and
• Joshua Fit The Battle of Jericho

http://www.africanamericanspirituals.com/

---

[1] Anderson, Talmadge and Stewart, James, Introduction to African American Studies: Transdisciplinary Approaches and Implications. (Black Classic Press, 2007)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMF_24cQqT0