“Dear SEM,”

My response to this query reveals nuances offered through African-derived worldviews and the ways in which those perspectives inform how we analyze musical scenes in the United States. In African-derived thought, there is no distinction between sacred and secular, religious and non-religious, belief and unbelief. And to adopt that binary is an inadequate and partial doing of Black music research pedagogy.

Over the years, I have observed scholars who are situated in dominant cultural approaches—i.e., Western/European/“American,” Christian, “respectable,” heterosexual, “elite,” male-identified/phallogocentric, “able-bodied,” monograph-centered written traditions—and wrestling with whether their methods should embrace their thick positionality identification as an instructive moment. To be a “believer” researching believers usually involves not disclosing the scholar’s own shared beliefs. Conversely, I noticed disciplinary anxiety about identifying oneself as non-religious for fear of having to deal with the ineffable. I experienced scholars’ willful obliviousness as hubris as they disregarded powerful realms of meaning in their analysis, which turned their cultural conversation partners off and caused their projects to fall short in an accurate hearing and amplification of the people they sought to represent. 

To be a “believer” researching believers usually involves not disclosing the scholar’s own shared beliefs. Conversely, I noticed disciplinary anxiety about identifying oneself as non-religious for fear of having to deal with the ineffable.

Whether it is the tonal and interlocking nature of rhythm; aspects of sonic intensity; musically induced, altered states of consciousness; or religious expression; many of the features in African-derived music require attention to what outsiders and insider-outsiders (evoking a term conceptualized by Dr. Mellonee Burnim and others to indicate myriad intracultural and intraracial identity configurations) cannot easily describe. As a result, scholars in Black music research quarters have spent their careers naming the otherwise imagined unnameable. 

And so, for students who don’t share faith-based views with their instructor or mentor, they still ought to experience training in other systems of belief that undergird the musical activity they intend to analyze or teach, especially when religious belief functions as culture in those realms. 

What follows are three concepts to consider through Black music research pedagogy for approaching discussions of religion/faith and music in academic settings with students who occupy a spectrum of (dis)belief. One must be clear about the significance, functions, and uses of the 1) culture-bearers, 2) institutions, and 3) repertoires that are ostensibly religious, while connecting to non-religious correlates and disjunctures in comparative music research.

CULTURE-BEARER AS ACTIVATOR:

 In my realm of research, musical traditions must be activated with culture-bearers who are respected intraculturally and possess a critical affirmation of the traditions. My dissertation advisor and lauded culture-bearer Dr. Melvin L. Butler identified himself early on in his courses as an African American Pentecostal believer, jazz musician, and scholar doing research on Jamaican and Haitian Pentecostalism. To do the research and teach without divulging his positionality would be a disservice to students who needed to experience the ways in which scholars challenge belief systems that they both respect and critique. In fact, I would assert that the performance, the very utterance of faith, is a musical competency. And for those familiar with the values of those spheres, they immediately get a sense of the tensions with which he likely negotiated to complete his work, specifically the stereotypical prohibition on non-religious music participation as a Pentecostal.

INSTITUTIONS AS A CLEARINGHOUSE:

Proper training in analyzing the network of African American genres requires an engagement with the “Black Church” (Black churches across denominational affiliations). Historically, the “Black Church” has been, and still often is, a cultural clearinghouse, functioning as a community center used for public arts education serving the entire community, regardless of faith tradition. Its institutional influence can be heard in soul music, hip hop, funk, and jazz, to name a few. Even though the term “Black Church” is emblematic of strong religious connotations to outsiders, it concurrently represents civil rights, social services, and sanctuary to insiders and seekers. These institutions have such a far-ranging reach that I have sung in gospel choirs alongside Christian believers, followers of Islam, followers of the Santeria tradition, and humanists who wanted to remember their gospel pedagogy rudiments and learn new repertoire. Inclusion of the "Black Church" should be done with critical affirmation, embracing its legacy in all its complexity.

REPERTOIRES OF SACRED FOLK MUSIC:

One of my earliest memories of navigating formal training in musics of the world was as a voice performance student at Duke Ellington School for the Arts, a predominantly Black high school in the District of Columbia Public School System. Regardless of their racial, cultural, and religious identity, every student in the program was assigned concert repertoire that included art song traditions such as Negro spirituals, German lieder, French chanson, and Italian arias. One might think that Negro spirituals would not be assigned in a public school because of its overtly Christian references. And yet, I recall singing Negro spirituals and other Black sacred musics alongside followers of Islam, Hebrew Israelites, spiritualists, agnostics, and atheists, continuing the programming standardized in the Historically Black College and University (HBCU) music legacy. Negro Spirituals are the folk tradition of people of African ancestry in the United States, a people who are imagined to have been made a completely Christian people. We know they participated in dominant hetero-Christian culture as a part of a sophisticated storytelling and information sharing tradition, finding ways to maintain personal and immediate familial (dis)beliefs alongside dominant religio-cultural impositions. Those repertoires were our shared folk orature.

Erasing the religious representation and, in this instance, my value of those concepts in complex ways removes the richness of the meaning made in these already overlooked and underheard spaces. Revealing my religious biases, commitments, and dissents provides another layer of precision in doing ethical, intentional, and transparent research.

My research on the changing role of spirituals in the nineteenth century is historical. I can’t build trust with the Jubilee Singers who sang their songs some 150 years ago; they can’t speak for themselves. Even if it is impossible for me to truly understand their faith and how they felt about bringing spirituals to a white public, I can at least try to write about them in an ethical manner. Two brief examples will illustrate how I have attempted this task.

I can’t build trust with the Jubilee Singers who sang their songs some 150 years ago; they can’t speak for themselves. Even if it is impossible for me to truly understand their faith and how they felt about bringing spirituals to a white public, I can at least try to write about them in an ethical manner.

    Ella Sheppard—Fisk student, Jubilee Singer, and piano accompanist who served as an assistant director to the troupe—was eventually tasked with transcribing some new spirituals from the group’s repertory for publication. In her diary entry dated June 29, 1875, she exults that she “did not make a single mistake” in notating her first spiritual, exclaiming that she “was so rejoiced” when (white) troupe director Theodore Seward found it “correct.” From this we learn that she transcribed under the “white gaze,” with Seward in the role of a teacher who would “pass” or “fail” her work, judging the key signature, pitches, rhythm, and part-writing by the standards of Western tonal harmony. That Sheppard was accorded the honor of transcribing the music of her own people is ironic. It is clear from her diary entries that she considered it a heavy responsibility, but whether she considered it a privilege is more ambiguous, for other entries reveal that Seward was too sick with exhaustion from constantly touring abroad (they were in England at the time) to transcribe the new songs himself. Yet Sheppard’s daily responsibilities were equally onerous. In fact, some diary entries consist of only one line because she was too tired to write more, and some days she skipped writing entirely (exceptional, as she was a dedicated chronicler). Clearly, adding transcribing to her schedule came at a cost. When her transcriptions were printed in the next edition of Jubilee Songs, she received no credit for her labor. Only researchers who have searched out the crumbling pages of her diary are aware of the outsized role she played as troupe member, and the physical and emotional toll this exacted.

    Singer Thomas Rutling furnishes another example. After the original Fisk Jubilee troupe disbanded in 1878, he lived and studied in Germany before settling in England. Around 1907 he published an autobiography, Tom, which included revised arrangements of many of the Jubilees’ most popular spirituals. His rationale for doing so was that “the musician (all due respect to him) who took down the melodies from the singing of the Jubilee Singers, made so many errors in many of them that the singers did not recognize their own songs.” (He refers here to Theodore Seward.) When I first eagerly studied Rutling’s arrangements, I expected to find a wildly different representation of the spirituals that had been published so far. Disappointment ensued, as Rutling’s scores were almost identical. And yet a handful had revealing deviations: melismas, grace notes, pitch variations, all of which had corollaries in folk practice. Clearly Rutling regarded his scores as a significant corrective despite their similarity to earlier publications. Why weren’t they more different? Several factors suggested themselves: the 30 intervening years since he’d last sung those spirituals with the Jubilee Singers; the many times he’d sung them since as a soloist; his study in Germany; his career as a voice teacher in England; and his intended audience of white patrons, for whom he had added idiosyncratic piano accompaniments. Rutling also adopted the rhetoric of the directors and the popular press when describing the songs (e.g., their “complicated” but “strikingly original” rhythm). In other words, what lived in his memory was unavoidably influenced by his environment—a foreign environment that failed to reinforce his Southern roots. (It’s also possible that Rutling, like many transcribers before him, found Western notation inadequate for notating the sounds he heard in his memory.) Despite this, there is no reason to doubt Rutling’s claim that he was speaking for “the singers” and trying to reveal an essence of the songs that had been lost in transcription.

    These two cases illustrate the importance of thoughtfully interrogating sources and cross-checking information when possible; identifying one’s subject position; and considering the intended audience of the sources left behind. For example, Thomas Rutling was writing for a white “fan base” that had a folkloric interest in spirituals, but also wanted parlor arrangements to perform. We tend to regard diaries as especially trustworthy because they are private, but even Ella Sheppard’s diary had an audience: Sheppard herself. A devoutly religious person who would one day marry a pastor, Sheppard might still have been performing a role in her diary—that of a dutiful, self-sacrificing Christian. Whether expressing private or public thoughts, both Rutling and Sheppard lived in social climates where whites ultimately controlled the narrative. In the end, probing the historical push-pull between Black agency and Black subjugation may not yield definitive answers, but treating it as a dialectic reveals a richness that the surface usually obscures.

References

Rutling, Thomas. n.d [ca. 1907–09]. Tom: An Autobiography; with Revised Negro Melodies. North Devon, England: Thos. J. Dyer, Printer.

Sheppard, Ella. 1874–1876. Ella Sheppard Diary. Jubilee Singers Collection, Fisk University Special Collections.

I am used to being a religious fish out of water. I grew up as the child of teachers in a rural Mennonite community, going to the “teacher’s church,” a congregation with more teachers, church workers, and community leaders in it than most neighboring congregations. Some of my friends and neighbors called our congregation “the church that doesn’t believe in the Bible”—a humorous critique of our too-liberal, too-educated congregation, always interpreting the Bible and not always following it to the letter. We were both insider elites and, to some extent, outsiders.

As an ethnomusicology and writing professor in the mid-Atlantic urban United States, I was an oddity as well: a mostly-ordinary-seeming person who was religious, and maybe even “ethnic.” When people asked, I tried to tell people the least threatening thing I could think of, while remaining truthful: that Mennonites were like Quakers who sing. (Mennonites are, in fact, a small and very diverse Christian group, spanning the entire political spectrum, the urban-rural divide, and encompassing a wide diversity of racial and ethnic self-identifications—but with a common commitment to peace, community, and service.) But I tried not to exclude my religious life—that I went to church, that I led singing, and so on—from my professorial persona. I was far from alone in this. In particular, I felt kinship with Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu colleagues. But even though relative to many of my religious colleagues I had privilege and could “pass,” I carried a sense of religious difference with me.

Allowing my churchly life to be part of my professorial persona made me, sometimes, a safe person to talk to for students who were religious. After teaching a class on shape-note music, in which I talked about how Mennonites sing shape-note music too, one student took me aside and said, “You know how you said you were something weird? I’m something weird, too.” Then they told me about their faith within a family and community of Jehovah's Witnesses. Other students told me of numerous Christian identities, Jewish identities, Hindu identities, African traditional religious identities, and so on. As a mostly-progressive Christian, I was surprised when one student told me they were becoming an observant Christian again because we read ethnographies about Christians in my classes. This wasn't the outcome I’d expected or intended to produce. But the student told me their story and it was beautiful all the same—a gift for me to have been confided in, in this way, all the same.

After teaching a class on shape-note music, in which I talked about how Mennonites sing shape-note music too, one student took me aside and said, “You know how you said you were something weird? I’m something weird, too.”

So my first reflection here is that, in my experience, being honest about who I was as a religious person sometimes made space for others to be seen, to be recognized in a university setting.

Doing ethnomusicological research with Mennonites (and friends) presented me with something of the opposite situation. Frequently, but far from always, I researched and worshipped in church contexts that were more conservative (and perhaps reflexively more “religious”) than my own church or family contexts. I only partly knew the affective, theological, and liturgical norms—maybe enough to pass, but certainly not enough to lead.

Where I was recognized as sharing faith to some degree with my conversation partners, I tried to make it clear that I wanted to worship with them. I wanted to be respectful—to be clear that I did not see their worship as a “text,” but as an act of participating in something real and immense, something I didn’t “have the answers to.” This reflection may not be a lot of help for readers working across much greater religious divides than I have mostly done in my fieldwork. But I think this move tended to position me as a learner and not an expert. And it positioned me as partly-within the bonds of care (and power, and problems) that are part of religious life and community.

Sometimes it meant that I was able to share an experience of divine presence in worship. I haven’t been able to fully think through this aspect of fieldwork in religious contexts yet. In my research and writing I seek to understand what animates the space between us. What is bigger than us? What makes it possible for us to love and to understand each other across deep divides of language and experience?

But the analytic parts of my writing about religious music-making end up exploring “meaning” more than they explore being, focusing on how meanings are constituted and conveyed and not on participation in a shared reality (real in and of itself, not “understood as real in a comparative and symbolic frame”). Thus, in my writing and my presence in the field, there is a kind of betrayal that I am still working to understand and to make amends for—at least by being open, as I’m trying to be here—that I haven’t figured out how to write about yet.