“My Country! ‘Tis of Thee, Strong Hold of Slavery:” The Musical Rhetoric of the American Antislavery Movement (original) (raw)
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Why We Love the Hymns An African Methodist Episcopal Perspective
Sunday Magazine: The Lord's Day Alliance , 2019
The Israelites celebrated the freedom to observe the Sabbath as a benefit of their escape from Egyptian enslavement. Exodus theology and the liberation of mid-19th c. American blacks have likewise been an oft-recurring theme in the AME church’s rich collection of hymns. Before the Emancipation Proclamation, Sundays represented a time and place when enslaved blacks might gather in a community less (directly) overseen by others. After 1863, hymns reflected social constraints that still made life hard. Social Gospel hymns appeared in the 1900s.
Methodist history, 2014
For the historical development of hymnody, nineteenth-century America is a particularly fruitful period for research. Building upon the foundations of European tradition, Christians in the United States began developing a hymnic corpus unique to their own experience. American hymn writers began composing their own texts; the folk shape-note expression of the era furnished hymnody with many enduring hymn tunes (i.e., “Amazing Grace”/“New Britain,” “Foundation,” “Beach Spring,” “Holy Manna”); the African American spirituals were forged in the crucible of slavery and continued legal forms of oppression (i.e. Jim Crow segregation); finally, from these many sources, the uniquely American genre of gospel music was born, developing and strengthening at camp-meetings and revivals that swept across the American landscape. With Methodism’s close ties to the frontier religion of the camp-meeting and revivals, the story of U.S. Methodist hymnody is intertwined with that of gospel music, as many...
A Study of Selected Slave Narratives: Mapping the Importance of Religious Experience and Slave Songs
Criterion, 2015
The genre of slave narratives holds an influential place in the African-American literary tradition. The present paper seeks to analyze a few slave narratives-Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself by Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, Written by Himself by Henry Bibb and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself by Harriet Jacobs. The purpose is to underscore some of the aesthetic elements, argumentative strategies and literary techniques which characterize the genre and have enabled their success. This paper also concerns itself with the gamut of black religious experience and practice. It seeks to explore how slaves interpreted and adapted the teachings of Christianity and blended it with their African culture. The paper also traces how slaves carried forward their rich African-American legacy by narrating their experiences and expressing their religious views through the medium of songs and spirituals.
Songs of the Faithful: The Wesleyan Hymns as Border for the People Called Methodists
The Wesleyan hymnody held a special place in the doctrinal and practical formation of early Methodists. The hymns served to establish guidelines for doctrinal understanding, set expectations for common Christian experience, and gave expression to the faithful witness of the Church. They both marked out and stood sentry over the practical-theological borders of the Methodist movement, articulating the voice and vocation of the societies. The hymns also became a vehicle through which Methodism was conveyed to the masses and through which Christians were formed in their homes. This paper investigates the role of the Wesleyan hymns, particularly the 1780 Collection, in establishing and protecting the practical-theological borders of early Methodism, and in the formation of everyday Christians, and explores the implications of a Wesleyan understanding of the form and function of hymnody for current Christian worship, theology, and formation.
““My Chains are Gone”: Language of Enslavement and Freedom in Contemporary Worship Music
The Hymn, 2021
This paper will first provide an in-depth analysis of contrasting popular worship songs that rely on imagery of enslavement and freedom, noting the ways these images are contextualized and embodied both musically and lyrically by white evangelicals. It is these same white evangelical congregations that rely so heavily on the language of enslavement that are also the most reticent to admit to slavery’s lasting impact in terms of racial oppression and inequality. Using Michael Emerson and Christian Smith’s concept of the “white evangelical tool kit,” we will argue that the tendency toward individualism, antistructuralism, and ahistoricism has led White evangelical congregations to appropriate language of enslavement and freedom in correspondingly narrow and ahistoric—and therefore problematic—ways. Finally, we will end by suggesting possible strategies for White congregations to better use concepts of enslavement and freedom within their congregational songs.
Black Hymnody: A Hymnological History of the African-American Church
American Historical Review, 1993
... OF THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN CHURCH I Jon Michael Spencer Page 2. Page 3. Black Hymnody Page 4. Page 5. Black Hymnody: A Hymnological History of the African-American Church Jon Michael Spencer THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE PRESS / KNOXVILLE Page 6. ...
Hymnody of change: A study of classical African orature in a social justice context
2018
Communal music has been and is still a prominent method of cultural expression for generations, in particular for the generations of displaced Africans on American soil. The roots of this music, an amalgam of African tradition and a forced Christianity, have remained a constant companion to African American cultural response to inequity. Thus, it is imperative that communication tools be developed that allow analysis of this music, collections of communally sung works that communicate the destruction and continual reconstruction of a colonized culture. The purpose of this study is to explicate communally sung hymns, those sung in a social justice context, as an example of classical African orature. As such, these hymns utilize various aesthetics of nommo, the productive word. These aesthetics are used to move toward maat, realized as communal and spiritual harmony. In order to advance understanding of this process, I introduce binding and location as rhetorical moves that speak to past and future rhetorical legacy. Chapter 1: Not Just Any Kind of Music November 6, 2017, at the Intellectual House on the Campus of the University of Washington in Seattle, a mass meeting was held. This mass meeting would not have been out of place in 1962. In fact, the feel was likely nearly the same as meetings that were held at the Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia. At one point, about a third of the way through the meeting, the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, founder of the Moral Mondays movement Repairers of the Breach, and co-chair of the New Poor Peoples' movement remarks about the importance of music and singing: "This is a mass meeting and mass meetings always have a certain atmosphere. In mass meetings we don't just sing just to be singing-not just any kind of music. But music draws us together" (Repairers of the Breach, 2017). He then introduces Yara Allen, an African-American woman, theomusicologist, and music leader for both Repairers of the Breach and the Moral Mondays movement. As she prepares the room to sing, she makes the statement, "When you walked through those doors tonight, you came to choir rehearsal" (Repairers of the Breach, 2017). Ms. Allen then proceeds, in the tradition of a Bernice Johnson Reagon, to teach and lead the room in singing the African-American social justice hymn "Woke Up This Morning With My Mind Stayed on Freedom." This song, used extensively in the civil rights movement of the sixties, had its roots in the spiritual "Woke Up This Morning With My Mind Stayed on Jesus" (Sanger, 1995). The new words were provided by the Rev. Osby of Aurora, Illinois and by Robert Zellner (Carawan and Carawan, 2007). After being taught the song, the attendees began to sing. At first, Ms. Allen led, bidding the gathered to follow in a call and response manner. Soon, they were in unison, singing with and to each other in community, repeating over and over, "got my mind stayed on freedom." But then, the song takes on a new improvisation as Ms.