Category Archives: Spirituals

High John de Conquer and Holy Laughter

From Zora Neale Hurston’s The Sanctified Church:

High John de Conquer came to be a man, and a mighty man at that. But he was not a natural man in the beginning. First off, he was a whisper, a will to hope, a wish to find something worthy of laughter and song. Then the whisper put on flesh. His footsteps sounded across the world in a low but musical rhythm as if the world he walked on was a singing-drum. Black people had an irresistible impulse to laugh. High John the Conquer was a man in full, and had come to live and work on the plantations, and all of the slave folks knew him in the flesh.

The sign of his man was a laugh, and his singing-symbol was a drum. No parading drum-shout like soldiers out for show. It did not call to the feet of those who were fixed to hear it. It was an inside thing to live by. It was sure to be heard when and where the work was hardest, and the lot the most cruel. It helped the slaves endure. They knew that something better was coming. So they laughed in the face of things and sang, “I’m so glad! Trouble don’t last always.” And the white people who heard them were struck dumb that they could laugh. In an outside way, this was Old Massa’s fun, so what was Old Cuffy laughing for?

Old Massa couldn’t know, of course, but High John de Conquer was there walking his plantation like a natural man.

You never know how or when the threads of your lives intertwine. I have written three books in recent years and, upon reflection, I see that they are inter-related: People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music, Reluctant Prophets and Clueless Disciples: Understanding the Bible by Telling Its Stories, and Jesus Laughed: The Redemptive Power of Humor. And now that I’ve begun work on Nothing But Love in God’s Water: The Influence of Black Sacred Music on the Civil Rights Movement, I see where they all connect. They’ve all helped prepare me for this moment.

I wrote Jesus Laughed in part because of the visits Mary and I had made to black churches in the course of writing People Get Ready. Black churches resound with laughter before, during, and after the services in a way that the white churches I’ve attended do not. Where did we lose that capacity to laugh?

I’m writing Nothing But Love in God’s Water in part because of the ways black sacred song — from the spirituals through the union movements through the Civil Rights movement — has continued to irrepressibly bubble up and envelope black people at their times of greatest need … as if this music is always there, always available, always waiting for a moment like this.

And now I stumble across Zora Neale Hurston’s essay on High John de Conquer, a mythic black figure who pre-dates John Henry and Stagger (or Stack-o) Lee. High John’s weapons are laughter and song. And speed. High John is fast, as Hurston writes:

Maybe he was in Texas when the lash fell on a slave in Alabama, but before the blood was dry on the back, he was there. A faint pulsing of a drum like a goat-skin stretched over a heart, that came nearer and closer, then sombody in the saddened quarters would feel like laughing and say, “Now High John de Conquer, Old Mass couldn’t get the best of him. That old John was a case!”  Then everybody began to smile.

It’s about story — a story that came from Africa that sustained the slaves and their descendents for generations. It’s about song — songs that came from Africa and enveloped the best of the Christian faith and withstood the dogs and water cannons in Birmingham. It’s about laughter — laughter that came from Africa and enabled blacks in the Jim Crow south to laugh secretly at those who spent most of their waking moments trying to figure out ways to crush High John and the millions like him.

It is no accident, Hurston writes, that High John de Conquer has evaded the ears of white people. They were not supposed to know. You can’t know what folks won’t tell you.

And so it is with Nothing But Love in God’s Water. I’m teasing out from the songs and singers HOW this music helped them get over. WHAT this music provided that enabled them to challenge the most powerful nation on the planet armed only with love and justice. It’s all there in those on spirituals and those unstoppable gospel songs — the stories, the laughter, the music. The trouble is, of course, is that I’m seeing (and hearing) through a glass darkly. 

And armed this knowledge, once again, I pray for strength every day to do that song, that laughter, that story justice.

Spirituals: Christmas and the Eternal Now

The spirituals at Christmas

In this season, because I have been immersed in African American spirituals for the past couple of years, I find myself pausing a moment to ponder a different Child.

The religion of the slaves existed in the Eternal Now. They believed that the fragments of scripture they heard were stories of real people living today. The patriarchs live in Georgia. Mary and Joseph are traveling to Mississippi. Now. Father Abraham is Abraham Lincoln. Moses is Harriet Tubman. And across the Ohio River lies heaven or Canaan – or both. The spirituals have a thrilling sense of immediacy about them: “Were you there when they crucified my Lord. It causes me to tremble.” Now. I tremble now.

The birth of Jesus is a popular topic in many spirituals. Which makes sense, of course. Born in a stable or cave, surrounded by animals, nurtured by refugees, hunted by faceless oppressors, the advent of the Christ child was an instantly recognizable event to a captive people.

Consequently, spirituals about the birth of Jesus are among the most beloved of all — “Wasn’t That a Mighty Day When Jesus Christ was Born,” “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “Rise Up Shepherds and Foller” and “Mary Had de Leetle Baby”:

 Mary had de leetle baby

Born in Bethlehem

Eb’ry time de baby cry

She rock in a weary lan’

           But my favorite is “O Mary, What You Goin’ to Name That Pretty Little Baby?” because of the tender urgency found in the words. The singer is standing outside the stall in Bethlehem and wants to know now what the Child will be called. It’s important. After all, there are shepherds to tell.

          And that is the great lesson to me on this Christmas season. I found it in a spiritual. Jesus Christ IS born today. Jesus is no less born today than He was born 2,000 years ago. Jesus is continually being born in the hearts of those who follow The Way.

          Now you there – sitting amid the pretty paper and charming bells of this manic, consumer-driven Christmas – listen up! Go tell it on the mountain … Jesus Christ IS born!

The Spirituals and the Labor Movement

W.C. Handy, the so-called “Father of the Blues,” once said on a radio broadcast that he was always inspired by the spirituals and that the spirituals did more for the slave’s emacipation than all of the guns of the Civil War.

I’ve spent the past few years examining the influence of the spirituals, Freedom Songs, gospel songs, R&B songs, and the hymns of Isaac Watts on the Civil Rights Movement. And people like Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga) have echoed Handy’s words as they relate to another fight, 100 years later.

So it shouldn’t have surprised me to discover that the spirituals were used by African Americans in the labor movements of the 1920s and ’30s as well, when the Federal government used American soldiers to slaughter strikers and corporations controlled entire blocs of states, not just their representatives.

This research path has taken me to “New Masses,” “The Labor Defender” and other feisty newspapers and magazines from that era. And in an article on the lynchings in the U.S. in 1933, there is an account of what black Share Croppers Delegation at the Farmers Second National Conference sang that year, to the tune of the spiritual, “We Shall Not Be Moved:”

“We fight against the terror/We shall not be moved/We fight against terror/We shall not be moved/Just like at tree that’s planted by water/We shall not be moved.”

Which brings me to my favorite James Taylor song, “Millworker,” written for a musical version of Studs Terkel’s “Working” project. Few songs move me as powerfully as this:

Now my grandfather was a sailor
He blew in off the water
My father was a farmer
And I, his only daughter
Took up with a no good mill-working man
From Massachusetts
Who dies from too much whiskey
And leaves me these three faces to feed

Millwork ain’t easy
Millwork ain’t hard
Millwork it ain’t nothing
But an awful boring job
I’m waiting for a daydream
To take me through the morning
And put me in my coffee break
Where I can have a sandwich
And remember

Then its me and my machine
For the rest of the morning
For the rest of the afternoon
And the rest of my life

Now my mind begins to wander
To the days back on the farm
I can see my father smiling at me
Swinging on his arm
I can hear my granddads stories
Of the storms out on lake eerie
Where vessels and cargos and fortunes
And sailors lives were lost

Yes, but its my life has been wasted
And I have been the fool
To let this manufacturer
Use my body for a tool
I can ride home in the evening
Staring at my hands
Swearing by my sorrow that a young girl
Ought to stand a better chance

So may I work the mills just as long as I am able
And never meet the man whose name is on the label

It be me and my machine
For the rest of the morning
And the rest of the afternoon
Gone for the rest of my life