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Early Southern Music and Its Influence by Matthew Moye “Early Southern Roots of Modern Popular Music part 1” During a performance of early African-American music at Westville recently, Frankie and Doug Quimby gave an apt demonstration of the link between 18th century Southern music and modern popular music. Mrs. Quimby explained how the captain of a slave ship, John Newton, had become disaffected with the wickedness of his work. In a fit of remorse for having stolen people into human bondage for profit, he wrote what would become the world’s most famous religious song, “Amazing Grace.” The power of religious conversion, both then and now, was evident as Mr. Quimby offered a soulful, booming baritone rendition of the hymn. Mr. Quimby’s version was itself memorable, but then he fast-forwarded us to the 1950s. He told how the late Sam Cooke, one of the early innovators of modern popular music, had been a Gospel singer before he sang secular music. Cooke had sung the words “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound” to a different tune. Cooke later used that new tune with new words to compose his blockbusting chart hit, “Darling, You Send Me.” As Mr. Quimby gave his interpretation, he showed how the familiar 1789 hymn words fit into the also familiar 1956 tune, “Darling, You Send Me.” An Exchange of Ideas Spiritual conversion, as Mr. and Mrs. Quimby showed, was a pivotal element in the development of popular music. It did not come about easily or without resistance in America. The story of its addition to the cultural mix of the Southern colonies is the subject of this first installment of the history of Modern Popular Music. White people brought musical instruments with them on their voluntary journeys from the Old World. Africans were not afforded that luxury on the slave ships, though the traditions came with them nevertheless. Historians today note three important sources of musical backgrounds in the early South—-European middle and upper class, British folk, and African folk. Africans brought very different ideas to the attention of white people. These ideas were described from the beginning of British slave importation to North America in the early 1600s: (1) pronounced rhythms and motion, (2) spontaneous group dynamics, (3) use of coded, subtle, or subversive meanings, and (4) gapped scales. At first, blacks and whites kept their distances. Africans were not evangelized, nor did they respond. The reason was that European Protestants purposefully rejected emotion in their religious practice. Here is the evolution of evangelical hymnody, a critical bridge which eventually connected white formal and folk music with the vital elements of black folk music. Luther, Calvin, and Wesley, Unlikely Fathers of Modern Popular Music The American Protestant hymnody is huge and so pervasive today that it probably is the single-most influential source of creative expression in the English-speaking world. Strange as it may seem to us now, the early Protestant leaders (outside of Germany) were firebrands against church hymns. The reason for this odd fact goes to the heart of Protestantism. In the Roman Church of the 1500s, the clergy supplied the liturgy and the music for the congregation. The German founder of the Protestant movement, Martin Luther, by contrast, felt that every person should pray and praise God individually. Luther reasoned that the Scriptures were God’s voice. If a person repeated the Scriptures, he would hear God’s voice. By singing the Scriptures, then, the individual could have a personal conversation with God. Luther looked to certain Catholic hymns called the Breviary to fill this bill. They were simple and plain, like the Scriptures. John Calvin of France, however, went a step further. He banned both hymns and instrumentation, which took the church organ out of use. As substitutes for the hymns, Calvin and others began setting the naturally musical Psalms of David to meter. Among Calvinist Protestants, hymns thus were thrown out, and Metrical Psalters were in. Some of these Psalters are still used today, such as, “Old Hundredth” by Louis Bourgeois, also known as “The Doxology.” Psalters were thus the religious music which the settlers of the New World brought with them. This fact is important here because the first African slaves to Jamestown in 1619 probably heard music from Sternhold and Hopkins, a 1562 Psalter. The very first Western music that the very first slaves heard was probably the folk music of the Dutch sailors on board the slave ships. However, it’s fair to say that their real indoctrination to the Western styles was through Metrical Psalters. Seeing “David Converted into a Christian” By 1700, the Church of England still allowed no hymns, but psalm-singing and music education in general had fallen off as well. In fact, many churches in the colonies had no music at all. Then, the common craving for music began to chip away at the Calvinist ban on hymns. The 1696 Irish Tate and Brady book introduced “paraphrases,” which were less strictly Scriptural than the Psalters were. Next in 1706, Dr. Isaac Watts of England published his Psalms and Hymns which included some New Testament paraphrases. Watts felt he had “led the Psalmist of Israel into the Church of Christ.” To get the musically illiterate congregations to sing his music, Watts himself began “lining” the notes to them. When a music instructor lines, he stands in front of the congregation, singing out the notes, which they then repeat to him. We will see in a later installment that this practice became very important in spreading music in New England and the South. In 1736, John and Charles Wesley arrived in Savannah. John began translating some German Protestant hymns for early morning devotionals, which he sang to people who met for mutual spiritual comfort. He published Collections of Psalms and Hymns in Charleston in 1737, the first Anglican hymnal. Instead of praise from church leaders, however, his work brought him a grand jury arraignment for altering the Psalms. Evangelistic Hymns Back in England, Charles and John Wesley had emotional “conversions,” which led them to add emotional elements to the hymns they composed or used. In this way, the Wesleys invented the evangelistic hymn. By 1790, this new form of expression would be a fundamental element in the conversion of hundreds of thousands of slaves to Christianity. This musical phenomenon will be explored in next quarter’s installment. Summary Martin Luther and John Calvin may be properly credited with putting church music into the mouths of the common folk of the colonies. John Wesley put the spirit of the music into their hearts. These contributions may seem obvious today, but they were enormous advances which took centuries to effect. In the bi-racial colonies, the fruits were ready to burst forward as the colonies won their independence from England. Newton’s hymn, “Amazing Grace,” which Mr. Quimby sang so powerfully to the Westville audience, would play no small part in this impending revolution.
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Early Southern Music and Its Influences
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