Suggestions for American Black culture?

IllmaticDelta

IllmaticDelta

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....a song form that ties into jazz funerals and homegoings etc..

Spirituals (or Negro spirituals)[1][2] are generally Christian songs that were created by African Americans.[3] Spirituals were originally an oral tradition that imparted Christian values while also describing the hardships of slavery.[4] Although spirituals were originally unaccompanied monophonic (unison) songs, they are best known today in harmonized choral arrangements. This historic group of uniquely American songs is now recognized as a distinct genre of music.[5]

"The African American spiritual (also called the Negro Spiritual) constitutes one of the largest and most significant forms of American folksong."[6] James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson presented Spirituals as the only type of folk music that America has.[3] Spirituals were sung as lullabies and play songs. Some spirituals were adapted as work songs.[12] Antonin Dvorak chose spiritual music to represent America in his Symphony From the New World.[13]

Spirituals remain a mainstay particularly in small black churches, often Baptist or Pentecostal, in the deep South.[33]


The term "spiritual" is derived from "spiritual song", from the King James Bible's translation of Ephesians 5:19, which says, "Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord."[6] Slave Songs of the United States, the first major collection of African American spirituals, was published in 1867.[7]

Musicologist George Pullen Jackson extended the term "spiritual" to a wider range of folk hymnody, as in his 1938 book, White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands, but this does not appear to have been widespread usage previously. The term, however, has often been broadened to include subsequent arrangements into more standard European-American hymnodic styles, and to include post-emancipation songs with stylistic similarities to the original African American spirituals.

Although numerous rhythmical and sonic elements of African American spirituals can be traced to African sources, African American spirituals are a musical form that is indigenous and specific to the religious experience in the United States of Africans and their descendants. They are a result of the interaction of music and religion from Africa with music and religion of European origin.[8] Further, this interaction occurred only in the United States. Africans who converted to Christianity in other parts of the world, even in the Caribbean and Latin America, did not evolve this particular form.[9]
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Just A Closer Walk With Thee (negro Spiritual)

"Just a Closer Walk with Thee" is a traditional gospel song that has been covered by many artists. Performed as either an instrumental or vocal, "A Closer Walk" is perhaps the most frequently played number in the hymn and dirge section of traditional New Orleans jazz funerals.


The author of "A Closer Walk" is unknown. The song became nationally known in the 1930s when African-American churches held huge musical conventions. In the 1940s, southern gospel quartets featured "A Closer Walk" in all-night gospel-singing rallies.

The first known recording was by the Selah Jubilee Singers on October 8, 1941, (Decca Records 7872) New York City; with Thurman Ruth and John Ford lead vocal; Fred Baker, lead baritone; Monroe Clark, baritone; J. B. Nelson, bass vocal; and Fred Baker on guitar. Rosetta Tharpe also recorded the song on December 2, 1941 (Decca 8594), with Lucky Millinder and His Orchestra.[3] In 1950, it was a million-seller for Red Foley.

An unreleased home recording exists of Elvis Presley performing the song, made in Waco, Texas on May 27, 1958. Presley's studio version can be heard on Just A Closer Walk With Thee (2000) (Czech CD on Memory label). Tennessee Ernie Ford made the charts with it in the late 1950s. By the end of the 1970s, more than a hundred artists had recorded the song.
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although difficult to trace most writers agree that "Just a Closer Walk with Thee" originated as a black spiritual sometime before the Civil War. In his book How Sweet The Sound, Horace Clarence Boyer of how the song was "discovered". While traveling between Kansas City and Chicago in 1940, songwriter Kenneth Morris got off the train to strech his legs. While standing on the platform, he overheard a porter singing some of the words to "Just a Closer Walk with Thee". Not thinking much about it, Morris boarded the train and went on his way. The words and melody of the song kept repeating in his head and he knew he had to lear the rest of it. At the next stop, Morris got off the train and took the next train back to the previous stop. There he managed to find the porter and Morris pursuaded him to sing the song while he copied down the words. Morris soon added to the lyrics and published it in 1940. In the following years, the song has been translated into eleven languages and has appeared on over 600 albums
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This song was arranged by Kenneth Morris in 1940, by the end of the year it had swept the country, becoming one of the most popular gospel songs of it's time. In Morris's own words, the performance of "Just a Closer Walk with Thee" at the Baptist National Convention in 1944 "put us on the map". Alot oc controversy exists over the authorship of this song, with accusations that it does not belong to Morris. Morris, however, claims he arranged it from an old spiritual. "It was a plantation song," he explains, " and I heard it and like it so I made an arrangement of it". Morris originally heard it sung by a choir at a conference in Kansas City. When he asked the choir director where it came from, the director did not know, explaining only that he heard it all his life. Morris then went and arranged the song, and the first version of the song in print was his. After presentin git in 1944 at the Baptist National Convention "everybody was using it" Morris said. "[However]", at that particular time, we weren't too careful about getting copyright so it was stolen from me".
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Just A Closer Walk With Thee is one of the best known gospel songs in the world. It's words are a reflection of the message of the New Testament but it's theme are as old as the children of Israel. It's been recorded countless times by scores of artists in a wide variety of gospel and secular genres. Everyone from the Blackwood Brothers to Mahalia Jackson have lent their talents to these simple lyrics and tune. It is now such a part of the American worship experience that it has found it's way into hundreds of hymnals.

Although first popularized during World War 2, the song seems to dat back to the Civil War. personal histories jotted down by African Americans from the late 1800's and 1900's mention slaves singing at they worked in the fields about walking by the lords side. It is not surprising that one could trace the popular classic's roots back more than hundred years before it's mass introduction to the American public.

Over the coarse of the next 100 years "Closer Walk" was passed down generation to generation , from church choir to church choir, remaining a staple of southern black religious experiences. yet it wasn't until the 1930's, when black church banded together to create massive musical conferences, rallies and conventions, that "Just a Closer Walk With Thee" found national audience.

In her book Well Understand It By and By, Bernice Johnson Reagan documents the fact that pioneer gospel song writer and arranger Kenneth Morris heard noted vocalist Williams Hurse sing "Closer Walk" in a 1940 concert. Copying the words and researching the songs history, Morris determind that it had never been published. Creating additional lyrics and a choral arrangement he realesed the songs just months after hearing it. By 1941 the song had already risen to become of the most popular African-American church anthems. Not copyrighted and therefore part of public domain, other publishers including Stamps-Baxter, also quickly picked up the song. Thanks to radio performances by numerous versions of the Stamps Quartets, "Just a CLoser Walk With Thee" had become a white quartet favorite by the end of the war. Although steeped in black history, the song was quickly adopted by southern whites as their own.
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IllmaticDelta

IllmaticDelta

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When the Saints Go Marching In (negro spiritual)

"When the Saints Go Marching In", often referred to as "The Saints", is an American gospel hymn that has taken on certain aspects of folk music. The precise origins of the song are not known. Though it originated as a spiritual, today people are more likely to hear it played by a jazz band. The song is sometimes confused with a similarly titled composition "When the Saints are Marching In" from 1896 by Katharine Purvis (lyrics) and James Milton Black (music)
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A traditional use of the song is as a funeral march. In the funeral music tradition of New Orleans, Louisiana, often called the "jazz funeral", while accompanying the coffin to the cemetery, a band would play the tune as a dirge. On the way back from the interment, it would switch to the familiar upbeat "hot" or "Dixieland" style. While the tune is still heard as a slow spiritual number on rare occasions, from the mid 20th century it has been more commonly performed as a "hot" number. The number remains particularly associated with the city of New Orleans, to the extent that it is associated with New Orleans' professional football team, the New Orleans Saints. Both vocal and instrumental renditions of the song abound. Louis Armstrong was one of the first to make the tune into a nationally known pop-tune in the 1930s. Armstrong wrote that his sister told him she thought the secular performance style of the traditional church tune was inappropriate and irreligious. Armstrong was in a New Orleans tradition of turning church numbers into brass band and dance numbers that went back at least to Buddy Bolden's band at the very start of the 20th century

On May 13, 1938, Louis Armstrong and his Orchestra walked into Decca’s New York studios to record a song Armstrong had played as a child. The song was “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In” and that first Armstrong recording of the tune transformed the piece from a traditional gospel hymn to a jazz standard that has become an anthem of sorts in the United States, having been performed by everyone from B.B. King to Bruce Springsteen. Gospel groups have performed it, it’s been heard in films and television commercials, children are taught to sing it in elementary school and just about every New Orleans-related jazz band closes with it


Analysis of the traditional lyrics

The song is apocalyptic, taking much of its imagery from the Book of Revelation, but excluding its more horrific depictions of the Last Judgment. The verses about the Sun and Moon refer to Solar and Lunar eclipses; the trumpet (of the Archangel Gabriel) is the way in which the Last Judgment is announced. As the hymn expresses the wish to go to Heaven, picturing the saints going in (through the Pearly Gates), it is entirely appropriate for funerals.
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When the Saints Go Marching In” is an African American spiritual originally played by jazz musicians and brass bands in New Orleans, Louisiana. The tradition of playing this tune at a slow hymn-like tempo while accompanying a coffin to the graveyard and then jazzing it up in a “hot” or “Dixieland” style on the way back home
is still practiced today.

The lyrics express a wish of the deceased to join the Saints marching through the “Pearly Gates” into heaven. Many New Orleans musicians in the early 1900s made a practice of turning church songs into brass band and dance tunes. “The Saints” became well known as jazz music as well as early rock music.
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IllmaticDelta

IllmaticDelta

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Fried Egg Sandwich said:
There are white people that are descendent of slaves for that matter.
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:comeon:

Which group in the diaspora are you referring too?
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he's clearly talking about new world blacks

atlantic-slave-trade-02.jpg
 
IllmaticDelta

IllmaticDelta

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im_sleep said:
:mjgrin:

I’m just curious what his actual stance is. I don’t mind having the conversation if it’s honest, but if it’s just gonna be rhetorical questions, it goes right back to my original point about trolling.
:beli:
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his post here

Suggestions for American Black culture?

let's us know where he's heading but it's going to end up blowing up in his face when we bring up violence and crime in latin america/west indies/african countries [sarcasm]with actual cultures[/sarcasm]:pachaha:
 
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