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PNEUMA 38 (2016) 394–410
Holiness and Worldliness
Theologies of Early Black Gospel Music in the Sanctified Church*
Awet Andemicael Yale University, New Haven
Abstract
What was truly distinctive about the black Gospel music style of the Sanctified Church was its extensive use of musical instruments previously associated with “the world.” Yet, this fact presents a theological conundrum. The very churches that were so enthu- siastically “embracing” the Gospel style were, at the same time, ardently emphasizing strict moral living and the repudiation of all things carnal. In this article, I suggest lines of theological reasoning that may have informed early black Holiness and pente- costal Christians in their widespread liturgical use of the Gospel style. Drawing on pri- mary source material fromcogicfounding Bishop Charles Mason, I expand Lawrence Levine’s model of the relationship between early black Sanctified churches and the sec- ularblackmusicalworldandarguethatamorenuancedconceptionof theChrist-world relation than is generally assumed may have undergirded Sanctified development of early Gospel music.
Keywords
black Gospel music – Sanctified Church – Charles Mason – holiness and worldliness – instrumental music – dance – Holy Spirit – sacred and secular
* Earlier versions of this paper were delivered at the American Academy of Religion National
Conference, Music and Religion Consultation, Chicago, il, 1 November 2008, and the Forum
on Music and Christian Scholarship Conference, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame,
Indiana, 28 Feb 2009. The author wishes to thank those who read and provided gracious and
helpful feedback on earlier drafts, including Dr. Markus Rathey, Dr. Robin Leaver, Rev. Dr.
Leonard Lovett, and Rev. Dr. David D. Daniels, as well as participants in the above-named
conference sessions.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/15700747-03804003
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Introduction: “Earwitnesses”1to Early Gospel Music
In his autobiography, jazz bassist “Pops” Foster recalls an episode from his youth in New Orleans that involved something of a misunderstanding about Sanctified Church2theology: “I remember that a bunch of us young guys heard about the Holiness church back then, where you went down and rolled around with everybody.We thought it meant you could go down there, pick out a chick, and roll around with her. So we went down and they threw us out.”3 It is not clearhowmanypeoplemayhaveequatedtheenthusiasmof Sanctifiedworship with more carnal forms of exuberance. Nevertheless, Foster continues with a comment on what he did find:
The Holiness church was the only one that didn’t consider music sinful … They’d clap their hands and bang a tambourine and sing. Sometimes they had a piano player, and he’d really play a whole lot of jazz … We used to hurry to finish our theater job so we could go listen to them play. They really played some great jazz on the hymns they played.4
The suggestion that the distinctive music of the Sanctified churches was essen- tially secular music with sacred texts is taken up by other contemporary observ- ers, including jazz and classical woodwind player Garvin Bushell: “They sang the blues in church; the words were religious, but it was the blues. They often had a drummer and a trumpet player there … The Negro carried his [sic] trou- bles to church and talked to God about them.”5
1 Cf. David Douglas Danielsiii, “‘Gotta Moan Sometime’: A Sonic Exploration of Earwitnesses
to Early Pentecostal Sound in North America,”Pneuma30, no. 1 (2008): 5–32.
2 In this article I use the terms Sanctified Church and Holiness-Pentecostal traditions virtually
interchangeably. Although there are a number of theological differences between and within
Holiness and pentecostal groups, the relevant portions of their theologies and their responses
to early Gospel music were, for the purposes of this article, similar enough to support, if not
actually justify, such uniform treatment. According to Jerma A. Jackson, “the proliferation
of congregations designating themselves as Holiness or Pentecostal proved so great [by the
1920s] that the term ‘sanctified church’ emerged in black communities to refer to these
collective congregations and denominations” (Jerma A. Jackson, Singing in My Soul [Chapel
Hill,nc: University of North Carolina Press, 2004], 18–19).
3 George Murphy “Pops” Foster,The Autobiography of Pops Foster, New Orleans Jazzman, as told
to Tom Stoddard (San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2005), 19.
4 Ibid.
5 Garvin Bushell, as told to Mark Tucker, Jazz from the Beginning (New York: Da Capo Press,
1988), 20–21.
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Even those observers who do not necessarily posit a secular source for Gospel music still point out strong stylistic affinities with secular styles. Lang- ston Hughes describes his experience in a Sanctified church in Chicago around the time of World War i as follows: “I was entranced by their stepped-up rhythms, tambourines, hand clapping, and uninhibited dynamics, rivaled only by Ma Rainey singing the blues at the old Monogram Theater … the music of these less formal Negro churches early took hold of me, moved me and thrilled me.”6 Like Bushell, the closest musical parallel Hughes could find for the Sanctified sound was the blues.7
Many of the characteristics of Sanctified music that brought secular music to the minds of “earwitnesses”—to borrow David Douglas Daniels’s term—can be traced to some degree to the spirituals and other early sacred genres and are shared with a wide range of African American musical repertoires, both sacred and secular.8 What was truly distinctive about the black Gospel music style of the Sanctified Church, however, was its “innovative use of instrumental accompaniment”:9 the Sanctified sound seems to have been the first genre of African American sacred music to make extensive use of musical instruments previously associated with “the world.” Yet, this fact presents a theological conundrum. The very churches that were so enthusiastically “embracing” the Gospel style from the turn of the twentieth century were, at the same time, ardently emphasizing strict moral living and the repudiation of all things carnal.10 Thus, with one arm, their theologies held “the world” at a distance, while with the other, their style of worship music seems to have embraced it, reaching out “to the rhythms of the secular black musical world around
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Langston Hughes, “Gospel Singing,” newspaper clipping, October 27, 1963, quoted in Law- rence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 180.
In retrospect, this was particularly appropriate: one of Rainey’s pianists, “Georgia Tom,” was later transformed intoThomas A. Dorsey, the “Father of Gospel Music,” who combined the Sanctified Gospel sound with his own blues milieu to produce the “gospel blues.” Cf. Michael W. Harris, The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
George Robinson Ricks, “Some Aspects of the Religious Music of the United States Negro: An Ethnomusicological Study with Special Emphasis on the GospelTradition” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1960), 28–33.
Ibid. Cf. also John W. Work, “Changing Patterns in Negro Folk Songs,” Journal of American Folklore62, no. 244 (April–June 1949), 136.
Leonard Lovett, “Black-Holiness Pentecostalism: Implications for Ethics and Social Trans- formation” (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1978), 104.
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them” and bringing into the church the profane “sounds of ragtime, blues and jazz.”11
This is an ironic juxtaposition, indeed.12 How might early black Holiness– Pentecostals have reconciled their theologies’ antagonistic stance toward “the world” with a seemingly unqualified acceptance of “worldly” music at the very heart of their worship practices? Despite the dearth of primary written and transcribed oral material on early black Holiness and pentecostal theologies of music, I will present some of the evidence that is available, and suggest lines of theological reasoning that may have informed early black Holiness and pentecostal Christians in their widespread liturgical use of the Gospel style.
The Sanctified Church and Theological Antagonism toward “The World”
How does one characterize the anti-worldly stance of the Sanctified Church? According to Leonard Lovett, the Sanctified tradition bases it largely on a strict interpretation of 1John 2:15, which serves as the “bedrock” of everyday ethics. Lovett writes:
The world for Black holiness-pentecostals is viewed as human society without Christ, or may refer to human behavior which reflects fallen man [sic] and does not conform to the image of Christ as revealed in the presence and power of the Holy Spirit … Within Black holiness- pentecostalism the individual is exhorted to “give up worldliness” as a part of the sanctifying process.13
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Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 180.
Several scholars present this paradox, including Work, Boyer and Levine. Work, “Changing Patterns in Negro Folk Songs,” 140; Horace Clarence Boyer, “Contemporary Gospel Music,” The Black Perspective in Music 7, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 5; Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 179–180. Among those who address it from a theological perspective are Sanders and Spencer. Cheryl J. Sanders,Saints in Exile:The Holiness-Pentecostal Experience in African American Religion and Culture(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 63, 70, 89; Jon Michael Spencer, Protest and Praise: Sacred Music of Black Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 171–173.
Lovett, “Black-Holiness Pentecostalism,” 104.
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This “giving up of worldliness” entails a repudiation of and separation from the world. As Charles Price Jones, cofounder of the Church of God in Christ, explains:
Christ sanctified every believer when He died … but we must sanctify ourselves by giving up sin and sinful companions and yielding ourselves to the Holy Ghost. And this is what we mean by getting sanctified. We sanctify ourselves byseparationfromevil…Without this two-fold holiness we cannot see God.14[emphasis added]
Thus, the rejection of sin and separation from the world must be accompanied by a “yielding … to the Holy Ghost,”15 a surrender of personal agency to the absolute sovereignty of the Holy Spirit at work in the believer.
Music and Worldliness in the Sanctified Church
Within the broader Holiness-Pentecostal tradition, there seems to have been a range of views on how this concept of worldliness applied to worship music. In her book This Is That, pentecostal preacher Aimee Semple McPherson (1890– 1944) denigrates “worldly and rag-time music”16 but also praises the use of instruments for worship, as shown in her rather condescending, though prob- ably well-intentioned, description of a Miami “colored camp meeting”: “They sang as only colored folk can, played their musical instruments and shouted till people ran to know what had happened. Many danced right on the march and demonstrated to all that ‘It is joy unspeakable and full of glory.’”17
Several witnesses to the Azusa Street Revival report that, at the beginning of the meetings, music consisted solely of a cappella singing.18 According to RachelSizelove’sdescriptionof theservices,worshippers“hadnopiano,drums, or any musical instruments of any kind … they had no strange fire, which typ- ified any use of carnal means to kindle the fire of devotion and praise … O how could the Holy Ghost have right of way if they had carnal instruments
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Charles Price Jones,Truth, Organ no. 35, Vol. 10 (March 15, 1906); cited in ibid. Ibid.
Aimee Semple McPherson, This Is That: Personal Experiences, Sermons and Writings (1919; repr., New York: Garland Publishing, 1985), 38–39.
Ibid., 161.
Daniels, “‘Gotta Moan Sometime,’” 7.
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to depend on?”19 Along similar lines, Frank Bartleman (1871–1936) comments that “no organ or hymn books were used. The Spirit conducted the services and there seemed no place for them.”20 An anonymous reporter in The Apos- tolic Faith, the newspaper of the Azusa Street Revival, describes God “playing” human beings as instruments: “the Lord simply touches us by His mighty Spirit and we have no need of organs or pianos, for the Holy Ghost plays the piano in all our hearts … It is so sweet. It is heaven below.”21Unlike McPherson, Sizelove, Bartleman, and the anonymous reporter do not seem to be concernedprimarily with the genre of music involved. Their denigration of the use of instruments seems to stem from fear of the emotional impact human beings could make with them, which might interfere or compete with the agency of the Holy Spirit in stirring human hearts.22
Others claim that instrumental music was in fact used in at least some of the Azusa Street Revival meetings.23 Participants relate that a number of individuals, including Jennie Moore (1883–1936), received the gift of the abil- ity to play musical instruments under the influence of the Holy Spirit, when they had previously had no such ability.24 The case of Moore, an African American, and her use of instruments as early as 1906 may have challenged received notions of propriety among many in the African American commu- nity.
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Spencer, Protest and Praise, 171–172.
Frank Bartleman, “How Pentecost Came to Los Angeles as It Was in the Beginning,” 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: F. Bartleman, 1925), reprinted in Witness to Pentecost: The Life of Frank Bartleman(New York: Garland Publishing, 1985), 98.
Apostolic Faith1, no. 4 (December 1906), 2.
Cf. Spencer, Protest and Praise, 171. Like many of the early Christian theologians, they “spiritualize” instruments and are thus able to uphold biblical passages like Psalm 150, with its call to use them to praise God, while still opposing the human use of “carnal” instruments. Cf. James McKinnon, ed.,Music in Early Christian Literature(Cambridge,uk: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1–4. I am grateful to Dr. Robin Leaver for pointing out this parallel.
Daniels, “‘Gotta Moan Sometime,’” 7. This is not necessarily in contradiction with Size- love’s and Bartleman’s assertion, since there seems to have been a wide variety in the particulars of any given meeting during the multi-year revival.
Spencer, Protest and Praise, 172.
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Instruments in the African American Christian Sacred Music Tradition
Until the Sanctified sound, spirituals, lined-out hymns, and other types of AfricanAmericansacredsongweretraditionallyrenderedacappella.25AsPearl Williams-Jones explains, “this tradition of non-instrumental accompaniment (whether by choice, custom or circumstance singularly or combined) … was continued long after slavery and well into the period during which blacks estab- lished their own churches.”26Arrangements of spirituals for voice or voices and piano were available, but these were generally intended for concerts and other secular entertainments rather than for worship purposes.
Musical instruments were widely considered not only secular and worldly, but downright devilish,27 since “the instruments available in the community, the piano, the guitar, harmonica, and the banjo were too closely identified with secular life—or ‘the world,’ as opposed to the sacred—the church.”28 For example, when the young W.C. Handy (1873–1958) bought himself a guitar, his father roared: “A box, a guitar! One of the devil’s playthings … Take it away, I tell you … Whatever possessed you to bring a sinful thing like that into our Christian home?”29For many, such music called to mind such worldly contexts as brothels and speakeasies. As Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) explains, “the secular music known as the blues” was born “in the smelly, shoddy confines” of the jook (house of ill-repute),30 and those associations were difficult to eradicate. Willie “the Lion” Smith (1893–1973) recalls that
back in those early days churchgoing Negro people would not stand for ragtime playing; they considered it to be sinful. Part of that feeling was due to the fact that the popular songs you heard played around in the saloons had bawdy lyrics and when you played in a raggy style, folks would right away think of the bad words and all the hell-raising they heard, or had heard about, in the red-light district. Yeah, in the
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Pearl Williams-Jones, “Afro-American Gospel Music: A Crystallization of the Black Aes- thetic,”Ethnomusicology19, no. 3 (September 1975): 378.
Ibid.
Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 177–178.
Work, “Changing Patterns in Negro Folk Songs,” 137.
W.C. Handy,Father of the Blues: An Autobiography(New York: Collier Book ed., 1970), cited in Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 177.
Zora Neale Hurston,The Sanctified Church(New York: Marlowe and Co., 1981), 62.
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front parlor, where the neighbors could hear your playing, you had to sing the proper religious words and keep that lilting tempo down!31
Use of Instruments in Early Black Gospel Style
Within the African American community, part of the groundwork for wel- coming instrumental music into Sanctified worship may have been laid by the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s introduction of instruments around 1848,32 as well as by the church-sponsored instrumental bands founded in
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Willie the Lion Smith, Music on My Mind: The Memoirs of an American Pianist (London: Jazz Book Club, 1965), 25–26, quoted in Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 178. This concern about the evocative power of music was certainly not unique to African American Christians. In fact, it has been a continual theme in theologies of music since at least the fourth century. Theologians such as John Chrysostom (347–407) denounced instrumental music because of its association with musical practices of the Graeco-Roman cult. McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature, 1–4. More than one thousand years later, John Calvin (1509– 1564)wasconcernedtoeliminateasfullyaspossibleallsecularinfluencesonsacredmusic, so that sacred music would be clearly distinguishable from other kinds of music and the mind would not be drawn away from God by means of worship practices associated with levity. Cf. John Calvin, “Epistle to the Reader,” in Charles Garside, Jr., The Origins of Calvin’sTheology of Music: 1536–1543(Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1979), 32.; John Calvin,Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (London: James Clarke and Co., 1957), 148–149.
Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne, Recollections of Seventy Years (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968), 235–238. The first documented instance was a concert of sacred music at Bethel ame Church in Baltimore, md. In the ame Church, the style of instrumental accompaniment during worship was generally oriented toward a Euro- American aesthetic model, with the piano or organ supporting the choral harmonies but playing only a minimal rhythmic role. Although this sort of accompaniment was unlikely to inspire particularly salacious mental associations, the very use of instruments was still a controversial issue. In his memoirs, Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne (1811–1893) claims that the introduction of (unspecified) musical instruments to the ame Church was warmly received. Nevertheless, his subsequent statement implies that the acceptance of it involved the overcoming of at least some initial reluctance: “After [the first two concerts of sacred music with instruments in an ame church] the members of Bethel were convinced that instrumental music could be as fully consecrated to the service of the living God under the New Testament dispensation as it was under Old Testament.” (Payne, Recollections of Seventy Years, 236.) This scriptural debate—weighing the relative influence of the frequent Hebrew Bible references to instrumental music against the New
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places like Alabama and North Carolina in the years following the Civil War.33 Precisely when and how the use of musical instruments became accepted among African American Holiness and pentecostal Christians is not clear, though anecdotal evidence affirms that such practices were adopted early. The late Mattie Moss Clark reports that the Church of God in Christ (cogic) was using instruments like the guitar, piano, and percussion possibly as early as its founding in the 1890s.34
The use of instrumental accompaniment in the Gospel style was radically different from the Euro-American-inspired use of organs and pianos in church. Note that Foster, Bushell, and Hughes all make specific mention of the use of a
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Testament’s dearth of such—was to resurface decades later with Charles Price Jones (cf. Horace Clarence Boyer, How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel [Washington, dc: Elliott and Clark, 1995], 21–22). Unlike Price Jones, however, Payne’s account of the use of instruments in church strongly affirms a Euro-American musical model, as he was adamantly opposed to a traditional, folk-oriented African American cultural aesthetic. Cf. Payne, Recollections of Seventy Years, 253–257, for his stinging rebuke of the West African- inspired African American sacred dance, the “ring shout.”
Glenn Douglas Hinson, “When the Words Roll and the Fire Flows: Spirit, Style and Expe- rience in African-American Gospel Performance” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1989), 94–95.
Mattie Moss Clark, telephone interview by Timothy M. Kalil, January 13, 1993, quoted in Timothy M. Kalil, “Thomas A. Dorsey and the Development and Diffusion of Traditional Black Gospel Piano,” in Perspectives on American Music, 1900–1950, ed. Michael Saffle (New York: Garland, 2000), 174. This predates the Azusa Street revival meetings, which began in 1906, and subsequent reorganization of cogic from a Holiness to a pentecostal denomination, by almost ten years. In contrast, Boyer indicates that there may have been anti-instrumental sentiments in certain Sanctified quarters. Boyer asserts that Charles Price Jones questioned the propriety of using musical instruments in worship, harkening back to the theological position that Payne refuted in his memoirs (Payne, Recollections of Seventy Years, 236). Because he saw no mention of musical instruments used as part of New Testament worship, Jones is said to have banned them (Boyer, How Sweet the Sound, 21–22). Nevertheless, Jones could not have disavowed instruments entirely, since he relates that he used the organ when composing sacred songs under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and his Christ Temple Church in Jackson, Mississippi installed an organ as early as 1906 (Charles Price Jones, “Autobiographical Sketch of Charles Price Jones Founder of the Church of Christ [Holiness] u.s.a.” and “History of My Songs” [both 1935] in Otho B. Cobbins, ed., History of Church of Christ [Holiness]u.s.a., 1895–1965 [Chicago: National Publishing Board, Church of Christ (Holiness)u.s.a., 1966], 25, 129, 415). Moreover, Clark’s testimony about instruments having been “always in the Church” further complicates Boyer’s assertion, since Jones was part of the cogic leadership team up until the post- Azusa Street split in 1907.
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wide range of instruments in Sanctified worship, and this is typical of accounts of Sanctified church music at that time.35 Gospel instrumental ensembles were often comprised of whatever instruments the congregation could obtain. As Clark’s statement indicates, pianos, guitars, and a wide array of percus- sion instruments, including tambourines, triangles, and drums, were popu- lar when available. Other instruments included trombones, trumpets, sax- ophones, washtub basses, and double basses.36 Whatever the collection of instruments, Gospel accompanimental style in Holiness-Pentecostal churches typically underlined the rhythmic vitality of Gospel songs, even when the actual material of the songs was no more novel than a restyled spiritual.37 So even a piano in the hands of an Arizona Dranes (ca. 1891–ca. 1963), for example, was, for all intents and purposes, a new instrument in the church.
According to Boyer, Dranes’s 1928 recording of “I Shall Wear a Crown” “epit- omizes her Gospel-piano style … the introduction to the song … is placed in the middle of the piano register by the right hand, reminiscent of the ragtime piano style of a few decades earlier. Indeed, this recorded performance bears several striking resemblances to ragtime … [during the interlude] she uses a highly syncopated style.”38Daniels describes Dranes’s piano style as a blend of “ragtime, barrelhouse techniques, and a bluesy quality. Her piano sound had a ‘somewhat raucous barrelhouse or honky-tonk quality with the highly rhyth- mic and rapidly repeated percussive chords.’”39Intense instrumental rhythmic drive like this was one of the primary commonalities with secular music. Many recordings of the 1920s and 1930s made extensive use of a “rocking, driving beat” typical of the blues and jazz of the period.40
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For example, in 1919, the New York Times reports that the neighbors of a pentecostal church in Harlem complained about the noise of the worship music, which was “ren- dered with organs, drums, and tambourines, and sounds like a jazz orchestra” (“Com- plaint of Church Noise: Pentecostal Pastor, Colored, Summoned on Complaint of Neigh- bors,” New York Times, September 24, 1919, cited in Daniels, “‘Gotta Moan Sometime,’” 21).
Jackson,Singing in My Soul, 23; Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 180. Mellonee V. Burnim, “The Black Gospel Music Tradition: Symbol of Ethnicity” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1980), 3.
Boyer, “Contemporary Gospel Music,” 31–32.
Daniels, “‘Gotta Moan Sometime,’” 22.
Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 179.
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Black Holiness–Pentecostal Theologies of Music
We return to our principal question: how might early Black Sanctified Saints have reconciled theological antagonism toward “the world” with liturgical embrace of ostensibly “worldly” music?41InBlack Culture and Black Conscious- ness, historian Lawrence Levine states that “musically, [the Holiness churches] reached back to the traditions of the slave past and out to the rhythms of the secular black musical world around them.”42This two-part model will serve as our starting point.
“Reaching Back” is not a very controversial component. As Mellonee Burnim explains, “[I]n its earliest stages, gospel music can be characterized as both a reinterpretation and expansion of existing musical traditions.”43 A wide range of scholars have demonstrated the socio-historical and musical connections between Gospel music and the music brought from West Africa and developed by African Americans living in slavery.44
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I should note in passing that not all black Holiness and pentecostal Christians may have accepted all aspects of Gospel style early on. The issue of the use of musical instruments was contested, although the reasons for objecting to them were a bit different from the ones I outlined earlier. Some scholars suggest that they may have denounced the use of instruments because of concerns about the emotional impact human beings could make with them, which might interfere or compete with the agency of the Holy Spirit in stirring the human heart (Spencer,Protest and Praise, 171; Frank Bartleman, “How Pentecost Came to Los Angeles,” 98: “No organ or hymn books were used. The Spirit conducted the services and there seemed no place for them”). Charles Price Jones seems to have objected to instruments because he saw no mention of them as part of New Testament worship (Boyer, How Sweet the Sound, 5.) Jones could not have disavowed instruments entirely, however, since he relates that he used the organ when composing sacred songs under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and his Christ Temple Church in Jackson, Mississippi installed an organ as early as 1906 (Charles Price Jones, “Autobiographical Sketch of Charles Price Jones Founder of the Church of Christ [Holiness]u.s.a.” and “History of My Songs” [both 1935] in Otho B. Cobbins, ed., History of Church of Christ [Holiness] u.s.a., 1895–1965 [Chicago: National Publishing Board, Church of Christ (Holiness) u.s.a., 1966], 25, 415; Cobbins, History of Church of Christ [Holiness] u.s.a. 129). Nevertheless, the bulk of anecdotal evidence does suggest a widespread use of Gospel style early on in black Holiness and pentecostal churches.
Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 180.
Burnim, “The Black Gospel Music Tradition,” 3.
E.g., Hurston,TheSanctifiedChurch, 105; David Douglas Daniels,iii, “The Cultural Renewal of Slave Religion: Charles Price Jones and the Emergence of the Holiness Movement in Mississippi” (Ph.D. diss., Union Theological Seminary, 1992).
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“Reaching Out” is rather more problematic, theologically speaking. In later years, while using music as an evangelizing tool, some Holiness and pentecostal musicians would declare: “music gets ’em; preaching keeps ’em.”45 Anecdotes exist of Sanctified churches hiring jazz and blues musicians to play in church services and recordings.46 Others, including most notably Thomas A. Dorsey (1899–1993), went back and forth between the worlds of church and “jook joint.” By the 1940s, however, this apparent fluidity between religious and sec- ular zones sparked a fierce debate in the African American community about the viability of sacred music drawing too close to secular contexts. It seems implausible that worldly music qua worldly music could be imported into the Sanctified Church, and it is not clear whether either evangelization concerns or aesthetic judgments would have provided sufficient grounds to justify poten- tially “contaminating” believers with the stain of “the world.”
Some, including Mahalia Jackson (1911–1972), would claim that the influence went in the reverse direction, which would certainly solve much of the theolog- ical dilemma. In her autobiography, Jackson proposes that “the blues and jazz and even the rock and roll stuff got their beat from the Sanctified Church.”47 While Gospel certainly had a strong influence on later secular styles such as rock ’n’ roll and rhythm and blues, Gospel’s relationship with earlier genres like the blues and early jazz is harder to pin down. The early histories of the blues and Gospel are shrouded in mystery, making it difficult to determine the direction of influence or even the character of that influence, be it unidi- rectional, reciprocal, or merely a family resemblance resulting from common stylistic ancestors. Each scenario has different theological implications, and it is virtually impossible to make univalent statements about the theology of the interaction of sacred and secular.
Thus, while “reaching back” and “reaching out” may help explain the Sancti- fied Church’s use of Gospel style, they go only part of the way toward account- ing for the theological aspects of the matter. I submit that neither can function as theologically consistent without a firm grounding in a third dimension: the dimension of “Up.” In other words, God—especially God the Holy Spirit—must play a key role in any conception of Sanctified theologies of music, else the model will be incommensurate with the pneumatological focus that charac- terizes much of Holiness and pentecostal theology.
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Burnim, “The Black Gospel Music Tradition,” 246.
E.g., Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records (New York: Cam- bridge University Press, 1984), 197.
Mahalia Jackson with Evan McLeod Wylie, Movin’ on Up (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1966), 33.
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Some clues to the Sanctified understanding of the role of God in sacred music may be found in Charles Mason’s defense of the propriety of the holy dance known as the “ring shout,” entitled “Is It Right for Saints of God to Dance?”48 In it, he lays out a theological foundation that may be comparable to his view of Gospel-style music, since scholars have well established the historical and cultural connections between the ring shout and Black Gospel.49 Mason documents four instances of dancing in the New Testament and several in the Hebrew Bible, and then proceeds with his apology:
Dancing shows that we have victory—1Samuel 18:6. Dancing of the peo- ple of God is to be in the Spirit of Jesus only, for as in Jesus only we rejoice and praise God, we must have Jesus and all Jesus, Jesus in all things in the church and His saints. The people of God do not dance as the world dances, but are moved by the Spirit of God. So you can see it is all in the Spirit of God and to the glory of God. It is not to satisfy the lust of the flesh, or the carnal appetite, as the world’s dance, but only to glorify God and satisfy the soul. The world dances of the world, about the world and to the world. The children of God dance of God, for God and to the praise and glory of His name.50
We see a trinitarian structure to holy dancing: believers dance in the Spirit of Jesus, in whom alone they rejoice and praise God; they are moved by the (Holy) Spirit of God, who, to the glory of God, forms the ground from which this activity takes place. Mason concludes that the entire expression results in an act that is oriented to God in Christ Jesus. Although he does not delineate precisely how he envisions the hypostases of the Trinity interacting with each other and with the believer in this spiritual, physical, and metaphorical dance, it is clear that the Holy Spirit plays a critical and connective role in this econ- omy.
In addition to relating to the entire Trinity, Mason’s approach seems in line with the threefold declaration of Romans 11:36: “for from him, through him, and
48
49 50
Closely allied to the exuberance of Gospel singing is the enthusiasm of the ring shout, a religious dance brought to the West Indies and North America by enslaved Africans. The ring shout represents “an impressive fusion of call-and-response singing, polyrhyth- mic percussion, and expressive and formalized dancelike movements” (Art Rosenbaum, Johann S. Buis, Shout Because You’re Free: The African American Ring Shout Tradition in Coastal Georgia[University of Georgia Press, 1998], 1).
E.g., Work, “Changing Patterns in Negro Folk Songs,” 141; Jackson,Singing in My Soul, 25. Lovett, “Black-Holiness Pentecostalism,” 26.
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to him are all things.”These two three-part structures may provide a framework for understanding Sanctified theologies of music.
Like Martin Luther, black Holiness and pentecostal Christians considered music a gift from God, an instrument of the Holy Spirit, which is inherently good51 but can be misused for ungodly purposes if joined to ungodly texts.52 However, if that same music is “unclothed” from “idolatrous … texts” and re- clothed in “the living and holy Word of God in order to sing, praise and honor it,” then such music can be “properly used to serve her dear Creator and his Christians.”53Though Satan could use rhythmically rousing music for fiendish ends, “the devil should not be allowed to keep all this good rhythm,”54 as one church elder exclaimed. Music had to be restored to sacred use in order to reinstate its legitimate purpose of being a “tool of praise.”55 As Jerma Jackson explains, Sanctified congregations
imputed a sacred meaning to instruments and rhythms typically associ- ated with secular music … anxiety about style and expression … did not pervade the sanctified church, because it engaged music as a vehicle for experiencing the divine. As a result, the particular form music assumed or the instrument one played seemed almost incidental.56
Early black Gospel musicians may have thereby been able to address the issue of intertexuality without resorting to the wholesale eradication of secular influ- ences. The music, having been transformed back to its “legitimate” purpose— the praise of God—could then be used in worship.
Inadditiontobeingpart of God’sgoodcreation,musicwasseen asa charism, a gift of the Holy Spirit, as shown in the gift of playing instruments given to Jennie Moore and others at Azusa Street. “The people of God do not dance as the world dances, but are moved by the Spirit of God,” Mason writes, and it is likely that he would have written the same of singing and playing music. Christologically, Mason asserts broadly that “we must have […] Jesus in all things in the church and His saints,” and that dancing and singing to God is “to be in the Spirit of Jesus only, for […] in Jesus only we rejoice and praise God.”
51
52 53 54 55 56
Martin Luther, “Preface to Georg Rhau’s Symphoniae iucundae,” inLiturgy and Hymns, ed. Ulrich S. Leupold, Vol. 53 in Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1965), 323.
Ibid., 324.
Ibid., 328.
Work, “Changing Patterns in Negro Folk Songs,” 141.
Hinson, “When the Words Roll and the Fire Flows,” 96–97.
Jackson,Singing in My Soul, 24.
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The gift of music having been given, the Holy Spirit plays a critical role in enabling Christians to make music: “So you can see it is all in the Spirit of God and to the glory of God.” Central to Sanctified theology is the idea of “exuberant worship as an expression of the Holy Spirit’s presence in the believers’ souls and bodies.”57 The body is considered a “critical intermediary between the world and the Holy Spirit.”58Thus, once it has been redeemed by God and consecrated to God by holy living, the body can be used by the Holy Spirit to manifest its presence and force. Such physical manifestations—including fits, “the jerks,” fainting and, most famously, speaking in tongues (glossolalia)—are considered beyond human control.59
In terms of the content of the music, the use of sacred texts rather than pro- fane words presumably changes the focus of meaning from worldly subjects to music “about” God. More profoundly, however, a critical factor in this process may have been the intent or spiritual orientation of the singer or instrumental- ist. Without an inward orientation toward God, the musician could easily fall prey to all the dangers of which opponents of “worldly” musical instruments warned. As Cheryl Sanders asserts:
for the saved and sanctified performer, the selective synthesis of sacred and secular elements in the music proceeds according to the principle “in the world, but not of it.” What matters here is not the sacred or secular origin of the particular style or technique being used … At issue is intentionality.60
57 58 59
60
Ibid., 19.
Ibid.
Jackson,Singing in My Soul, 20. Such emotionally communicative acts had been a feature of African American worship since the early nineteenth century, if not earlier. In the Methodist church, it became the object of criticism by those, such as John Fanning Watson (1779–1860), who felt that a “methodological” approach was more valid. (Cf. John Fanning Watson, “Methodist Error,” in Antirevivalism in Antebellum America: A Collection of ReligiousVoices, ed. James D. Bratt [New Brunswick,nj: Rutgers University Press, 2006].) Later in the century, Price Jones and Mason countered Watson’s claims by examining the Scriptures. In 1890, Jones discovered that ecstatic worship, possibly comparable to African American practices, had been a standard part of early Christianity. In fact, the “sedate” religion preached by mainstream American churches carried “none of the signs spoken of in the Scriptures,” convincing Jones that such an approach was “not toting fair with Jesus.” Jones joined Mason, at the time a traveling minister from Arkansas, in writing The Work of the Holy Spirit in the Churches, which “put forth what they felt constituted true religion, namely the manifestation of divine presence” (Jackson,Singing in My Soul, 16). Sanders,Saints in Exile, 89.
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If the source of the holy dance and Gospel music is God, the doing of the dance and the music are enabled through God, and the orientation of both the musician and the music are toward God, then the Holy Spirit maintains the sovereignty and agency that Sanctified theologies require. This may have eased the concerns of those who, like Sizelove and Bartleman, strove to defend the agency of the Holy Spirit against human incursions. Moreover, even the staunchest critic of the use of musical instruments would have been challenged to argue against cases like Jennie Moore without either calling into question the veracity of the miracles at Azusa Street or questioning the wisdom of the Holy Spirit. In response to those anxious about the possibility that Gospel music might be intended principally to arouse an emotional response in the believer, Lovett counters that, in black Holiness–Pentecostalism, the intention is not to bring about possession by the Spirit, but rather to express human joy in response to the Holy Spirit’s presence and activity.61 Again, God is consid- ered the primary locus of agency, while human beings can do no more than respond.
Conclusion
A model such as this may have enabled early Holiness-Pentecostals to consider their music to be categorically different from the world’s music, despite any phenotypical correlation. In other words, Holiness-Pentecostal churches may have sought to strip instrumental music of its internal “worldliness,” even if it continued to resemble worldly music in its exterior features. This would have enabled them to maintain their theologically antagonistic stance toward “the world,” while promoting a style of worship music that, rather than taking them back into “the world,” served to “symbolically ‘usher’ the saints ‘out’ of this world and into a more authentic one discerned within sacred time and space.”62
Over time, some Sanctified churches may have relaxed their vigilance. Anec- dotes of worldly blues musicians playing Gospel music in worship services “trouble the waters” of the claim that, in the Sanctified Church, music can only be oriented to the praise and glory of God when the heart of the performer is turned in that direction.Yet, the very controversy generated by performances of Gospel songs and spirituals by jazz bands and the “cross-over” careers of such
61 62
Lovett, “Black-Holiness Pentecostalism,” 27. Sanders,Saints in Exile, 63.
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high-profile musicians as Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915–1973) implies a perceived threat to the ideal widely upheld in the Sanctified community.63
This version of the story may provide a more complex portrait of the Sanc- tified Church than the simple stereotype of the monolithic “Christ against Culture”64 paradigm by which it is so often illustrated.65 If Holiness and pen- tecostal Christians did indeed negotiate their way to an acceptance of Gospel music that was internally consistent with their larger context of anti-worldli- ness, then they merit more credit for theological subtlety and nuance than has been thus far attributed to them.
63
64 65
Cf. Jerma Jackson on the secularization of Gospel music, especially her discussion of Tharpe (Singing in My Soul, 77–102).
Cf. H. Richard Niebuhr,Christ and Culture(New York: Harper, 1951).
Cf. Matthew S. Clark, Henry I. Lederle, et al.,WhatisDistinctiveaboutPentecostalTheology? (Pretoria, South Africa: University of South Africa Press, 1989).
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