Paul Robeson and Slave Music

I've been making note here the last couple of weeks that I've been listening to songs by Paul Robeson (1898-1976), the famous African-American bass-baritone whose singing was as beautiful and inspired as his politics were controversial.  (Robeson was a proud member of the Communist Party.)  This Web site from the Princeton Public Library has a good number of links about Robeson, his life and career: Paul Robeson on the Web.

What got me listening to Robeson's music lately was an essay by Sterling Stuckey of the University of California-Riverside called "Paul Robeson and Richard Wright on the Arts and Slave Culture" in Slavery and the American South (2003), Winthrop D. Jordan, ed.  One of the points Stuckey emphasizes about Robeson is that Robeson as a child had exposure to music as sung by former slaves.  And that this experience gave him not only a knowledge of the slave music styles and songs, but singing them that way was an important part of his early musical training.

Robeson grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, the son of a man who had originally escaped from slavery.

Many of the Robeson relatives, ex-slaves and former sharecroppers from North Carolina, lived there and formed a close family at center of which was Paul's father.  The Reverend William Drew Robeson disdained any airs of superiority toward his largely illiterate kin, some of whom worked as caretakers and coachmen in town, as laborers at farms nearby, or in brickyards in Princeton. ...

Despite their poverty, he [Paul] found among the ex-slaves and sharecorppers folk wit and talk and the joy of laughter.  Theirs was a world in which the home was concert stage, theater, and social center where the whole range of Negro music was heard: songs of trials and triumphs, of love and longing, hymn-song and ragtime ballad, gospels and blues, and the "healing comfort of the illimitable sorrow of the Spirituals."  The Robesons, together with otehrs, cherished spirituals and blues at a time when many in the black middle class, seeking approval from whites, shunned them.  That they sang blues as well as spirituals was by then exceptional, especially in the home of a preacher.  During slavery, the two musics enjoyed a closer relationship than is generally conceived today, and Paul's father continued that tradition, so Paul did not conclude, as some students of slave music have, that the spirituals were sacred, while the blues were profane and the devil's music.

Stuckey discusses the fact that Robeson took a positive artistic view of "Negro dialect," in contrast to some other African-American artists like Harlan Ellison.  He insisted on using the dialect in singing the spirituals.  "Thus, in his voice as he sang spirituals, the world came to hear, perhaps without realizing it, the projection of slave vocal potential and fulfillment, of which his ex-slave father's voice provided a prime example."

Stuckey also emphasizes another aspect of Robeson's background that is a reminder of the varied sources of musical influence:

Furthermore, to argue that Robeson lacked training is to overlook the fact that most of the great black musicians of the [20th] century, singers as well as instrumentalists, were under the influence of the music of the black church.  Robeson addressed the matter: "Yes, I heard my people singing! - in the glow of parlor coalstove and on summer porches sweet with lilac air, from choir loft to Sunday morning pews - and my soul was filled with their harmonies. Then, too, I heard these songs in the very sermons of my father, for in the Negro's speech there is much of the phrasing and rhythms of folk song.  The great, soaring gospels we love are merely sermons that are sung; and as we thrill to such gifted singers as Mahalia Jackson, we hear the rhythmic eloquence of our preachers, so many of whom, like my father, are masters of poetic speech."  In that statement there is a feature of black culture, during and since slavery, not often remarked - that sermon can become song and song sermon, a movement from one category to another that defies compartmentalization.  What is involved is a flowing conception of reality in relating speech to song.

Hey, I had to get that cosmic phrase "a flowing conception of reality" in here some way!