Judge
Jackson and the Colored Sacred Harp
Review by Kiri Miller
FROM THE ALABAMA REVIEW QUARTERLY
used with the permission of the University of Alabama Press
Judge Jackson and The Colored Sacred Harp. By Joe Dan Boyd. Montgomery: Alabama Folklife Association, 2002. 159 pp. $29.95.00. ISBN 0‑9672672‑5‑0. Purchase $29.95
This
slim, oblong book contains as much community effort, as much eccentricity, and
as much rich material as any of the shape‑note hymn compilations it is
designed to resemble. It has a layered and recursive form, in which various
streams separate and converge: a biography, a personal memoir of the folk
revival, a critical survey of scholarly literature on African American Sacred
Harp singing, a generous selection of evocative photographs spanning the
twentieth century, and a CD that ranks among the most valuable and carefully
compiled collections of historical Sacred Harp recordings ever assembled. John
Bealle's introduction plays the role of the traditional "rudiments of
music" section of a shape‑note hymnal, providing a concise and
sensitive history of Sacred Harp singing, its diverse adherents, and its
intersections with the folk revival. Joe Dan Boyd's prologue prepares the reader
to engage the main body of the book (which dates from 1969) as a document of
"the eager, innocent spirit by which so many people engaged traditional
culture at that time" (p. 24). Boyd's self‑awareness pervades the
book and makes it a more complex work than most other celebratory folklore
biographies.
In
many respects, judge Jackson (1883‑1958) was much like other leading
figures in the southern communities that sang from The
Sacred Harp in the early twentieth century. He was born poor and rural, did
agricultural work all his life, gained a patchwork music education from a
variety of singing‑school teachers and friends, taught his own large
family to sing, became a prosperous and charismatic cultural leader in his own
community, and eventually compiled a shape-note tunebook that included some of
his own compositions. This sort of life history is not uncommon in Sacred Harp
circles and has long supported the master narrative of American
self‑reliance, native ingenuity, and folk artisanship that has informed
the reception of this kind of singing almost since the invention of shape-note
notation.
But
Judge Jackson's story is of special interest because he was African
American‑the "black giant of white spirituals," as Boyd
subtitled the folklore master's thesis on which this book is based. (With this
title, Boyd made a wry commentary on George Pullen Jackson's unfortunate and
persistent terminology for shape‑note singing, made famous by his book White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands [Chapel Hill, N.C., 1933],)
Judge Jackson's own awareness of the race‑based claims and assumptions
bound up with Sacred Harp history is evident from the title he chose for his
hymn compilation: The Colored Sacred Harp.
Jackson first had the book printed in 1934, funding it primarily with his
own savings. The effort probably made him enemies, given that Alabama was deep
in the Depression and those unsympathetic to his cause might have smelled a
vanity project. Indeed, such enemies could also point to the fact that the book
never quite achieved the level of recognition and general use that its compiler
hoped. Among the greatest contributions made by Boyd's narrative is his detailed
exploration of this anticlimax: why wasn't The Colored Sacred Harp more widely adopted? Boyd moves from the
book's physical attributes to contextual social factors, confirming
ethnomusicologist Doris Dyen's observation that the very existence of the book
served a symbolic purpose apart from its function as a collection of music to be
sung.
Boyd's
fieldwork in Alabama began after Jackson's death, so he never met his
"black giant." The story of his long relationship with Jackson's
Wiregrass community is as important a document as his biography of Jackson. An
"epilogue" that runs to half the length of the original thesis
describes how the Wiregrass singers came to be recognized as national treasures,
through performances alongside white Sacred Harp singers at the 1970 Smithsonian
Festival of American Folklife and the 1971 Montreal "Man and his
World" exposition. Boyd's frank discussion of the tensions that arose
between the black and white singers over competition for the crowd's attention,
differences in style, and repertory choices, among other things‑is far
more historically valuable than the typical romantic, celebratory accounts of
such festivals. But this account also shows that the singers themselves shared
the ideals of those celebrations of conflict‑free diversity and actively
worked to find a basis for mutual respect. Boyd's work is a testament to the
success of that effort.
KIRI
MILLER
Harvard University
Judge Jackson and the Colored Sacred Harp
by Joe Dan Boyd with an introduction by John Bealle. Purchase $29.95