Christianity and Race in the American South by Paul Harvey

Author:Paul Harvey [Harvey, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978--0-226-41549--9
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

Biblical Literalism and Musical Visionaries

From the early 1900s to the 1940s, southern cultural expressions in both “low” and “high” arts exploded. William Faulkner authored his groundbreaking modernist novels and Flannery O’Connor her stories exploring the southern grotesque; southern bluesmen created new forms of music that revolutionized American music; black gospel writers penned some of the early classics of what would become the gospel music sound; and vernacular visionaries such as Howard Finster and Sister Gertrude Morgan painted works of spiritual intensity.

Southern religious culture juxtaposed a pietist Biblicism with wildly imaginative music, literature, and art. That striking contrast generated a productive tension between the text-bound theology and the demands of artistic production. The biblically literalist culture of the American South inspired, but ultimately was overcome by, the spectacularly imaginative readings given to biblical passages in the lyrics of spirituals and in the carefully rendered character sketches, ribald parodies, or angry manifestos of other contemporary music. Precisely by taking the Bible as a literal and historical document seriously, southern musicians extrapolated tales that wove their way into deeply American histories of struggle, injustice, triumph, backsliding, and visionary experiences.

In music, more than any other art form, the cultural intersections of race and southern Christianities have deeply imprinted and shaped American cultural life. In black spirituals, Americans learned of the deep theology and culture of the nation’s most despised and oppressed people. Through black and white variants of gospel music and in the rhythmic intensity that black and white Pentecostals carried forward through the twentieth century, Americans learned a spiritual dance. In the 1960s spirituals morphed into freedom songs. Singers envisioned a new hope, and biblical imagery empowered movements for social change. In more contemporary forms of Americana, musical artists have returned to the kinds of biblical sketches used by the folk musicians of decades ago, usually for the purpose of telling stories of mystery, irony, and tragedy. In all these cases, biblically inspired stories and meanings have stretched far beyond the kinds of restrictive renderings placed on biblical texts in the theology of the evangelical belt. Biblical tales, retold and spun into new forms, have inspired the production of creative sound art by those who insisted that they needed nothing but the Bible but yearned for something more as well.

Southern Protestantism was not the most promising place to look for the origins of contemporary American popular music or for inventive adaptations of biblically inspired lyrics. For much of the nineteenth century, for example, white southerners only grudgingly accepted aesthetic cultivation in worship practice. “Harmony is voluptuous,” a nineteenth-century Virginian mused in his diary. “It requires no pious emotions for a man to love harmony.” Like many, this believer thought that “mere accompaniments” should have no place in sacred music. Nonetheless, over time, Southern evangelicals who had been suspicious of vocal display gradually accepted stylistically refined music as spiritually uplifting.37

By the mid-nineteenth century, congregations were moving away from a cappella hymns “lined out” by individuals and toward congregational singing accompanied by pianos and organs.

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