In this most crucial of all years for democracy, it is inevitable that art should reflect the crisis. But much of that art will be dated, and except to document the times, will not outlast them. One work that will, I believe, was performed before a large and distinguished audience, June 25th, at the Lewisohn Stadium, under the baton of Artur Rodzinski. It is the choral ballad, “And They Lynched Him On a Tree,” poem written by Katherine Garrison Chapin and musical score by William Grant Still.
There are several reasons why this significant work should become one of the permanently representative American classics. In the first place because its beauty and originality transcend, verbally and musically, most of the chants for democracy that the crisis has inspired. Instead of their rather rhetorical approach, this work goes to the core of the theme and universalizes it, both beyond the particular stress of today’s problems and certainly also beyond the warrantable but limited claims of the Negro’s stake in democracy. In the days of its youth, democracy needed, no doubt, the lusty praise and encomiums of a Walt Whitman; and many of the contemporary works on this theme have obviously the Whitman flavor. But democracy today needs sober criticism, even courageous chastizing, and by inspired indirection but with no loss of power, And They Lynched Him On a Tree gives our democracy in crisis just that much-needed heroic challenge and criticism. So doing, it universalizes its particular theme and expands a Negro tragedy into a purging and inspiring plea for justice and a fuller democracy. When, on occasion, art rises to this level, it fuses truth with beauty, and in addition to being a sword for the times it is likely to remain, as a thing of beauty, a joy forever.
Very fittingly, this work is the result of the collaboration of a white poet and a Negro musician, and the treatment of the subject dramatizes this even further with the double racial chorus, representing first the tragically divided and hostile majority and minority groups, and finally the united chorus of citizens aware of their ultimate solidarity of interests. From Negro and white groups they blend into an impersonal Greek chorus of raceless and timeless humanity chanting:
They left him hanging for the world to pass by,
But a bloody sun will rise in a bloody sky,
A bloody sun will shine across this sand,
And a long dark shadow will fall on the land!
Cut him down from the gallows tree!
Cut him down for the world to see!
Speak to your brother and take his hand,
And clear this shadow that falls across your land;
The long dark shadow, the long dark shadow.
Oh trust your brother and reach out your hand
And clear the shadow that falls across your land!
Few American works have achieved such effective dramatization of native materials, due in large part to the remarkably close welding of the words and music. This has minimized the ballad’s potential melodrama and brought out in stark simplicity its inner tragedy and elemental humanity. Like a Greek tragedy, the poem opens with its catastrophe already over. It develops its theme in a series of five choral sections, each registering a different aspect and mood of the central situation.
First is the chorus of hate and mob passion:
‘We’ve strung him higher than the tallest pine, Come along, feller, come along home,’
its heartlessness made all the more pointed by the half-hearted note of pity as a strident woman’s voice exclaims: ‘God, I’m glad he’s no son of mine.’ In this section Still has painted musically the nervous tension and inflamed hysteria of the crowd and its blatant, unchallenged power. Staccato chords and throbbing disharmonies point the scene, with spare but effective tone colors, closely descriptive of the text.
In a brief instrumental interlude this stridency fades out into the still and fitfully romantic atmosphere of the Southern night, with occasional hints of sombre and ominous silence. Then in muted whispers, the Negro chorus of terror and groping begins, as the man’s friends slink toward the tragic place. The chorus of Negro women moves suddenly to a poignant outburst of grief which soon becomes the melodie matrix for the lyric climax of the ballad, The Mother’s Lament. This contralto solo and relative, in clever, unorthodox order—written with the possibilities of Marian Anderson’s voice in mind—was fortunate to find another entirely adequate interpreter in the person of Louise Burge, whose rendition received a well-deserved ovation from an audience of 13,000 in attendance. So, in addition to registering one of the high-water marks of Still’s creative talent, this lyric dirge brought Miss Burge to her first great public debut, and very probably put another Negro singer into a career of stellar rank. In this section, with only hints of the idiom of the spirituals, the composer has very successfully reflected not only the mood of the situation but the characteristic idiom and tonal colors of the Negro folk.
The third section is even folkier, and echoing the mother’s grief-stricken reminiscence of her luckless son’s career, paints a lively epitome of his life from carefree childhood through careless, love-free youth to crime, jail and tragic death. Here is sharp, effective contrast to:
‘Oh, sorrow, oh sorrow
Oh, my son!
Oh, Jesus, Jesus,
What have they done,’
We have the syncopated and almost heroic ballad of the bad man:
‘He was a man, his proud head
He carried high. Quick with a gun,
Quick with love, he passed by
Now he swings high.’
Double chorus and narrator carry this section to a climax of almost reckless praise, till the shadow of the deed steals suddenly back with a sharp foreshadowing of the social tragedy behind the personal one. ‘But justice was a slow thing to be waiting for,’ and in alternating staccato of hate and passion, a sobering realization of society’s counter-crime breaks through to the chorus of indictment, ‘In the false name of justice they broke the law!’ Here, in a passage of tense dramatic skill, Still achieves one of his best dramatic climaxes.
Transitional to the final section is a recurrence of the Mother’s Lament, this time more challenging, more impersonal, and against the background of the double chorus, symbolizing the awakening realization of the social situation. Miss Chapin has made the case of social criticism all the stronger by the admission of guilt, the concession of due and proper punishment, and thus the all-the-more moving challenge of the mother’s cry:
‘He did wrong
But couldn’t they let him be,
Not die like this
On a roadside tree.’
The drama sweeps swiftly now to a final chorus of challenge and protest, the concluding lines of which have already been quoted. Orchestra, both choruses, and soloist work up to a complicated antiphonal finale, strong but fortunately restrained. Especially in the concluding measures of the exhortation chant:
‘Call him brother and take his hand
And clear the long dark shadow that falls across your land!’
Both the professional and popular reaction seem to indicate that a major work has been added to the repertory of significant and characteristic American music. The composition more than held its own in comparison with the now familiar Earl Robinson’s Ballad for Americans, rendered effectively but with little subtlety by Paul Robeson; and in the much harder test of comparison with Roy Harris’s Challenge: 1940, written especially for the occasion. Only the heavy requirements of full orchestra and two large choruses can stand between it and frequent performance, and these should not—since in all the literature of this theme to date, nothing yet tops it. For the discriminating in poetic and musical taste, this is, for our decade thus far, the ballad of democracy. Dr. Artur Rodzinski, who sponsored and admirably directed the first performance; Hugh Ross and the Schola Cantorum; the Wen Talbert Chorus, which sang admirably; and the discerning Stadium management may well be proud of their part in this historic event. As to Katharine Garrison Chapin and William Grant Still, they have earned the gratitude of their fellow-citizens, black and white, who want truth and beauty in American art, and tolerance and justice in American life.