And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song—rhythmic cry of the slave—stands today not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas.
—W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
What is the sacred sound of freedom? For continental and diasporic Africans in North America in the early eighteenth century, the sound would inevitably have been polyphonic. Freedom would have been a sonic cacophony of beats, rhythms, and melodies, clapping and stomping in syncopated time that moved between and beyond purely notational patterns. It would have resembled, reflected, and refracted the stirrings of an Atlantic world in motion.
The sacred sounds of freedom in the Americas included “the syncretic Afro-Brazilian religions of macumba and Umbanda, the black Catholic congado, and the quasisacred remnants of the otherwise secular batuque circle dance.” Eighteenth-century America served as a conjuring space for Black sacred sound. African religions—Abrahamic and indigenous—gave expression to the historical, cultural, and religious expressions of these communities. New world African communities deployed this sound in expressing the hopes, joys, dreams, histories, aspirations, and longings of a people with a history who were simultaneously an emerging people creating a new world. A dichotomous sacred and secular did not operate within this conjuring context. It was all one. Indeed, as the pioneering musicologist Eileen Southern notes, “The music is everywhere! Often, one needs only to stop and listen.”
Enslaved communities in North America were ethnically diverse. These continental and diasporic Africans forged a new world community with a new sound. The music in these communities not only captured the diverse traditions and cultures of Africans, it also developed in dynamic ways to reflect the contingencies of life in North America. Sacred sound transmitted histories, traditions, stories, myths, religions, and culture. “Song texts generally reflected personal or community concerns. The texts might speak of everyday affairs or of historical events; texts might inform listeners of current happenings or praise or ridicule persons, including even those listening to the song….But the most important texts belonged to the historical songs that recounted heroic deeds of the past and reminded the people of their traditions.”
The sheer diversity, complexity, and variety of musical forms and styles point to the depth and character of this soundscape in motion. Scholars have attempted to understand this music in a number of ways. Musicologist Guthrie Ramsey reminds us, “A most striking quality of early black music historiography ideology is how writers—particularly African American ones—negotiated the generally accepted ‘divide’ between Euro-based and Afro-based aesthetic perspectives.” Ramsey underscores the challenge of understanding eighteenth-century Black music: to develop an adequate knowledge of the music itself and translate it into an appropriate contemporary idiom. You run the risk of underdeveloping or overdetermining the immense African contributions shaping and forming the music when you make it conform to European-derived musicological registers. A further challenge is the need to hear the music absent the sound and play the music absent notes. You have to find another path to understanding.
Despite the diverse sources of Black sacred music in North America, spirituals were initially presented by Europeans in translation form, in the idioms of European notes and categories. But these translations were inadequate to the task of expressing the music’s rhythmic texture and robust sound. Dena Epstein writes, “Afro-American music included many elements not present in European music and for which no provision had been made in the notational system. For example, Lucy McKim Garrison wrote in 1862: ‘It is difficult to express the entire character of these negro ballads by mere musical notes and signs. The odd turns made in the throat; and the curious rhythmic effect produced by single voices chiming in at different irregular intervals, seem almost as impossible to place on score, as the singing of birds or the tones of an Æolian harp.’ ” The worlds of continental and diasporic Africans could not be fully represented by the notational representation of latter-day ethnographers and musicologists.
So what is the sound of Black freedom? Perhaps it is best to begin by thinking reflexively about the probing question posited by W.E.B. Du Bois: “Do the sorrow songs sing true?”