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 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 Purchase $29.95
