Years ago when Jess and I were first married, we attended a radical Catholic Church in Rochester, NY. I’ve preached and written about Corpus Christi before. It was a place where women preached, LGBTQ relationships were blessed, where the poor were an integral part of the parish and where peace was a priority. It was the place where I first experienced a call to ministry.
It was also the place where I learned to sing Gospel music.
The parish started a Gospel Choir in order to reach out to African American members, hiring a local jazz musician to lead it. Rather than attracting People of Color to the new endeavor, the ones who showed up to the first rehearsal were White people who were unfamiliar with singing Gospel – Jess and I among them.
The choir director, George Banks, who had led large Gospel choirs in the public schools of Rochester and who played the organ in a jazz combo, tried us out on several pieces. Then he politely put off the debut of the choir – for several months. We needed lots of help, we earnest musicians who sang from our heads, were uncomfortable with clapping on the second beat and couldn’t sway to save ourselves. So he reached into his music groups and invited some of his best singers to join our choir. He not only diversified our group and our church, but he created a community of care that learned to sing together, eat together, play together and pray together.
George had us stand among the new members – high school students, single parents, night club singers. He told us to pay attention and to listen to how they sang and what they sang. Do what they do, he said. I still remember the day when the song Go Tell it on the Mountain came straight out my chest, from someplace deep within. I never sang the same again.
Eventually our little group learned to sing complex harmonies, to sway as one body, to clap at the right time. George took us to the church where he grew up and had us sing with his old choir. We sang on Sunday mornings and sometimes at local street fairs and other venues.
This little choir wasn’t just an opportunity to learn from and sing from the African American musical cannon. But it became an act of solidarity – learning from one another, laying down preconceived notions of how music should be sung, yielding to rhythms and movements that gave the Holy Spirit free reign over the place. It was glorious.
That experience of more than 35 years ago comes back to me as I flip through the pages of our new Lift Every Voice and Sing II hymnals. Bless the Lord, O My Soul. Steal Away. Sign me Up. Glory, Glory, Hallelujah. The words, the harmonies, the feel of my body shifting from one foot to another, all come back to me as I encounter the tunes. And so do the singers.
I remember LaTonya who had been part of the church’s prison ministry and had learned to sing in a jail choir, how when she sang Go Tell it on the Mountain, she brought the mountain to you. I remember the young father who brought his little boy to choir because he had no babysitter. I remember the woman who sang jazz solos in local night clubs. They taught us how to sing from that deep-inside place, where pain and redemption sit side by side. They taught us how to be church – the kinds that listens in order to learn, and that transforms many different voices and abilities into one body at song.
On Saturday, Oct. 5 from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. St. Peter’s will host Singing the African American Spirituals with Integrity, offered by the diocesan Anti-Racism Commission. It will be led by professionals in the field and by Black choirs and musicians. We will learn by listening and we learn by singing – full throated, hands clapping, bodies swaying, hearts praying. It’s not just for choirs, or music directors, but for anyone who wants to immerse themselves in the foundation-shaking music of the Spirituals and all the lessons they teach.
The Spirituals are a powerfully important segment of the African American musical canon, preceding Gospel music and jazz. They are the songs of enslaved people who cry out in pain and joy to a savoir who suffered as they had, who was lynched by the powerful and then raised to freedom by an awesome God. Some songs were used as code to arrange daring escapes, or to call people to forbidden liturgical gatherings. Others were songs of defiance that talked back to oppressors. They still do.
We live in a time when the Spirituals have a lot teach us about what it means to be truly free, to defy powerful opponents, to be joyful and hopeful in the face of woe that doesn’t seem to let up. I can tell you from experience that this is music that changes you if you let it. I hope you will join me on Oct. 5 to experience this music as you may have never sung it before. Learn more and register here.
It’s a good way to remember “we have come this far by faith” and we’ll keep going that way as well.
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