
To Do This You Must Know How
Music Pedagogy in the Black Gospel Tradition
by Lynn Abbott ad Doug Seroff
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Pub Date Feb 05 2013 | Archive Date Apr 24 2013
University Press of Mississippi | American Made Music Series
Description
A landmark study tracing the current of music education that gave form and style to the black gospel quartet tradition
To Do This, You Must Know How traces black vocal music instruction and
inspiration from the halls of Fisk University to the mining camps of Birmingham
and Bessemer, Alabama,
and on to Chicago and New Orleans. In the 1870s, the Original Fisk
University Jubilee Singers successfully combined Negro spirituals with formal
choral music disciplines, and established a permanent bond between spiritual
singing and music education. Early in the twentieth century there were
countless initiatives in support of black vocal music training conducted on
both national and local levels. The surge in black religious quartet singing
that occurred in the 1920s owed much to this vocal music education movement.
In Bessemer, Alabama,
the effect of school music instruction was magnified by the emergence of
community-based quartet trainers who translated the spirit and substance of the
music education movement for the inhabitants of working-class neighborhoods.
These trainers adapted standard musical precepts, traditional folk practices,
and popular music conventions to create something new and vital.
Bessemer’s
musical values directly influenced the early development of gospel quartet
singing in Chicago and New Orleans through the authority of emigrant
trainers whose efforts bear witness to the effectiveness of “trickle down”
black music education. A cappella gospel quartets remained prominent well into
the 1950s, but by the end of the century the close harmony aesthetic had fallen
out of practice, and the community-based trainers who were its champions had
virtually disappeared, foreshadowing the end of this remarkable musical
tradition.
Lynn Abbott, New Orleans, Louisiana, works for the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University. Doug Seroff, Greenbrier, Tennessee, is an independent scholar. Other Abbott and Seroff collaborations include Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889–1895 and Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, "Coon Songs," and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz, both published by the University Press of Mississippi.
Advance Praise
“To Do This, You Must Know How tells the history of the black gospel quartet by examining the story of the great gospel trainers – musicians who taught the singers of the quartets repertory and style. Its sources are the black newspapers of the time, interviews with singers – including archived interviews from as early as the 1980s, here used in detail for the first time – and an encyclopedic knowledge, gained from listening as well as from discographies, of the recorded repertory of these quartets. To these sources the authors bring a great love for the bedrock American music which illuminates their entire narrative. To Do This… will speak page by page to those who are moved by music from this great tradition.”
—Wayne D. Shirley, emeritus senior music specialist, Library of Congress
Available Editions
EDITION | Hardcover |
ISBN | 9781617036750 |
PRICE | $75.00 (USD) |