Swing Low

I love negro spirituals.  Now, I know saying so may make me the Beta VCR or eight-track tape of young ministers, but I do.  There are few things more awe-inspiring or empowering than listening to an impromptu group of church mothers moan "I Got a Robe" or hear a choir belt out "Swing Low" just before a sermon.


This past Sunday, I was sitting in the pulpit of the church I attend and I was listening to the choir.  Naturally, because this is Black History Month, they were singing a number of negro spirituals.  As the choir sang, I reflected on how much strength I drew from negro spirituals in dark moments as an adult.  When things have been trying in my professional life, I have closed the door of my office and hummed a few lines of "Bye and Bye" or "O, Mary Don't You Weep."  When there have been rough patches in my personal life, a stanza of "Pass Me Not" has served me well.  In fact, many times when my sons were much younger, the only way I could get them back to sleep in the middle of the night, was to sing "Swing Low" to them as I patted them back to sleep.


When I was matriculating in high school, I was in a concert choir.  One day, the music teacher, a wonderful and kind woman, pulled out sheet music of a negro spiritual for the choir to sing.  After, I heard the choir rehearse the song a few times, I objected to the choir singing the song.  After some discussion about the song and my objections to the song, the teacher removed the it from the choir's repertoire. 


The teacher, among other things, asked me why I objected to the choir singing the song.  It was a fair question.  At the time, I told her that it was a negro spiritual that was not generally recognizable to most, that it was demeaning to people of color to have the choir mock the broken English of slaves and that there were other more acceptable songs for the choir to sing.  So, in essence, I didn't have very good reasons for not wanting the choir to sing the song. 


What bothered me then about the choir singing the negro spiritual, is that negro spirituals are hauntingly beautiful, but they are beautiful within a context.  Most negro spirituals were written by slaves who sung them to ease the pain of the oppression and marginalization they felt on plantations.  The songs were written to sound very simple, but were infused with several encoded messages to God and to a society that oppressed them.  The songs were sung in joy, in pain, in heartache, in the quiet moment--all for spiritual empowerment and transcendence. 


It bothered me that we were preparing to sing a negro spiritual without any explanation of that context, without any explanation of why the song was beautiful or the people who created.  It bothered me that when I heard the song sung by the choir outside of this context, it sounded uninformed and even rustic.  All of this bothered me, I just couldn't articulate it then.


Negro spirituals are beautiful and empowering and intelligent.  They are, however, even more so when listened to and sung within the context and spirit of liberation they were written.