Those of us lucky enough to get into the Harlem Gospel Choir’s concert Sunday night saw two shows—three, if you count the audience’s joyful participation in what was on stage. (Four, if you count the 30-plus minutes of encores.)
The first act’s concert was a recital of classic Negro spirituals and a ten-minute medley of songs from “Porgy and Bess.” The second act’s songs were, with the exception of “Amazing Grace,” recent gospel music of a Pentecostal bent.
I have to admit my strong preference for the music of the first act, much of which I learned as a boy from my mother and in elementary school. “Soon I Will Be Done with the Troubles of the World,” “I Got Plenty of Nothing,” “There Is a Balm in Gideon,” “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” “Down by the Riverside,” “Summertime”—those were sung, and well sung, leaving so many more I wanted to hear: “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” “I’ve Been ‘Buked and I’ve Been Scorned,” “Lord, If I Got My Ticket, Can I Ride?”, “Deep River,” “My Lord, What a Morning.”
The choir’s deeper affinity was with the songs of the second act. (A symbol of this: in the first act it sang from sheet music; in the second, no.) These songs, none of which I knew, all had a solo singer, woman or man, singing and shouting while the chorus called out catch phrases from the lyrics. To see what I mean, go to the choir’s website (www.harlemgospelchoir.com/) and click at the top of the page to “view video.”
Now, I admit that the chorus did a terrific job belting out these upbeat songs, that the audience loved them, and that I enjoyed them. It was songs like these sung by a choir like the H.G.C. that moved Steve Martin, the con-man preacher in the film Leap of Faith (1992), to shout out the unforgettable praise, “Is this white boy heaven, or what?” But I don’t remember the melody from even one of the songs, remember at most a word or phrase: “Happy!”, “Freedom!”, “He blesses me!”, “He cares!” Granted, as the choir performs them, the songs are wonderful to see and hear because they give us a bit of the ecstatic, Holy Roller—God’s right with us in this room!—experience.
But the heart loves most what it loves most, and I had tears in my eyes listening to the songs in the first act. How profoundly these “Negro” songs have become part of most American’s experience! My mother, who grew up white and well off in ‘teens and 20s in the Jim Crow city of St. Louis, used to say she wanted “Deep River” sung at her funeral. I feel I have as much right to the songs, or almost, as any of my African-American contemporaries.
And let’s note that whites have done a lot to promote this music. The Czech composer Anton Dvorak said the spirituals (and "Indian music") were America’s greatest musical contribution to world culture and used several melodies in his “American” compositions, most notably of course his Symphony No. 9, “From the New World.” Jean-Paul Sartre (in Nausea) and John Osborne (in The Entertainer) have written movingly of the transcendent beauty of black folk music. And Allen Bailey, who founded the H.G.C. in 1986, is himself white.
Further—and here we’re really digging back—we could argue that, just as it was the French who kept Faulkner’s name alive through WWII, when none of his books were in print in the U.S., and the French who made jazz and detective films and (some think) Jerry Lewis intellectually respectable, so it was the British of the 1870s, and particularly the most famous Brit of that and five other decades, Queen Victoria, who made Negro spirituals something all educated people should know.
The chorus from Fisk University, an institution for blacks in Nashville, Tennessee, toured Europe in 1873, singing classical lieder to show how cultured black people could become and, more important, raise money for their young school. As encores they sang a few Negro spirituals. (This, incidentally, was what the great black contralto Marian Anderson generally did—classical music for the body of the concert, black music as frosting on the cake.) British audiences were bowled over by the spirituals—music they had never heard before and that fit right in with the Romantic rage for “the folk” and its art. The Fisk students—first generation emancipated slaves, remember—were invited to sing for Victoria, who rewarded them with a painting of her that now hangs in the university’s Jubilee Hall.
If you missed the concert, wait: with any luck the H.G.C. will be back in a few years; its last visit was 2002. Or you can see it in New York, where every Sunday afternoon another edition of the choir performs at B.B. King’s Blues Club in Times Square, or you’ll catch up with it as it travels—as it constantly does—around the world. Between October 3 and December 29, 2006, it will give a total of 71 performances in Ireland (24), the Czech Republic (6), Russia (6), Japan (11), Italy (6), Poland (13), Lithuania (3), Latvia (1), and Estonia (1).
The H.G.C. is notable in ways that have nothing to do with their singing. They are wonderfully dressed: men in black, women in white. They are beautifully polite: a man offers a hand to help the women up and down the stairs to the platforms on which they sing. They are grateful, modest, and good-humored about the audience’s delight in their work. While they don’t take themselves seriously, they do their singing; one man buttoned his jacket as he walked forward to do his solo.
Finally, the choir has a magical conductor, pianist, stage director, silent emcee. My wife and I arrived too late to get a program, but the H.G.C. website leads me to believe this wizard’s name is Solomon Bozeman. Mr. Bozeman, if it was he,* created one of the most casually thrilling theater moments I’ve seen. When the choir sings a cappella, he gets up from the piano and stands to conduct. Once while conducting, he turned around and faced the audience in the middle of a song, and we worried something was wrong. But he smiled and then, for the first and only time, he himself sung, solo, in a warm tenor voice. “If you cannot sing like angels, if you cannot preach like Paul,” he sang, “you can tell the love of Jesus, Who died to save us all.’” On the words “sing like angels,” he gestured slightly toward the chorus. We knew what he meant.
From The Santiago Times, September 30, 2006
*It wasn't. A friend with a program told me later that it was Gregory Hopkins.
FOLLOW-UP: a still later note. It may have been Gregory Hopkins, but it wasn't the Harlem Gospel Choir. The H.G.C.'s manager, Anna Bailey, having seen my review in the Santiago Times, emailed me to tell me the group I heard were imposters and had no right to use the H.G.C.'s name, which is copyrighted in Latin America by the New York City - based H.G.C.
