NEGRO SPIRITUALS

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 555, 7 January 1929, Page 11

NEGRO SPIRITUALS

NATIVE AFRICAN TRACES THEIR HISTORY

A unique experiment in tracing tile sources and history of the American negro spiritual is being conducted in j Africa by N. G. J. Ballanta, a native . of Freetown. Sierra Leone, West Africa, says the New York "Times."; Mr. Ballanta, under a Guggenheim Fellowship, trained a number of j Africans to sing the spirituals and ! recently gave- a recital at Lagos. Ni- ' ■geria, under the patronage of Sir ‘ Graeme Thomson. Governor of that country. A feature of the programme was the playing of African melodies on a specially built organ which employs IT tones to the octave. Mr. Ballanta has discovered that the native music requires 17 tones for its accurate presentation. Mr. Ballanta is a graduate of the Fourah Bay College in Freetown, and studied music while holding a clerical position under the British Government. About five years ago he went to America to study at the Boston Conservatory of Music and later at the Institute of Musical Art in New York. Aided by George Foster Peabody, who has long been interested in negro education in America, he collected negro melodies in Southern States and published them in a book entitled “St. Helena Spirituals.” Upon completion of this work he was granted the Fellowship for Research In native African music.

In comparing the spiritual with the African folksong Mr. Ballanta points out that both are sung in harmony, whereas all other folksongs, except k those of Hungary, are expressed in I unison. The form of the spiritual is 'expressed by a leader and a choms as in the African folksong. These facts, according to Mr. Ballanta, show that the African, on being transplanted into another environment, preserved the same means of musical expression to which he had heen accustomed in his native land. The spiritual, although conceived and expressed as is any African folksong, is of a higher order and is said to prove the negro's musical talent to be highly developed in his new environment.

Mr. Ballanta, along with James Weldon Johnson, an authority on the spiritual, believes that the spiritual, although based upon primitive rhythms,- has advanced to its present state of development largely through the spirit of Christianity. FORCE OF CHRISTIANITY “Christianity,” he sallys, "is the force that, has breathed life into the innate musical talent of the African in his new environment. At the psychic moment there was at hand the precise religion for the condition in which he- had been thrust. Far from his native land and customs, despised by those among whom he lived,, experiencing on the auction block the pangs of the separation from his loved ones, knowing the hard taskmaster, feeling the lash, the negro seized Christianity, the religion of compensations in the life to come for the ills suffered in the present existence, the religion which implied the hope that in the next world there would be a reversal of conditions, of rich man and poor •man, of proud and meek, of master and slave.

"The result was a body of songs voicing all the cardinal virtues of Christianity—patience, forbearance, love, faith and hope—through a necessarily modified form of priifaitive African music. The negro took complete refuge in Christianity and the spirituals were literally forged of sorrow in the heat of religious fervour. They exhibited, moreover, a reversion to the simple principles of primitive communal Christianity. “It is not posible to* estimate the sustaining influence that the story of the trials and tribulations of the Jews as related in the Old Testament exerted upon the negro. The story at' once caught and fired the imagination of the negro bards and they sang, sang their hungry listeners into a firm faith that as God saved Daniel in the lions’ den, so would He preserve them; as God' delivered' Israel out of bondage in Egypt, so would He deliver them. How much this firm faith had to do with the negro's physical and spiritual survival of two and a-half centuries of slavery cannot be known. “Thus it was by sheer spiritual forces that the African chants were changed into the spirituals: that upon the fundamental throb of African rhythms, were reared those reaches of melody that rise above earth and soar into the pure ethereal blue. And this is the miracle of the creation of the spirituals.”