Lifting Ev’ry Voice in Church

 

Theodor Kaufmann, On to Liberty, 1867

Theodor Kaufmann, On to Liberty, 1867

Let me end this series of posts concerning racism in America on an up note.  This past Sunday I was singing in the Trinity Episcopal Church choir (in St. Mary’s City, Maryland) and we concluded the service with a rousing rendition of hymn 599, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” also known as the black national anthem. (The music and the words can be found here.)   I love this hymn in and for itself, but its appearance in the 1982 revised Episcopal hymnal has special significance for me. That’s because, when I was growing up, I associated Episcopalians, especially Episcopalian bishops, with segregation.

I grew up in the small town of Sewanee, Tennessee, home of the University of the South.  The university (actually it’s a small college) is governed by 23 southern dioceses of the Episcopal Church.  Sewanee has an Episcopalian seminary, an Episcopalian chapel connected with the seminary, an old Episcopalian chapel that used to be connected with the seminary, two active Episcopal churches (Otey Parish and All Saints Chapel), and a breakaway Episcopal Church.  When I was growing up, there was also a black Episcopal Church (St. Mark’s) until desegregation allowed it to merge with Otey Parish.  Although Sewanee is located deep in the heart of the Baptist Bible belt, I grew up thinking that everyone in the world was Episcopalian. 

A number of these Episcopalians were staunch segregationists, especially Bishop Juhan, after whom the college’s gymnasium is named. My father battled Bishop Juhan for many years as he worked to desegregate the college.

Well, desegregation won out, Bishop Juhan (to his credit) acknowledged that he had been wrong, and Sewanee now has an active (albeit small) African American contingent in its student body.  And the black national anthem is now in the Episcopalian hymnal.

I don’t know enough about music to be able to speak intelligently about the interplay between lyrics and music in songs and hymns, but I can describe what it’s like to sing it.

Basically, the hymn soars in some spots and rumbles in others.  I like to belt out the rumbling parts because my bass voice feels more comfortable there, whereas I have to strain to reach the high notes.  (Sometimes I’ll just jump down an octave when I get to those parts.  I’m not the greatest singer in the world.)  This soaring and rumbling capture wonderfully the tension in the song, between the suffering we undergo on earth and the freedom we aspire to.


Take the first stanza for instance.  The music rises with the first two lines: “Lift every voice and sing, ‘Til earth and heaven ring.”  It soars even more in line four: “Let our rejoicing rise.”  The movement so far has been heavenward.

But then, much to the relief of bass voices, it goes low:

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us.

The poem reminds us that there is a dark past.  Faith and hope have been necessary to get us through these times.

But mention of hope begins a new rising and suddenly we are soaring again to the hymn’s highest notes, with the highest landing on the word “sun”:

Facing the rising sun
Of our new day begun,
Let us march on ’til victory is won.

There are instances in the next two stanzas which also correspond with this movement between aspiration/high notes and suffering/low notes.    The following images of violence occur within the lower register:

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,

But then the word “slaughtered” rises with the second syllable and the choir holds it, turning a gruesome image into something to build on.

Similarly, while the second and third stanzas begin with images of suffering, the voice then goes high with hope.  The “steady beat” of our weary feet (and the steady beat of this hymn) will offset the stony road and the chast’ning rod.  The God of our weary years and silent tears will (voice rising) lead us into the light.  The song carries us inexorably forward through its sheer confidence.

When I sing this song, I think of the conditions under which it was written.  James Weldon Johnson, the principal of a segregated school, wrote it in 1900 and his brother John set it to music.  It was written to commemorate Lincoln’s birthday and recited by the students to a visiting Booker T. Washington.   Blacks at that time were experiencing renewed racism as the south was reversing the gains made with the ending of slavery and the establishment of Reconstruction.  Jim Crow had been released on the land.  Yet when one sings it, the oppression seems incapable of keeping people down.

I also think of the death of my son as we sing.  The road has indeed been stony and the rod bitter.  Yet something opens up within me.  Coming (as it almost always does) at the end of the service, it sends me out into a new day.

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