Spirituals to Swing

U. S. Negroes are generally credited with two great contributions to U. S. folk music: 1) spirituals, 2) the musical dialect of jazz. Why these two contributions should be so different has long puzzled high & lowbrows. One obvious reason: spirituals are sacred and solemn, hence naturally slower and tamer than jazz.

Another: while jazz comes to the jitterbug hot off the griddle, spirituals are dished out to concertgoers like musical cold meat. By the time they reach the concert hall most spirituals have been written down on paper, dressed up like hymn tunes, adorned with fancy piano accompaniments, "interpreted" according to the best rules of high-brow music. But in the whitewashed rural churches of the deep South, their spiritual home, spirituals are as hot as hot jazz, and often sound like it.

People in big cities seldom get a chance to hear such authentic hot spirituals. But last week at a Carnegie Hall concert of Negro music sponsored by the leftist New Masses, 2,600 Manhattanites heard some pretty warm ones. Entitled "From Spirituals to Swing," the New Masses concert set out to demonstrate the evolution of Negro music from the African jungle to the boogie-woogie. This it did not quite do. The boogie-woogie (played by Meade "Lux" Lewis and others) was fairly well in the groove but the jungle music (represented by African phonograph recordings) sounded as irrelevant as a mass by Palestrina. Up the evolutionary ladder from the jungle to the boogie leaped such big-league Negro swingsters as Count Basic and Sidney Bechet.

What the concert did demonstrate is that the best U. S. Negro music is not all produced in Harlem and on Broadway, but that some of it comes from towns of the South and Middle West. From them the concert's manager, Swing Pundit John Hammond, had imported eleven hand-picked Negro musicians. Of these the most musically interesting were four lean, earnest-looking Negroes from Kinston, N. C., who call themselves Mitchell's Christian Singers.

Though known to inquisitive record collectors through a few recordings of curiously wailing, syncopated spirituals,/- Mitchell's Christian Singers had never before sung at a formal concert. Their spirituals were sung with touching solemnity, and with the intensity and abandon of hot jazz. Both jitterbugs and highbrows heartily approved them.

Mitchell's Christian Singers all grew up in Kinston, where two drive trucks, one is a carpenter and one a tobacco-factory hand. Being good friends, they gradually drifted into the habit of singing together in the evenings after work. Being musically illiterate, they invented their own songs.

The quartet's diminutive first tenor, Brown, has quiet tastes, plays a little cooncan and setback, mostly just "cheers himself with his family." But stocky Bass Bryant, Second Tenor Davis and Baritone David secretly cherish ambitions to be movie stars. All used to be farmers. Last month Tenor Brown saw his first football game. Uncertain how to behave, he noticed that the other spectators all held their mouths open. So he opened his. Accidentally getting too close to a goal post, he got severely bumped, still carries a bruise or two. Says Tenor Brown: "God help a football game."

/- Among the best: Lord Have Mercy, While He's Passing By, Hide Me Oh Lord, Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Got My Ticket, all recorded by Vocalion.

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