The collection of music in the Lead Me Guide Me hymnal filled a need within the Black Catholic community. Historic Negro Spiritual Scholars additionally cite this spiritual as one of many used to convey coded messages among the enslaved. When I fall on my knees with my face to the rising sun Spirituals, songs of faith and freedom that chronicle the cultural, civic and theological history of African Americans, comprised 18 percent of the hymnal’s musical entries. This hymnal, dedicated to Father Rivers, contained a variety of musical genres in use within Black Catholic communities, including Mass settings and compositions of Black Catholic composers, gospel music, Gregorian chant, European, and European American and African hymns. ![]() Both Father Rivers’s “Mass Dedicated to the Brotherhood of Man” and a widely respected preface article by Sister Thea appeared 20 years later in the first edition of the Black Catholic hymnal, Lead Me Guide Me, published by GIA Publications Inc. He described such attempts as “shot-gun weddings” consisting of pre-existing melodies mismatched with incompatible texts. Sister Thea and Father Rivers, in their roles as scholars (both held Ph.D.s) and people of faith, took the spirituals seriously. Father Rivers, however, specifically decided against quoting the melodies of spirituals directly. Concurrently, pioneering Black Catholic composer Father Clarence Joseph Rivers composed Masses based on the musical idioms of spirituals, gospel and jazz. It was good for my mother and my father.īy the time Sister Thea sang spirituals with her students in the mid 1960s, pieces from this tradition were in use as hymns for liturgy within and beyond the Black Catholic community of the United States. Black Catholics were part of the original creating communities of the Negro spirituals, a fact unknown in popular and even official church liturgical circles. Based on these origins, spirituals invite full engagement of the mind, spirit and body while expressing the existential realities of the community. The musical culture and idioms shared by the peoples included call-and-response song, communal singing, the inclusion of improvised additions to the music, as well as music and dance as essential elements of African spiritualities. This historic and traditional music was the song of her and their people. The brutal crucible of chattel slavery forged these diverse peoples into a people in what became the United States. They also conveyed languages and influences derived from European contact: Portuguese, English, Spanish, French, Creole and Dutch. The enslaved spoke indigenous languages such as Kikongo, Fon, Igbo, Akan and Taino, original to the Caribbean. They practiced African and Caribbean traditional religions, Catholicism in the Kingdom of the Kongo, and they brought Islam with them as well. Spirituals, an early foundational music of the African American experience, emerged from the moans, cries, chants, rhythms, harmonies and traditions of peoples stolen from their West African and Caribbean homelands. Through spirituals her students sang out for justice, lamented oppression, resisted white supremacist ideas about their humanity and expressed their people’s enduring hope. It told stories of fictive biblical forebears the people had taken as their own. ![]() It reflected the experience, thoughts, sorrows, joys and spirituality of their enslaved and free ancestors. To their instruction Sister Thea added the singing of Negro spirituals. Segregation, violence against civil rights activists, the hard work of voter registration in the Black community, and tear gas attacks on peaceful protesters in Canton, among other events, preoccupied the minds and spirits of her high school students. Servant of God Sister Thea Bowman, the sole African American member of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, considered Negro spirituals essential to the education of Black students in her home parish, Holy Child Jesus School and Mission in Canton, Miss. – Spoken by Servant of God Sister Thea Bowman, F.S.P.A., on a 1967 LP recording of spirituals, featuring the Holy Child Singers, called “The Voice of Negro America” Though our forefathers bent to bear the heat of the sun, the strike of the lash, the chain of slavery, we are free. Listen! Hear us! While the world is full of hate, strife, vengeance, we sing songs of love, laughter, worship, wisdom, justice, and peace because we are free.
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