Our Advent series, “My Heart Shall Sing,” includes a suggested hymn for each Sunday of the season. Several come from other countries; two of them, “My Lord, What a Morning” and “Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning,” are spirituals that originated in Black North American communities.
The question of whether spirituals can be performed by mostly-white groups has been getting more play in recent years in the world of both vocal performance and church music (read this, this, this, this, and this). It’s for good reason: there’s growing cultural acknowledgment that white supremacy still scars our institutions, including the Church—the five of us Barn Geese are ordained in one of the whitest denominations in the United States—and there’s no getting away from two aspects of American history that frame the white encounter with spirituals:
- Slavery. Many early African American spirituals are inextricably connected with the history of slavery in the United States.
- Minstrel shows. This uniquely American form of entertainment was popular from the early 19th to the early 20th century. These shows involved white performers blackening their faces and playing out racial stereotypes for the entertainment of fellow white people.
Cards on the table: we Barn Geese a) are so convinced of the value of Black spirituals that we believe they’re worth singing even in the complicated context of mostly-white congregations, b) believe strongly in the importance of representing the diversity of God and of humanity in our worship, and c) are pretty dang white ourselves.
So we recognize that this gets complicated. And that the advice we offer is going to be inseparable from our experience as members of the privileged group in this conversation. So as you read, please take these caveats seriously:
- We’re not authorities on this subject.
- What we offer reflects our current understanding of best practices, which is always evolving.
- This article focuses on the Black culture that birthed the spirituals that form part of our Advent series for the two reasons we outlined above, but the risk of misappropriation applies to other songs in our Advent series too.
- Most of all, we really, really hope that this article isn’t the only one you read on the subject, and that it gives you a jumping-off point to foster some robust dialogue among your leadership, congregation, and community.
That said, here are five considerations for mostly-white congregations who sing spirituals:
- Remember that spirituals are sacred living artifacts.
They represent the suffering and resilience of a people. Their composers and authors are often unknown and uncredited. Spirituals are also living artifacts: they continue to grow, change, breathe, and give life. For many Black people, spirituals offer a connection to ancestral wisdom and resilience that may be otherwise inaccessible by genealogy tracing or blocked by trauma. White people are wise to remember that these songs carry a spiritual trust for all of us, but that they do not belong to all of us.
- Invite your musicians and your congregation to join you in this learning.
Teach your congregation about the spirituals you sing. Who may have written them? Why do they have the structure they do? What does the text refer to? What information did people communicate with them? What is their history?
These questions are best undertaken in a congregation that’s already engaged in the work of racial justice, but they can also be the doorway to that work.
By the way, Barn Goose Linnéa provided bulletin blurbs for every song in “My Heart Shall Sing” to help you get a foot in the door with this work. You can find them in the Hymn Commentary—a resource we designed with church musicians in mind.
- Research historic and current performance practices.
Look up YouTube videos to see how Black communities and artists traditionally perform these songs. (We made you a playlist for our Advent series!) Why don’t we sing “My Lord, What a Morning” happy and fast? Why do we want a nice steady walking rhythm for “Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning?” Our hymn commentary for “My Heart Shall Sing” provides a starting point for this research, and also provides short blurbs appropriate for bulletins or for oral sharing before the congregation sings— a simple way to invite the congregation into further learning.
Doing this research might lead you to performance practices that your congregation isn’t equipped to reflect/reflect well; for example, you might hear the use of an instrument that comes from another culture, or a style of music in which your musician isn’t fluent, or a dialect that no one in your choir speaks. Opinions about how to interpret these performance practices in a mostly-white congregation vary—a lot—and we can’t offer hard-and-fast rules about what’s going to work best for your congregation. We commend to you these words from Courtney Ariel as you and your musicians approach these questions:
“When we hold things that belong to — and were created by and for — a group of people with an ethnicity, religion, spirituality, culture, sexual orientation, gender identity, and/or lived experience outside of our own, we must hold these things very carefully and lovingly, acknowledging that we are visitors within that space.”
A small rabbit hole we invite you to visit: be mindful that of all the possible ways to misappropriate a song from another culture, the one that seems most likely to trigger a reaction is when a white or mostly-white choir sings with an accent or dialect that doesn’t belong to them. While some folks feel that taking a song out of its original dialect is another form of misappropriation, we suggest that mostly-white communities steer away from unfamiliar accents or dialects.
- Consider using music to build a bridge to other communities in your neighborhood.
Let’s say you’re serving a congregation that’s still not singing communally, because, y’know, pandemic. Instead, you’ve decided to use soloists to introduce one or more of the songs that anchor “My Heart Shall Sings.” Can you tap soloists from your congregation that reflect the culture from which the songs emerged? Or hire a professional singer from that culture to sing?
And if the answer to that is “no,” then can you leverage that “no” to explore the “why not?”
Maybe there are no members of your congregation who 1) have roots in that culture and 2) are willing to sing, and there’s no funds for hiring professionals either.
Maybe there’s no one from that culture in your whole town.
Maybe taking on this question in the middle of one of the most hectic times of the church year doesn’t fit into your personal energy budget.
Maybe you’re game for the conversation, but know that it will be a healthier one if you can lay more groundwork with your leadership first.
And MAYBE—just maybe—your community and/or leadership is ripe to talk about their longing to build stronger relationships with communities of color in your town, and the question of how to bring in a soloist of color can open up a much bigger conversation about building relationships with the neighbors to whom God has given you.
- Remember that you’re worshiping, not putting on a concert.
Many articles on the topic of white people singing spirituals approach the question assuming a performance context. A song offered as a hymn by a faith community is a different animal than the same song performed by an artist for an audience. Singing spirituals as an act of faith and offering of praise should raise questions of how we can engage with these songs in a spirit of obedience to the Great Commandment: loving God above all things, and our neighbors as ourselves.
Our hope and challenge for you is that if your congregation chooses to sing these spirituals this Advent—or at any time—then they also choose to step into the confession, the reconciliation, and the radical hope that our uniting Christ offers.
I’m conflicted by the singing of Black spirituals in all-white churches after hearing a friend, a Black woman who does anti-racism workshops, explain to me that the only way many white people demonstrate “diverity” is by exploiting Black people for their entertainment value (most often music,sports). In the same white church that sings Black spirituals, would hear the voice of Black intellect in sermons, litanies, call to worship, communion, etc. If it’s only Black music that’s included in white worship spaces, that seems racist…especially recognizing that the stereotype that defines black intellect as inferior to white peoples’ has been used as a legitimate reason for segregation and denial of opportunities in employment. Another observation: a white southern church in my cimmunity and that that streams its worship online has an online loop of announcements – the announcement that says”Welcome, we we’re an inclusive church” is always immediately followed by a picture of their stained glass window featuring a White Jesus”. To the Black outsider, this screams “we prefer to image and worship a white
Jesus ..we are a church that is for and about white people”. Worship begins and indeed, everyone is white. The choir’s singing of a Black spiritual feels like cheap tokenism and yes, exploitation of Black people to make white Christians feel good (in this case, everyone goes home from a church that fairly screams “whites only”, thinking they have a “diversity and inclusion” church because they used a Black spiritual in worship.
Great point to raise about how white congregations can fall into a trap of paying “lip service” to diversity by drawing from Black musical traditions, but don’t nurture the same concern for representation in other worship elements, particularly sermons. Engaging with internalized racism in the Church is a complex and crucial task!
I came across this post because we had “Standing in the need of prayer” as one of our hymns yesterday. We’re thousands of miles and an equivalent cultural distance from the origins of the Spiritual musical tradition. We are a white congregation in an overwhelmingly white (99%+) part of Scotland. We don’t have any musicians so our worship uses recordings that I generate from digital scores and record a vocal lead over. I found myself challenged by how to approach the song with due respect for the culture in which it lives, not wanting to try to imitate Black styles, but also wanting to avoid the musical equivalent of white man tacos and stripping it of its power and resonance.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply! We Geese wholeheartedly condone the evident care and intention you bring to your musical planning. It’s a difficult balance to strike for sure…your context is in Scotland has different considerations to navigate than the U.S. context, especially with its not-ancient-enough history of enslaving Black people. What kinds of conversations are happening among your local colleagues and liturgical work groups around issues like these?