104 PART 1 | FROM COLONIZATION THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR
What galled Watson most was not the behavior of blacks at camp meetings
but their infl uence. “The example has already visibly affected the religious
manners of some whites.... I have known in some camp meetings, from 50 to
60 people crowd into one tent, after the public devotions had closed, and there
continue the whole night, singing tune after tune, (though with occasional epi-
sodes of prayer) scarce one of which were in our hymn books.” How could so
many white worshipers sing hymns all night without hymnbooks? Apparently,
by following the example of blacks, who did not depend on books in the fi rst
place. The hymns they sang relied on short, simple statements of music and text,
with plenty of repetition, including call and response. The “endless” stream
of sacred music sung by these transported souls seems to have come not from
memorizing but from a kind of oral composition they had learned from blacks,
using familiar formulas of tune and word. Watson’s criticisms indicate that the
camp meeting helped white Protestants learn something that black Protestants’
African heritage was always asserting: that the key to sacred expression lay in
awakening the proper spirit.
The story of the camp-meeting hymn refl ects two complementary processes
from which much of the distinctive quality of American music has fl owed: blacks
infusing Euro-American practices with African infl uence, and whites drawing
on black adaptations to vitalize their own music making. The fi rst of these two
processes has been evident in this chapter. The second will become more and
more evident in the following chapters, which take up white instrumental and
vocal music in the antebellum years.QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION AND REVIEW
- What aspects of the music of American slaves show traces of African heri-
tage? How did their musical practices change in the New World, and why? - What aspects of Euro-American music making were borrowed by slave musi-
cians? How do their adaptations show signs of African influence? - Compare the social function of work songs with that of military music, as
described in chapter 2.
FURTHER READING
Dargan, William T. Lining Out the Word: Dr. Watts Hymn Singing in the Music of Black Americans.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press; Chicago: Center for Black
Music Research, 2006.
Djedje, Jacqueline Cogdell. “African American Music to 1900.” In The Cambridge History of
American Music, edited by David Nicholls, 103–134. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998.
Gura, Philip F., and James F. Bollman. America’s Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth
Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
Kmen, Henry A. Music in New Orleans: The Formative Years, 1791–1841. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1966.
Roberts, John Storm. Black Music of Two Worlds: African, Caribbean, Latin, and African-
American Traditions. 2d ed. New York: Schirmer Books, 1998.172028_04_086-105_r2_vs.indd 104 23/01/13 10:07 AM