Black America sings
Ivry, Benjamin
MUSIC Benjamin Ivry BLACK AMERICA SINGS Belafonte's 'The Long Road to Freedom' Now seventy-four, Harry Be-lafonte, the Harlem-born singer, actor, and produc-er of Jamaican origins, has long been...
...It wasn't until that happened that slaves began to have the capacity to speak and to converse and to sing...
...Indeed, veteran jazz critic and author Gary Giddins confessed on the CBS "Sun-day Morning" TV show that he was moved to tears by listening to Long Road to Freedom, calling the set "a whole treasure of songs that are so good that when you hear them, you think...'Where have they been all my life...
...five-CD set plus bonus DVD and 140-page book, $74.98...
...you couldn't play instruments...
...Long unreleased because RCA and Reader's Digest, which sponsored the project, dissolved their partnership, the recordings languished in a BMG storeroom vault until now...
...Possibly one of his greatest achievements, however, has waited until now, The Long Road to Freedom: An Anthology of Black Music (BMG/Buddha Records, 99756...
...There they traced the black experience in America in eighty songs featuring more than fifty singers...
...Some of the songs heard here mix joy with bitterness, such as those in the slave Christmas section, such as, "All Roun' de Glory Manger" ("They turned 'way Mary and Joseph / 'way from the inn, / and that's what made the Glory Manger") and Belafonte's own solo, coached by Jones, in "Wonderful Councillor" ("I call Jesus the Wonderful Councillor...
...Belafonte recorded Jones shortly after she had assembled her superb singing group, and her prayer shout, "Kneebone Bend," has the direct emotional appeal of a secret rite: "Kneebone in the mornin' / Ah-ah, kneebone, / Bend my kneebone to the ground, / O Lord, kneebone bend...
...You couldn't sing...
...Indeed, Jones possessed one of the great American voices, blessed with vibrant intensity and razor-sharp rhythmic sense, accompanying her vocals with clapping and other homespun effects...
...MUSIC Benjamin Ivry BLACK AMERICA SINGS Belafonte's 'The Long Road to Freedom' Now seventy-four, Harry Be-lafonte, the Harlem-born singer, actor, and produc-er of Jamaican origins, has long been active in black cultural awareness, whether as an early ally of Martin Luther King Jr...
...Belafonte says, "When these slaves landed in America, they were no longer permitted to speak the language of their birth...
...Jones and her group took their shoes off and pounded the recording studio's wooden floor during this passionate rendition of "Kneebone...
...The primal power of many of these songs reflects the key role of the church in the slaves' spiritual rebirth...
...How could these have existed, and why aren't they part of American culture?' Which they will be, from now on...
...Jones's Georgia Sea Islands group showed a pure influence of the music of the Bahamas, in a way that Belafonte himself, although born in New York, was permanently influenced by Caribbean sounds...
...More identification came in joyful choruses full of the energy of certitude, like "There's a Meetin' Here Tonight," and especially "We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder," sometimes called "the great pilgrim spiritual...
...From 1961 to 1971, Belafonte worked with George Marek, then director of RCA Records, to bring some of America's greatest folk voices to a New York recording studio...
...Belafonte and Marek, for this musical experience of intense joy that is, among other things, a matchless affirmation of faith.ion of faith...
...or with his own million-selling recordings like Calypso...
...No doubt, Belafonte's set includes some hybrid performances, although perfectly valid ones, such as Count Basie's singer Joe Williams in a couple of delightful folk numbers, and Belafonte's own inevitably sophisticated renditions that would never be mistaken for those of a gritty street preacher like folk artist Joseph Crawford, also heard here...
...One quibbling consumer on Ama-zon.com comments that he prefers "field recordings" made by folk song professionals like the great Alan Lomax's Sounds of the South, on location...
...His family had returned to Jamaica from 1935 to 1940...
...Yet Belafonte's wonderful achievement needs no apology...
...He explains that for him, recording "in an acoustically controlled environment was a key objective" because of the quality it achieved, and also because he lacked the funds and the technology to go all over America to gather the same material...
...Thank you, Messrs...
...We are informed in the book that accompanies the boxed set that slaveholders used Christmas mostly as an occasion for secular revelry, which accounts for "the dearth of Christmas spirituals....The slaves, however, who had professed Christianity, understood the event as sacred, as meaningful, and undoubtedly identified with the plight of the newborn [Christ child]'s family...
...Regardless, the result is deeply inspiring and worth the forty-year wait...
...How they did learn was through the church...
...The collection is of astonishing quality, offering hymns, shouts, spirituals, Christmas carols, and songs of protest, all testifying to the deep faith that was essential to the spiritual survival of African American culture...
...Belafonte states in an illuminating essay that a key contributor to the recordings was Bessie Jones of the Georgia Sea Islands, whose community circa 1961 "still sang songs and hymns of slavery...
...Defining aspiration by an absolutely sure reward, of meeting God at the top of Jacob's ladder, this hymn, arranged like the rest of this material by the gifted musicologist and conductor Leonard de Paur, is deeply moving...
Vol. 129 • February 2002 • No. 3
