The Vernacular Tradition

1. The Vernacular Tradition Going Beyond the Page

2. The Vernacular Defined • In African American lit: vernacular refers to church songs, blues, ballads, sermons, stories, and rap songs that are part of the oral, not the literate (written) tradition of black expression. • Distinguished by it’s “in-group”—usually not meant for circulation beyond black group itself.

3. Hughes: songs, blues, tall tales, work songs, games, jokes are still here, not isolated in the past. It “makes up a rich storehouse of materials wherein the values, styles, and character types of black American life are reflected in language that is highly energized and marvelously eloquent” (1). Ellison: vernacular arts account for black American’s legacy of self-awareness and endurance. Vernacular comprises: “nothing less than another instance of humanity’s ‘triumph over chaos’” (2). Past remembered and evaluated Attempt to humanize often harsh world. Ellison and Hughes on the vernacular:

4. History of the Vernacular: • 18th/19th century: • Jefferson: musically slaves: “are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time” (2). • Mississippi planter talking to Frederick Law Olmstead (landscape designer): “niggers is allers good singers nat’rally. I reckon they got better lungs than white folks, they hev such powerful voices” (2). • Frederick Douglass: meaning of slave songs—sing to release troubles, pain.

5. Early 20th Century Vernacular: • Late 1930s: Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison warned against sentimentalization of “the folk.” • Encouraged blending vernacular seamlessly into their own work: “to capture the note and trick of the vernacular at the same time that he or she transformed it into something drawing on artistic sources and traditions beyond the vernacular” (2).

6. Redefining the Vernacular: • Comes from the Latin vernaculus: “Born into one’s house, native, from verna, a slave born in his master’s house, a native” • Definitions: • Belonging to, developed in, and spoken or used by the people of a particular place, region, or country; native; indigenous” • “characteristic of a locality; local” (3) • Referring to American art: blending learned traditions and locally invented. • Black vernacular: songs, prayers, sermons, work songs, secular rhymes, blues, jazz, stories, dances, wordless musical performances, stage shows, visual art forms.

7. Spirituals: • Religious songs sung by African Americans since earliest days of slavery. • First gathered in book in 1801 by Richard Allen (black church leader). • Not sung only in church/religious settings. • Sung during work time, play time, rest time • For slaves: “concept of the sacred signified a strong will to incorporate ‘within this world all the elements of the divine.’” (5).

8. Combating Slavery • Served as shields against slaveholders’ cruelty. • Gave a sense of self-worth as a child of God. • Provided psychic escape from workaday world of slavery. • Central theme: “this world is not my home” (5). Looked to world beyond immediate.

9. Central Themes in Spirtuals: • Representation of a just King Jesus with comfortable space around his altar to rest. • Visions of justice and peace (afterlife): • Healthful impulse to escape sorrowful world. • Criticism of life’s work, injustice, violence. • Focus on furiously watchful O.T. God and prophets (Moses, Job, Daniel, Samson) and idea of “chosen people.” • Heaven=freedom

10. Form of Spirituals: • Used call/response patterns of West and Central Africa • Single voice of chorus would be answered by group of singers (usually entire group). • Lining-out employed too: calling out of the song lyrics in anticipation of group’s singing of lyrics. • Varied in rhythm.

11. Similarities between Spirituals and Gospel: • Both black sacred songs constructed in variety of forms. • Both born/nurtured in context of ritualized Christian worship • Both comment widely on circumstances of black life in white America.

12. What is Gospel? • Emerged in the first decade of 20th century in context of blues and early jazz styles of singing and playing instruments. • A highly percussive, polyrhythmically syncopated and bluesy music. • These singers: “fight the devil by using what have been considered the devil’s weapons. Tambourines, cymbals, trumpets, and even trombones and bass fiddles are now accepted in some churches. The devil has no right to all that fine rhythm, so a joyful noise is made unto the Lord with bounce and swing” (16).

13. Ralph Ellison: on Gospel and Mahalia Jackson • “It is an art which depends upon the employment of the full expressive resources of the human voice—from the rough growl employed by blues singers, the intermediate sounds, half-cry, half recitative, which are common to Eastern music; the shouts and hollers of American Negro folk cries; the roughened tones and broad vibratos, the high, shrill grating tones which rasp one’s ears like the agonized flourishes of flamenco, to the gut tones, which remind us of where the jazz trombone found its human source…” (17).

14. Works Cited The Norton Anthology: African American Literature. Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997.