Abstract
In To Do This, You Must Know How: Music Pedagogy in the Black Gospel Tradition, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff tell the story of how Black gospel quartets learned their art. Beginning with the Fisk University Jubilee Singers, the authors trace the evolution of gospel quartet singing from Fisk to Birmingham and Bessemer, Alabama and then to Chicago and New Orleans. The book has many photos, concert programs, and advertisements for concerts from quartets of various eras. There is considerable detail as well as copious endnotes in this extremely well-researched book.
Starting in the late 19th century, the Fisk Jubilee Singers sang “plantation songs,” spirituals, and other Black culture folk songs, and became quite popular with white audiences throughout the country. Their tour performances were used as fund raising for the university. Four-part harmony was practiced by the enslaved in the antebellum South and this style of singing continued after emancipation. The Jubilee Singers was a small choral ensemble. From it came male and mixed quartets that sang much the same repertoire as the larger group. Because of the work of John Work II, who was first a student singer at Fisk and later a faculty member, and finally organizer and leader of the Jubilee Singers, Fisk became a center for the teaching of singing and especially of spirituals. The influence of Work, music department chair Jennie A. Robinson, and others on the Fisk faculty was important to Black vocal music education throughout the South. Fisk prepared “a highly capable corps of black southern grammar and high school teachers to impart the training they received at Fisk to the children of the working class and rural peasantry” (5).
In the early 20th century quartet singing emerged in Alabama through the work of community-based quartet trainers such as Charles Bridges, Norman McQueen, and Gilbert Porterfield. This was especially evident in Jefferson County, which included the industrial cities of Birmingham and Bessemer where Black music education flourished, partly because of the work of Fisk and other university graduates who were teaching in the schools. Trainers carefully worked with quartet members, correcting mistakes, and working on voice production and diction, as well as stage deportment. Like the singers, trainers were from the working class, especially the steel workers in Birmingham and Bessemer, but were well-versed in the techniques of quartet singing, able to sing all four parts well and freely demonstrate proper technique. Industrial High School in Birmingham, the first Black high school in the city, nurtured singing and produced a number of male quartets, and encouraged the Black community through community sings.
Black quartet singing accompanied the Black diaspora from the South to northern industrial cities. While African Americans were expected to live in Black areas of those cities, there was less overt discrimination and they could live freer lives. Chicago emerged in the early 20th century as a center of Black entertainment and quartet singing was part of that culture. Alabama singer and trainer, Norman McQueen moved to Chicago in the 1920s and began working with local quartets in the Alabama style. At one time he was associated with 100 singing groups through an organization called the Progressive Quartet Association. This association included nearly 500 singers, all of whom benefited from McQueen’s knowledge and training. McQueen continued to train quartets into the 1950s. As in Alabama, many of the quartets were associated with factories while others were associated with Black churches. Quartets sang on local and national Chicago-based radio programs prior to the widespread popularity of television. The Mills Brothers, a Chicago group, began a hugely popular broadcast on CBS radio in 1931, earning $200,000 in 1932, an enormous amount of money at that time.
Alabama style quartet singing also flourished in New Orleans and was even more prevalent than the famous brass bands. Religious quartet singing began as early as the 1880s but blossomed in 1930s New Orleans under the influence of quartet trainers who were originally from Alabama. Based on the harmonies standardized by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, New Orleans quartets in the 1930s also added an improvisational barbershop style of harmonizing. New Orleans quartets “developed a subtler blend of voice culture, vernacular innovation, and religious fervor” (274). While several Alabama style quartet trainers were prominent over the years, perhaps most significant was Gilbert Porterfield, who was originally from near Natchez, MS. Porterfield worked at a New Orleans sugar mill and sometimes trained quartets during his lunch hour. He also trained many female gospel quartets during the 1930s.
Influential music educators in the New Orleans schools, along with community-based quartet trainers contributed to the excellence of many quartets. The end of close harmony quartet singing came in New Orleans with the boisterous stage antics of quartet performers in the 1940s and 50s. When guitars became the standard accompaniment for gospel and jubilee quartets, the end was near. With the addition of drums and electric bass guitars, replacing the bass voice, the heyday of the quartet ended.
A shortcoming of the book is that it addresses only quartet singing in the Nashville area with the Fisk influence, and quartets in Birmingham, Bessemer, Chicago, and New Orleans under the influence of Alabama quartet trainers. This reviewer was left wondering if quartets flourished in other cities with large Black populations such as Memphis, St. Louis, and Little Rock. In spite of this rather minor flaw, the book is a must-read for those interested in quartet and gospel singing.