Cheryl A. Wall, "Zora Neale Hurston's Essays: On Art and Such" (page 5 of
6)
Hurston's insights into the form of African American religious
expressive traditions are particularly compelling. "Spiritual and
Neo-Spirituals," like "Characteristics," was published in Nancy Cunard's
Negro. Hurston begins by drawing a controversial distinction
between spirituals defined as the collective musical expression sung by
believers in worship, and neo-spirituals, the written compositions based
on spirituals that were performed by soloists and quartets in concert
halls in the 1920s and subsequently. Hurston asserts that true
spirituals have never been performed to any audience anywhere. Critics
including Hazel Carby and Paul Gilroy have taken Hurston to task because
of this apparent investment in authenticity. Her stance threatens to
freeze folk expression in time.
From a twenty-first century perspective it seems unarguable that
Hurston was wrong to devalue the "arranged" spirituals and right to
value the anonymous musicians who kept other traditions of black sacred
music alive in their communities rather than on stage or on record. Yet
her stance is never simplistic. Although she does not introduce a third
term, she seems aware that "spirituals" and "neo-spirituals" are not the
sum of black sacred music. She opens the essay with a reference to a
recent popular song that a congregation in New Orleans has retitled
"He's A Mind Regulator." The title evokes a floating lyric in black
sacred music, one that gives its name to a gospel song that enjoyed
decades of popularity throughout the twentieth century. Far from a
static form, gospel music, the genre that Hurston does not name, was
created in churches in the 1920s and 1930s and continues to reinvent
itself in the present.
Quite apart from the question of authenticity is the essay's
reflection on the meaning of the prayer ritual in southern black
churches; Hurston asserts that black people regard all religious
expression as art, by which she seems to mean that they hold in high
esteem those who are able to express their faith artfully. Although in
"Characteristics" Hurston offered the tenet that for African Americans
"there can never be enough of beauty, let enough too much," she placed
the highest value on the beauty of religious expression: "Nothing
outside of the Old Testament is as rich in figure as a Negro prayer.
Some instances are unsurpassed anywhere in
literature."[18] Having
provided this point of comparison with which her all of her readers are
familiar, she presents details of the practice to which those outside
the community she depicts would not be privy. While, for example, the
prayer may strike the outsider as extemporaneous, such a view is in
error. Hurston insists that the prayer follows a formal pattern. As
ritual, it is introduced by a hymn; the "prayer artist" is then
compelled to create a dramatic setting, by calling attention to the
physical situation he shares with his auditors; the interpolation of all
or parts of the Lord's Prayer is required, as are the pauses in which
the congregation is invited to interject a response. During what Hurston
designates the accelerando passage, however, the audience takes
no part. Lest the reader doubt the quality of the artistic performance,
Hurston introduces another comparison that challenges any sense of
artistic hierarchy the reader may harbor. A response from the audience
during this passage "would be like applauding in the middle of a solo at
the Metropolitan." As the performance reaches its climax, the artist
"adorns" the prayer. Listeners sit in rapt attention: "nobody wants to
miss a syllable."[19]
Rather than quoting examples here, as she does in Mules and
Men, Hurston invents a figure of her own. It partakes of the
tentativeness that I attribute to the essay and dares the knowledgeable
reader to invent a better figure. It extends moreover the musical
metaphors on which the essay has relied, and it offers in conclusion an
inscription of the spirit of the worship/artistic experience as a whole.
"The best figure that I can think of," Hurston writes, "is that the
prayer is an obligato over and above the harmony of the
assembly."[20]
Her humility is misplaced. The figure not only illuminates the function
of the prayer ritual; it theorizes Hurston's concept of the individual
artist's relationship to the group. According to the Oxford English
Dictionary, obligato is a musical figure essential to the
completeness of a composition. It is an accompaniment that whether sung
or played on an instrument has an independent value. Hurston's metaphor
fuses the musical figure that alludes to the elements of performance she
describes with the idea of religious duty or obligation. The prayer
affirms the spirit of harmony, of one accord, that is the goal of
religious worship. Assembly denotes a gathering of persons for
religious worship or a congregation. As it rises above the assembly, the
voice of the artist is distinct from, yet dependent on, the collective.
The metaphor sheds light on Hurston's impatience with the singers of
"neo-spirituals." It is due less to their too-proper diction and formal
attire or even the relative lack of improvisation in their performances
than it is to the absence of the congregation that could affirm their
value. Hurston's conception of the artist's role partakes of traditions
of West African performance in which the performer is one with the
audience. Yet the prayer artist retains a significant degree of
individuality, which is heightened when his voice is heard against the
sustained response of the congregation. In this regard the prayer artist
is in a privileged position, far superior to that of the child Zora
"speaking pieces" and alienated from her neighbors, or to that of the
adult Zora in the New World cabaret, whose racial identity stands out
against a white background but whose individual voice is muted in a
pattern that evokes slavery's legacy. At the conclusion of "Spirituals
and Neo-Spirituals," Hurston sets forth an ideal that she as a writer
did not achieve. Although she was both the conduit of collective memory
and a singular talent, the assembly that was her audience too rarely
affirmed her song.
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