by Imani Perry
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” was a ritual bridge between the political and the spiritual dimensions of black social life that were so often deeply connected. Expressions of faith were intimately integrated into both politics and the social world of black Americans, and the placement of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in church programs befit this dynamic. At the 1927 celebration in honor of the 110th birthday of Frederick Douglass at the Calvary Baptist Church of Topeka,50 the choir sang “Lift Every Voice,” and Frederick Douglass’s granddaughter Fredericka Douglass Sprague Perry shared stories about her grandfather’s home life and his kindness to children. She noted what a shame it was that black Americans didn’t celebrate the birthday of John Brown like they did those of Douglass and Lincoln. Another speaker encouraged the young people in the congregation to read The Narrative of Frederick Douglass. “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was thereby ensconced spiritually, politically, and historically in black church life.
Every community has its fault lines, its points of internal distinction and dissension. Unquestionably, class and region were sometimes the bases for conflict between black people in the United States. Also, the sacred and the profane, or the church and the juke joint, were opposing zones of black life, distinct and sometimes in direct tension. Different forms of expression developed and were curated for each. In other words, Friday night demanded different things from community members than did Sunday morning, not to mention which hat one was to put on to go to work on Monday morning. Which music one listened to and where was part and parcel of these tensions. “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was a song of black formal life, both religious and civic, but the lovers of the song were also folks who hung out in the juke.
The father of the blues, W. C. Handy, was a contemporary of the Johnson brothers, musically trained and formally educated as they were. But he took a divergent path from theirs as both a musician and archivist. However, a consideration of Handy’s life, work, and memory also reveals how central the Johnson brothers’ anthem was to black America, from the secular to the sacred world.
Handy’s father was a pastor in Guntersville, Alabama, and W. C.’s youthful experiences with the sounds and sites of poor and rural southern black culture were the raw material of his musical genius. Handy noticed, while working at a furnace company, “the music made by the workers as they beat shovels, altering the tone while thrusting and withdrawing the metal part against the iron buggies to pass the time while waiting for the overfilled furnace to digest its ore. With a dozen men participating, the effect was sometimes remarkable. . . . It was better . . . than the music of a martial drum corps, and our rhythms were far more complicated.”51
Handy was captivated by black culture’s ability to make music everywhere and out of anything at hand, no matter how humble the circumstance. And although he was a composer and even held a post as a faculty member at Alabama A&M between 1900 and 1902, he was drawn primarily to exploring black music in the most vernacular settings. And so he went to the Mississippi Delta. There, he settled in Clarksdale and became the director of a band. During his six years in Mississippi he grew familiar with the repetitive wailing strings of the local guitarists and mandolin players. He noticed, among his many observations, that in the local square dances all the songs were called in the key of G.
The primitive southern Negro, as he sang, was sure to bear down on the third and seventh tone of the scale, slurring between major and minor. Whether in the cotton field of the Delta or on the Levee up St. Louis way, it was always the same. Till then, however, I had never heard this slur used by a more sophisticated Negro, or by any white man. I tried to convey this effect . . . by introducing flat thirds and sevenths (now called blue notes) into my song, although its prevailing key was major . . . , and I carried this device into my melody as well. . . . This was a distinct departure, but as it turned out, it touched the spot in the folk blues the singer fills up occasional gaps with words like “Oh, lawdy” or “Oh, baby” and the like. This meant that in writing a melody to be sung in the blues manner one would have to provide gaps or waits.52
As a musician and composer, Handy was identifying the sophisticated and distinctive compositional forms of rural black social music and rejecting suppositions of its inferiority in comparison to the classical composers he’d also studied.
In 1912, Handy published “Memphis Blues,” which initiated the classification of the twelve-bar blues as a genre in published and copyrighted music. Of the first time his most famous composition “St. Louis Blues” was played in 1914, Handy wrote, “The one-step and other dances had been done to the tempo of Memphis Blues. . . . When St. Louis Blues was written the tango was in vogue. I tricked the dancers by arranging a tango introduction, breaking abruptly into a low-down blues. My eyes swept the floor anxiously, then suddenly I saw lightning strike. The dancers seemed electrified. Something within them came suddenly to life. An instinct that wanted so much to live, to fling its arms to spread joy, took them by the heels.”53
Handy had a lucrative career playing and writing the blues. While Rosamond, and to a lesser extent James, composed and collected some vernacular expressions, including the pop styles of their day—“coon songs” and “rag time,” as well as traditional southern sermons and spirituals—they were not bluesmen like Handy. Several times, however, Handy worked with Rosamond, and even when they didn’t work together, their paths frequently crossed. For example, Handy’s one-time musical partner Henry Pace established Black Swan Records in 1921. It was the first African American–owned record company in the United States and would be identified as the music company of the Harlem Renaissance. Many greats of the 1920s and 1930s recorded for Black Swan, including William Grant Still, Ethel Waters, Fletcher Henderson, Nathaniel Dett, and Alberta Hunter.
Black Swan announced itself with an advertisement that read, “Every Time You Buy a Black Swan Record, you buy the only record made by colored people.” Oftentimes in the Crisis the page advertising the sale of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” sheet music (which read, “The National Negro Hymn, Sung at Emancipation Day Exercises, Public Meetings and Conventions. Suitable for Choruses, Schools, Choirs, Etc.”) came directly before the advertisement for Black Swan Records. It is appropriate, then, that Black Swan pressed the first recording of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” performed by a gospel quartet called the Manhattan Harmony Four. On the flip side of that record was the spiritual “Steal Away Jesus.”
As is evidenced by these vignettes, the musical landscape available to black people in the first half of the twentieth century was wide, spanning from gospel and blues to jazz and concert music. The musicians, even if they specialized in one style or another, generally had deep knowledge across the spectrum, as their audiences experienced and appreciated it all. This was true of both Handy and the Johnson brothers, although their centers of gravity differed.
Arguably, Handy’s most striking achievement was the 1929 two-reel film St. Louis Blues, which featured blues queen Bessie Smith in a Prohibition–era nightclub singing Handy’s most famous song. Rosamond was the arranger and provided the choral background. For Smith, it was a reprisal of the hit she and Handy had in 1925. This story of a woman left by her philandering man had an all-black cast and is the only film recording of Smith.
Just two years after the film’s release to great acclaim, Handy was honored in his adopted hometown of Memphis, where a public park was named for him at the end of Beale Street. A musical cavalcade processed to the park, with the local community cheering all along the route. They played some of Handy’s greatest songs: “Memphis Blues,” “Beale Street Blues,” and “AfraAmerican Hymn,” a march written for a military band. The only non-Handy song on the program was “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
At the podium, Handy recalls, “some of the most forceful speakers of both races began a flood of oratory covering every phase of achievement in Memphis relative to our race. Many speakers were veterans and others brilliant young men just out of their teens. Some
were humorous, others serious, but all contributed to the greatest experience of my life.”54
The program was dedicated to Handy, but it was also intended to honor the collective. Handy stood as a representative of black achievement. His gifts shone light on the entire populace. This was at a time when public parks, train stations, and stores in Memphis and throughout the South remained segregated. “Lift Every Voice and Sing” symbolized collective will, achievement, and endurance. But what makes Handy’s commemoration an even more special setting for “Lift Every Voice” is the manner in which it rested, as part of that program, in the midst of a larger musical tradition alongside Handy’s blues, gospel, and jazz, a tradition that was both sacred and profane, vernacular and classical. “Lift Every Voice and Sing” belonged to it, and yet within it, it remained distinctive and ceremonial.
Many critics have noted that music has been the primary art form of African American culture and has, as a result, influenced all other artistic forms in that tradition. While this may be true, the literary—textual, aural, and oral literature—has also been central to the African American artistic tradition and influenced other artistic forms. Even the man hailed as the father of the blues was first and foremost a composer. The music that would be called jazz is defined by improvisation yet rooted in the mastery of musical composition and notation. Part of what made “Lift Every Voice” work so well as an expression of black American identity is the synchronization of masterful musical notation, and masterful poetry, in song.
Far less attention has been paid, both historically and presently, to how visual artists fit within the African American aesthetic tradition. But while a smaller tradition, the visual arts are nevertheless substantial. Visual artists also found inspiration in “Lift Every Voice,” and the substance of that inspiration reveals a great deal about the intimate experience, and the individual expression, of the collective singing voices that intoned the anthem.
Vivian Schuyler Key, an artist who provided paintings and drawings fairly regularly for the Crisis, was the first African American woman to pursue a program in art at the Pratt Institute in New York, from which she graduated in 1923. Key was less famous and less highly regarded than some of her fellow Crisis artists, such as Laura Wheeler Waring and Aaron Douglass. She was also poorer and therefore professionally hampered. She simply didn’t have the resources to devote herself solely to art. Yet her legacy is still significant.
In August and September 1927, Vivian drew the maps that DuBois used for his display at the Pan-African Congress. She did so under difficult conditions. In response to his request that she take on the work, she wrote to him, “I would be glad to do the work of which you speak, that is the work on maps and charts. But I am handicapped in a way. I am working down near Northampton Beach. Although I am kept quite busy, I have three or four hours a day which I could devote to your work.”55
Two months later, Schuyler learned that she’d won first prize in the cover illustration contest for the NAACP’s popular theatrical group the Krigwa Players. This meant her work would grace the cover of the November 1927 issue of Crisis. Her winning piece was titled Lift Every Voice and Sing. The anchor of the image is a sultry Lady Liberty with her palms open in supplication and an impressionistic face that appears to be in distress. The title and the lyrics from the first verse are written to her right and reach behind her back. Key’s placement of a woman at the center is striking and yet appropriate. Notwithstanding the fact that the ideals of masculinity and men leading the race toward freedom were widely embraced in black religious life and in the largest black political organizations, black women were central in black social and political leadership at all levels, and across the nation. Moreover, as we have seen, black women were primary figures, as educators and activists, in the process by which the song was adopted as an anthem, one endowed with political and spiritual purpose for black America.
Upon learning she had received the prize, Schuyler wrote to DuBois, “It is with great pleasure that I acknowledge receipt of your letter announcing the success of my crisis cover. I am proud and happy beyond description.”56 This prize, however, was to be a bittersweet victory, as her career soon fell on hard times. Within a few years she was divorced and became the single mother of three children. Schuyler spent most of the following years struggling to maintain a career despite those obstacles. She worked with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and taught at the Merrick Community Center. However, she only occasionally was able to sell paintings. Much of the time she made a living doing the most common work for black women of her era: cleaning the homes of white people.57
During the interwar years, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” consistently captured the imagination of artists and political leftists (both black and white) despite the fact that according to mainstream aesthetic norms it would have registered as bourgeois “high culture.” As a feature of black formal culture, it cut across class and was part of the broad panoply of black expression, ranging from the improvisational and vernacular to the formal and ceremonial. Perhaps more significant, Key’s story and those of many others reveal that black life was overwhelmingly working class. In the first half of the twentieth century, even college-educated and professionally accomplished black Americans frequently found themselves in the position of being hand-to-mouth “working people.” And so black formalism was in many ways a cultural expression of working-class people.
Black folks in America were, to the minds of many leftists, and communists in particular, America’s peasant class. The Communist Party and various socialist groups grew in popularity in the 1920s and 1930s in the United States and made gains in recruiting black people with their willingness to stand against American racism and as advocates of the working poor. Given that large proportions of African Americans did agricultural labor, the leftists’ image of them as America’s peasantry wasn’t far off the truth. However, this resulted in communists’ often thinking of black people exclusively in conventional folk terms. It was true that the majority of African Americans still lived in a plantation economy and those in industrial centers were by and large pushed to the edges of the working classes. However, black culture was not simply what could be designated as “folk” according to European frames of reference. In fact, much of it, such as the anthem, was formal. Hence, when members of the Communist Party embraced “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” it was usually set somewhat awkwardly alongside simple and rustic folk songs in songbooks and curricula.
The cover of the November 1927 issue of the NAACP magazine The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races shown here featured a painting titled Lift Every Voice and Sing by artist Vivian Schuyler Key. Key won a cover contest with this piece, which features lyrics from the first verse of the song, a sensuous Lady Liberty with her hands up in supplication, and background scenes of black life in slavery and freedom. Used by permission of Crisis Publishing Co., Inc., the publisher of the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
At the Little Red School House, a left-wing day school in New York (the official name was the Elisabeth Irwin School), predominantly white children were taught to sing “Lift Every Voice” instead of one of the other patriotic anthems of the United States, in addition to traditional African American spirituals, labor songs, and rural European folk songs. Dina Hampton, in her book about activists educated at “Little Red,” describes them as coming of age “in a counter-culture hothouse steeped in progressive pedagogy and radical politics. . . . At assemblies, everyone would stand to sing the Negro national Anthem (‘Lift Ev’ry Voice’) in place of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ . . . Social studies, taught by ‘a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist,’” formed the core of the curriculum, “with emphasis placed on the exploration of oppressed cultures.”58
Although black formalism blended these forms as well, the effect was quite different. In black formalist settings the range of forms of expression, and the range in terms of substance, became a composition of identity of sor
ts, rich, nuanced, and vast in the range of accomplishment. In contrast, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” did not sound like the “proletariat” imagined by Marxists, even as it was the ballad of America’s peasant class. This distinction paralleled the distinction between the mainstream Left and the black Left. While there was ethnic and geographic diversity in the mainstream white Left, the black Left in the early twentieth century operated within both a predominantly white leftist movement and a politically and philosophically wide-ranging group of black organizers, educators, and activists. In black communities of the 1920s, black leftists often worked alongside people who had quite different political philosophies from them. In this way, black communists and socialists anticipated the “Popular Front” turn of American leftist radicals toward working with the political mainstream by about ten years. The 1924 “Negro Sanhedrin,” for example, was hosted by the politically moderate and capitalist Kelly Miller, a professor at Howard University and a member of the NAACP, and it was first conceived of by the radical William Monroe Trotter, who founded the National Equal Rights League and opposed the degree of control white NAACP members maintained over the organization as well as its more cautious political stances. In attendance at this “supreme council” of the race were black people from sixty-one organizations across the political spectrum, including the NAACP, the National Race Congress (a national organization focused primarily on suffrage rights), and the Communist Workers Party of America. Participants also included members of one of the most radical black organizations, the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), a group formed to defend black people in the wake of the Red Summer of 1919. Their membership was largely comprised of West Indian communists and socialists. And although the ABB members were welcomed, some other delegates scoffed at them when they suggested that “The Internationale” be adopted as the song of black freedom. Again, black America already had its anthem, and it was embraced across the political spectrum.
