Express Yourself
By Nick Salvatore
Barack Obama went back to (the black) church during his Tucson speech as he brought good news about Gabby Giffords - "She opened her eyes! She opened her eyes! She opened her eyes!" His little improvisation reminded me of Al Sharpton's gospel triad at Michael Jackson's funeral - "Michael never stopped! Michael never stopped! Michael never stopped!" In the following piece, Nick Salvatore - author of the biography of the great African-American preacher C.L. Franklin, "Singing in a Strange Land" - meditates on Franklin's singular contribution to the tradition that's helped shape Obama's best "black and more than black" self (and songs). B.D.
On a cold, sunlit January day in 2000, while driving from Ithaca, New York to New Haven, Connecticut, Aretha Franklin, C. L.'s daughter, boomed from the car’s CD player singing gospel hymns released years before she became the acknowledged "Queen of Soul." These were her first records, taped live before an open mike at Detroit’s New Bethel Baptist Church—her father's church—in 1956 when she was but 14 years old. (They are available on Aretha Gospel, Chess CHD-91521.)
Her rendition of "Never Grow Old" particularly moved me. As I listened, imagining the recessed choir loft, with the young teenager at the mike in front, by her father's pulpit, my mind turned to C. L.'s sermons which I had been studying intently for months. They were masterful sacred performances, I thought, each built around a sustained and compelling message and delivered in a "whooped", or chanted, musical style that revealed one source of his daughter’s extraordinary musical talent. Of the more than 70 sermons I was working with, four especially struck me for their powerful depiction of faith’s impact on both private and public life. Somewhere during that car trip before New York’s Route 17 turned into Connecticut’s Route 34, I realized that C. L.'s sermon, "Without A Song," was the key to much of his life and its legacy. While the other sermons ("The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest," "Dry Bones in the Valley," and "Moses at the Red Sea") are indeed masterpieces, this sermon more than others countered the harmful effects of an enforced silence, of being without a song and the voice to sing it. It was the most appropriate symbol for his life's work.
Franklin (1915-1984) grew to adulthood in the Mississippi Delta at a time when "segregation in the raw," as he later called it, dominated the region. Lynchings and other forms of violence against African Americans were a common method of reminding blacks of their social place in a world dominated by racist thought. Like almost every other black Mississippian at that time, young Franklin could not escape that oppressive atmosphere, which was as pervasive as the dense, humid air of a Mississippi August. A loving mother who demanded excellence and the power of the black church community with whom he worshipped as a boy helped young Franklin solidify his determination to never allow the hostility of others to silence him. In the process, he discovered his voice, entered the ministry, and over the course of four decades led others through a similar process.
These thoughts ran through my mind as I listened to his then young daughter's masterful voice, and I began to realize that I had found the theme, the voice, if you will, for the book as well.
The sermon, "Without A Song," is based on the 137th Psalm, where the Israelites, in Babylonian captivity, are asked to sing for their captors' amusement. In a lament that echoes down even into our own time—in Verdi’s opera, Nabucco, as in songs by the Medallions and Steel Pulse—the Israelites respond: "How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?" Franklin's response was direct, even blunt: The Israelites should have sung, he told his congregation, because "Some things you can’t say you can sing." In contrast with the Israelites, who had yet to reach their Promised Land, African Americans were in what many countrymen considered their Promised Land—but it remained “a strange land” for black citizens nonetheless. If that "strangeness" of segregation and prejudice were to be transformed, black Americans would need to find their individual and their collective voice. It was that voice that could transform themselves, and the nation, with its powerful reminder that, even for an unknown, individual slave surviving in a harsh, horrific system, "a change is goin' come". As C. L. reminded his congregation of an old hymn that described how God gave Moses the power to part the Red Sea and save the Israelites, a current of anticipation and hope snaked through his audience, particularly when Franklin sang out in his strong baritone of a slave named Mary: "Oh Mary, don't weep. Don't mourn; / Pharaoh's army got drownded; / Mary, don't weep, and then don't mourn."
In faith, through human effort, came the conviction that God would not abandon even the least of his people; that to find one's voice was to transcend the oppressiveness that some sought to impose. Indeed, it may even transform the oppressor.
The more I thought of that sermon, the more I realized that its core message was in fact the central meaning of C. L. Franklin's ministry. As he insisted his audiences lift their voices and express their songs, Franklin urged them as well to lay claim to this land in the face of the very hostility that made it so strange. The result, a communal song of dissent and of affirmation, encouraged all—Babylonian and Israelite, black and white Americans—to transform that land, and in the process to explore more fully the intimate ties of their common humanity.
From February, 2011
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