Sorrow Songs
The second line of New Orleans honors their fallen with song. The funeral march slowly somber down the wet streets of Tremé and celebrate that the struggle of their beloved is over. The tradition is old and born from the cultural mixing pot of the oppressed. From the Natives of the Louisiana swamps, to the people brought in bondage from the great continent of Africa, to the French, Spanish, and English immigrants who’ve made their home in the costal colonial city of the Mississippi, a textured tapestry of sound has merged into the American gift of Jazz. The second line blares their song, the bass drum beats like a solemn heart, the march goes on, and the people greave with music. Amongst other thoughts of prayers, their souls are glad for the freedom that their loved ones now experience, and that they often are stripped of in life.
When black survivors of the terrors of southern segregation, Jim Crow laws, and countless lynching rode buses across the country to fight for the right to live, they sang. The lyrics of the civil rights movement was often its greatest solace, source of hope, and place of peace. Mahalia Jackson was the first black woman to sing gospel at Carnegie Hall in 1950, and her voice carried the souls of many sacrificed and living victors of the movement with her transformative rendition of “We Shall Overcome.” She was asked to come sing with Ralph Abernathy and Dr. King to help raise money for the Bus Boycott in Montgomery, despite the killings in Alabama. Upon returning, the Abernathy house had been bombed. They kept singing after that, and we keep singing today. Dr. King said many powerful things about the path of healing the human heart from all of the violence. "No lie can live forever", deep in my heart, I too believe that we shall overcome.
Music and singing played a critical role in inspiring, mobilizing, and giving voice to the civil rights movement. (Stanford University) Today, my heart cried, and I wanted only to be silent. I was originally thinking about moments of silence, out for respect for the dead. Then I thought about the songs of New Orleans, the voices of great singers like Aretha Franklin, Mahalia Jackson, and the soul singers who sang to fight the bondages of slavery, racism, and the oppression of black people in America, and in fact, the disenfranchisement of the less fortunate throughout the world.
In W.E.B. Du Bois ‘The Souls of Black Folk’, he writes about the negro “in the south that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days -- Sorrow Songs -- for they were weary at heart.” I don’t know that any of us realize just how deep the wound of American slavery really is. It’s not just a poetic phrase, or a piece of tragic literature. It isn’t healed, but I feel it heal all the more when I listen to the voices of those Sorrow Songs, the Gospel music of Mahalia, and the words of Sam Cooke, “Change is Gonna Come.”
De Bois continues, “Ever since I was a child these songs have stirred me strangely. They came out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me and of mine. Then in after years when I came to Nashville I saw the great temple builded of these songs towering over the pale city. To me Jubilee Hall seemed ever made of the songs themselves, and its bricks were red with the blood and dust of toil. Out of them rose for me morning, noon, and night, bursts of wonderful melody, full of the voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the voices of the past.”
If these songs are unknown to you, I beg that you listen to their tale today. If you want to grieve, then mourn the murders of our brothers and sisters with a chorus of the greatest gift to the American people, the music that was born here to fight for freedom, love and peace.
From “The Souls of Black Folk”, by W.E.B. De Bois:
I walk through the churchyard
To lay this body down;
I know moon-rise, I know star-rise;
I walk in the moonlight, I walk in the starlight;
I'll lie in the grave and stretch out my arms,
I'll go to judgment in the evening of the day,
And my soul and thy soul shall meet that day,
When I lay this body down.
-NEGRO SONG.