(4 of 6)
They crucified my Lord,
An' He never said a mumblin' word;
They crucified my Lord,
An' He never said a mumblin' word.
Not a word, not a word, not a word.
They pierced Him in the side,
An' He never said a mumblin' word;
They pierced Him in the side,
An' He never said a mumblin' word.
Not a word, not a word, not a word.
He bowed His head an' died,
An' He never said a mumblin' word;
He bowed His head an' died,
An' He never said a mumblin' word.
Not a word, not a word, not a word.
Audiences who have heard Miss Anderson sing Crucifixion have sometimes been too awed to applaud. They have sensed that they are participants in an act of creation—the moment at which religion informs art, and makes it greater than itself.
Birth of the Soul. The theme of the greatest music is always the birth of the soul. Words can describe, painting can suggest, but music alone enables the listener to participate, beyond conscious thought, in this act. Beethoven's Violin Concerto is a work secular beyond question. But when, in the first movement, the simple theme subtly changes, the mind is lifted and rent—not because the strings have zipped to another key, but by a tone of divinity conveyed through the composer's growing deafness by an inspiration inexplicable to the mind. The spirituals are perhaps the greatest single burst of such inspiration, communicated, not through deafness, but through the darkness of minds which knew nothing of formal music and very little of the language they were singing.
Professional musicians and musicologists are still locked in hot debate about the musical origins of the spirituals and the manner of their creation. One simple fact is clear—they were created in direct answer to the Psalmist's question: How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? For the land in which the slaves found themselves was strange beyond the . fact that it was foreign. It was a nocturnal land of vast, shadowy pine woods, vast fields of cotton whose endless rows converged sometimes on a solitary cabin, vast swamps reptilian and furtive—a land alive with all the elements of lonely beauty, except compassion. In this deep night of land and man, the singers saw visions; grief, like a tuning fork, gave the tone, and the Sorrow Songs were uttered.
Perhaps, in little unpainted churches or in turpentine clearings, the preacher, who soon became the pastor and social leader of his wretched people, gave the lead:
Way over yonder in the harvest field—
The flock caught the vision too:
Way up in the middle of the air,
The angel shovin' at the chariot wheel,
Way up in the middle of the air,
O, yes, Ezekiel saw the wheel,
Way up in the middle of the air,
Ezekiel saw the wheel,
Up in the middle of the air.
The Big Wheel moved by faith,
The Little Wheel moved by the grace of
God,
A wheel in a wheel,
Up in the middle of the air.