What the Inner Soul is Saying

Last but not least, in our services anybody can sing, and there are very few if any people that sing of a caliber of a Katie Jackson. Most people can't sing a lick. Contrary -- I mean, they're really bad singers, and they have bad timing, to debunk the stereotype about African American people. And, what we have to do as musicians is be able to pick up on what they're singing and bring that spirit that they're trying to bring out and bring that expression out, and help the service reach that level of being able to express what their inner soul is saying.

--Chuck Campbell, sacred steel guitar player in the House of God African American Holiness Pentecostal Keith Dominion, speaking with Renee Montagne Friday, May 5th 2000 on NPR's All Things Considered, after Arhoolie records released its album Sacred Steel. Before that, sacred steel, "a way of leading and luring worshipers to the spirit," was rarely heard outside the House of God, Keith and Jewel Dominions. (Part 1 of the interview was Thursday, May 4)

A ward choir director, one of the several I sang under in Seattle, once said I had an unparalleled ability to harmonize, which meant I would match any note anyone in the choir was singing, except the note I was supposed to be singing from the sheet music. As one who loves to sing, has a good voice, but doesn't sing well (if I want to know what it feels like to be illiterate I go to choir practice, usually late) it was deeply comforting to hear Chuck Campbell say that the Lord wants to hear from every voice and raised up a musical tradition to help each sorry voice raise itself to depths of great contrition and grand praise, a tradition of guitar "trying to mimic the human voice and try to bring it to another level."

I thought about this when we went down to the Villa Theater July 10 to see Margaret Young's I Am Jane. I was moved when the cast came onstage through the audience, clapping and singing "Amen." I have loved that song since I heard Sidney Poitier sing it in The Lilies of the Field decades ago. Ten or so years after I first saw Lilies of the Field Clayne Robison introduced me to Jester Hairston's music ("Elijah rock, shout, shout, / Elijah rock, coming up Lord") in a multi-disciplinary class. A year or two later Hairston, an old man, came to BYU with his choir and during the intermission he sat on the edge of the DeJong stage talking with the audience about the early days of his marriage and other things. I loved his generosity, spending his break time with us.

Then I went off to graduate school, and a few years later saw Hairston, older still, playing Rolley the deacon on a sitcom about the Black Church, Amen! Very nice comic timing, and I loved the Christmas episode where each cast member was presenting a gift. His was directing a choir.

Then we came back to Utah and a still older Jester Hairston was performing in the Tabernacle, and he sang "Amen," which, he told us, he had written for, and sung in, Lilies of the Field. He explained how the song follows events in Jesus's life, for example, "'Preaching in the temple.' Now you don't sing Amen there because that's disputation." You sing it after the resurrection, drawing out the A. "A-Amen, Amen, Amen."

What a beautiful word -- Truth -- to hear a cast sing as they come onstage. I went to hear that singing, to hear their story. For you see, I carry a wound.

I must have been in kindergarten in November 1963, I had turned five that summer, and I remember the feeling of helplessness when I heard that President Kennedy had been shot, the same feeling I felt 5 years later -- still in elementary school -- when I heard Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been shot. By that time I had come to see something very confusing in my country. I had teachers who taught me about the evils of slavery and the brave people who fought for civil rights--and other people who told me Martin Luther King, and those like him, were communists.

And I remember very clearly Black Panther comments about killing pigs and a news report of a Black Panther breakfast where comic books were handed out with pictures of children killing pigs in cops' clothes. I came to a conclusion that blacks hated whites--and with good reason, considering how whites had oppressed blacks for centuries.

Of course it was not true that blacks hated whites, just like the rumors about the blacks coming to SLC to march on general conference and start a race riot were not true. But imagine yourself a brilliant child with a deep sensitivity to language, but not enough rhetorical skills to understand the difference between speechifying and the language people use to say their truths. How would such a child understand the angry words from so many sources?

There was language of hate all around me, deeply angry language, like Eldridge Cleaver's review I came on years later of The Wretched of the Earth, where Cleaver said Frantz Fanon had written the book to legitimate the murderous rage oppressed people develop for their oppressors.

And I found many years later, reading Michael Quinn's article about Ezra Taft Benson and Hugh B. Brown, that the rumor about race riots at general conference was started by ultra-conservative whites, wanting to stir up a riot.

So I carry a wound when I delve into Black American life and experience. I have no right to ask that part of my culture to heal my wound. That those sisters and brothers give out their healing is an act of grace. There is a snatch of hymn from my childhood that expresses the grace of such healing, "What comfort this sweet sentence gives."

There is deep mystery in that line. I knew that a sentence was something a judge hands down, like a death sentence. How could a sentence be sweet? I also knew that Jesus's suffering was an act of supreme love, and I supposed that was what made his death sentence sweet. I asked my father, and he reminded me that a sentence is any collection of words, not simply what a judge says, and the sweet sentence those words referred to was, "I know that my Redeemer lives."

Well, I grew up wanting to write sweet sentences. And to hear them. There are lots of sweet sentences in I Am Jane, some preachy sentences right at the end, and the inter-cutting of Martin Luther King's and Spencer W. Kimball's voices didn't work very well (maybe that device doesn't work well, or maybe the sound system just wasn't good enough to pull it off), but enough sweet sentences that I hope the people in Chicago find it as moving as I did, and enough sweet voices to understand why that stereotype Chuck Campbell talks about still plays from a lot of stereos.

Harlow Soderborg Clark