The 'Old Songs Hymnal': Harry Burleigh and his spirituals during the Harlem Renaissance.

摘要

Harry Burleigh (1866-1949), prominent African American composer, singer, and spokesperson for the spiritual, co-published the Old Songs Hymnal, Words and Melodies from the State of Georgia in 1929. This dissertation examines the scarcely known hymnal in light of the history of the spiritual and its presentation. The African American sacred folksongs known as the spirituals were popular during the Harlem Renaissance as evidenced by the rate of publications, concert performances, and an increased amount of critical discussions surrounding the genre between 1867 and 1929. It became one of central musical genres in the discussions by intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. The dissertation's Introduction establishes a framework and context for the document. Chapter one scrutinizes the connections between Burleigh's biography and the history of the spiritual between the 1860s and the 1920s. Chapter two investigates the concept of preservation, the central intellectual paradigm which informed the reception of the spirituals during that era. Chapter three evaluates the 600 extant transcriptions which Burleigh collected from ex-slaves in Mansfield, Georgia, and from which the songs in the Old Songs Hymnal were chosen. Chapter four studies the 187 hymn arrangements Burleigh created following a style that does not align with other arrangements of the spiritual from the early twentieth century. Chapter five examines the spiritual as it was discussed by Burleigh and other intellectuals before and during the Harlem Renaissance. A brief epilogue posits some possible reasons for the hymnal's comparative obscurity.