Who gets to sing spirituals? A reckoning with James H. Cone

Here's the deal: I really haven't read much of the work of James H. Cone, the theologian and author who passed away yesterday. Only one book, in fact.

There, I said it. Not particularly proudly, but it's true.

You can blame my whiteness, sure. You can blame the fact that I'm a latecomer to theological study, and was busy loading up on courses on worship in seminary and didn't sign up for the right courses to read Cone's stuff (if there were any). You can blame the fact that even now I'm more likely to read religious history stuff on my own time these days. Or you can just blame me for being a wuss theologically and spiritually and in most ways, basically.

But I have in fact read only one of Cone's books, and it isn't one that most would consider one of his major books. Furthermore, I didn't read it as a theological person; I read it as a musicologist.

Cone's The Spirituals and the Blues was first published in 1972 and reissued in 1991. Cone isn't a music scholar and doesn't claim to be so, and is diligent to credit those who did take up the music of the spiritual with a more scholarly or at least serious intent. His interest in them is, not surprisingly, not about the music to a great degree, although he bristles mightily at suggestions the music is "unoriginal" or derivative of white models (and yes, people said that kind of thing backintheday).

Cone's interest is, not surprisingly, cultural and theological (in the sense that the two are inseparable in his thinking). He reads them for their understanding of God, Jesus, heaven and other "churchy" topics, but never leaves behind the brutal reality of the slavery from which the songs were born. It is in the final chapter that the blues, a "secular spiritual," are introduced and discussed.

Looking back at the book now, from my current situation, the most difficult stuff might be in the introduction. After some reflection on his own experiences of both spirituals and blues, he makes the statement that "I am therefore convinced that it is not possible to render an authentic interpretation of black music without having shared and participated in the experience that created it" (3).

One could interpret that as a warning against spirituals being sung by anybody but black folk. Having never met Dr. Cone, nor heard him speak, I'll likely never know if that's how he felt. And of course I've gone on record saying that churches, particularly very white churches like my own, need to sing not only spirituals and other black forms of hymnody.

At the risk of disrespecting the dead, I stand by that assertion, with the understanding that Dr. Cone is also correct. I won't "understand" black music, necessarily, and I won't come close to understanding the spirituals and the experiences that formed them. In a way that's the point. White folk (and white churches) very specifically need to confront exactly those experiences they cannot understand, even if the musical experience won't be anything like authentic. We're entirely too likely to think we "have things down," we white church folk, and desperately require being disabused of that notion. It probably doesn't happen nearly enough.

There is, of course, the risk that the spirituals get "domesticated," rendered harmless in much the way that, say, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s work gets defanged in the modern understanding, stripping away the radical and contentious nature of his preaching and writing. That's the preacher's job to guard against, I guess. Particularly as the spirituals represent a form of music that owes its very origin to one of the worst sins of the (white) American people, that risk is real; nevertheless, the music must be sung, and heard, and confronted for its very confrontation of us.