Conductor Bennie L. Williams leads the Spirituals Project singers in “Wade In The Water.”

The Spirituals Project performs April 24 at First Presbyterian Church in Brighton. The Project is a nonprofit, secular organization that was formed to help preserve the teachings, folk music and spiritual values of enslaved Africans in the United States.

Members of the Spirituals Project tap wooden dowels, which symbolize broom handles, on the ground during the performance of “I’m Determined to Walk With Jesus,” a traditional ring/shout-style song. Musical instruments were scarce to enslaved Africans, who used improvised instruments such as tools or brooms.

Spirit in the dark
Vocals brings history, healing to performances
By Nicholas Dewart • dewart@mscd.edu
Photos by Matthew Jonas • jonasm@mscd.edu

   Spirituals were steered by a history of slavery and oppression, but are driven by hope.

   A Denver-based nonprofit organization, The Spirituals Project, utilizes the mind, body and spirit to deliver this message in ways that apply today.

   Spirituals are folk songs that were sometimes used by African-American slaves to communicate messages unbeknownst to their masters. More notably, the use of spirituals extended to uplifting the spirit of the slaves and, in turn, helped them survive the harsh confines of the plantation and maintain a sense of community.

   “ A true folk song has no known author, but is created and refined by a community, expressing individual and common feelings, values and issues,” said Arlen Hershberger director of The Spirituals Project’s choir.

   The need for spirituals still persists today where, in the United States, human slavery no longer exits as a dominant, socially acceptable entity. Still, parallel injustices have manifested themselves into the mind.

   “ The thing that the spirituals give us now is hope,” The Spirituals Projects choir director Bennie Williams said. “I think for those of us who are not in the upper quadrant of the economy, we are, in a way, being beaten and salt is being rubbed into (the wounds of) our psyche by the way we are being treated. It’s not a slavery of physical, but there is an emotional torment that thinking people are suffering at this point. Singing spirituals can help you to survive this.”

   The Spirituals Project, founded by Arthur Jones, uses the intimate medium of its choir’s live performance, directed by Hershberger and Williams, as a vehicle to take the art form off of the page and to drive the feeling of the spirituals to their audience.

   “ Spirituals, like jazz, have to have a certain attitude,” Williams said. “People get so caught up with what’s on the printed page and they never allow their hearts to get involved.”

   While the choir brings the visceral aspect of spirituals to the community, the project doesn’t neglect the page by delivering lectures and speeches on the historical importance of the spirituals.

   Understanding the history of where these songs came from allows the person to gain an empathetic point of view of the spirituals and renders them an inspiring tool in overcoming adversity.

   “ I began to appreciate the almost unlimited potential of the spirituals as sources of wisdom and guidance in addressing current societal and psychological issues,” Jones said in his book “Wade in the Water: The Wisdom of Spirituals.”

   Like a language, spirituals are alive and change in vocabulary as time goes on. This durability makes them a tool for contemporary application.

   “ One of the spirituals that became almost the anthem of the civil rights movement was ‘Oh Freedom,’ and one of the components of spirituals, as with most folk music, is that singers can make lyrics up,” said Geoffrey Wodell, a Spirituals Project member. “So, new lyrics were added on top of ‘Oh Freedom,’ which (originally) said, ‘I’d rather be dead in my grave than buried as a slave,’ then they added ‘oh segregation’ and they added other words to it and it becomes a new song.”

   The animate nature of the spirituals is fostered by the fact they are not defined by a rigid definition of a genre, such as gospel, which was originated by Thomas Dorsey. Gospels originated from spirituals as Dorsey blended the spiritual’s music with lyrics from the Gospels.

   In his book, Jones elaborated on how the tradition of spirituals has an influence on the art of today as he commented on lyrics by Arrested Development, from the song “Raining Revolution.”

   “ Refreshingly, new sounds rise up into the air, again providing us music which signals the arrival of new hopes and new visions,” Jones wrote.
The project’s goal is to educate people about this art form and to preserve this American cultural tradition.

   The Spirituals Project achieves this by being an educational resource center, through its choir, through its multimedia Web site, through its youth initiative, through its national networking and by inviting additional outside artists.

   Major source of achieving this goal comes straight from the members themselves while Jones and Hershberger have an immense knowledge base about the history of spirituals that compliments the emotional passion Williams brings to the project.

   “ It’s interesting because I can sit and chat with Art (Jones) and we can talk about the philosophy of the music and it’s grand,” Wodell said. “Then I can talk with Arlen (Hershberger), who has forgotten more about some of the history of the music then many people will ever know and then I can talk with Bennie (Williams) and I can get this incredible intensity of feeling.”

   Part of the project’s goal is to be more than just an educational tool for the public to utilize, the project aims to leave a cultural impact on the community.

   “ It’s very encouraging for us to do things in social and not just artistic contexts,”Hershberger said. “We want to get more involved with the community and have worked with organizations such as Colorado Youth at Risk and elementary schools, for which we have been seeing a growing number of requests.”

   According to The Spirituals Project’s Web site, http://spiritualsproject.org, the project was formally incorporated in 1998, but its roots stretch back to 1991 when Jones did a program, along with his piano accompanist Ingrid Thompson, about spirituals at the Denver Museum of Natural History as part of the Museum’s annual African-American Heritage Month programming.

   Jones, a clinical psychologist, researched and planned the program as a stepping stone into other music he was interested in performing, but as his research continued he found himself thoroughly immersed in the spirituals.

   “ I began to focus almost exclusively on spirituals,” Jones wrote in his book. “I read about them, sang them, attended concerts and listened to recordings, dreamt about them and absorbed them thoroughly into my consciousness.”

   Since the project’s beginning as a small song and lecture program, it has grown to include more speakers and a choir of 60 to 75 voices from all backgrounds, races and traditions.

"There is an emotional torment that thinking people are suffering at this point. Singing spirituals can help you to survive this."

-Benny Williams