“You’re all dancing like you’re from Bellingham,” Gloria Burgess, a performance studies PhD and author said, while leading a lecture exploring the idea of “the negro and spirits from a perspective of African spiritual history” at The Performing Arts Center on Tuesday Oct. 4.
“It’s a joy and a blessing to be here this evening,” Burgess said to start her lecture.
Burgess introduced to the audience the idea of Old Africa, around which she set all of the lecture content. Burgess spoke solely of the past to bring the audience back in time to enhance their worldview in a new direction. Burgess and the audience defined worldview as morphing, wide perspective, and so began her insights into the transformation of Africa.
“Old Africa was one huge landmass,” she said. “Now, it is split up into so many countries.”
Burgess stated that these human-made boundaries between African countries goes against the spiritual connection Old Africans worshipped for so long.
“Everyone in [an African] village believed they were a single organism,” Burgess said. “‘We’ was privileged over ‘me.’”
Their sharing of life transcended the physical realm and allowed them to feel each other’s presence among the village. Everyone was connected by something, which Burgess helped the audience discover.
“Hush, hush, hush now. Mmmm. Listen,” she said to quiet the audience so they could listen like Old African tribes would. “Lean into those voices that whisper at dawn…Words and music. What is this? Words and music. These are the glue that hold people together.”
Through music, African communities strengthened their bonds. The belief is that music was everywhere and at all times, as was their spiritual worship.
“The songs are free. There is music in the air over my head,” Burgess said.
The music they hear is referred to as spirituals, which are African songs that can be created about anything occurring in life that had enough emotion to be sung about. These songs bridged the worshippers to each other, their religion and daily life.
“Music and words are intimately connected to everyday life,” Burgess said. “There were songs for war, songs for playing, songs for conceiving a child, songs for having a child. Worship was not set aside, everything was worship.”
These tribes believe music purposefully connects the whole world and can carry certain meanings. The audience learned that spirituals have layers to them. The first layer is the real, definite meaning of the song. For example, in “Wade in the Water,” the clear definition is an instruction to simply walk through the water. However, African slaves, who were taken from Old Africa, repurposed the meaning of the lyrics to function as a code; they did so with other songs, too. This spiritual, then, carried multiple meanings slave owners could not interpret, so slaves sang this to instruct anyone escaping to walk through the water to avoid tracking from dogs.
“Spirituals become, then, a radical declaration,” Burgess said. “A radical declaration of community, of salvation, preservation of the whole being. A whole way of knowing.”
Music being in the air connected all people of Africa together, allowing each individual to feel the presence of their tribe and friends and family and self. Interestingly, when many were taken from their homes and then enslaved in the United States, the people of Africa did not refer to them as stolen, but lost. This is because they could not feel the presence of some of their nearby peers, but also because they did not know about slavery, they just felt their absence. Spirituals were then what continued to connect those who were taken away, or lost, to their home.
Burgess, to really relate the African spiritual history to the audience, invited the attendees of the lecture down to join her in a ring shout, which is a mode of celebration. A ring shout can last hours upon hours, with singing, drumming and dancing. Burgess quickly taught everyone the words to “Sometimes I feel like a Motherless Child” and “Wade in the Water” and suddenly the room beat with a cadence of claps and stomps and voices putting the music back into the air.
Considering few audience members had participated in the ring shout, the energy felt low for Burgess. Usually, these ring shouts are filled with an abundance of people, all of whom know the lyrics and meanings and so embrace the power of the music.
Burgess has published four books, given keynote speeches and master classes on African Heritage at venues like Benaroya Hall and the Women’s International Network Conference in Geneva. Heritage resources brought Burgess to participate in this lecture, and will continue hosting talks and exhibitions to broaden the worldview of the Western community.
