"Nobody Knows De Trouble I've Seen"

"To me Jubilee Hall seemed ever made of the songs themselves, and its bricks were red with the blood and dust of toil. Out of them rose for me morning, noon, and night, bursts of wonderful melody, full of the voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the voices of the past." 

- W. E. Burghardt Du Bois. The Souls of Black Folk, from the chapter "Of the Sorrow Songs"

My project was inspired directly from two elements: first, the song I chose to focus on is "Nobody Knows De Trouble I've Seen," sung by Marian Anderson, and second, W.E. Burghardt DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk. The way I drew the woman looking (or maybe not looking) in my picture is to hint at what the song is titled. When I listen to the song, I hear a gentle woman but also the experiences she was involved in or had seen. The troubles she has seen in her life after being transported to America. Yes, the landscape maybe beautiful, but it is full of cotton and ugly events that hold in the memories of the African Americans. Now after pondering for a bit, the title is ironic because now that we have access to so much information on the history of slavery, it does seem like we DO know the troubles she has seen... but have we? 

It is constructed of watercolored cardboard
resembling bricks with pen drawn onto it. The material it is placed on is very significant to the picture itself... it is a cotton cloth... 

It is connected to DuBois's quote that I have copied above because I could imagine the fine details within bricks: the cracks, air pockets, that could tell a story while sitting on the crimson red surface of the brick that makes Jubilee Hall. I've included a picture of Jubilee Hall (below) as well and did some research into its history. Now it is a residence hall at Fisk University, but historically, it is one of the first structures built for the education of African Americans in the South. Its musical connection is tied to being constructed with funds from the historic 1871 Jubilee Singers' tour, which was a nine-member choral ensemble. For my project I wanted to create it to look like the bricks of toil described by DuBois as well as draw a scene of what a song does. The woman is working, but the less obvious aspect to notice is that she is looking somewhere else. Not at the cotton, not at the baskets of cotton in the foreground either, but away. The songs take us away to the past, or what we hope for in the present. 

LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) brought an important concept to the table in Blues People of the fact that slavery was not simply cruel for its obvious reasons of forced labor and toil since (slavery had also been practiced in Africa), but it was even crueler because the Africans were thrown into a foreign country with "a completely alien philosophical system" that led to the white American slave masters to view the Africans as mere savages (Jones, 7). This non-subtle change in environment for the Africans was filled with restrictions cast upon them by the "Western white man," of which included the suppression of African religion and rituals by the white masters, as well as songs that were tied to those (or any song, really) (Jones, 19).

From this background I can see what LeRoi Jones meant when he said that "the music was our history" and that because of a song's intangible nature, it could not have been taken away, suppressed, or destroyed by white masters (Jones, xi and 16). This was interesting in the creation of blues. Since the history of blues runs its creek through backwards along predecessors of work songs, religious music, then the deepest roots of original African music, blues is a product of the adaptations the slaves made to their African culture in coping with their foreignness in America. In LeRoi's own words, "blues could not exist if the African captives had not become American captives." (19). With the threat of punishment looming for singing African religious songs, work songs took place in the fields of the slaves to deal with their hours of labor. This change from African culture having a place in the songs led to the work songs being "stripped of any purely African ritual," which was interesting to me because I always thought work songs were created simply from working in the field, but they really were transformed from their African roots to provide comfort while working and comply - somewhat - with the white masters' restrictions.

Before looking it up, my prediction of the difference between "spirituals" and "gospel" after listening and watching the YouTube videos posted on Tony's blog, seems to be that spirituals were created by the slaves and for the slaves to help push through their troubles at the present times, while gospels are to give hope to achieve the future, for instance, heaven. Thomas Dorsey's "If You See My Savior" he sings at the very end "I am coming home some day," that home being heaven. From what I found online regarding the difference between the two, I am not that far off. Spirituals were indeed sung by slaves and passed down orally, and gospels came after the spirituals with more secular content and I believe would have been better preserved than the orally passed down spirituals. It may be that the spirituals are more personal to the African Americans.