H ISTORY OF M USIC IN THE S OUTH By: Donna Roberts

M USIC THAT SLAVES SANG TO S END M ESSAGES The fact that contemporary soul descended from an amalgam of Gospel music and R&B is beyond question, but if we trace its roots back still further we come to the point from which all Afro-American music evolved, the slave songs. Before the Civil War, the crime of helping slaves to escape, or even inciting them to escape was punishable by death. For this reason the slaves started to put coded messages into their songs, so that they could communicate in ways that the ‘massa’s’ could not understand.

J OHN G LASSBURNER &M ARLENA S HAW This ‘Gospel’ version was allegedly a derivation of a coded slave song. My first task was to find out if Marlena Shaw’s song was a secular re-work of this gospel favorite or not. Thankfully John Glassburner, a contact on the internet, who has three versions of the Gospel original, and the contemporary version was able to confirm that it was. Furthermore he was able to provide the lyrics of the gospel song.

W ADE IN THE W ATER Now if you should get there before I do (I know) God's gonna trouble the water Tell all my friends that I'm comin' too (I know) God's gonna trouble the water Sometimes I'm up lord and sometimes I'm down (You know my) God's gonna trouble the water Sometimes I'm level to the ground God's gonna trouble the water (I Know) God's gonna trouble the water To try and de-code this song now is difficult. Firstly we don’t know what the code is but which must have been quite sophisticated if it was to fool the Massa’s and the bounty hunters. The second problem is that there is no guarantee that these are indeed the original lyrics. The slave songs were passed on by word of mouth and never written down. There may well have been several other variants before we arrived at the gospel version we see here. None the less there are still enough references for us to say it was originally about escape. The very title of ‘Wade in the Water’ is advice to the runaways on how to avoid being tracked by bloodhounds. The reference to ‘Jordan’ could well be the Promised Land, in this case Canada where slavery did not exist. ‘It chills my body, but not my soul’ is reference to the physical discomforts that the journey will take, but at the same time is trying to bolster the spirits. ‘Now if you should get there before I do’ and ‘Tell my friends that I’m a comin’ too’ are much more obvious allusions to a journey.

I N C ONCLUSION The sounds of rhythm and blues music in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s can be grouped into 5 main categories: Dance Hall Blues, Club Blues, Bar Blues, Gospel-Influenced Music, and “Secular” (non-gospel) Vocal Groups. Of these, the first 3 categories are all directly linked to the older blues style that was born the American south in the late 1800’s and spread to urban areas.