Go Down, Old Hannah; Examined Utilizing Sylvan's Theoretical Motifs: Sociocultural, Physical, Psychological, and Ritual The assignment

calls for an application of the theoretical frameworks that Robin Sylvan describes in Chapter 1, the theoretical framework that undergirds the remaining chapters of Traces of the Spirit. However, it would be remiss of me not to begin by mentioning why I chose this particular song / video and a little background information surrounding its usage in African American history. While slave songs and African American spirituals have been familiar to me for a long time - I took a course in "hymnology" in seminary - I was not familiar with how those same songs evolved into prison songs during the early 1900's. Go Down, Old Hannah was a slave song, primarily sung among field slaves of the deep south on cotton plantations. After emancipation, there was the very real threat that the entire cotton industry would collapse due to the lack of cheap labor. To rectify the situation, a series of laws were passed that made being without work, loitering, or being "mischievous" a crime that demanded state incarceration... as long as the "criminal" was black. Thus, the chain gangs and work farms of the time were actually places of legal slavery. It will come as no surprise that the still-remembered slave songs of only a few years prior were quickly appropriated by the new class of slave: the prison inmate. Go Down, Old Hannah, with it's clear reference to the quiet bitterness of the unjustly imprisoned, the depressed acceptance of the nearness of death, and the steady, trudging pace through uncounted hours and days... is a wonderful (albeit painful) example of what Sylvan calls the "sociocultural level" at which music works. Here are the lyrics, given without the call-andrepeat structure of the video: Go Down, Old Hannah Oh, we call the sun ol' Hannah Blazing on my head Yes, we call the sun ol' Hannah And her hair is flamin' red. Why don't you go down, ol' Hannah Don't you rise no more If you come up in the mornin' Bring judgment sure Well I look at ol' Hannah She was turnin' red Well I look at my partner He was almost dead Said if you get lucky, Or make it on your own Please go down by Julie's Tell her I won't be long

Kept sayin' I was a good man But they drove me down Yes, I was a good man, But they drove me down Well, it look like ev'rything Ev'rything I do Yes, it looks like ev'rything I do is wrong The song is much more than Blacking's "humanly organized sound." It imparts a deep emotional affect, both upon the hearer and the participant, though these occur on very different levels. For the prison inmate, the song is primarily one of community. Its sociocultural level of impact is first one of solidarity, of us-together-against-them and only secondarily of musicality (tone, harmony, pitch, etc). While a modern-day UCF student can listen, commiserate, and marvel at the depths which our country's moral history has plumbed, we aren't experiencing it; the song's very nature is not something that can be fully experienced alone, and perhaps by us, not at all. "Moreover, those melodies, harmonies, or rhythms...may have no effect on someone from another culture...[they only have psychological import] within the learned meaning system of a particular sociocultural context" (28-29). Only a slave-laborer can "experience" Go Down, Old Hannah. For the outsider, listening to the song is observational, not experiential. The physicality of slave and prison music had multiple purposes, none of which Sylvan addresses in his text. The rhythm of the chant was very basic to the task at hand; nearby supervisors were known to be violent with "shirkers." A steady "call-and-response" kept all the prisoners working at a measured pace and therefore held potential aggressive response from an ever-present prison supervisor to a minimum. Some tasks (like chopping down trees or pulling stumps) required concerted effort. Call-and-response songs had a very practical application, similar to when a couple of undergraduates are attempting to roll a police car or get an overstuffed couch to a second floor apartment. "One-two-three-HEAVE!" Sylvan stresses the hypnotic qualities associated with the physical level of music, which leads me to wonder: the accelerando and crescendo in the video recording is interesting. I wonder if Go Down, Old Hannah also had the effect of putting the prison workers in a mild trance like state that would enable the day to go by more quickly as Gilbert Rouget suggests (22). While Sylvan separates the psychological level at which we can understand music from the physical, it is clear that the two are connected, at least in terms of entering "altered states of consciousness" and "musical state of being." Suffice it to say that the steady, driving rhythm of Go Down, Old Hannah, along with the accelerando and crescendo demonstrated by the leader, could easily have moved the prison workers to enter an altered state; rather than creating a "heightened state of being," more than likely served to diminish the workers experience of a horrific situation. On this question, we cannot be sure. Ethnomusicologists at that time were rare (and not studying chain gangs). I am keenly fascinated by the insights provided by Jonathan Z Smith regarding the ritual of music and the notion that "ritual represents the creation of a controlled environment...a means of

performing the way things ought to be in conscious tension to the way things are..."(36). This theory - that the ritual aspects inherent in a group of prisoners singing a slave call-and-response song is an attempt to control the uncontrollable - resonates deeply with me. In this regard, I embrace Sylvan's idea that ritualized music creates in the participant both a virtual time (the prisoners can escape the monotony of the task and "time flys by") and a virtual space (the prisoners are, at least psychologically, not working in a field). Go Down, Old Hannah may not be the best depiction of religiosity expressed in music, but it is certainly a fascinating example of how multiple levels of meaning and interpretation can happen, as Sylvan suggests multiple times in the text, simultaneously. Word Count : 1004