Music as Memory: Dr. Fredara Hadley on Culture, Spirituals, and Du Bois (Part 1)

🎙 Episode 6: Music as Memory: Dr. Fredara Hadley on Culture, Spirituals, and Du Bois (Part 1)

Description:
In this powerful episode, we sit down with ethnomusicologist Fredara Hadley following the premiere of W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel with a Cause. Together, we explore the deep relationship between music, history, and the Black experience—uncovering how sound carries memory, identity, and truth across generations.
From field hollers and spirituals to the groundbreaking work of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Dr. Hadley unpacks how Black music has always been more than sound—it is survival, storytelling, and cultural preservation.
This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation.

In This Episode, We Explore:
* What it means to be an ethnomusicologist and why music cannot be separated from culture
* The evolution of Black music—from field calls and work songs to spirituals and early gospel
* How music served as catharsis, healing, and community-building after enslavement
* The regional differences in Black musical traditions across the United States
* How W.E.B. Du Bois first encountered spirituals and called them “sorrow songs”
* The role of the Fisk University and the Jubilee Singers in preserving and globalizing spirituals
* Why arranging spirituals helped both fund Black education and preserve musical traditions
* The concept of Black music as a site of conjuring, memory, and world-making

Watch episode here: https://youtu.be/Ip-USqYBVYQ

Resources / Links:
*  Watch the trailer https://youtu.be/5kMsik6rDQM?si=0Xm2f...
* Transcript is available here https://www.buzzsprout.com/2598323/ep...
* Stay connected https://linktr.ee/ritacoburnmedia

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Be a part of the conversation. These are our truths, our history, our stories—and they shape the world we live in.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

We are here with our truth, our history, and our stories. And we have had a fabulous night, Fradera Hadley and I uh were with over 700 people at the Directors Guild for the premiere of W.E.B. Du Bois Rebel with a Cause. And Fradera moderated a wonderful panel that really spoke to the totality of the documentary. We had David Levering Lewis, Corita Brown, and we also had Jeffrey Wright with us. Today, what I want to talk to Fradera about is who she is and what she does and what she did for the film. Because Fradera Hatley is an ethnomusicologist. And that really means that she studies music from an ethnic perspective and studies it over time and years. And I guess, Fredera, you can tell me what else that means because you work at this point through Juilliard.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

Yes, yes. I am an ethnomusicologist. And um when I told my parents I was going to be one, I assured them I would find a job and that um I did not make it up. And it is the study of music and culture and understanding how music shapes culture and culture shapes music. You can't separate those things. There's no such thing as music that is devoid of culture. And my focus has been on African American music. And I have to pause and give a lot of credit to my advisor, another black woman, Portia Maltesby, who is now Professor Emerita from Indiana University, who really instilled in us that you can have your little specialty, but you better understand the journey of African American music and understand the journey of African Americans. And not just in isolation, but connected to the continent, the diaspora, and all that. And so I've carried that with me in my more than 15 years of teaching, research, and talking about African American music.

SPEAKER_01 2:10

And so I think what's important from a historical perspective is we know there's always the music. Yes. But there's so much meaning in the music, and the music has changed over time from field calls and hollers that had more in it in America than we thought, to spirituals, which some classically arranged uh got the Jubilee singers to be able to go all over the world and raise money for black institutions. And it wasn't until the 70s that we got gospel. But when we look at W.E.B. Du Bois, we start in 1868 in Great Barrington. Yes. Totally different place. Three years after the Emancipation Proclamation, black people are mostly down in the South and trying to struggle out of the first generation out of being enslaved. What were they listening to? And what was he listening to being in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and not having been uh enslaved?

SPEAKER_00 3:23

I think it's so important, as you just alluded to, that there are regional differences, and there's still different regional differences in terms of how people engage music, black people in particular. And so in 1868, the majority of black people are in the South, and that doesn't start to change until the 20th century, and we have the great migrations. And so in the South, people are absolutely connected to field haulers. There are secular songs that are connected to um holiday rituals as well. So that's important to say. And of course, there are work songs and there are Negro spirituals, right? And at that at that point in time, the Negro spirituals are what we would call a folk spiritual. They haven't been set yet, as we would become accustomed to hearing them by groups like the Pissed Jubilee singers. These are songs that people get together in informal church settings, religious settings, and sing for themselves. Sometimes white people observe, and we have documentation of that. And sometimes they're fascinated, sometimes they're horrified at the bastardization of Christianity and music. But this, I think the important thing about that is it is really um uh a catharsis, if you will, for black people enduring a situation that is unimaginable, right? That is not the world that W.B. Du Bois emerges from, and that does not diminish his black experience either.

SPEAKER_01 4:48

But before you go forward with that, you just said something. It's a healing. Black people have just gotten out of slavery, and some of them have to stay on the same plantation. It's not like they can go anywhere. Where do they have to go? And singing got them through hot days and beatings and being separated from their children. What was the blood is in that music? What was that music like?

SPEAKER_00 5:18

I have to I have to add a personal anecdote because of what you just said. I'm from West Palm Beach, Florida, but my parents are both also from Florida. My dad, uh, both my parents, thankfully, still with us. My dad is from Tallahassee, Florida. Actually, unincorporated Leon County when he was born. But he was raised, his parents were tenant farmers, and he was raised on Orchard Pond Plantation, which is the same plantation where his great-grandmother was enslaved and lived after slavery and is buried nearby. So your point is absolutely right. For so many black Americans in the South, it's important to say these aren't abstract historical facts. They are still, for generations, as my family was, connected directly to the land, connected to memory, connected to uh blood lines. And so carrying this music forward, bringing this music forward is not only a remembrance of something that is far away. It's something that is immediate. And it helps them to navigate, one, build kind of community cohesion, but helps them to navigate this new world of freedom, what it means and what it doesn't mean, right? The hopes that it brings and the challenges that it brings. And so I often say that black music is a site of conjuring and catharsis. It's a place where we imagine a world that we don't yet have, if we're talking about before slavery ends, but also process a new world that we are now in together, because the call and response in the music and spirituals in particular, um, how they lend to uh blending of voices and improvisation, making space for the individual experience inside of the communal, I think is such an act of world-making and self-making. And so the music, I think spiritual is the perfect way to describe it because it helps to kind of, I don't want to say solve, but grapple with those kinds of complexities that we cannot imagine. And so we know that different regions had different spirituals, but we find some version of the spirituals throughout the South. And so, and and the elders in my family would talk about going down to hush harbors and still, even after slavery ends, like gathering together for themselves in secret and all these kinds of things. And so these practices are life-sustaining and life-affirming in a world that says that you are you literally not a person. And even after slavery ends, we don't know what to do with you because we didn't have a plan for emancipated Negroes. And so people have to kind of turn inward. And the music, I feel like, is one of the strongest records we have of what they were thinking, what they were feeling, how they made sense of their world in a in an era where it was illegal, if we're talking about during slavery, for black people to learn how to read and write, and white people to teach them in the South. This wasn't the case. This wasn't the history in Massachusetts, even though there had been slavery in the North, we know it ended before the Civil War, which meant that there, it doesn't mean that they were free of prejudice, but it means that there was greater latitude for African Americans to kind of have some sense of self-determination. So for someone like Du Bois in a place like Great Barrington, which has a long tradition of tolerance and even acceptance in some cases, it gave his family the opportunity to kind of take this precocious young black boy and not worry that he's going to be killed because he's precocious, because he's smart. That can be a danger in the South if you are too smart, if you're too clever, right? And Great Barrington, it becomes an opportunity for the community, for his family and the community to kind of support him and let him develop and flower into who he ultimately becomes. And so, you know, the music that he's engaged in is likely still largely religious music, hymnity, classical music, choral music, and things of that nature, but not the kind of communal, not so much of the communal uh black music that religious music that we associate with the South.

SPEAKER_01 9:30

I feel that because I know that um this didn't make the documentary, but the different churches that Du Bois attended, at one point he was over the sewing circle. Uh he was a young man who was involved in the churches, and the churches helped to provide money for him, and that got him to Fist University. And when he got to Fist University, that's the first time he heard the spirituals, and he labeled them the sorrow songs, that there was something inside of that music that he immediately connected his life to. And I find that so interesting because that was happening. When we say spirituals, the Fist Jubilee singers took the spirituals of the South and classically arranged them so that when they took them to Europe and places and raised money, that the white people who were giving that money and they went to Queens, they did not hear the guttural field cries and hollers, but they heard the music in a way that they could understand, but they couldn't extradite the pain from that music. So tell me a little bit about what it means to classically arrange a spiritual.

SPEAKER_00 11:02

Sure. Um, one thread that is operating through all of that is that of religion. And so Du Bois is supported by churches and religious organizations. He comes to FISC, which is established in 1866 by a religious, a white religious organization, primarily the congregational church. And so um that element of religion governs how music exists at FISC. And this is true for lots of other HBCUs founded by religious organizations as well. And the one thing we have to say, the the dominant popular music at the time is blackface minstrelsity, right? And so that really, as these new Negro schools start to sprout, um I believe that has a hand in why people are so strict and austere about the kind of music that can exist on these campuses, right? Because they do not want their students, their institutions associated with menstrual sea at all. They are trying to avoid that. And so he comes to Fisk, and by the time he gets there, he hears Nashville is a has a thriving black community, but we're still in the after, in the immediate aftermath of slavery. And in fact, the original Fisk Jubilee singers, almost all of them are formerly enslaved people or the children of, right? And so uh they're trying to figure out how you keep this fledgling school alive. And the treasurer George White, who was white, who was also the music teacher, he hears these students singing these songs to themselves in the way that they would sing them in their community. And he's like, this is the repertoire that they we should be singing because they've been singing other choral repertoire and not finding the success that they needed in order to um keep Fisk open. And all of these years later, we can't imagine the level of precarity that these institutions face, but it was a very real notion. And so um he works with a young woman who's one of the original Fist Jubilee singers, Ella Shepard, and they start to, and and other members of the Fist Jubilee singers, start to imagine what you you just described sonically as a type of middle ground. They have to raise money and they have to raise money from white people because those are the people who have it. They need a sympathetic audience who believe in this experiment of educating young black people in the South and the possibilities that that can bring. And so they have to, out of necessity, kind of think about what will work in that environment, what will work in the name of that cause. So, yes, there are changes. The harmonies are orchestrated and written out for four-part and four-part harmony. The timbers are smoothed a bit in the arrangement. We still arrangements, we still hear call and response, we still hear emotion, right? That is not strained out. We still hear some dialect even. And so it really is this middle path of bringing together the experience of those from the plantation, but this new emergent type of black American, which is a young, educated black person in the South. And I like to think that what the Fist Jubilee, the innovation that these young people are able to bring to this music, does two really important things. It sort of soundtracks what this new era sounds like, what these young people sound like who have access to education. And that does not make the arranged spiritual better than the folks spiritual at all, but it does make it reflective of the experience that they are going through, being young black people who travel the world, travel the country in the name of their educational institutions. Their parents could not have imagined that that would be their lives. And so I connect how they sing the spirituals to this new world that they're now entering. The second thing it does is the act of notating the spirituals through arrangement, is an act of preservation. And so do we have it exactly the way it was from the plantation? Not really, but we do, it does start to build a canon of arranged spirituals that we continue to draw from in the 21st century. That the fish jubilee singers obviously continue to sing, but so many choirs, black, white, and global choirs, sing this music largely because the fish jubilee singers um made that innovation and made it possible for there to be an established canon of music. And, you know, there are lots of different takes about this. Zorinal Hurston famously famously calls them neo-spirituals and not spirituals, right? But ultimately, I think they the those original Fish Jubilee singers and the music that Du Bois encounters and is so moved by that he weaves it throughout Souls of Black folk, right? Um, is an ultimate treasure and gift that they've given to all of us who came after. In addition to keeping Fish University open and establishing its first permanent building, Jubilee Hall, on this campus.

SPEAKER_01 16:06

That's right. Their music raised enough money to build a building and to keep a university open. Yes. And that partnership between a white man who heard those voices and said there's something here and the people who were just singing among themselves uh changed a nation. Yes. So I want to thank you for that. And what I want to tell all of you is if you want to hear some more about the music of the film, because this is tracking the music of our culture, our continent, then you're going to hear some of that on another part because I think you have enough to digest right now. And we're weaving spirituals through this so that you can hear. Understand that those spirituals are in the public domain, those early ones, so you can go on to the internet and find them and listen to them and imagine who you are and where that music comes from. This is all about our truth is in those notes. Our history of this music, and this is part of our story. Thank you for being with us, and thank you for listening and come back and hear more about the music. I am the producer, director, and writer of W. E. B. Du Bois Rebel with a Cause, a PBS documentary that will air on American Masters PBS May 19th of this year, 2026. Please search for the YouTube trailer and share it today.