Harry Burleigh as Ethnomusicologist? Transcription, Arranging, and the Old Songs Hymnal

Harry Burleigh's demeanor has been described variously by some of the younger artists of the Harlem Renaissance as elegant and refined or as aloof and removed. Although many saw dignity in Burleigh's bearing as well as in his artistic arrangements of spirituals, others saw something else. Harlem Renaissance choral arranger and director Eva Jessye intimated that Burleigh's deportment was "related to his desire to disclaim his racial heritage" (quoted in Spencer 1997, 6). Zora Neale Hurston struck a similar note in a 1931 letter to Charlotte Mason, asserting that Harry Burleigh "has less sympathy for the Negro than anyone ... [that I] can imagine" (6). Either complaint may have stemmed partly from Burleigh's focus on art song arrangements of spirituals instead of a more folk-centric attempt at presenting this music. And yet, it is interesting to note that during the 1920s and early 1930s, Harry Burleigh regularly traveled to rural Georgia to transcribe spirituals from black tenant farmers. Burleigh was well aware of the spiritual as it existed in the folk sphere in the 1920s, not to mention the plight of southern Negros and issues surrounding the preservation of their racial heritage. Of the more than 600 extant transcriptions that Burleigh made of African-American folksongs (Burleigh [ca. 1929]), 187 spirituals were published jointly with Burleigh's collaborator, Dorothy Bolton, in a hymnal titled The Old Songs Hymnal, Words and Melodies from the State of Georgia (Bolton and Burleigh 1929). Burleigh's work on this hymnal and his journey to transcribe folk tunes in rural Georgia remain an unknown but significant chapter in his biography. In order to fill in this lacuna, this article briefly surveys Burleigh's transcriptions and arrangements of spirituals, as well as the known biographies of some of his informants and his collaborator, Dorothy Bolton. The details of Burleigh's work in rural Georgia must be inferred from the extant manuscripts and the Old Songs Hymnal. The majority of both Dorothy Bolton's and Harry Burleigh's personal correspondence appears to have been destroyed, which precludes definitive conclusions about motives and methods. The only oral accounts of Burleigh's trip come from Dorothy Bolton's grandsons, who are now in possession of Burleigh's manuscripts. They claim that Bolton employed Burleigh because she saw him as the leading expert on spirituals in America (Bolton 2003). Although Bolton had collected the texts of many African-American folktales and folksongs, she could not transcribe the music. According to her descendants, Bolton transcribed the lyrics of the spirituals, and Burleigh transcribed the tunes. Later, the two published a hymnal containing many of these songs. Neither grandson remembers Burleigh, although both were alive (under ten years old) and living nearby during his last datable visit in 1933. There are two types of manuscripts extant. The first is a legible transcription of a spiritual, with the music handwritten in pen (see Ex. 1). The musical notes are clearly written without mistakes in Burleigh's unambiguous hand. Words referring to the music, such as "verse," "cho" (for chorus), "slower," or "rubato," also appear in Burleigh's handwriting. The sureness of Burleigh's musical penmanship, which dates from his early training as a stenographer and is better known through his more famous work with Dvorak, is clearly reflected in these transcriptions. The texts of the spirituals are typed beneath the music, the syllables aligning with the notes and the extra verses appearing below the music. It seems likely that Bolton typed the text into Burleigh's musical manuscripts. (1) These legible transcriptions include 500 pieces of African-American folk music. Dorothy Bolton created an index for most of these songs, although the extant indices do not fully match the titles of the songs. Of these tunes, 187 furnish the soprano lines and texts for the arrangements in the Old Songs Hymnal. …