This is a marvelous recording of the kind of African-American song that, ever since spirituals began to be sung on concert stages, has resisted classification as art song or popular or vernacular song, which says more about the problems of those categories than anything else. The selection includes spirituals themselves, mostly in powerfully spare voice-and-piano arrangements by the late Moses Hogan, as well as a variety of later music from the traditions of concert music, jazz, and stage musicals that make use of the idiom of the spirituals in some way. That description cuts a very wide swath, and the recording includes famous pieces like "I Got Plenty o' Nuttin'" and "Ol' Man River," as well as comparative rarities like a fine Howard Swanson setting of
Langston Hughes' poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." (The composers and arrangers are listed only in a separate section of the booklet, not in the track list on the back cover.) The program has as much of a claim as any other on its Songs of America title, although it carries the feeling of representing personal selections on the part of bass-baritone
Oral Moses. His voice, drawing on his background experiences in both opera and contemporary gospel music, is a primary pleasure of this little release: he has an affecting way of moving between those traditions, inserting little passages of gruffness into the spirituals that bring them down to earth, so to speak, without sacrificing the detail of vocal style that has characterized the operatic interpretations of many of
Moses' predecessors. Pianist Rosalyn Floyd also does well with almost minimal accompaniment parts that occasionally swell into the style people used to call church-house rag. The collection of more contemporary pieces runs from
Roland Hayes to arrangements by the disc's annotator, Uzee Brown Jr. (don't miss the extremely unusual version of Amazing Grace, track 12, it is also absorbing and suggests an effort to extend the idealistic musical vision of the Harlem Renaissance forward into the present day). This disc is recommended above all to teachers seeking to introduce the spirituals to students, for they ought to respond to
Moses' direct, heartfelt readings. But anyone interested in the intersection of the concert-music and African-American traditions should give this a listen.