The Pathbreaker and the Mapmaker, or, Harry T. Burleigh and Me
This is a story about ambition and struggle, success and failure, hubris and humility. It’s a story about the way a new pedagogy can change the teacher as much as the students. It starts with a song.
I can’t remember where I first encountered Harry T. Burleigh’s 1917 arrangement of the spiritual “Go Down, Moses”—it may have been at a family Passover seder when I was young—but I now teach it in as many different undergraduate courses as I can. Teaching this song to non-majors and majors in classes large and small, I’ve found that “Go Down, Moses” offers diverse points of entry for students with varying levels of musical experience.
Burleigh’s 1919 recording of the song (the only extant recording of his voice) is particularly arresting. I’m drawn to Burleigh’s delivery, which is sometimes crisp and restrained, sometimes vast, seemingly in excess of the capacities of the recording apparatus. And I love the song’s weighty accompaniment, the way the bass line narrates Moses’s path downward in the refrain even as the vocal line rises, foreshadowing triumph.
In its arrangement as an art song, “Go Down, Moses” conveys so many complicated histories. Across his work as a baritone, arranger, and composer, Burleigh demonstrated devotion to concert spirituals as a vehicle for Black excellence, proving himself as an exemplar of the group W.E.B. DuBois called the “Talented Tenth.” Burleigh’s participation in the transmission of the Black spiritual tradition from folk practice to the concert hall helped elevate what Samuel Floyd Jr. dubbed the classical “stream” over folk and popular streams among Black intellectuals. In her Music of Black Americans, Eileen Southern described Burleigh’s pathbreaking arrangement of spirituals for solo voice as “a unique contribution to the history of American music.” In short, the song, its composer/performer, and its reception make rich prompts for classroom discussion, especially at my institution.
St. Olaf College is an undergraduates-only, liberal arts college with a conservatory-style music department where many students struggle to reconcile the apparent distance between their musical training and the racial injustice they witness or experience. On a campus wrestling with racial politics and located just forty minutes from the site of George Floyd’s murder, studying “Go Down, Moses” offers a glimpse into musicology’s relevance to students’ lives beyond the classroom and concert hall.
I’m not primarily a scholar of Black musical traditions, but witnessing the richness of “Go Down, Moses” as a point of entry for students, I wanted to know more so I could teach more material like this. I wondered: how else might Burleigh’s music and legacy serve as a foundation for student inquiry? The answer came from an unexpected place. Indulge me in a quick detour:
Over the past seven years I’ve collaborated with teams of student researchers to produce a series of interactive, digital maps—visual representations of the movement of music and musicians within local, regional, and international geographies. Our maps tell stories and make arguments. The process combines traditional methodologies of archival research (using digital and physical collections) and more recent methodologies from the geographic information sciences. Working in archives to solve historical puzzles and create public resources, students gain expertise in research as well as new perspectives on the challenges of knowledge production. (Click the previous links to read what my students have to say about each of these points.)
When I first started working with students to represent music history via digital maps, we visualized various aspects of early twentieth-century French music (my primary research area). But after hearing a presentation at the 2017 annual meeting of the AMS in Rochester titled “Singing Concert Spirituals on Campus: Performances of Respectability in the Black Lives Matter Era” by ethnomusicologist Dr. Marti Slaten, co-founder and executive director of the H.T. Burleigh Society in New York, I was inspired to take my love of Burleigh to a new level. Soon after, Dr. Slaten and Burleigh Society co-founder Lynne Foote became my partners during a month-long undergraduate research course that I taught in January 2019.
With the goal of producing maps through which visitors to the Burleigh Society website and other students of music history could learn more about Burleigh’s music and career, twelve music majors (first-years through fourth-years) and I immersed ourselves in all things Burleigh. We read Jean Snyders’ Burleigh biography and dove into digital archival collections—especially newspaper databases—in search of evidence of performances by Burleigh, performances of his music by other artists, and important life events. We also read about the perils of digital mapping, grappling with the inherent biases of data collection and the ways that map design can offer compelling lies to readers. We examined the promise of countermapping, an approach that challenges dominant narratives and lifts up marginalized histories. Limiting ourselves to Burleigh’s own lifetime (1866-1949), we ultimately identified hundreds of performances by and of Burleigh, in the United States and abroad. Out of that data we created more than a dozen interactive maps that allow users to explore different aspects of what we called “The Life and Legacy of H.T. Burleigh.”
The map below, for instance, aggregates 200 of Burleigh’s own performances. I encourage you to click here to open it in a separate window so you can fully appreciate its functionality. Alternately, I have prepared a narrative description of the map in hopes of making the map-reading experience more accessible.
Click here if you’re interested in learning more about how students generated this map and the others in this essay. And click here to see other maps of Burleigh’s career and reception.
Stitching together evidence from Snyder’s biography and digital newspaper databases, this preliminary map suggests that Burleigh concertized throughout the northeastern and midwestern United States and performed extensively in New York City, but only performed in the American South on a handful of occasions, almost always at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HCBUs) or on occasions celebrating Black excellence. As Snyder has shown, Burleigh was committed to the politics of racial uplift and seems to have chosen performance opportunities in the South accordingly.
In response to making this map, my students and I asked: did White, Southern audiences have the opportunity to hear Burleigh? Does our map reveal Burleigh’s efforts to remove himself from Jim Crow segregation, or are we just missing a substantial body of evidence, perhaps squirreled away in newspapers that have yet to be digitized? We were able to answer the first and last of these questions by mapping performances of Burleigh’s music by his contemporaries. Again, click here to open the map below in a separate window and click here for a narrative description of the map.
Selected Performances of Burleigh’s Music
As you navigate the map, I invite you to pretend, for just a moment, that you’re a student using this map. Click the layers list icon (fourth from the right at the top of the legend; you can select or deselect performers to compare their reach). Now, go to Oxford Music Online and look up each of the musicians named in the layers. Select and deselect the appropriate layers to visualize where White performers included Burleigh in their concerts. Now do the same for the Black performers on the list. Based on this particular map, what might you argue about the spread of Burleigh’s music in segregated spaces? What questions does the map raise?
This map makes clear that while Burleigh himself avoided the South, Black and White performers carried his music throughout the United States—and beyond. Marian Anderson performed “Go Down, Moses” to a segregated audience in Savannah, GA (1917); White performers Kitty Cheatam, John McCormack, and Oscar Seagle presented Burleigh’s music in Georgia (1921), Arkansas (1917), Louisiana (1915), Texas (1916), and Oklahoma (1913). Through exploration of this map, students can determine for themselves that Burleigh’s music traveled where Burleigh could not.
These data leave us with tantalizing questions: what did Segregationist, white-only audiences think about when they heard White performers singing Harry Burleigh’s spirituals? Did they understand that their lives were being enriched by a form of Black excellence that segregationists otherwise denied existed? Did Burleigh’s spirituals serve as a kind of primer, Black-washing White listeners’ ears, aiding in the long and painful and sometimes violent process of pushing aside the legal and cultural roadblocks that White Americans had erected? And today, amidst debates about whether the performance of spirituals by white performers constitutes harmful cultural appropriation, how might Burleigh’s pathbreaking example reveal a counterhistory that encourages—rather than curtails—the performance of his music by diverse performers?
Whether making digital maps or making use of them, my students will tell you that we often generate more questions than we answer. The process of generating those questions, however, is itself instructive. And what we gain through that process is remarkable: new research skills, deepened expertise, and best of all, a healthy dose of humility. The more data we collect, the more we learn, the more we recognize how much more there is to know. We recognize the imperfection in our maps, embrace the likelihood that they will never be complete, and recommit ourselves to learning more. In this way, whether we’re researching Burleigh or any one of the topics my students and I will tackle in the coming years, every map we make points us to treasure.
Interested in making your own maps with or without students? Click here to access a guide to research and musicological mapmaking created by Louis and University of Denver undergraduate Maeve Nagel-Frazel.
With thanks to Andrea Bohlman, Elizabeth Craft, Ailsa Lipscombe, Frank Lehman, Hannah Lewis, and Matthew Mugmon for their feedback on earlier drafts of this essay.
