Embroidered Folk Songs

A tall, lank, bespectacled Negro looking much like a country preacher stood poised one night last week before the orchestra shell in Manhattan's Lewisohn Stadium. Around him were 16 blackamoor singers, the men in dinner jackets, the women in flouncy dark dresses. Cajoled and driven by two bony, restless hands upraised and contorted, they sang sweetly, harshly, simply, complexly. They were the Hall Johnson Negro Choir, long known to Stadiumgoers and to those who saw The Green Pastures in Manhattan and on tour. Last week it was announced that the Hall Johnson Choir would depart from Manhattan in busses next October for its first concert tour. Already booked are dates in Harrisburg, Pa., Lawrence and Emporia, Kan., El Paso, Tucson, Los Angeles, Pasadena, Santa Ana, San Francisco, Oakland and other California cities, Seattle and Bellingham, Wash., Denver.

Born 44 years ago in Athens, Ga., Hall Johnson studied at Knox Institute and Allen University (Columbia, S. C.), whose president his father William D. Johnson had become in 1904. Tall Hall Johnson taught himself the violin, saved $40 to go to Philadelphia where he studied more violin and, at the University of Pennsylvania, composition. After the War he got a job in a New York orchestra, thence got into the orchestras of Shuffle Along and Runnin' Wild. Settled in Harlem, Hall Johnson began teaching other Southern Negroes to sing their folk songs the way he thinks they should be done -- not in Moody & Sankey hymn style but in free, polytonal, dramatic harmonies. In 1930 Hall Johnson won the Harmon Award for his work in music.

Not all the Hall Johnson spirituals are as simple and pious as those he arranged for The Green Pastures. From many a black-&-tan honky-tonk come the "St. James Infirmary Blues" and the "St. Louis Blues" which Hall Johnson says utilize the "half-unconscious embroideries" of Negro crooners and orchestra players. "WaterBoy Fantasy" freely combines "WaterBoy" with an old chain-gang song called "If I'd Known My Cap'n was Blin' " in what sophisticated Mr. Johnson calls "that rather pathetic mood of external swagger over internal suffering which has produced so many of these songs of the road and the rail." Other songs are otherwise dressed up. Fiery, spontaneous, pungent, the Hall Johnson Choir is very much the child of one man, as seemed evident last June when a sextet from the group broadcast songs without much vitality or naturalness. Hall Johnson was at the piano then, not out in front hypnotizing.

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