In Georgia: Through the Gospel Grapevine

By Bruce Morgan

The sound of American slavery is living very quietly on a dark side street in Brunswick, Ga. And a young black composer named Walter Robinson has come a thousand miles to hear it: tones, overtones, agony and all. Call it gospel, or call it the blues. The sound starts low and shades into the sky, leaving behind an ache or sprig of consolation. "That's the sound I want," he says, as he drives toward his destination.

At the door of their modest brick bungalow, Doug Quimby and his wife Frankie greet the 37-year-old Robinson fondly, with gruff good humor. The three have met before, and the Quimbys know why their friend is here. Doug, 51, is slated to play a major role in a folk opera that Walter has just completed, and the two men need to run through some changes in the score. In addition to this contribution, the Quimbys offer their visitor an entree to gospel singers in the small, isolated churches of coastal Georgia. Untrained choir singers such as these will be the stars of Walter's opera.

Walter has a tape he wants Doug to hear, so they head for the family room and pop a cassette into the machine. "Right here -- what's that? What's he saying?" asks the younger man as the tape begins. Doug angles his upper body toward the sound. A black preacher is crying out his sermon, his voice cracking with emotion through line after line, at times shifting to an eerie falsetto high above the drone of his congregation. It's part Motown, part a century or two of brutal noonday toil, and it will raise the hairs on the back of your neck.

"He's saying 'We are not yet with you, Jesus,' " Frankie volunteers from the couch; her glasses shine. "Is that it?" asks Walter. "There's a place in my opera where I'd love to use that sound. We could mount four speakers at the corners of the theater and get exactly that same effect of being surrounded by the sound." Doug's brother is a deacon in the church, so maybe a full-scale taping can be arranged.

These days Walter Robinson has arranging on the brain. His opera, finished after eight years of starts and stops, must now be staged and led to its audience. The subject matter is a bit of a stumbling block. Robinson has elected to dramatize the true story of Denmark Vesey, an erudite black carpenter who plotted an 1822 slave revolt in Charleston, S.C., and was subsequently hanged for his trouble.

Delving into black history, Robinson believes, means honoring the black voice in all its suggestive power. Working through the gospel grapevine, he has recruited exceptional black singers from church choirs in half a dozen states in order to load his work with feeling. "Black churches are the museum of black life," he says. "There is nowhere else to go." Of 37 parts in the opera, only one, that of a slave master, is white.

Doug is waiting the next day at his church, a low-slung building the size of a corner gas station, where there's an organ and a clunky, slightly out-of- tune piano. It's a Saturday. Several women are moving around in the kitchen; the small, bare chapel is deserted. Walter plays a quick phrase on the piano and sings the lyric faintly for Doug, and Doug (who does not read music) sends it booming back. Then again, with an altered stress:

First we weren't sure

If it was God's will for us

To be on our own.

So for two years we debated

A-mong ourselves.

Quimby began sweating in the rice and cotton fields when he was four years old. As a teenage sharecropper, he sang spirituals to himself out behind the plow. Then this soft-spoken man with the gentlest of handshakes met Sea Islands Folklorist and Singer Bessie Jones in 1969 and discovered that the songs he'd been summoning all his life went back, virtually unchanged, to slavery days. "Singing is a part of our heritage," notes Quimby. "The slaves liked to sing to keep the pressure off of them, to make it easier on them." These days Doug and his wife travel the country presenting educational programs on slave life and culture. Doug is a repository of countless haunting melodies and is fully capable of transporting a listener 200 years into the past with a stamp of his foot and a huskily ringing baritone.

"Isn't his voice incredible?" marvels Robinson. "It comes out of who he is and what he'd done -- it just goes to the pit of your soul." The composer is determined to snag as much of that rough emotion as he can. During rehearsals for his opera, he has repeatedly cautioned his singers to sound less "white" and instead let their voices rip. "I want you to sing just how you do back home," he tells them, "when you're in your own church choir."

Robinson has come great distances by knowing how to shade a tune. He was born in Philadelphia to parents who worked at collecting trash and scrubbing other people's linoleum. In the late 1970s he played bass behind Folk Singer Livingston Taylor. Now he owns a rusty, faded blue BMW and a house on Martha's Vineyard, where Lionel Richie has hung his hat. For the past four years he has held a plum job at Harvard's W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research, which asks only that he put the final touches on his opera. Robinson has steeped himself in the nightmare world of the lash, lock and branding iron. He admits, "I have black friends who say, 'Why do it? That's over.' Well, I think, 'Why not do it?' "

Porgy and Bess seems like a term paper by comparison. George Gershwin penned part of his famous opera while eavesdropping up the coast in South Carolina. Gershwin wrote to a friend upon completing a prayer-music scene in 1934 that "this has somewhat the effect we heard in Hendersonville as we stood outside the Holy Rollers' Church." Robinson tells the story with a smile. "I'm not on the outside; I'm inside," he says.

Originally drawn to the notion of writing his opera about Black Abolitionist Harriet Tubman, the composer finally settled on Vesey because "the issues were hottest there." Robinson is fascinated by the question of what it meant for Vesey to be a prosperous free black -- he got lucky and bought his freedom with $600 of $1,500 in winnings from the Charleston lottery -- living in a city that was then a capital of the slave trade.

Vesey's wife remained a slave. What must family life have been like under those conditions? Most of all, what led a man who had profited from playing it safe to then rise and howl at the age of 55? "It is difficult to imagine what infatuation could have prompted you to attempt an enterprise so wild and visionary," noted the Charleston court in a tone of disbelief, as it sentenced Vesey to death.

Both the lingering questions and the doleful answers may be audible before long. Robinson is in the process of staging selections from his work (titled Look What a Wonder Jesus Has Done) for theater representatives in Boston and New York City. Meanwhile, he's also casting the last few parts by ransacking the countryside for those voices that can pierce the floor of heaven with their wails.

Which brings us back to the Quimby home. After the tape of the rustic church service has run its course, Walter quizzes his hosts about other possible mines of vocal talent in the area. "How about over on St. Simons -- do they sing that way over there?" he asks. "No, they don't," answers Frankie. She reflects for a moment before suggesting another church she knows of nearby. "Oh, you have got to hear them," she tells Walter. "That what you've got on the tape there can't touch what this is."

"Really?" says Walter, his eyes alight. It's late on a Friday, and dark outside. For the moment there's nothing to be done. But in his mind Walter's already slipping down the road beneath the palmettos, toward the place where history and music cross.