The Message in the Music: It's Almost Midnight by s. rocha

Listen closely to the message in the music—the Negro spiritual. 

      What Douglas was trying to say is that there is something to be learned from the power of voice--not to be heard through the skewed reception of ethnosympathy, but through pure and unobjectified listening.  This is the kind of listening that requires a particular extended dialogue that involves an interlocutorship between the producer of the song and the recipient.  In that voice one will most determinedly hear the strength of resistance and the resolve of survivance (to coin a Gerald Vizenor term).

      Sterling Brown explained that the parallels between songs of freedom for the White man and for the Negro meant something very different—it meant freedom from slavery for the Negro.  For the White man it meant freedom from his own sins.  It was the only bondage he understood, and the only one he could identify with.  There is no reason to think that the Negro would address the issue of freedom from sin in a figurative manner. 

      Cruz describes how “The abolitionist movement began to rally around” the spiritual and created “ethnosympathetic” ways of hearing the music.  And though the intellectual formation that determines how a spiritual might mean to such a community, the reception of the music by the community that produces it is based not on a marketing schematic nor an institutionalized American commodity. The spiritual serves its producers as an emancipatory adroitness that gives vitality to the fearless spirit of struggle. Even more, it is metaphysical and the effects are far more reaching than the mere singing of a song.  It is, according to W.E.B. Dubois, a gift of true and traditional American music—perhaps the only American made musical truth.  At least, the first.  

“Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty.” (The Souls of Black Folk)

The words of the gospel song, “It’s Almost Midnight” play in the back of head as I read this text.  It sends old chills of wonder as I re-experience the might of a spiritually charged moment through song.  I am embraced in the cradling arms of recall:  my grandmother, my father, my young brother, my many loved ones who have passed.  The power of this particular song stands omnipotent in the face of Cruz’ descriptions of “intellectual formations”.  I feel relieved knowing that the folk element of the music will never be anything more than the lore of the intellectual.  The profundity and timelessness of the spiritual rests in the endurance of the voice and the place it lives within the Soul of Black Folks.

It’s almost midnight

     The cry is about to be made

     Behold the bride groom cometh

     Have you any oi,l are you saved?

     It’s almost midnight

     The master is on his way

     He just might come tomorrow

     He just might come today

     It’s almost midnight

     The rapture is about to take place

     Shame on you if you miss it,

     Please accept is amazing grace

     Enough of the Bible has been fulfilled

     This should give your conscience a spiritual chill

     It’s almost midnight

     Did you hear what I said

     Time is winding up

     It’s almost midnight