Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War’s “Gospel Army”

Jabir, Johari. Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil Wars “Gospel Army”. The Ohio State University Press, 2017.

The Introduction defines what is meant by conjuring. The practice of conjuring arose from Africans enslaved in the new world of America. “Conjure is the black cultural practice of summoning spiritual power as an intentional means of transforming reality and involves a belief in an invisible magical power that can be used for healing and/or harm” (2). The book explores conjuring through the 1st South Carolina Volunteers regiment and how they used “music and religion to conjure a “cosmic vision of freedom,” a vision of black freedom that was negotiated through both legal and cultural means” (3).

Without needing to say, this is the American Civil War. The 1st SC Volunteers were “the first black regiment in the Union Army, but they referred to themselves as “a gospel army” . . .” (3). The ring shout “holds the key to the sacred singing of Civil War black troops” (15). Both African retentions and new ways in the new world combine in slave songs. There is no European type of separating facets of life, such as civic, religion, aesthetic, economic.

The black conservatory is named and defined, and revealed as to how it was used. Further, “As the first black regiment of the Civil War, the 1st South represents an additional dimension in the black communcal conservatory: black music in the black military experience” (22).

Chapter 1 engages with the regiment’s commander. Chapter 2 explores how religion is a springboard for creativity. Chapter 3 enumerates how manhood expresses both in the spirituals sung and composed. Chapter 4 places death, water, and freedom in view to interpret how these themes were front and center in the face of uncertainty of death and suffering. Chapter 5 incorporates the themes of the book by examining the film “Glory” and its presentation of race, religion, violence, masculinity, and music. The postlude bookends the prelude with the author’s returning to the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC. The prelude meditates upon the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, how the church gathered on 31 December, 2013 and anticipated connecting to the feelings of enslaved Africans from 150 years earlier. The postlude goes to the senseless massacre that happened at that church in June, 2015.

While expressing sadness the author penetrates the circumstances with the overarching evenness of getting at the truth. The meanings being revealed. He leaves with, “. . . when such performances (Aretha Franklin singing “My Country ’tis of Thee” at the first black President’s inauguration) are understood as a musical conjuration, this comprehension raises the necessary social/historical/political and even spiritual intersections that are still urgent for black freedom here and now” (157).