A CRITIQUE

By Rev. Johnny M. Wilson, Pastor

The Mount Calvary Baptist Church

Wyatt Tee Walker, Somebody’s Calling My Name: Black Sacred Music and Social Change.

(Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1979, Sixth Printing 1992. 207pp.)

During the week of January 24-28, I had the opportunity to be in the company of Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker at the United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, where a special tribute was bestowed upon Dr. Walker, the senior pastor of the Canaan Baptist Church of Christ.

Black sacred music has a unique purpose in the African-American tradition. Black meter hymns are rarely taught and this present church generation is unfamiliar with the rich dynamics of meter hymns. This is an example of some of the resources that Dr. Walker brings out in his book. In Somebody’s Calling My Name: Black Sacred Music and Social Change, Dr. Walker makes use of social analysis as critical research on the examination of the study of music from rhythm and blues to five types of Jazz to pure spirituals. He makes his review of fifteen categories of his study known as the “music tree.”

Dr. Walker makes a serious claim in an attempt to catalogue the timeline and development of Black sacred music in the context of African-American culture. He assists his readers by reviewing the historical perspective from the roots of Africa to World War II and through the Civil Rights era. The book is divided into three sections, one section focusing on the oral tradition from its development in Africa to the present age.

The first four chapters give the historical foundation of African and American music. Dr. Walker observers that the "oral tradition that survived the horrors of the Middle Passage and the bestiality of the American slave system persisted and contributed largely to an ever-widening circle of musical expression.” (p.37) Dr. Walker further adds, “The members of the antebellum slave community were, for the most part, totally illiterate and thus exhibited complete dependence on oral transmission for news and communication of any kind.” (Id.)

Chapters 5 and 6 are the heart of the book. His chapter, “I love the Lord, He Heard My Cry,” provides a discussion of the historical and social dynamics of black meter hymns. There is a careful analysis that resonates throughout the book placing the center of historical and social aspects of meter hymns, jazz, gospel and more in the lives of blacks in America and Africa. "The historical period embraced by the development and dominance of Black meter music is an overlapping era of both slavery and freedom.” (p.75)

Somebody’s Calling My Name is the most informative social and historical analysis of black sacred music that I have read. Dr. Walker makes a persuasive argument when he says, “the Black religious experience was born and developed and shaped in a specific social context of suffering and oppression.” (p.192) Truly, this book is something to read and something to enjoy. I encourage you to read, Somebody is Calling My Name. n