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‘It is America’s first music’: Conductor Everett McCorvey on the importance of preserving Negro spirituals
01/07/25
As the United States enters its 250th year, it boasts a rich and varied musical legacy. But for conductor Everett McCorvey, American Negro spirituals stand apart from the rest of the country’s songbook.
“It is America’s first music,” he said of the songs that enslaved people created when they mixed African rhythms with the European hymns they heard in mandatory church services. “The immigrants who came to this country brought their own music with them. It was not until the blossoming of the spiritual that America found its voice.”
Today, even as the more contemporary sounds of gospel fill most Black sacred spaces, the thunderous spirituals continue to thrive, thanks in large part to the American Spiritual Ensemble, a group that McCorvey founded 30 years ago. Many of those spirituals will be taught and sung in Central Massachusetts over the next 18 months while McCorvey serves as Music Worcester’s artist-in-residence.
His residency begins Saturday with an American Spiritual Ensemble concert at Mechanics Hall, and continues with school workshops and concerts that will find McCorvey conducting the Worcester Chorus.
McCorvey’s childhood in Montgomery, Ala., was full of Black sacred music as well as civil rights activism. To this day, every American Spiritual Ensemble concert starts and ends with “Walk Together Children,” a spiritual that Martin Luther King Jr. often quoted in his sermons.
“My mother was Methodist, my father was Baptist, and luckily their churches were just a block apart,” McCorvey remembered in a Zoom conversation from his home in Lexington, Ky., where he teaches voice at the University of Kentucky. When choirs from historically Black colleges visited, a young McCorvey heard “this beautiful a cappella music that moved me greatly.”
Early in his career as an opera singer, McCorvey noticed that “gospel music was exploding, but American Negro spirituals were not. I wanted to make sure that this music that I felt was so important to the American musical canon was not lost.”
McCorvey said that spirituals are “a sound that people all over the world try to emulate,” thanks to techniques like call-and-response that originated in spirituals and are now a staple of popular music. Besides drawing on the thousands of spirituals that have been passed down from generation to generation, the ensemble also includes African percussion, jazz, and Broadway songs like “Summertime” and “Ol’ Man River” to demonstrate where the spirituals came from and how they influenced American culture.
When McCorvey founded the American Spiritual Ensemble in 1995, he drew on his colleagues in the opera world to fill out its roster. He said it’s still exciting when he hears the combination of “all of these big voices that could fill a concert hall by themselves.”
he day before the Mechanics Hall concert, the American Spiritual Ensemble will perform at Doherty Memorial High School, where the audience will include members of area high school choir groups and Black student union organizations. McCorvey will return to the school in March for more educational collaborations.
“For some of our students, spirituals are already something that they have a strong personal connection with. For other students, they will discover how spirituals gave us everything else in American music,” said Lisa Leach, district performing arts curriculum specialist for the Worcester Public Schools. “Spirituals as a genre are so powerful on so many levels: emotionally, personally, spiritually, historically, and as an understanding of what people can hope for and dream of.”
McCorvey agreed that spirituals are for everyone to learn and experience. He recently met with a mostly non-Black college choir whose members did not want to sing spirituals because they thought it would be cultural appropriation.
“I told them, ‘You pay honor to us by performing this music,’” said McCorvey, who pointed out that it was Czech-American composer Antonín Dvořák who played a major role in bringing spirituals into concert halls after Black composer Harry Burleigh introduced Dvořák to them.
“This music is for everybody,” McCorvey added. “It tells of a very important time in our American history. It’s a story that I want every community to learn.”