Excerpt from “Together Let Us Sweetly Live”

The Sign and Praying Bands opening a hymn by clapping their hands and tapping their feet over the mourners’ bench – © 2024 Lloyd Wolf / lloydwolf.com

In the earlier years of the 20th century, according to the older people of today, many African-American residents of tidewater Maryland and Delaware would, in late summer, set aside their tools, leave their cornfields just when the tassels on each stalk turned golden and the tips of each blade changed from green to brown, leave their tomatoes when a soft blush of red appeared on the hard green fruit, allow, for a time, their beans and sweet potatoes and melons to ripen on their own, and make their way by horse and wagon, by car, or by bus to a Methodist camp meeting to attend to their sacred work.¹This portrait of an old-time camp meeting in the Chesapeake Bay area is something of a composite, drawn from the memories of the many participants with whom I have talked. Personal interview with Cordonsal Walters 7/7/1998; Personal interview with Benjamin Beckett, 5/24/1999 Those who had moved to the nearby cities of Baltimore, Wilmington, or Philadelphia in search of both the higher wages and the excitement that life in the city seemed to offer, returned home by land or by water, traveling perhaps on one of the ferries that plied the Chesapeake or Delaware Bays from city to town, from shore to shore, and back again. ²Cordonsal Walters 7/7/1998; Personal interviews with Alfred Green, 9/3/1995 and 12/22/1995; Personal interviews with Rev. Edward Johnson, 3/19/1987 and 11/6/1987. According Mr. Walters, ferries used to leave from the Grey’s Ferry area of Philadelphia, for example, and drop people off in Frederica Delaware. From Frederica, those heading to the camp meetings in Southern Delaware would travel by horse and wagon.

If the camp meeting was nearby, some individuals and families, some groups of unrelated church members might attend nightly services and return home to sleep, to work the next day perhaps, but then steadfastly to make their way right back to that same camp meeting for the next night’s service, and the next, until that camp meeting’s final, cathartic day.³Alfred Green, 9/3/1995; Personal interview with Susanna Watkins, 6/16/1996. During several of the old-time country camp meetings, however, many would unhitch their horses, arrange all the separate wagons into a circle around a wooden-roofed, outdoor tabernacle, arch a sheet of canvas over each wagon, and stay right there on the church ground for the duration of the meeting. Preparing ahead of time, women brought baskets and cheese boxes filled to the brim with fried chicken, home-smoked ham, biscuits, cabbage and green beans.⁴Personal interviews with Benjamin Beckett 4/14/1999 and 5/24/1999; Personal interview with Rev. Edward Johnson 10/14/1986; Cordonsal Walters, 7/7/1998. Men and boys had dug up old pine stumps and piled them high on the campgrounds, to be placed on fire stands and set ablaze to give light to each evening’s spectacle.⁵Personal interviews with Alfred Green, 9/3/1995 and 1/3/1996. In the heat of the summer, when the ground might be parched and dust might billow – when you couldn’t even walk across the ground barefoot, it was so hot – everyone lived in the shade, and “everyone had a good time,” as they would recount later.⁶Cordonsal Walters, 7/7/98.  The two weeks of intense but relaxed, joyful, communal “laboring in the Spirit,” manifested itself in a day-after-day pattern of a spirited testimony service, followed by a spirited preaching service, followed at last by a climactic, regionally-distinct, Singing and Praying Band service. During this service, in a maneuver that scholars might refer to as a “ring shout,” participants formed a circle with a leader in the center, and singing and clapping their hands, stamping their feet and swaying their bodies all the while, they slowly raised several hymns and spirituals to a raucous, rejoicing, shouting crescendo, concluding the meeting with an ebullient march around the entire encampment.⁷Personal interview with Benjamin and George Beckett 8/17/1996; Personal interview with George Beckett, 5-24-99; Alfred Green 9/3/1995 and 1/3/1996. Although these bands shocked some outsiders and reminded other observers of Africa,⁸In referring to the Singing and Praying Bands in his autobiography as “heathenish,” as an “ignorant mode of worship,” and even as a “Voudoo dance,” the 19th century Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne of the A.M.E. Church implies knowledge of the pre-Christian, African roots of this mode of worship and these groups. Daniel Alexander Payne, Recollections of Seventy Years (1886; rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1969), p. 253-56. committed participants considered them to be the foundation of the Church.

Camp meetings were not unique to this area or to that time at the dawn of the 20th  century. Because of the heady combination of religious salvation and spiritual democracy advocated in these festivals,⁹Michel Chevalier, Society, Manners and Politics in the United States: Being a Series of letters from North America, trans. T. G. Bradford (1839; rpt. Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, 1967), p. 306 [Letter of7 August 1835, from Bedford Springs, Pennsylvania]. Chevalier writes that Methodist camp meetings were festivals attuned to the ethos of the new American democracy. Americans of various backgrounds had been making such yearly treks to camp meetings for over a hundred years.¹⁰Two separate books, The Frontier Camp Meeting, by Charles Johnson and And They All Sang Hallelujah, by Dickson Bruce give an overview of the history of the American camp meeting tradition as a whole. Charles A. Johnson, The Frontier Camp Meeting: Religion’s Harvest Time (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985). Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain-Folk Camp-Meeting Religion, 1800-1845. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973), pp 36-95. These early meetings gave form to a religious movement attuned to the ethos of the new nation. In the frontier areas of Tennessee and Kentucky where they began, camp meetings sponsored by various Protestant denominations, became temporary sacred cities, places of equality of souls and social solidarity that tempered the struggle to survive in the wilderness. In the states of the Upper South and in Pennsylvania, these meetings also thrived. Here, where the camp meetings were predominantly organized by Methodists, African Americans, both enslaved and free, participated in large numbers along with English and German speaking European Americans.¹¹Don Yoder, Pennsylvania Spirituals (Lancaster Pa.: Pennsylvania Folklife Society, 1961). pp. 1-32. Perhaps because of Methodism’s original anti-slavery witness,¹²William Henry Williams, The Garden of American Methodism: The Delmarva Peninsula, 1769-1820 (Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1984), p. 112. in Maryland, for example, this denomination received most of the black converts,¹³ Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), p. 71. while in 1800, approximately one-fifth of the Methodists in Virginia were black.¹⁴Berlin, Slaves without Masters, p. 66. According to the internal statistics of the Methodist Episcopal Church itself there were 10,859 white church members in Virginia, and 2, 531 black members in Virginia in 1800, a total of 13,390 members. See Minutes of the Methodist Conferences Annually Held in America, From 1773-1813, Inclusive (1813; rpt. Swainsboro, Gerogia: Magnolia Press, 1983) pp. 240-41.

The Singing and Praying Bands “marching around Jericho” outside a church in Dorchester County, Maryland, closely associated with Harriet Tubman – © 2024 Lloyd Wolf / lloydwolf.com

At the beginning of the 19th century, white and black people alike frequently attended the same religious services, though often in segregated and unequal arrangements. Yet that century witnessed a complex and powerful movement to establish separate religious institutions for black Methodists. First came the effort to establish separate churches for Africans. Eventually Methodist Episcopal Church established a separate conference for all black churches within their denomination.¹⁵W. E. B. Dubois, ed., The Negro Church (Atlanta, Georgia: Atlanta University Press, 1903), pp. 137-38. A related movement led to the founding of independent, African Methodist denominations. Finally, beginning before Emancipation but accelerating after freedom, a similar but less remarked effort saw African-American Methodists starting camp meetings of their own. In the mid-Atlantic in particular, these large outdoor, African-American religious events were the meetings that the grandparents and great grandparents of today’s participants built and today’s older people witnessed when young. These camp meetings continue on even today, in the 21st century. No, the camp meetings that the old soldiers of today recall were not unique; they were merely one echo of the religious festivals that became a new secular democracy’s first religious mass movement. Yet the old-timers of today recall, above all other things, those aspects of their camps which were unique. That is, they speak mostly about the Singing and Praying Bands,¹⁶Members of the Singing and Praying Bands always refer to their organizations in capital letters. This book will follow their lead. for whom the camp meetings in this area became the primary regional showcases: These bands made these meetings special. They tell of the prayer meetings from which the camp meetings originated. They speak, also, of the march around Jericho, in which the Singing and Praying Bands led those at the camp meeting in a grand march around the entire campground on the final day of the meeting.

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This excerpt was taken from Jonathan’s book Together Let Us Sweetly Live. Purchase the full book including 80 incredible black and white photos HERE.