Hayes - "My Lord, What a Morning" (Val Mathenia, baritone)
Details
| Title | Hayes - "My Lord, What a Morning" (Val Mathenia, baritone) |
| Author | Dale M |
| Duration | 3:41 |
| File Format | MP3 / MP4 |
| Original URL | https://youtube.com/watch?v=xHJ_Lg2p0sc |
Description
SOLO My Lord, What a Morning
(Traditional Spiritual arr. by Mark Hayes, 1997)
Val Mathenia, baritone; Dale Morehouse, piano
St. John's Methodist - Kansas City, MO
July 11, 2021
Val Mathenia sings this African-American spiritual arranged by Mark Hayes (b. 1953), a beautiful ethereal lament on death and hopes of freedom and salvation.
While many spirituals may have been conceived on plantations in the southern United States, free African Americans also composed them in the independent black congregations of the North, where these congregations, freed from the supervision of white clergymen, could conduct their religious services as they wished. “My Lord, What a Morning” appears to have been one of those composed in the North.
W.E.B. DuBois (1868–1963), author of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), comments on this genre of text in his book’s final chapter, “Of the Sorrow Songs”:
Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences or despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, [people] will judge [people] by their souls and not by their skins. Is such a hope justified? Do the Sorrow Songs sing true? (DuBois, 1961, p. 189).
In the early summer of 2020, two great pandemics of our time converged —COVID-19 and racism. We can quickly draw apocalyptic parallels between the chaos and calamity of 2020 and this spiritual. DuBois’ words from 50 years ago are a condemnation that the United States has made little progress. At the same time, DuBois, anticipating the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr., offers a word of hope echoed in King's paraphrase of an 1853 sermon by Theodore Parker, an abolitionist minister. King’s famous version of Parker's statement follows: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
My Lord, what a mornin’. My Lord, what a mornin’.
My Lord, what a mornin’ when the stars begin to fall, when the stars begin to fall.
Done quit all my worldly ways, joined that heavenly band.
