We Go Fly to Glory

DESCRIPTION: Leader: "We go fly to glory." Congregation: "Give me the wing."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1939 (WITrinidadVillage02)
KEYWORDS: travel nonballad religious
FOUND IN: West Indies(Trinidad)
RECORDINGS:
Vernon Hedley, Carl Monsegui, "We Go Fly to Glory" (on WITrinidadVillage02)
NOTES [381 words]: The description is all of the WITrinidadVillage02 text, which is repeated more than 15 times in less than one minute. It is a Spiritual Baptist "chorus" as described by Zane: "Choruses are tickets to various places and experiences. They are easy to learn and remember. By singing them, the Converted hitch on for the ride. Through the words and tunes of the choruses all are able to enter metaphorically into different spiritual lands. Some, by singing them, empirically enter those spiritual realms. The titles of the choruses are clues: "Go Down in the Valley," "Canaan Land," "Beulahland," "We Are Marching Onward to Zion," "Over in Zion, There is Music in the Air," etc. Other choruses attend actions in the church service or set a certain mood. For example, "Be Still and Know That I Am God" quiets the congregation and "Greet Somebody in Jesus' Name" is used during the greeting ritual.
Choruses are short musical pieces of about 15 seconds in length, seldom exceeding 30 seconds. They are always repeated several times. When the mood is appropriate they may be sung 50 or 60 times ...." (Wallace W. Zane, Journeys to the Spiritual Lands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 199, pp. 53-54).
Why have I included the keyword "travel": "travel" in what sense? In Zane's Introduction he writes, "I did not go to the field expecting to find travels in spiritual lands. They had not been described as other than hallucinations in the previous literature. However, my aim was to get an understanding of Spiritual Baptist experience. My constant question was, 'What is it like to be a Spiritual Baptist?' The answer often involved travels in spiritual lands." (Zane, p. 12) McDaniel, on the subject of Spiritual Baptist song, writes, "Trance states and mental or astral travel govern the mystical goals of believers who contact the spirit world through dreams, visions, and propitiations for healing.... These ... [songs] constitute the musical ground for overlayered, superimposed 'sheets of sound' that form the prayer ritual and the mental search for 'power' and astral flight" (Lorna McDaniel, "Memory Spirituals of the Ex-Slave American Soldiers in Trinidad's 'Company Villages'" in Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Autumn 1994 (available on JSTOR)), p. 120, fn. 3). - BS
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File: RcWeFtG

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