BLACK MUSIC IS FOCUS OF ‘DOCU-OPERA’

NEW YORK —  First of all, they beat the Mayflower, arriving in Jamestown, Va., in 1619, aboard a Dutch ship called the Jesus. Wrenched from their homes in West Africa, these first black Americans were the core of the fledgling country’s slave society. They also formed the foundation for what would swell to a 1985 black church membership of 20 million, worshiping in some 60,000 congregations around America.

Worshiping--and singing.

“The music of the black religious experience,” contends Tony Brown, host of the televised “Journal” that bears his name, “is the primary root of all music born in the United States.”

Black music, Brown maintains, “is the only music indigenous to America.”

And so Brown, searching for a way to mark this Black History Month, set upon the ambitious project of dramatizing nearly four centuries of black music in America. More than mere metaphor, Brown decided, “in the black community, music is the culture.”

Nearly a year ago, he linked up with a New York-based expert on black music, the Rev. Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker, to undertake his double biography of black music and the black church in the United States. Finally, late last week, Brown’s resulting four-part “docu-opera” was unveiled here in Harlem, at Walker’s own Canaan Baptist Church.

“Thank God!,” the new series is called, and from the 500 or so black church and community leaders assembled in the pews, this was but one of the cries of joy heard as Brown screened excerpts from a musical drama that starts in what purports to be the jungles of Africa (actually, he did most of his shooting in the swamps of Florida), proceeds through the rigors of pre-Emancipation America and concludes with a version of “We Shall Overcome” guaranteed to melt even the crustiest of atheists or political agnostics.

“Tony Brown’s Journal” airs Sundays at 10 a.m. on KCET Channel 28, with the first installment of “Thank God!” due this weekend.

Thunderously received by its initial audience, Brown’s latest “Journal” entry extols “How Africans Sang the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land.” This is “Jesus on the mainline,” it insists, praising all the while the “pleasures of faith.”

Four slaves died for each who survived the brutal ocean journey and the nefarious slave marches, Brown’s research showed. And yet, “in spite of the sorrow that Africa would suffer, her children would carry her music in their hearts.”

That legacy, “the Afro-American spiritual experience,” Brown asserts, “gives us our best internal evidence of how our ancestors got through the slave experience.”

Music was “the black telegraph,” Walker agrees: “Without the Afro-American spiritual, which was the embodiment of our faith experience, I do not know how black folks would have made it over here.”

Certainly the acting and the narrative are compelling, as is the ever-agonizing issue of slavery itself. So evocative is the music in “Thank God!” that viewers are left practically leaping in their seats.

And why not? “The same beat that black folks dance to on Saturday night is the same beat we shout to on Sunday morning,” Walker says on tape. “If you don’t know which it is, watch the direction of the shouting, because from side to side is secular.”

A nearly all-black audience laughed uproariously at this particular piece of information. From the black and white audience that Brown hopes to reach, however, the same laughter might be less than entirely appropriate. Inevitably, doesn’t Brown’s message--that music is the message--foster certain stalwart stereotypes about the black experience? In its completely earnest and well-documented way, does not “Thank God!” reduce black history in America to four centuries of singing, clapping and, yes, hand-jiving?

These are questions for which Brown, former Howard University dean and host for 15 years of the country’s longest-running black affairs television series, has neither time nor energy.

“I really do not concern myself with these kinds of matters,” Brown said. “If I find that something is right, if I am convinced that it is the truth, then that is what I am going to report.

“In terms of stereotypes,” Brown continued, “the music is what we are.”

More important, Brown said, “The music is my link as a black American. That is the point. It is a matter of pride. We have made great contributions.

“It is not that we just sing and dance well, but that we do sing and dance well. You simply will not find a well-populated black church that does not have good music.”

In a way, there is a parallel in sports, Brown believes: “I mean we play basketball better than others. That’s a fact. But we don’t only play basketball.

“I know that is our history, and that is our culture. What anybody thinks of it is their problem.”

Besides, the Rev. Walker added, “There is not anything in my view that is negative about hand-clapping and joy and enthusiasm. In the most oppressive bondage in the history of mankind, we still had enough strength and resiliency to laugh, and sing and have fun and develop as a culture.”

Anthropologically, Walker argues, “our tradition is an oral one. It is almost natural that out of it would come a stronger expression in our music than in anything else.”

Following its television appearance, “Thank God!” will be reassembled as a single unit and circulated as a film, Brown said, “the first film I have directed” and also “the best thing I have ever done--no question, absolutely.”