American religious historians are reading and talking about To Serve the Living: Funeral Directors and the African-American Way of Death, an important new book by George Mason University professor Suzanne Smith that explores the dignity, pageantry, and politics of African-American funeral practices.
I asked Smith, whose first book examined Motown, to compare the role of music and the role of religion in African-American history:
“I tend to see the role of music and the role of religion in African American historical experience as completely intertwined. The earliest slave funerals in the New World were held late at night in the ‘hush harbors’ of the slave quarters. These early burial rituals were largely musical and included African-style drumming, slave spirituals, and chanting. Yet, they were also the foundation of what became the independent black church as it was here at these funeral ceremonies that black preachers would have a chance to speak freely and give the funeral sermon. Music, in other words, is so central to the formation of African American religious experience that it is difficult to separate the two from each other. Music also functions in African American religious experience as a tool to give spiritual support in times of tremendous loss and to celebrate the spirit of a deceased person. This is clearly evident in the New Orleans jazz funeral, which is a dramatic musical performance that expresses both the grief and joy embedded in the African American funeral.”
Smith’s book is taking a place on my bookshelf next to one of my favorite cultural studies books of all time, Karla Holloway’s Passed On: African-American Mourning Stories. Coming as I do from a religious culture that has an extremely understated relationship to grief, these books have taught me a great deal about other ways of facing loss and going home.
