July 1, 2012

Album of Golden Gate Quartet, with Josh White
recorded at the Library of Congress in 1940.

Long before Detroit’s Motown sound changed the world of popular music, there was a distinct and enormously influential Norfolk sound. Like Motown it was built around crisp, sophisticated harmonies and driving rhythms. But, in a category by itself, this music was part jazz and part blues, but mostly gospel.

It’s been called the Tidewater gospel sound or the jubilee quartet movement, and it came straight out of black church choirs. Its popularity spread around the nation and abroad and put its stamp on both Motown and rock ’n’ roll.

Among the stars of this genre was – and still is – the Golden Gate Quartet. Founded in 1934 by students from Booker T. Washington High School, the group, originally the Golden Gate Jubilee Singers, was one of the most successful gospel groups in America.

“They really made it big,” says Rachael Born, a recent College of William and Mary graduate, who wrote a meticulously researched paper about the subject while in her freshman year.

There were many other groups from Norfolk that rose to national prominence, including the Silver Leaf Quartet, the Sparkling Four and the Harmonizing Four. They were known for close, four-part harmony, usually sung without accompaniment.

A modern group, the Paschall Brothers of Chesapeake, call themselves torchbearers of the Tidewater gospel sound.

During the early 1900s, Norfolk was a magnet for immigrants from nearby Virginia and North Carolina where the effects of slavery still lingered, and the music they brought came from the depths of this experience, says Clarine Roberts, a former professor at Norfolk State University.

“They could go to the churches to get some comfort,” she says. “Steal away, steal away to Jesus. It goes back to the cotton fields. To comfort themselves they would sing. The same thing went into the groups that were formed. That’s all you’d hear. Hot roles and fried chicken for breakfast on Sunday and listen to gospel on radio. You went to church and came back home and listened some more.”

As the groups grew in stature they staged competitions. The Sparkling Four advertised in the Norfolk Journal and Guide in 1922 that it was ready to challenge any other group in completion, Born writes, adding that the Golden Gate Quartet and the Heavenly Gospel Singers engaged in a good-natured rivalry.

But it was “the Gates,” with their driving beat, close harmonies and clever sounds that mimicked instruments and even train engines, who took the world by storm. The originals were Orlandus Wilson, bass, Willie Johnson, baritone, William Langford, tenor, and Henry Owens, second tenor.

In 1938 they performed at Carnegie Hall in New York, only one month after the first black artists performed there. Three years later they sang at Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inauguration and were often invited by Eleanor Roosevelt to sing at the White House. During World War II, they performed in such Hollywood movies as “Star Spangled Rhythm” and “Hollywood Canteen.”

After their star lost some of its luster in the mid-fifties the group moved to Paris and continued to travel to several countries on concert tours and on behalf of the State Department in cultural exchanges.

Just as the Golden Gate Quartet drew inspiration from popular groups like the Mills Brothers, they spread their influence into later American popular music. Born quotes music critic Michael Corcoran who said the quartet “is the link between the Fisk Julilee Singers . . . and the Motown-inventing Soul Stirrers.”

And then there was Elvis Presley, a huge fan of the group. While in the Army, he caught their act at a Paris nightclub and reportedly held a jam session in a dressing room until the early hours of the next morning. Some of his recordings, especially “Rock My Soul,” sound almost like a Golden Gates recording.

In fact, the tenor soloist in the Gates version could easily have been Elvis.

There were several personal changes through the years as members found other opportunities. One helped make the Ink Spots famous. There are numerous recordings and videos on the Web, including a recent performance in Vienna of “Oh Happy Day.” 

The leader of the Gates introduces the number in French. Throughout the performance, many of the mostly white Europeans in the audience dance as though at a rock concert. The singers reflect this enthusiasm with broad smiles.

They’re a long way from Norfolk.

June 24, 2012

If the early history of Virginia Beach is about people then Old Donation Episcopal Church pretty much wrote the book.

Old Donation Episcopal Church. Watercolor by Roy Awbrey

This cast of characters includes powerful, rich, ambitious, proud, quirky, righteous and intolerant people, and one who was so independent-minded that townsfolk thought she consorted with the Evil One.

As parishioners of this 375-year-old church celebrate their anniversary at services today, many will marvel, and perhaps shake their heads, at the movers, shakers and others who have shaped its history.

We start with a fellow who must be considered one of the first entrepreneurs of his day. Adam Thoroughgood first came to America as an indentured servant. That’s because he wasn’t a first-born son and had to make his own way – a good thing, as it turns out.

After working off his indenture on tobacco fields in Kecoughtan, he sailed back to England and promptly returned with the first of dozens of immigrants. At 50 acres per settler, this “headright” policy earned him more than 5,000 acres of land on the western shore of what was known as the Chesopean River.

He promptly renamed it the Lynnhaven River – after King’s Lynn in Norfolk County, England – and settled at the mouth of the river. He built a crude wooden house and, in 1637 and soon convinced his neighbor, William Wilkinson, an Oxford-educated priest, to hold church services at his residence.

Such was the beginning of Lynnhaven Parish Church. There have been three church buildings.  The word “donation” refers to the gift of land by one of its colonial-era rectors. The present-day building near the Western Branch of the Lynnhaven goes back to 1736.

The church’s history, compiled for this occasion by parishioner Bob Perrine, is peopled by fascinating individuals.

They include Adam Keeling, who organized a group to dig a channel from the Lynnhaven River through a huge sandbar to the Chesapeake Bay. It’s now the inlet that goes under the Lesner Bridge.

The ever-enterprising Thoroughgood is credited with starting a ferry service – a rowed vessel – between Norfolk and Portsmouth. After he died in 1640, his widow Sarah remarried several times and in the process brought terror into the hearts of anyone slandering her good name.

In the records of Lower Norfolk Court is the proceeding of Aug. 3, 1640 in which the wife of a church vestryman responded to one of Sarah’s defenses of her husband’s reputation with the word “Pish!” The word cost her dearly. The woman, Goody Layton, was ordered to ask Sarah’s forgiveness on her knees, both in court and in church.

There was the Rev. Anthony Walke who preached about the end of slavery but remained the largest slave-holding Episcopal minister in these parts, listing 65 at his death – and failing in his will to mention freeing any of them.

Another major slave holder and importer was Francis Land, whose house stands among the Beach’s most historic.

Also tucked into the church’s history is the story of an alleged witch who got ducked to see if she’d drown.

Today, Grace Sherwood is celebrated not as someone possessed by the Devil but as one of the first liberated women. She defied custom by owning and working her own land and healing with herbs. Villagers accused her of blighting their gardens, causing livestock to die and influencing the weather. And, oh, dancing naked in the moonlight.

Confronted at a trial in the church, Grace said, “I be not a witch, I be a healer.” But the church vestry charged her with witchcraft and ordered her to undergo one of the most bizarre tests ever conceived: ducking. Tied hand-to-foot and rowed naked out into the river, she was weighted down with a heavy bible and shoved under water. The thinking was that if she drowned she was innocent; if she survived, she was bewitched.

Grace survived and served several years in prison. Eventually released, she was not exonerated until Gov. Tim Kaine, 300 years after the conviction, officially cleared her name. There’s now a bronze statue of the “Witch of Pungo” overlooking the church – on N. Witchduck Road – at Sentara Bayside Hospital.

There are major milestones in the church’s history, including a devastating fire that closed it for decades – but the characters that make up the history are the main actors in the story.

As part of its 250^th anniversary, another historic Episcopal church, Trinity in Portsmouth, is today dedicating a predella, or addition, to its Emmerson window. It contains the words, “Now my brave boys, are you ready/” which Arthur Emmerson III is said to have spoken to his infantrymen as they prepared to meet the British at the Battle of Craney Island. 

St. Andrews Chapel, 1911.

A third Episcopal Church, St. Andrews in West Ghent, is observing its 100^th  

June 17, 2012

TANGIER ISLAND – American troops took back this island from the British Saturday – 198 years too late.

Flushing them out from the marshes. By Paul

 Firing their muskets, with thunderous effect, into a dense thicket of marsh grass, re-enactors from the 60^th Regiment of Virginia Militia, and various other groups flushed out two local “redcoats,” arrested and shackled them and marched them down to the wharf to be banished from the island.

It was all in fun, of course, but the event was staged to call attention to Tangier Island’s important role in the War of 1812,

Tangier had been a thorn in the American side during the War. The British invaded the island in early 1813 and used it as a base from which to stage raids against towns and shipyards up and down the Chesapeake Bay.

They throttled commerce on the bay, seizing ships sailing from Baltimore, Washington and Norfolk,

Militia soldiers interrogate "redcoat" prisoners Ken
Castelli, left, and James Tyler. By Paul

“It was the perfect little terrorist base for the British,” said Paul Bess, one leader of Saturday’s mock invasion. “They could send out a couple of vessels to the Eastern Shore, sink a few American boats and head back to the island. The next day, they’d head over to the Northern Neck and do the same thing.”

A newspaper account in the New York Evening Post, begins, “The principal station of the enemy in our Bay is Tangier Island, but they continue a line of cruisers of light and large vessels from thence to Lynhaven (sic) Bay. . . .a part of them continually hovering close in along the shores of New Point Comfort to the mouth of the Rappahannock River.”

British Navy Commander George Cockburn chose Tangier for its protected harbor and strategic location. At the south end of Tangier, his troops set up what they called Fort Albion. It included a garden, 18 head of cattle, officers’ quarters, a 100-bed hospital, barracks, a church, breastworks and eight 24-pound cannon. As many as 1,200 troops crowded the low, marshy waterfront.

One report says that many liberated slaves who joined the Corps of Colonial Marines were trained here. The corps aided the Royal Marines in a number of engagements in the bay.  But conditions in their camp were deplorable. One local newspaper reported that “the crews there are very sickly with the flux, the water being brackish and bad. . . .”

Tangier was also a refuge for escaped slaves who were too old to fight, and women and children. Many of them were sent to Bermuda and other British colonies.

Here on the island, the British built rocket barges, small, shallow-draft boats from which rockets could be launched. It was from such vessels that rockets, glaring red at night, were fired at Fort McHenry. The wood for boats, for the fort and for fuel denuded what trees there were on the south of the island. However one section of woods, which was used for Methodist camp meetings, was left intact.

 
It was from here that the British in September 1814 launched their attack on Baltimore. They may have departed with heavy hearts because a Methodist preacher they had come to trust had dared to warn them that God wasn’t on their side.

Rev. Joshua Thomas, known as “parson of the islands,” was living on Tangier during the occupation. As the British were about to board their ships for Baltimore, the commander asked him to exhort his men – and got the sermon he would just as soon not have heard.

In “Preaching to the Enemy,” Thomas wrote, "I warned them of the danger and distress they would bring upon themselves and others by going to Baltimore with the object they had in view. I told them of the great wickedness of war, and that God said, 'Thou shalt not kill!' If you do, he will judge you at the last day; or, before then, he will cause you to 'perish by the sword.'

"I told them it was given me from the Almighty that they could not take Baltimore, and would not succeed in their expedition.”

He was right. In the attack, the British bombarded Fort McHenry at the entrance to Baltimore Harbor. BUT after 25 hours of “bombs bursting in air,” the fort held, inspiring Francis Scott Key to write the poem what became the Star Spangled Banner.

What if the British, remembering Thomas’s warnings, decided to turn back? That would make little this little island much more than just a footnote to this part of American history.

June 10, 2012

With apologies to John Smith et al.

Painting by Franklin Lewis Gifford (1854-1936) shows Bartholomew
Gosnold and the Concord at Woods Hole, Mass., in 1602. Five years later
he skippered  the Godspeed. Courtesy of Woods Hole Public Library.

On Saturday the 20^th of December in the yeere 1606, our ships fell from London with the outgoing tide. Unfortunately, wee were then stuck as frightful Stormes thrashed our little Vessels and wee had to anchor and wait for Devine Providence to let us proceed.


I’m a sailor on board the ship 
Godspeed, of 40 tons burthen, captained by Bartholomew Gosnold of Suffolk, England, a gifted mariner. His experience of journeying five years ago to New England and his passion for this voyage lend much to his credit.


Unlike a certain John Smith, Cap’n Gosnold is a man of action, not of words. Nor is hee master of the largest of our three ships, the Susan Consant. That honor falls to Mr. Newport. And yet – as I understand it – our leader was the one who persuaded England, yea the verrie King, to make this journie. And it was even hee who convinced Mr. Smith and the pompous Mr. Edward Wingfield to make this trip.


While imprisoned in that awful anchorage, our sailors could not help but overhear the terrible arguments that ensued from the other ship. Why, it is said that Mr. Wingfield wanted to turn around and go back to his comfortable home in Cambridgeshire and that he had Cap’n Smith clapped in irons for insubordination!


Imagine if wee had done that. It was commonly known that our rivals, the Spanish, were keenly interested in the New World. If we don’t make a success of this voyage, I’ll wager that the future Americans will call themselves Spaniards!


Above all, my master seems a man of great forbearance. As Mr. Smith suggested, wee should take great care not to offend the “naturals.” I have heard Master Gosnold speak of the natives as “being of tall stature, comely proportion, strong, active, and some of good years, and as it should seem very healthful.” Whereas, one of those so-called “gentlemen,” Charles Percy, has been heard to claim that they are “continually in warres, and will eate their enemies when they kill them, or any stranger if they take them.” He has called them “Dogges.”


Godspeed is small, just 88 feet in length; yet crowded with some 52 people, About half are crew and the other half passengers, many of whom I dare say never did a day’s work in their lives. How they expect to survive in the New World I do not ken. Maybe they really believe the lie that the land is paved with gold.


They spend most of their time ‘tween decks, crammed in with supplies, gambling with cards, dice and droughts. Many have been seasick and already show signs of scurvy.
The Godspeed is perhaps a bit odd in appearance, with both lateen and square sails. But she is well-found, built of good English oak. And when the contrarie winds finally ease and wee catch the trade winds, as our captain said wee would, the sailing is superb, even if we do suffer some occasional Stormes.


After reaching land and touching on small West Indies islands, wee sail 10 long days toward Virginia. There are many complaints, Cap’n Radcliffe on our third ship, Discovery, and divers others begin agitating for a return to England! (Our captain will hear none of that.)


Then, a tremendous Storme disabuses us of going back to sea. And finally, about four in the morning, an outline of land has been spotted! It is, we think, the opening of the Chesupioc Bay. Thanks be to God!

June 3, 2012

Godspeed on the Bay with all sails flying.
Courtesy Jamestown Settlement

Out on the Chesapeake Bay Thursday morning a curious-looking three-masted ship gradually takes on sail.

Rapid-fire commands by the mates – “ease off the brace!” slack the weather lift!,” “haul out the weather bowline!” etc., cause square mainsails, foresails, topsails, sprit and mizzen sails to drop from their yards like parachutes on a windy day.

And the Godspeed, now in the thrall of a 12-knot northerly wind, is suddenly alive – along with the story that includes her all-but-forgotten captain, Bartholomew Gosnold.

Godspeed and sister ships Susan Constant and Discovery, brought the first English settlers to America over four centuries ago. Their distant offspring, painstakingly replicated and lovingly tended to by staff and volunteers at the Jamestown Settlement, help recreate the voyage for thousands of tourists.

Volunteers Georgia Irby and John Robinson unfurl a sail on a
bright blue morning on the Bay. By Paul Clancy

If you watch the Parade of Sail this Friday, you’ll notice, just behind the Coast Guard’s tall ship Eagle, the not-so-tall, but still-quite-proud Godspeed sailing in second position, representing the state.

In preparation last week, the 88-foot bark-rigged vessel slogged through heavy rain on Wednesday to Hampton and then, on a gorgeous clear Thursday, sailed to Yorktown.

You could feel the tug on the tiller as Godspeed sailed close to the wind, heeling gently to starboard. And the tug of history as reminders of its centuries-old namesake walked its decks.

Gosnold was a lawyer, privateer and explorer who, arguably more than anyone, was the driving force behind the first English settlement in America. He captained a 1602 expedition to the coast of New England where he discovered and named Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard – after his deceased daughter – and built a fort on a nearby small island.

It might have been the first English settlement, but Indian attacks and lack of provisions for the winter sent the would-be colonists back to England.

But the idea of colonizing the New World had taken hold and the young explorer lobbied and eventually convinced King James to support a new venture. He recruited crew members, including Captain John Smith, for the enterprise.

Historians say that the ever-scribbling Smith is more famous only because he survived and because he wrote so much.

Gosnold didn’t lead the Jamestown expedition. Because of his political connections, the job went to Christopher Newport, who skippered the largest of the ships, the Susan Constant. The title of second-in-command went to Gosnold.

And even though he was never president of the colony, it was clear that Gosnold – who disliked the dismal Jamestown site – was really in charge. During a massive Indian attack he boarded Godspeed and turned the ship’s guns on the attackers, scattering them.

But the very reasons he hated the island proved to be his undoing. In August 1607 he succumbed to disease and was buried outside the fort. And promptly forgotten – until recent years when archaeologists excavated a grave believed to be his, although DNA tests proved inconclusive.

Even though he played such a major role in the first settlement in America, no great rivers, no great cities or universities have been named for him. Smith himself called him “the first mover of this plantation.” Recently, British Heritage magazine called him “the man who was responsible for England’s settling the New World.”

Well, if he’s forgotten it won’t be because the volunteers and crew of the Godspeed haven’t tried.

During the trip to Yorktown, Eric Speth, the captain of the Jamestown fleet who oversaw construction of the new Godspeed replica in 2006, takes me on a tour.

Down below in the cargo hold, he points to the ship’s authentic construction, from the hand-wrought nails and sea chests to the hardwood ribs, planks and beams, and, on deck, double-fluke anchors. There’s modern equipment, to be sure, diesel engines and GPS chart plotters, but they can be easily hidden away when tourists come aboard at Jamestown.

Speth constantly marvels at how well the Godspeed handles in spite of its odd appearance, and how capable it handles in the roughest conditions. As rough as any the Atlantic could dish out on that long voyage.

Although not the largest of the Jamestown fleet, the Godspeed may be its most visible. It’s now the one that does most of the sailing for events like OpSail and other excursions around the region.

And then perhaps there’s old Gosnold himself brooding about and wishing for a little more recognition. “One of the best feelings I get,” Speth says, “is that we can carry the story of the founding of Virginia aboard the Godspeed to other ports throughout the state.”

May 27, 2012

OK, it was a little bit unfair.

Last week, I quoted one historian who observed that after the Civil War, Norfolk became “a roistering, carousing, gun-slinging, mining camp of a town.” And I ended by quipping, “In other words. . . it’s old self.”

I’ve been mildly called to task for this. After all, the city hasn’t always been that way.

It hasn’t always been a noxious, odiferous, pestilential, malarial, swampy, slum-ridden, slave-trading, sinful, god-forsaken place.

But darn-near.

At least we had Thomas Jefferson, who on seeing Norfolk rebuilding after being incinerated during the Revolutionary War, found himself to be “happy that circumstances have led my arrival to a place which I had seen before indeed in greater splendor, but which I now see rising like a Phoenix out of its ashes to that importance to which the laws of nature destine it"

 But that’s about it, at least as far as I can find: no one with a kind word for the place. What we’re stuck with is gloomy gusses like the duke de La Rochefoucauld Liancourt who in 1796 called it “one of the ugliest, most irregular, and most filthy towns that can any-where be found.”

Or Auguste Levasseur, the private secretary of the Marquis de Lafayette, who commented that “Norfolk is the one that offers the least agreeable appearance.” He added that the city was further marred by the “sad and revolting spectacle” of slaves being forced to work for uncaring masters.

Maybe the unkindest cut came from landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted who, in a journalistic tour of the South in 1853, declared:

“Norfolk is a dirty, low, ill-arranged town, nearly divided by a morass….It has all the immoral and disagreeable characteristics of a large seaport, with very few of the advantages that we should expect to find….No lyceum or public libraries, no public gardens, no galleries of art…no public resorts of healthful and refining amusement, no place better than a filthy, tobacco-impregnated bar-room or a licentious dance-cellar, so far as I have been able to learn, for the stranger of high or low degree to pass the hours unoccupied by business.”

And then the Civil War just about shut the city down. Union occupation was like a mailed fist for unreconstructed white southerners. But for others – as the accompanying illustration by a German artist suggests – there was a lively downtown marketplace. In some ways, the city appeared to be thriving.

Historians point out that horseracing, an early form of bicycle racing and even yacht racing took hold. Norfolk’s wharves almost sagged with the weight of cotton, peanuts and lumber. Railroads and steamboats suddenly put the city on the map again.

Horse-drawn trolleys and soon electric trolleys were introduced. Coal trains began arriving. Some huge, lavish hotels, the Atlantic and Monticello, opened downtown. Norfolk showed off its railroad prowess by building a downtown station topped by an 80-foot clock tower. The Jamestown Exposition came to town in 1907 and, a decade later, the Norfolk Naval Base opened.

So, yes, things haven’t been all that bad. And the city didn’t really descend into a carousing, wild-west kind of place. At least not until World War II. But that’s another story.

All I can say is, dogs and sailors keep off the grass. Oh, oh, was that another over-statement?

Illustration: The scene at Commercial Place in 1865, as captured by a
German artist. Courtesy of the Sargeant Memorial Collection, Norfolk Public Library.