Dashon Burton's Song Sermon: Corporeal Liveness and the Solemnizing Breath

Abstract

American bass-baritone Dashon Burton's 2015 recording of the song sermon “He Never Said a Mumberlin’ Word” provides a case study of the interaction between sung melodies and audible breaths in the expression of a lyric. Acknowledging the relationship between Burton's performance and earlier notated arrangements by Roland Hayes, J. Rosamond Johnson, William Arms Fischer, and John W. Work, this study draws an arc from the macro-level of the song sermon's oral and notated history to the micro-level of Burton's sung syllables and, finally, to a spectrographic examination of his individual breaths. One of these, the solemnizing breath that inaugurates the fifth stanza of the work, is pinpointed as the expressive denouement of Burton's track. A contrast is drawn between the liturgical framework of Hayes's arrangement and the images of anti-racist protest marches that accompany Burton's recording. An emphasis on the granular aspects of Burton's voice invokes Sanden's concept of corporeal liveness, Barthes's writings on cinematic sound, and Bain's recognition of breath sounds as music. Studying the narrative totality of Burton's utterance engenders a connection between singer and orator, and builds a historical continuity between Burton and his antecedents.

Unknown Pleasure: interpretations of the mystery hiss in Feist's 2017 album

“…A loose analogy to help explain this relationship is how a speaker's verbal utterance is interpreted in relation to their nonverbal behaviour, and vice versa. Richard Beaudoin makes a similar comparison when discussing corporeal liveness in Dashon Burton's 2015 recording of ‘Never Said a Mumberlin’ Word’: ‘I see no reason to consciously and actively hear past the aural evidence of Burton's breath and body, in the same way that it makes little sense to ignore the facial micro-expressions of an interlocutor as they speak’ (2022, p. 21).…”