rock, rock, rock elijah rock

The first and only time I heard this song was at a Black Heritage Month concert at Texas A&M University, Kingsville, It was sung by a small choir from King Star Baptist Church in Kingsville. The energetic rhythms, harmonies, and cadences had so moved me that I could not get it out of my mind or body. All the next day as I taught my classes or walked around, I was singing this powerful hymn, silently within myself, inside my whole being. I finally realized that in fifteen words, the episode of the prophet Elijah running for his life is told. After bringing about the destruction of the heathen prophets, Jezebel is out to kill Elijah. The prophet flees back to Mount Sinai and hides in the same cleft rock where Moses stood as the Lord passed him by. Here Elijah hears “the still, small voice,” the voice of the spiritual God. “Rock, Rock, Rock. If I could, I would stand on the rock where Moses stood.” These are the fifteen words of the song.

 It took a while for this painting to come together. It was at another Black Heritage Month concert several years later that I began sketching out a composition. This latter group was a large formal choir of perhaps fifty singers standing still, a very different affair than the previous concert. As I began to paint, Elijah Rock started playing again in my mind. Somehow I had to catch that mesmerizing energy and power. The composition changed from straight rows of singers into small groups of figures, arranged like a landscape of mountains moving in juxtaposed opposition, like outcroppings of huge rocks, rocking in geologic rhythms to a powerful, unseen force. This is my visual metaphor for the musical rhythms that I could never forget.

The physicality of Black Gospel singing is in itself a profound commentary on the Scriptures it interprets. The rhythm and tone it imparts to words gives us their original meaning. It occurred to me that this was the way the Israelites must have sung their songs of victory at the Red Sea, in grand choruses with soloists feeding into and seeding the mass voice, as mariners, slaves, all who did hard labor in teams of workmen have sung through the ages to ease their hardship. In such singing, words are not simply put to music and allowed to reveal themselves through melody, but rather given their meaning by turning the words into physical beings, making them to have weight, and mass and dance into our ears, our hands, and our feet. One hears in Shakespeare’s language the same effect of words surpassing their audibility to become physical objects, thus returning to the hearer the original power of speech. The strongly consonantal Hebrew language is very amenable to speech as object, as a living thing, as a force as much of action as of thought. Speech and our two free hands are what the ancient Hebrews and Egyptians believed separated man from the rest of nature, what made man god-like. Speech and hand are the only metaphors that Scripture uses to describe God.