Syncretized Equality: Judge Priest, Early American Music, and Singing on the Front Porch

By Richmond B. Adams.

John Ford’s Will Rogers vehicle has yet to receive the full credit for the complexities of its cultural commentary…. the present examination will argue that Judge Priest undermines the world it supposedly affirms.”

From the middle-1920s through his death in 1946, my maternal grandfather, the Reverend Henry T. Brookshire, served as the full-time pastor to three Southern Baptist congregations in both Georgia and Mississippi. As was the principal custom during that era, each church provided the Brookshires a home in which they resided. Depending upon the nature of the congregation within its community, these homes also became showplaces for small gatherings, such as women’s groups or other occasions that transpired on important days during a given year. It was also usual that these houses (or pastoriums, as Baptists tended to formally designate them) were almost always located within close distance of the main church building.

The second of my grandfather’s calls¹ was to serve the First Baptist Church in Elberton, Georgia, a town approximately twenty miles east of Athens. Starting in 1930 and throughout a six-year period, the Brookshire family lived in a sizeable and elegant pastoral home. One of its features was a wrap-around porch whose name reflected its purpose (Brown, “The Story of the American Front Porch“). Such wrapping around did not, however, extend to the rear of the home. In retrospect, it becomes clear why such an arrangement was constructed, and by doing so, expressed another, and decidedly un-Christian, aspect of the culture that the porch helped to undergird. By exposing its endmost portion, the house conveyed its role in maintaining the racial code of Black and Caucasian relationships within the years of Jim Crow segregation.

More than barriers written into the law, Jim Crow was a complicated set of signifiers that local participants had to accept as a given situation may have necessitated. One person in particular who understood the cultural codes of white and Southern front porches was the Black domestic servant, who assisted my grandmother in the maintenance of First Baptist’s pastoral residence during the Brookshire’s tenure in Elberton. This domestic servant (whose name I am shielding for privacy) was a native of Elberton and knew that if she made even a slight effort to approach either the front porch or door of my grandparent’s home, she would bring upon herself and her family a great deal more than a single violation of the accepted milieu. Such racist expectations were, of course, common in all facets of life throughout the American South for the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century (Tapp and Klottner 369).

Much akin to its Georgia cousin, Kentucky had been a slave state during the antebellum period (Tapp and Klottner 2-4). As the Civil War began in 1861, it did maintain its allegiance to the Union, but with significant antagonism among those of its white citizens who held either Northern or Confederate loyalties (Ellis 3-5; Tapp and Klottner 2-4; 10-14). At the same time, Kentucky’s loyalty to the Union did not bring about the abandonment of its racism following the Confederate surrender in 1865 (Ellis 3-5). Almost a century of slavery and racism made it virtually inevitable that during the postbellum era, Kentucky’s power structure would come to embrace the burgeoning edifice of Jim Crow segregation (3-5; Tapp and Klottner 205-206). It was within this environment that on June 23, 1876, Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb came to life in Kentucky’s southwestern Ohio River town of Paducah (Ellis 3; Tapp and Klottner 275; 369). Only seven years later, as matters transpired, it also came to be that Kentucky and other states throughout the country were granted the legal imprimatur by the United States Supreme Court, in what came to known as the Civil Rights cases, to continue with the already extant or developing standards of racial separation (Canellos 263; Sullivan and Feldman 854-856). In sole dissent was Cobb’s fellow native of Kentucky, Justice John Marshall Harlan, who proclaimed in what became the first of many dissents concerning the aftermath of Reconstruction

[As] slavery [was] the moving and principal cause of the adoption of that [14^th] amendment … Congress, [may] enact laws to protect that people against the deprivation, because of their race, and of any civil rights guaranteed to other freemen in the same State.

(Canellos 265-267; Sullivan and Feldman 856; Justice Harlan’s emphasis) 

Notwithstanding Harlan’s argument, many states used the majority opinion of a stark distinction between public accommodations and individual conduct to create a bedrock of segregated post-bellum codes and expectations in communities such as Fairfield, Kentucky, which served as the hometown for Cobb’s main fictional protagonist, Circuit Court Judge William Pittman Priest (Canellos 263; Ellis 3-5). By the mid-1930s, John Ford had come to see an opportunity to make a film based upon Cobb’s stories from those late-century and postbellum years, which led to the eponymous Judge Priest being released in October 1934 (Eyman 129).

Judge Priest, when placed alongside other Ford films that originate in a rural and “idyl[lic]” small-town setting such as Doctor Bull (1933), Steamboat ‘Round the Bend (1935), and even How Green Was My Valley (1941), expresses its own singularity of apparent homage to the ostensible notions of a time “long gone” (Eyman 130; 129). With Will Rogers playing Judge Priest, Ford presents the film in what seems to be an acquiescence to the Jim Crow legal structure and racist stereotypes from not only the 1890s of setting, but the mid-1930s of showing. Even with accolades given by various Ford critics such as Joseph McBride, Tag Gallagher, Ronald L. Davis, and Scott Eyman, however, Judge Priest has yet to receive the full credit for the complexities of its cultural commentary. Through an examination of three connected sequences that center around the discourses of the postbellum American front porch and Ford’s use of historically based forms of both secular and evangelically Christian music, the present examination will argue that Judge Priest undermines the world it supposedly affirms. Through an opening sequence in the Fairfield County Courthouse that quietly, but clearly opens toward Ford’s subversive vision, he moves the film to its focus on the front yard, front porch, and home of Judge Priest (Adams 2. 497-498).

It would have been quite difficult in Jim Crow 1930s America, of course, for Ford to openly undermine the tenets of segregation. Judge Priest, however, demonstrates his adeptness at pitting the most normal of cultural signifiers against themselves in such a manner as to seem that nothing of the sort is taking place. Ford’s approach is to utilize repeatedly the stereotype of the happy and singing African American servant to perform adapted variations of what were then called ‘Negro’ Spirituals and, even more pointedly, Stephen Foster’s early 1850s composition of “My Old Kentucky Home” as vehicles to raise questions about the central question of racial relationships within American life (Judge Priest; Emerson 193-195; Work 28-32; Roberts 236-237; Thurman 7). Ford additionally employed the Pennsylvania-born Foster’s tune, which became Kentucky’s state song during 1928, in both Judge Priest and its remake The Sun Shines Bright (1953)² for specific reasons that were simultaneously and later noted by early twentieth century scholars as having strong roots in the spirituals themselves (Work 28-32; Thurman 7; Shankle 397-398; McBride 165-167; Emerson 15; 198; Kalinak 12).

As a loosely based historical narrative, Judge Priest provides a transition from one period of local authority to its successor. Such a transition is at the forefront of the film’s quite thin plot which focuses upon the courtship of Ellie Mae Gillespie (Anita Louise) and Rome Priest (Tom Brown), the judge’s nephew. Their romance and potential marriage is at the center of a secret maintained over “twenty-five years” by the local Episcopal Rector, the Reverend Ashby Brand (Henry Walthall) that he finally relates during the final courtroom sequence that comes as a result of Bob Gillis (David Landau) having been put on trial for accosting Flem Talley (Frank Melton) after he made crude reference toward Ellie Mae’s virtue in the local barber shop (Judge Priest). Reverend Brand’s revelation of Gillis’ secret gives imprimatur for the marriage to occur since Gillis is discovered to be both a Confederate hero and Ellie Mae’s father, both of which result in, and not unimportantly, Ellie Mae being free of any non-Caucasian blood (Judge Priest). With those issues resolved, she and Rome can wed, establish themselves within the proper expectations of their relatives and social peers, and carry on the name of “Priest” by honoring the past while looking to the still segregated future (Judge Priest). Through his use of Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home,” Ford gave his film a type of overarching commentary that, when coupled with the adapted spirituals sung throughout the film, expressed much more than what both expressions of music might initially seem to provide (Judge Priest). Given also that Ford, with his “prodigious knowledge of the nineteenth century …music,” also choose “the songs for his films,” it is certain that he realized how central Foster’s compositions were to the development of what became American popular culture (Kalinak 11; Emerson 15).

Within Judge Priest, Ford additionally frames and extends these sequences by utilizing the African American servants of Fairfield as a type of Greek chorus to provide ongoing musical exposition relating to the behavior and attitudes of their white fellow citizens. These singing observations created a pathway towards the film’s actual climax that comes not, as other critics have argued, with the scene of Gillis’ cultural (if not precisely legal) exoneration in the Fairfield Courtroom (McBride 211; Gallagher 104-105). That scene, which serves an extension of what occurs the previous evening on Judge Priest’s front porch, brings together Fairfield’s principal representatives of God’s Church and American law to achieve a more pointed purpose (Judge Priest).

Without any doubt, Ford’s film also evolved from his friendships with Rogers and Cobb (Ellis 179; Gragert and Johansson 5:266-267; McBride 208). Through their interactions, Cobb, Ford, and Rogers certainly discovered their shared interests in American history and the Civil War (Ellis 179-182; McBride 269; 417; Gragert and Johansson 5; 266-267). It further becomes reasonable to argue that they discussed the postbellum cultural upheavals which framed their lives during the early twentieth century (Ellis 179-182; Marty 297-201; Szasz 1-27). These conversations also supplied the background by which Ford examined racial issues and their connections to the still-predominant American discourse of evangelical Protestantism through an apparent frame of a “lost” but “idyl[lic]” picture of a stable, content, and reconciled postbellum Americana (Noll 17-18; Marty 297-301; Davis 73; Eyman 129-130). In the case of Judge Priest, such cognizance enabled Ford to understand that as a unique genre of music, spirituals were more than songs that accentuated Black evangelical Protestant worship (Thurman 7). Ford, and unlike the more recent denunciations he has received from present-day critics such as Quentin Tarantino, realized that during their earliest years in song and print during the nineteenth century, these spirituals offered a means for African Americans to express a counternarrative that initially opposed their enslavement, and now in Judge Priest set during the 1890s, their status as second-class American citizens (McBride 165-167; Paar “John Ford: The Technique of one of America’s Greatest Directors” <www. Videomake.com/how-to-directing film history/john-ford-the-technique-of-one-of-americas-greatest-directors/>; Thurman 7).

As noted by the religious scholar Howard Thurman in Deep River: An Interpretation of Negro Spirituals (1945), a central theme of the “slave Spirituals” is a focus upon “God as [their] deliverer” (4). More than other-worldly aspirations, these expressions of musical hope connected Black Americans to God’s action through “Jesus’ suffering on the cross” which intimated resistance to the legal and cultural bonds that now restricted them (7). Within the spirituals themselves, Thurman emphasizes how the slaves and their descendants came to see themselves at the side of their Lord who has promised to liberate them (7). In Thurman’s words, “they were with him. They knew he had suffered… They entered in the fellowship of suffering” for they understood that “there was something universal” in what he endured (7).

Ford’s applications of the spirituals centers upon Judge Priest’s principal domestic servant, “Aunt” Dilsey (Hattie McDaniel), who first performs as a soloist, then as the lead singer of a Black town choir, and finally in a “call and response” duet with the judge inside his living room (Judge Priest; Eyman 130. In these performances, the spirituals are employed not to convey an acceptance with segregation, but to express how the Black American citizens of Fairfield felt God was at their side during their struggle against it (Elder 337-341; Thurman 7; Judge Priest). Even as, however, a given white audience might accept what they seemed to see and hear, Ford pointedly undermines the same presuppositions that were supporting the veracity of the segregated order. By doing so, Ford extends the ways through which Dilsey and her fellow African Americans in Fairfield utilize spirituals to confront the racism across the Depression-era United States (Judge Priest; Gallagher 100; Rosenbaum “Ten Underappreciated Films of John Ford.” <https.jonathanrosenbaum.net>).

The film begins in Fairfield’s courtroom with Judge Priest establishing a type of working relationship with Jeff Poindexter (Stepin Fetchit), an apparently itinerant Black man, presently being cross-examined by State Senator Horace Maydew (Berton Churchill) concerning the accusation of his being a “chicken thief” (Judge Priest). From the bench, Judge Priest interjects his own questions that concern possibly shared acquaintances with the accused (Judge Priest). Beyond the judge’s assertion of authority to interject during his own legal ponderings, however, were the notability of Jeff’s answers and, even more so, the manner by which he provided them within the expectation of the Jim Crow legal order.

Ford initially presents Jeff in the stereotype of the “lazy” Black “vagrant,” in the words of Commonwealth Attorney Senator Horace Maydew (Berton Churchill) as he is sleeping in on a bench in the courtroom (Judge Priest). Once awakened by Sheriff Birdsong (Louis Mason) and summoned to the bench, Jeff is asked in a racist manner by Judge Priest “[w]hat’s your name, boy” (Judge Priest; Adams 2.498). Jeff responds in what seems to be a matter-of-fact way, “Jeff Poindexter” (Judge Priest). Even as Jeff’s answer is truthful, Ford uses it to undermine the segregated order. It was well expected within the Jim Crow order for a Black person, and especially a male, to respond to a question such as the one asked by Judge Priest with not only an accurate response of one’s name, but to add “sir” or, in the case of a woman, “ma’am” afterwards (Judge Priest). As I argued in my earlier review of Judge Priest for the anthology Race and American Film: Voices and Visions that Shaped a Nation (2017), such an answer given “[f]rom an actor well known for playing a stereotype [and] within a society that demanded submission and with lynching as an ever-present threat for disobedience, Fetchit’s omission of the required courtesy is stunning” (Adams 2.498). It does, nonetheless, present larger issues that point toward Ford’s vision of equality for all Americans before, at the least, the law.

During this apparently straight forward scene that Ford uses to introduce his principal emphases of the film, Fetchit’s performance is almost totally devoid of the stereotype associated with his name (Judge Priest). As his character approaches the bench upon being awakened and even as he seems to drag his feet in a shuffling manner, Fetchit’s performance within Ford’s direction has him standing virtually erect to suggest the form of a period “gentleman” through avoiding a “rough gesture” and drawing too much attention to himself Egan 18; Hartley 213). Throughout the remainder of the courtroom sequence and as it moves toward the shot of Jeff and Judge Priest walking toward Fairfield’s fishing hole, Fetchit continues his portrayal not of an obsequious “boy,” but as both a man and a gentleman through upright and elegant posture (Judge Priest). Ford furthers the courtroom and fishing sequences by presenting Jeff and Judge Priest walking side-by-side in broad daylight, presumably through downtown Fairfield and in the sight of local citizens both Caucasian and Black (Judge Priest).  Both Fetchit’s performance and Ford’s direction create an impression that the segregated order is in full force. At the same time, those impressions are being used against themselves to undermine what they seem to be supporting (Judge Priest; Adams 497-498).

As the judge and Jeff commence their fishing, Ford elides that sequence to Dilsey as she is “tak[ing] down the judge’s clothes” from the line adjacent to the back yard of his home (Judge Priest). Evidently singing in the Lost Cause stereotype of a satisfied servant, Dilsey appears to adapt her tune from a spiritual even while she praises God during the mundane task of folding the judge’s dirty laundry by proclaiming “Yes, Lawd, that’s what I gwine to do!” (Judge Priest; Longenecker 9; Roberts 6-7).

As her performance continues, Rome Priest, the judge’s nephew, arrives to inform Dilsey that he has returned home to Fairfield, ostensibly suffering from an upset stomach, but as he tells Judge Priest within very short order, he has completed law school, passed the bar exam, and now is looking to open a local practice (Gallagher 100; Judge Priest). Dilsey responds with elation by singing “Mr. Rome, home, Mr. Rome home!” (Eyman 130; Judge Priest). Through these interactions, Ford presents an image of Dilsey’s presumed concurrence with Fairfield’s racial divide rooted in legally sanctioned segregation (Judge Priest; 100; Longenecker 9). Ford pushes his surface narrative still more by having the judge appear to shift Dilsey’s attention, and with it all of Fairfield, toward the young love that has begun to bloom again between Rome and Ellie Mae Gillespie, who happens to live next door to Judge Priest (Judge Priest).

Ford, however, portrays Dilsey as more than a satiated singer who celebrates Fairfield’s most prominent pair of young white people (Longenecker 9; Roberts 6-7). Through her performance of “Mr. Rome, home,” Dilsey gives expression to the spiritual tradition of “swing[ing]” her head and body to the sound of the music (Johnson and Johnson 28; Judge Priest). As described by James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson in their two-volume work The Books of American Negro Spirituals, Including The Book of American Negro Spirituals and The Second Book of American Negro Spirituals (1926), “the swinging of the head and body” is “one of the two classes” in “all authentic American Negro music” (28). The authors note that “’swing’” within the spirituals serves as “an altogether subtle and elusive thing” (28). The Johnsons extend their argument by noting that the “’swing’” expresses … subtlety due to its “perfect” relationship “with the religious ecstasy that manifests itself in the swinging bodies of a whole congregation” (12-28; 164). Johnson and Johnson are, quite obviously, describing Black American Christians who experience their faith in God as he “la[ys] his hands on me” even while “King Jesus preach[es] to de po’” (“I Know De Lord’s Laid His Hands on Me”, Johnson and Johnson 2. 28; 164). Dilsey’s “swinging,” as Ford presents it, may well affirm Rome’s homecoming, but it also conveys a coded form of dissatisfaction toward the presumptions of white entitlement (Judge Priest).

Even as Rome and Ellie Mae move toward the beginning of their courtship, Ford expands the film’s narrative to the judge’s near-instantaneous hiring of Jeff, the same accused “chicken thief” (Judge Priest). While occurring within the space of only one day, Ford makes clear that Judge Priest has employed Jeff as a sort of handyman around his home (Judge Priest). Now it appears that Jeff is having little success in containing a goat that has eaten most of Judge Priest’s mint plants and is roaming freely throughout his front yard (Judge Priest). While lengthening time that the judge would rather use toward maneuvering circumstances which might bring Rome and Ellie Mae together, Ford instead focuses on Jeff as the expected stumbling and awkward Black servant while he chases the goat through the judge’s conveniently open front gate, and into the street where stand many of Fairfield’s prominent homes (Judge Priest; Longenecker 9). At the same time, and within all of Ford’s structured chaos that is the judge’s front yard, no connecting mention is made about how or when Jeff came either to be employed or have the sanction to chase a wayward goat across the front yard (Judge Priest). Without comment and by use of a comedic racist gag, Ford exposes those anticipated cultural boundaries through a scene where an African American man simply has been hired and admitted by his white employer within what is assumed to be a segregated and private space (Judge Priest).

Jeff’s departure from the front yard occurs simultaneously to the arrival of Caroline Priest (Brenda Fowler), the judge’s widowed sister-in-law and Rome’s mother, as she enters the front portion of Judge Priest’s lawn. Caroline approaches through the still open gate looking as if she carries the weight of a deep concern (Judge Priest). Almost by seeming happenstance, Caroline turns her head in the direction from where Jeff has just departed (Judge Priest). Quite irritated at the laxity of her brother-in-law’s attention to social proprieties, Caroline expresses worry about how the fleeing goat will damage the family’s name across the upper echelons of Fairfield society (Judge Priest). Once more, however, Ford employs a stereotype to subvert it. Given that Judge Priest had hired Jeff, who still stood as an accused “chicken thief,” only the previous day, Caroline’s glance toward his apparent buffoonery as she crosses into the yard conveys more suspicions about how and why the new servant is occupying any space at all in her brother-in-law’s personal domain (Judge Priest).

After confronting the judge concerning his lack of “dignity,” Caroline demands that her brother-in-law meet her “on the porch!” for a conversation (Judge Priest). Ford presents the judge’s porch as having rocking chairs which provide comfort and hospitality along with descending steps that lead into the front yard (Judge Priest; Bushman 261). Such would be the sort of place in the American South where, as Patrick Overton puts it in Re-Building the Front Porch of America: Essays on the Art of Community Building (2001), “people would sit and talk with their families and friends, … visit their neighbors who were out for a walk, [and] where people could stay in touch with each other and what was happening around them” (5). Overton summarizes his notion of the front porch as metaphor by stating how it serves as “an open invitation to gather together and share” (5).

 Ford’s use of the yard and porch, at their root, continues to build upon a history of long-held conversations between the judge and his sister-in-law, but also represents thousands of other Americans who had utilized similar spaces as a type of shield that allows them the emotional safety to revisit painful memories from the Civil War and, during the 1930s, the First World War (Judge Priest). Ford presents these recollections through a flashback with a young William Pittman Priest wearing his full Confederate uniform, apparently in the spring of 1861, while he says goodbye to his presumed fiancé, Mary (Judge Priest). Such a memory for the judge undoubtedly brought forth later images of multiple lost friends and relatives during the war, and after its end, Mary’s death, along with their two children, from an unspecified illness (Judge Priest). Caroline’s proud wearing of a pin that signified her membership in the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), alongside her reminder that the judge must maintain his “dignity,” gives way to his ironic chuckle that suggests how little such admonitions had come to mean next to wrenching memories of what takes place either on a battlefield or in the death room of his wife (Judge Priest).

By using the front porch as the place on which a representative of community standards within postbellum Fairfield articulates concern over the judge’s personal habits, Ford undergirds the scene by giving equal observance to the necessities of proper etiquette from a visitor paying a social call (Judge Priest; Duffey 50-60). Caroline first shades the actual purpose of her visit in order that she adheres to the expectation which avoids the appearance of being rude (50-60; Judge Priest). Through such verbal and physical maneuvering, Caroline is able to argue her case before the judge in an expected and ladylike fashion (50-60). As a result of her social caution, Caroline can finally express her purpose for calling on the judge that afternoon (Judge Priest). She references an objection to Rome’s romantic interest in Ellie Mae due to the unknown lineage of her father (Judge Priest). Ford portrays Caroline’s actual fear as one of race “connect[ing] with sex,” which would taint not only “[her future] grandchildren” with potential non-white blood, but also the Priest name “that means something in Kentucky” (McBride 559-560; Judge Priest).

After the judge mollifies Caroline’s fear of unproven social horrors, Ford interjects a musical commentary, sung by Dilsey and her fellow Black choral members within the grounds of Fairfield’s St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church, that he had earlier begun to suggest through these encounters between white and Black Fairfield on the judge’s front yard and porch (Judge Priest). As Dilsey and her fellow choral members sing about “Mister Jesus,” making them “as white as snow,” Ford now begins his move toward linking their music with its secular partner of popular and sentimental parlor songs (Emerson 15;68; Roberts 181-182; Work 28). At the same time, and even while he yet again seems to be portraying circumstances that appear to validate the correctness of Jim Crow segregation, Ford’s repeated utilization of adapted spirituals, as they become combined in a syncretistic relationship to Caucasian popular music, opens a commentary that will culminate with scenes that present his vision of human equality (Judge Priest).

Dilsey’s performance also provides a linkto Judge Priest’s venture downtown to call upon Bob Gillis at his place of work, which just happens to be within sight of Fairfield’s largest church building, courthouse, and business district (Judge Priest). After unsuccessfully trying to engage Gillis in conversation, Judge Priest climbs into his uncovered coupe carriage in which the riders are seated side by side. Jeff, who is occupying the driver’s seat, is steering the judge and himself toward a second round of fishing (Judge Priest).

Even while Ford portrays what were, without question, normal occurrences across late nineteenth century small-town America, he manipulates cultural expectations by the movement of his camera from an initial front shot to placing it behind the rear of the coupe while it begins its trek through downtown Fairfield (Judge Priest; Tapp and Klottner 369). Such movement happens to present a repetition of the manner that the judge and Jeff had first walked to the fishing pond just a day earlier (Judge Priest; Eyman 129-130). These postbellum conditions might otherwise have had the custom, contrary to Judge Priest’s presently sitting next to Jeff, of a white person having a carriage with front and rear portions, and the white person taking his or her place in the back seat while the Black chauffeur sat up front (Tapp and Klotter 205-206; 368-369; Ellis 51; Washington 16^th; 37^th). Nonetheless, as Ford presented the sequence, Judge Priest chose to ride downtown from his home in an exposed coupe designed for two people with a Black man he had hired virtually from the witness stand the previous day (Judge Priest). As he does throughout the film, Ford creates a scene of apparent normalcy, but in fact, becomes a means by which to expose and undermine that the otherwise expected bounds of segregation. Subsequently, Jeff and the judge leave for the fishing pond as they are seated next to one another in plain sight of Fairfield’s centers of political, economic, and ecclesiological authority (Judge Priest). In so doing and as he does throughout Judge Priest, Ford places the everyday institutions of Jim Crow against themselves to portray his insistence of equality for all American citizens (Judge Priest).

For the whole of Judge Priest, Ford uses the relationship between the postbellum front porch and the deep racial syncretism within nineteenth century American music to present his vision of every American as being equal before God and one’s fellow mortals.”

As the judge and Jeff leave for and then return from fishing, Ford eases the film into its culminating sequences. Such shifting opens with Jeff, having completed his fishing expedition, appearing in Judge Priest’s bedroom histrionically wearing a mink coat that the judge had earlier obtained from “a rich Yankee,” presumably during the late war (Judge Priest). The scene provides only a slight explanation as to how exactly the coat had come into the judge’s possession, and entirely overlooks why Jeff, still a new servant, has somehow garnered enough status to enter not only the front yard, but presently the most intimate room of the judge’s house (Judge Priest). By having Jeff drive the carriage to the local fishing pond while sitting side-to-side with a white man, only then to show him as having permission to parade himself in the judge’s most private space while wearing a garment taken from a loathed enemy whose cause freed the slaves, Ford does more through these connected sequences than comically accept a Lost Cause view of an itinerant man with a propensity for thievery (Judge Priest; Stout 404-405; Longenecker 9).

Once the judge and Jeff engage in bargaining over the coat, Jeff is sent to look for Dilsey, who already has begun to serve at an ice cream social hosted by Reverend Brand and his parishioners of Fairfield’s Episcopal Church (Judge Priest). Jeff locates not only Dilsey, but other Black female citizens of Fairfield as they seem to be pleasantly providing refreshments for the white people of Fairfield as they mingle around their town’s most prominent Protestant house of God (Judge Priest; Longenecker9). Even while Dilsey and her fellow servants continue with their entertainment for the white citizens of Fairfield, Ford proceeds to undermine this apparently joyous narrative of front porch, yard, church, and community by having these same Black Chorus members perform a musical sequence which culminates with the judge soon participating with them as they sing “My Old Kentucky Home” (Judge Priest).

To many Americans in the mid-1930s, Dilsey and her fellow singers might well have appeared content while they sang Foster’s tune. On the contrary, however, Ford is using their surface fulfillment to broaden his ongoing subversion of Jim Crow. By performing Foster’s song on the consecrated grounds of the local Episcopal parish of St. Gregory, Ford links his Black chorus and Foster’s parlor tune through a musical syncretism of antebellum parlor or popular music in the areas where Foster grew to maturity (Emerson 15-16; 43-44; 68; The Book of Common Prayer 576-574). At the same time and all too notably, several twentieth-century performers and music critics had previously noted that Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home” contains what the Black Blues musician W.C. Handy called “the negro stamp” (qtd. in Work 28; Thurman 6-7; qtd. in Emerson 11). Given Ford’s knowledge of American music and how he went about choosing specific selections for each of his films, it becomes certain that Ford knew the complicated racial background of Foster’s tune as well as the message it would convey (Kalinak 2; 5; 9; Emerson 68; Judge Priest).

Through his previous visual of the church marquee that specified the name of “St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church,” Ford had expanded these syncretized genres of early national American music through what appears to be a minor transition shot that displays the name of Fairfield’s sanctified as well as segregated house of God (Judge Priest; The Book of Common Prayer 567-574). It becomes no mere coincidence, however, that Ford centers his camera on the name of “St. Gregory” as it carries the memory and status of Pope Gregory the Great, who served as the Roman Pontiff between 590-604 AD (Grabner 153; 262). Ford also did so as well within the realization, as a lifelong and practicing Roman Catholic, that Pope Gregory eventually came to be consecrated as no less than the Roman and Anglican patron saint of singers and musicians (“My Catholic Life” https://mycatholiclife.life.saints/saints-of-the-liturgical-year/september-3-st-gregory-the-great; Grabner 153; 262; McBride 671). By visually meshing multiple strands of early American music with these ancient and traditional expressions of Christian music through their patron saint, Ford presents more than a placid notion of Black servants pointedly singing outside of a simple church building whose congregants include many of Fairfield’s affluent and white citizens (Judge Priest; Longenecker 9; The Book of Common Prayer 576-574).

Ken Emerson, in his biography of Foster, further establishes the relationship between his compositions and the manner of their melding among the earliest forms of American popular music. Emerson notes how African American music does not simply express “’the [African American] well of sorrow,’” but that while these same Black musicians saw their musical roots being performed in Foster’s tune, they also knew that it also contained “a well of mystery’” which presumably no white person could fully understand (Handy qtd. 11). While these same performers recognized their work being expressed within Foster’s compositions, they also knew it bore a connection to a separate form of expression whose more painful legacy across the nineteenth century ironically happened to enhance the subversive nature of the spirituals being sung by Dilsey and her fellow citizens in the Black chorus of Fairfield (qtd. 11; Roberts 266-269; Judge Priest).

Rising to prominence in the early portions of the 1800s, blackface and minstrelsy music gave the young nation a way to “flex its muscles and feel its oats” (Emerson 62). Newly arrived European immigrants found that blackface exhibitions gave white Americans a “veil and a vehicle [through which they could] discuss sex, violence, money and class–the dirty stuff of life that white Americans preferred to sweep under the parlor rug” (66). Blackface and its logical companion of minstrelsy, as both Emerson and Brian Roberts note, became so prevalent that they soon dominated the American entertainment landscape for more than half a century (89; 15-17). The existence of such racism within the burgeoning music industry further enhanced the circumstances within which Foster composed many of his tunes (Emerson 15;94; Rogers 183-184). With his background of early musical experiences along the Ohio River, Foster “was among the first white boys to do what [they] have been doing ever since—mimicking black music, or what they think is black music and style” (Emerson 15; 43). Foster’s tunes, as Emerson further notes, eventually “pioneer[ed] a path that has been followed by many, including Irving Berlin, …Benny Goodman, …and Elvis Presley” (15). 

At the same time, as Emerson continues, Foster’s compositions were more than manifestations of antebellum racism (15). Rather, while Foster wrote music that employed ghastly tropes, it also contained the roots of social and political resistance to which Dilsey and her fellow choral citizens of Fairfield’s Black citizenry gave expression (193-200; McBride 269; Judge Priest). It subsequently is not a large leap to note that Ford, though his knowledge not only of American history, but the ways in which its complexities often played against one another, grasped a similar feeling (193-200; Kalinak 12).

The church sequence, already replete with subversive codes through the linkage between music, history, and ecclesiology, soon leads through the Black Choral performance to the sequences in which Ford openly makes his case for the equality of all Americans. Ford moves his focus to now presenting Judge Priest sitting on his front porch as he listens to Jeff play the harmonica on the bottom step adjacent to the lawn (Judge Priest). Such a common picture of relaxation, as Scott Eyman notes, expresses “a beautiful evocation of another time and place in a country long gone” (129). It may be “long gone,” but it is also the case that for a film placed during the 1890s of Jim Crow Kentucky, many of those who initially saw the film in the middle 1930s would have either been children or younger adults with memories of such a melancholic circumstance (129). Ford presents, with the Judge on the porch and his servant on the step adjacent to the yard, what his adult viewers would have both recognized and affirmed. By doing so, Ford opens a means by which he can brings the film to its cultural, moral, and Constitutional fulfillment.

The scene continues as the Reverend enters Judge Priest’s front yard as he explains how “I have a Christian duty to perform” in revealing the secret that Bob Gillis is, as a matter of fact, a Confederate hero and Ellie Mae’s father. These are confidences, Reverend Brand indicates, that he has kept for a quarter of a century (Judge Priest). Before the Reverend can perform his “duty,” however, Jeff rose from his step adjoining the yard so that he might do his job of rearranging the two seats on the porch while also pouring refreshment into the drinking glasses of the judge and the Rector of St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church (Judge Priest). As Judge Priest and the Reverend settle into their adjoining chairs, Ford bluntly begins to portray his vision of statement of equality for all Americans (Judge Priest).

For as Ford constructs the scene, Jeff, as the judge’s employee responsible for providing comfort and refreshment to guests, continues to remain on the porch while Reverend Brand and Judge Priest exchange the customary pleasantries (Judge Priest). Through these normal and everyday movements, Ford leaves Jeff on the front porch of his white employer, who is the embodiment of American law and sharing cultural space with Fairfield’s most prominent clergyman, for a total of thirty-six seconds (Judge Priest–my italics). As Jeff goes about his duties for that very noticeable length of time, he conducts himself as he did in the opening courtroom sequence. Standing erectly and in the formal manner of a gentleman, Jeff does almost nothing to draw attention to himself (Hartley 213; Egan 73-75). By doing so, Fetchit’s acting reflects Ford’s direction. If perhaps not even cinematic in its emphasis, both Fetchit and Ford culturally realized what they were doing by presenting Jeff as an axiomatic equal to Judge Priest and Reverend Brand on the American emblem of community in the postbellum era (Judge Priest). Even while seeming not to do anything of the sort, Ford’s portrayal of Jeff literally on the same level as Judge Priest and Reverend Brand presents him as a Black man in much more than a social and racial inferior who performs his tasks in a Jim Crow environment (Judge Priest; my italics). For those thirty-six seconds, and in the middle of a scene that sparks memories of a “time and place long gone,” Ford presents his vision of American equality under the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, and in the eyes of God (Eyman 129; Genesis 1:28). Ford’s vision is clear: as Jeff stands on the porch for those thirty-six seconds, he does so as an equal before the laws of human mortals and the law of God (Judge Priest).

Within the space of time that Jeff remains on the porch, Ford nonetheless continues to portray him as a servant who completes his assigned obligations (Judge Priest). Virtually all white Americans in the mid-1930s would have noted Jeff as doing so, even perhaps while not recognizing the implications of his physical proximity to the judge and the priest (Judge Priest). It seems also plausible that as these mid-1930s viewers witness Judge Priest eventually wave Jeff away from the conversation, they would at least have seen it as an expectation of segregated privacy (Judge Priest). As ever, however, Ford continues to undermine this sequence of the Jim Crow power structure by constructing the scene so that the easiest and most polite way for Jeff to leave the porch is to retreat directly through the judge’s already open front door and into the main social areas of the house (Judge Priest; Adams 2. 497-498).

While Ford does not explain Jeff’s location after his departure from the porch, he does a good deal more than acquiesce to the spatial intricacies of the segregated South. After having an African American employee stand equal to white representatives of God and human law for any length of time on the judge’s front porch in 1890 and 1934, only then to be sent away from a period of communal revelation through that same home’s front door located directly behind its adjoining porch is to undermine codes of segregated propriety in a profoundly shocking manner. (Judge Priest) Ford does so, as ever, in such a way that it passes almost without notice.

Beyond even these overt sequences on the porch and at the front door, Ford continues to extend their implications still again (Judge Priest). As Reverend Brand finishes his story and departs for home, Ford creates a sequence in which Jeff has logically must walk through the judge’s front door, into the house’s middle portion, and stop not coincidentally within the principal area where his employer seems to conduct much of his legal as well as personal business (Judge Priest). The judge, who has made his way through the same areas following Reverend Brand’s departure, is busily writing a letter to Senator Maydew pertaining to the matters that had just been discussed on the front porch (Judge Priest). As he completes his letter, Judge Priest joins Dilsey in a second “call and response” musical exchange as they outline plans for the next day’s session in and immediately outside the Fairfield Courthouse (Judge Priest; Eyman 130). Even as the judge and Dilsey exchange musical choruses, however, she raises two names from the Christian Old Testament whose stories indicate that she is singing as much more than the image of a wide-eyed acquiescent servant of the postbellum and Jim Crow stereotype (Roberts 235-237; Longenecker 9; Judge Priest).

By having Dilsey once more engage with Judge Priest in a joint musical performance, Ford not only moves his narrative towards a rekindling of white America’s sentiment for a previous, and presumably more peaceful, era (Judge Priest; Davis 73; Eyman 129). By having each of them make references to Samson and Daniel³, two biblical heroes whose actions in God’s Name undermined oppressive power structures, Ford presents a type of choral sanctification for Judge Priest’s goal that will lead the next morning to the release of Bob Gillis from his legal entanglements (Judge Priest; Judges 13-16; Daniel 6:1-28). Even as Dilsey’s latest musical sequence appears to present her as a secondary participant in the judge’s intention to liberate Gillis, what Ford does in the present scene, as he does throughout the whole of Judge Priest, accomplishes something that becomes much more culturally transformative. By having Dilsey begin her “call and response” in the private power center of the judge’s home, Ford connects his film with syncretized American musical traditions that undermine socio-political structures which, most pointedly, had perpetuated slavery and, for Dilsey and her fellow postbellum African Americans, Jim Crow segregation (Judge Priest; Emerson 15; 193-198; Roberts 46). Even as there seems to be no way of ascertaining which actual spirituals Dilsey may have adapted throughout the film, it stands clear nonetheless that Dilsey knew her biblical stories and in this instance remembered that Samson initially “[K]illed/ about a thousand of the Philistine” even before he destroyed their Temple (qtd. Work 36; Judges 15-16). 

Even while she appears to sing about Samson in joyous response to the judge’s efforts to free Gillis from the local Philistines such as Flem Talley, Dilsey portrays another facet of what Ford has now extended from the judge’s front porch into his living room (Judge Priest). In the lyrics from the specific spiritual that Dilsey and the judge adapt which originates from the biblical narrative, Samson’s “strength became as any other man” (qtd. Work 36). While the story continues to be told, and despite Samson’s imprisonment and becoming blind, Dilsey also alludes to its ending when he brought down the Philistine Temple that resulted in the deaths of his captors as well as himself (Judges 16:30). The scriptural narrative heightens what Dilsey references by noting that Samson “killed many more when he died than while he lived” (Judges 16:30).

For the whole of Judge Priest, Ford uses the relationship between the postbellum front porch and the deep racial syncretism within nineteenth century American music to present his vision of every American as being equal before God and one’s fellow mortals (Judge Priest). Ford realized that these interlocking and culturally dense discourses helped to frame the parameters of the presumably “idyl[lic]” and “homey” image of small-town, postbellum America which he used as a vehicle to explore larger issues within American life (Gallagher 264; 472-473; Eyman 129; Kalinak 2-3; 5; 9; Evans 73). Portrayed within an ostensibly normal series of settings, Ford presents Judge Priest as expressing a series of cultural codes that portray his vision of how the descendants of slaves and slave defenders can sit on one another’s front porch as sisters and brothers under the Constitution and before the God who has created them in the divine image (Judge Priest; Eyman 130; Genesis 1:26). 

Endnotes

[1] In the Baptist tradition, the local congregation is the seat of all authority over its sense of itself as a people of God. When a given congregation needs a Pastor, it conducts a search and eventually presents the candidate’s name for a final church-wide vote to extend what was and continues to be a “call” that he (in my Grandfather’s time, always a male) can either accept or decline. I will continue to reference Baptist terminology as it is relevant within this essay.

² During the ending sequence of The Sun Shines Bright, the 1953 remake of Judge Priest, Ford first broadens the membership of the Black community choir by having both women and men sing Foster’s tune in celebration of Judge Priest’s heroism throughout the film. More significantly however, and some decades prior to the Kentucky State Legislature legally doing so in 1928, Ford altered the hideous expression “when the darkies are gay” to “when the children” express the same sentiment (my italics; Lexington Herald Leader 21 March 1986 A11; Shankle 397-398).

³ In working through these sequences, I have come to believe that while Dilsey and Judge Priest reference Daniel, he who survived the lion’s den under God’s protection (Daniel 6:13-22), they were primarily concentrating on Samson’s narrative with Daniel providing as a supplement to what one might call, and especially in reference to what happened in the Fairfield Courtroom the next morning as Reverend Brand told the story of Bob Gillis’ Confederate heroism, the cultural summation of Ford’s insistence that all Americans are equal not only in the sight of God, but (at the very least) before the law. Given the turn of more recent cultural and social events, one wonders what will become of Ford’s egalitarian spirit and basic human decency.

Works Cited

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Richmond B. Adams, Ph.D., is an Independent Scholar living and serving in Neosho, Missouri.