Friendship’s future has a past

Pipe organ tradition remains intact at Atlanta’s oldest black church

When the oldest black church in Atlanta agreed to sell its sanctuary to the city to make way for the construction of a pro-football stadium two years ago, it was hard to view the $19.5 million deal as anything other than a travesty.

Once again, progress was upending the past in a city with a chronic short-term memory.

What those of us on the outside looking in didn’t know, however, were the depths the members of Friendship Baptist Church would go to preserve that history. You might say it was music to their ears.

It takes a conversation with Dr. James Abbington to make that plain. The associate professor of Church Music and Worship at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology is one of the nation’s premier scholars and musicians in the black choral tradition. He’s authored and edited several texts on the topic, including Let Mt. Zion Rejoice! Music in the African American Church and Let the Church Sing On! Reflections on Black Sacred Music.

But it’s his role as consultant for the restoration and upgrade of Friendship’s illustrious more than 45-year-old pipe organ that brings me to his office on the campus of Morehouse College one recent Friday. He happens to be located in the Ray Charles Performing Arts Center, where Friendship also holds Sunday service temporarily until its future sanctuary is constructed nearby on land formerly owned by Morris Brown College.

“Of course, Friendship is the mother church to Morehouse and Spelman,” Abbington says, referring to the fact that both schools were established and held early classes in the church’s basement. The location couldn’t be better considering the shared history between the institutions. “The connection is very real,” he says.

The organ in question is also tied to the identity of Friendship. And its preservation symbolizes one church’s will to honor tradition in the face of transition.

No instrument better symbolizes the majesty of sacred performance than a well-played pipe organ. With its complex arrangement of three manual keyboards, foot pedals, stops, and ranks, Friendship’s isn’t just any old organ. Commissioned by former pastor Samuel Woodrow Williams in 1968 for $54,050, the handmade Casavant Freres Opus 2996 came with 2,111 pipes and remains one of the more prestigious organs in a black institution, according to Abbington. It’s currently in Quebec, Canada, at the Casavant workshop, receiving upgrades.

The history of the pipe organ dates as far back as third century B.C. It’s old enough to pre-date the Bible, though the organ mentioned in the Old Testament was archaic in comparison to the elaborate pipe organs that later flourished in the Baroque period. In Abbington’s travels, he’s seen organs in Leipzig, Germany, that Bach once played. They still work today.

Organs began showing up in black churches as early as the mid-1800s in the South, where congregations often preferred them over the more common piano because there was no biblical reference for pianos, Abbington says. Of course, he laughs, they weren’t invented at the time. Even as electric organs like the Hammond B3 became popular, many black churches refused them because of their connection with secular music such as blues and R&B.

Sitting at his desk, he pulls out a pristine bound program dated 2013, from Friendship’s 151st anniversary. It contains photos of the April 21 naming ceremony and organ rededication recital that happened just weeks before Mayor Kasim Reed began publicly negotiating with Friendship to purchase the church’s Northside Drive site for the future Atlanta Falcons stadium.

In a special service, the organ was named for former pastor Rev. Williams, under whom it had been originally purchased. His widow, Billye Aaron, bestowed the honor in conjunction with her husband of the last 42 years, Atlanta Braves legend Hank Aaron. “It was just classy,” Abbington says, recalling Aaron’s monetary gift toward the renovation of the organ and a matching grant included for future maintenance.

The organ’s namesake, Rev. Williams, pastored the church from 1954 until his death in 1970. But he was a force far beyond Friendship. A respected activist and scholar, he helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and served as president of the NAACP for multiple tenures. His most famed pupil at Morehouse College, Martin Luther King Jr., later referred to Williams as “one of the most demanding of my college professors.”

That same rigor is rooted in the musical lineage of Friendship. And Abbington’s knowledge of it is encyclopedic.

His own ties to the church date back to the early ’80s, when the West Virginia native came to Morehouse to train under his mentor Wendell Whalum, who served as Friendship’s musical director for many years. A choral music legend, Whalum was also a music educator at Morehouse.

In a black-and-white photo taken around 1968, Williams and Whalum are helping to unload the organ upon its delivery to the church. Today it remains one of only three such Casavant organs owned by black churches in the nation — a prestigious instrument for an elite congregation. This is the same church, after all, where Maynard Jackson Sr., the father of the city’s first black mayor, was once pastor. And the same church William Guy, father of beloved actress Jasmine Guy, presided over for more than 35 years and still serves as pastor emeritus.

Abbington carries all that history as he consults on the organ’s renovation. It requires meetings with the organ builders at Casavant, as well as the architects of the church building, to ensure the design of the forthcoming sanctuary will not only fit the instrument, but complement it acoustically. The newly expanded organ will contain an additional 1,061 pipes (3,172 total) when installed in the new sanctuary in 2017, bringing its value to $1.5 million.

Mostly, Abbington thinks about everyone who’s had a major hand in the original commissioning and renovation of the organ. “Every piece of advice that I give to this church, there are at least three people that stand over me,” he says. “The ghost of Wendell Whalum, the ghost of Rev. Samuel Williams, who I never met, but also the very real presence of Billye Aaron, who was the former wife of Samuel Williams, but who was responsible for the organ’s preservation.”

As for the instrument’s future, he also believes it’s in good hands — even as the state of the black church, and praise and worship music, continue to evolve. When asked about the pipe organ tradition in the church of the new millennium, Abbington offers a timely quote from Christian scholar Jaroslav Pelikan: “‘Tradition is the living faith of the dead,’” he says. “‘Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.’”

Like the legacy of Friendship, it’s a sacred distinction.