Once again I’ve proven that there’s no limit to the time you can spend looking up arcane knowledge on the Internet, even for what I thought was a pretty simple question. But while I had the lyrics to the song itself and easily found the plot summary for the 1942 film in which it appeared, Orchestra Wives, I couldn’t seem to find out if the “small-town girl” who marries the trumpeter in Glenn Miller’s band really was from Kalamazoo. I watched most of the movie but could never find any mention of the town’s name where Connie, our heroine, lives. However, I did a little detective work via Googlemaps and put that knowledge together with the plot. Here’s how the story goes: Connie is first seen in the soda shop putting a nickel in the jukebox to listen to “Gene Morrison’s” band, professing especial admiration for the trumpeter, Bill Abbott. The soda jerk (played by a very young Harry Morgan of TV M*A*S*H fame) tells her that the band is playing in “Dixon” that very night and that he’ll be glad to take her. There’s a Dixon, Indiana, located a little over two hours from Kalamazoo, a doable trip. Connie and Bill fall for each other at that concert, so she decides to catch another performance the next night, this time in “Elgin.”
Of all the spirituals I’ve sung with my own choir, this one, with its slow pace and minor key, conveys the feelings of an oppressed people the most strongly. It’s not just a series of complaints or calls for help, though. There’s a lot of scriptural truth packed into it.
The simplified explanation of how black spirituals came about goes like this: slaves heard about Christianity after arriving in the US and, especially on the southern plantations, came up with sung versions of those teachings that gave them hope of a better life, expressed their longings for deliverance, and often served as rhythmic work songs. All of this is perfectly true but raises further questions: how did this “hearing about Christianity” come about? And why, if you think about it, would slaves adopt the religion of those who had enslaved them? Wouldn’t they see that religion as massive hypocrisy on the part of the slave owners? There’s also a tendency, which I have unfortunately shared, to think of spirituals as rather primitive. But that tendency is clearly mistaken: these are songs with deep meaning, displaying a breadth of Scriptural knowledge. To quote a modern African-American scholar and preacher, 
Several interesting (to me, anyway) questions to be answered about what the angels said to the shepherds on Christmas night.
What’s distinctive about Ron Jeffers is that he’s a living composer who has produced a significant amount of original music and arrangements, all for sale as sheet music from various outlets including his own company, Earthsongs, and whose music is performed quite frequently if YouTube is anything to go by, and yet . . . he has no online presence whatsoever. No personal website. No blog, No (worst of all) Wikipedia entry! How is this possible? In fact, if I hadn’t looked under “Ronald Jeffers” instead of either “Ron Jeffers” or “Ronald Harrison Jeffers,” I wouldn’t have gotten much information beyond his date and place of birth and a list of his publications.