Songs Out of Slavery
Jacob, Cary F.
SONGS OUT OF SLAVERY By CARY F. JACOB THE Boek of American Negro Spirituals* has gone into a second printing; whereas Eight Negro Songs from Bedford County, Virginia** has attracted...
...The Negro, on the other hand, turns to all forms of diversion with a degree of abandon the more astonishing when one considers that the two groups have grown up under somewhat similar conditions...
...Plantation, factory, river life—all still make for the creation and preservation of communal interests which find expression in song...
...This quality appears very clearly in the Abbot collection in a song called Who's Gon' Bring You Chicken...
...Yet, as it forces upon the Negro an alteration of customs, inevitable in passing from a lower to a higher state of culture, it represents the discontinuance of folk-ways which have afforded large opportunity for communal expression of important race characteristics...
...In fact, the Negro can live happily and thriftily under conditions which spell degradation and misery for the white man, and which stifle in him every possibility of normal emotional outlet, even though he may at times show a surprising degree of mental alertness and vigor of an austere type...
...I hardly can see how the Negroes can continue to laugh unless they still feel that in either the words or the music is something decidedly funny...
...Much of the effect of freshness and vigor is due, I think, quite as much to this as to the extempore character of Negro singing...
...Six mont's in jail ain' so long...
...Shouting and uncontrolled exhorting are now frowned upon...
...The nonsense syllables of which they are made are to me without significance...
...That the younger generation of whites finds this throttling very hard to bear is evidenced in its daily rebellion against convention and in its seeking recreation through a return to exactly the orgic type of music and dancing which the Negro gradually is abandoning...
...whereas Eight Negro Songs from Bedford County, Virginia** has attracted very littje attention...
...It seems to me that I heard in The Emperor Jones something much nearer to the real tragedy of the Negro race than I have as yet discovered in any work of art which the Negro himself has produced...
...Of course, the factory is something comparatively new...
...for here others of the gang took the composition away from him, and collectively began to tell of the failure of "the boss man" to fulfil his contract...
...That final touch seems to me inimitable, and typically Negroid...
...The folk music of the Negro, as I know it in America, shows a decided superiority to that of the whites...
...The change in voice and in manner which must accompany this shift from speaker to speaker requires much skill...
...Just as I was convinced that the final destruction of one or the other was about to take place, the disputants suddenly would break into a perfect guffaw of laughter and would go back to their work wreathed in smiles, and chaffing each other in a most friendly and affectionate manner...
...Their voices would rise louder and louder...
...Their children have worked in the fields side by side with Negroes, and their homes have not been an improvement upon the black man's cabin...
...His dancing is stiff, and his songs are unimaginative and lacking in tunefulness...
...He stops in the midst of his commendations to say to his girl—"How does I talk, Babeh...
...Another song, one from many years prior to this occurrence, seems to have been similarly limited to a single community...
...but conditions on the plantations and on the boats are more conducive to communal * The Book of Americmn Negro Spirituals, edited with an introduction by James fVeldon Johnson...
...Six mont's in jail ain' so long, Babeh...
...The vibrance of the Negro voice and the unique swing of the rhythm likewise are qualities which defy reproduction...
...I recall very distinctly that on the next morning, a Negro shoveling, began to sing— "O, captain, you got to pay me my money, If you wants me to work for you...
...and she answers— "Talk all right...
...My complaint is not that one collection has taken precedence over the other, but rather that, where the two are so obviously complementary, both should not have received an equally enthusiastic welcome...
...The humor of the spiritual is unintentional...
...edited by Alfred J. Swan...
...In the spiritual, as in the secular songs, however, there is often another type of unintentional humor which is the result of natural lightheartedness and which saves even the most serious of Negro compositions from becoming tragic...
...In this song, the lover is extolling the virtues of different drinks...
...In fact, I am more than inclined to think that our present era of lawlessness is due in a surprisingly large degree to the lack of communal expression for those states of emotion which call for activity at any price...
...They would begin to quarrel...
...Even when religion does not prevent him from singing and dancing, he does both with a painfully self-conscious air...
...However, where the Negro really distances English folk music is in the musical setting of his words...
...They are distinctly choral in character...
...and he does not turn readily to any form of artistic expression...
...Among the colored race, folk music still flourishes, although the sources of development are markedly different from those of past years...
...Yet, there is coming a most welcome change in the arrival of several Negroes with truly lovely voices, so well trained as to be capable of interpreting with dignity and sincerity the folk music of their own people...
...The lover evidently has been arrested for stealing the chickens which he has presented to his sweetheart, and he now is consoling her at the same time that he is attempting to make her feel the calamity of losing him...
...The result is that they no longer can be satisfied to string together, somewhat loosely and incoherently, the elements from which they used to weave their songs...
...I am not altogether sure that I appreciate all aspects of Negro humor, although the naivete of much of it finds with me a ready response...
...It is there for the educated white man simply because he cannot help smiling at the childlikeness of conception behind the product...
...However much those who have his education in hand may wish to preserve his traditions and his customs, however great the racial pride which they seek to foster in him, if they succeed in changing his mode of life until it parallels that of the whites, he cannot escape the same shackling of his emotions as the latter themselves have experienced, and as has made of them an inarticulate race...
...But there were moans and turns and an endless repetition through fairly numerous variations of melody...
...Humor, pathos, and individuality are outstanding qualities in the secular songs...
...New York: The Viking Press...
...What have we of the white race to offer the American Negro that will compensate him for the loss of the emotional release which he has experienced in his barbaric public worship ? What have we to present to our own young men and women which will keep them from developing tendencies too violently anti-social before the coming to them of those years when they, as middle-aged men and women, instinctively turn from the spectacular forms of self-expression to seek happiness in the establishment of family and home...
...Negro music as Broadway presents it is a lamentable travesty...
...Although unusually simple, many of them are entrancingly lovely...
...Simplicity, dignity, and power of a peculiar sort are found in the Negro spiritual...
...This is as far as he got toward a song...
...I have heard them rendered both as solos and as choruses...
...New York: Enoch and Sons...
...English and Scottish ballads are far more varied in theme, but they become incomparably more formalized in the course of their development...
...How the Negro will react when compelled to undergo still further suppression is difficult to imagine and foolish to attempt to predict...
...but, even where the Negro's humor may be sly, the white man's is canny...
...In the first place, the Negro, being of a free and open nature, is naturally musical...
...I remember that at harvest time, at threshing, and at curing tobacco I often was allowed to ride with my grandfather over his plantation and to amuse myself with the Negroes while he was attending to business...
...One of the first things which the public-school teacher has to do for the mountaineer is to make him feel that amusement is not sin, and that for boys and girls to sing and dance together is natural...
...The accompaniment was usually beaten on the bottom of a tin bucket...
...but something has thus far saved the Negro, both there and under southern skies, from the tragedy which I am afraid he is doomed to meet as he attempts to rise in civilization and as he comes in competition with a more intense industrialism than has as yet prevailed in the South...
...and I have heard, too, a song start with a worker, and, before he had gone more than a dozen words, others take up his thought and his melody and develop them...
...music than they have been in recent years, simply because there now are fewer restrictions upon freedom of action than formerly...
...Periods of overwork followed by hours of purposeless loafing or of watching in our motion-picture houses the violent actions of the screen are compelled to bring unfortunate results, especially to minds which have as their background no cultural tradition to draw upon...
...Because of increased educational advantages, they have gained a knowledge of biblical narrative which fetters their imagination and leaves them less free to create new interpretations of familiar stories and experiences...
...Their violent arguments followed by the hand-shake and the parting in perfect amity are still to me incomprehensible mental conditions...
...The words were these: "Shew, rabbit, shew...
...The disposition of the Negro is so sunny that in spite of its tendency toward melancholy, the combination of these two elements—happiness and melancholy—gives to his music one of its especial charms...
...This reminds me that, although some of these secular songs are lyrics in that, like the spirituals, they are frequently in the first person and often show personal emotion, nevertheless they seem to possess all the other elements of ballad music whatever theory of origin be applied to them...
...As compared with the English and Scottish ballads, the narrative element in Negro folk-song seems decidedly limited, and the subjects for treatment are few and not well developed...
...I myself have heard especially gifted Negroes compose songs in which the others joined, and to which all added as time went on...
...Certainly I never have heard it sung elsewhere, nor have I found anyone who has heard it...
...All is tinged with melancholy...
...They are more desirous of imitating the whites...
...and Negroes have told me that they themselves do not attach any meaning to them...
...I do not mean by this that the white man is without a sense of humor...
...They cannot let themselves go...
...For the ancestors of many of these whites came to America as indentured servants...
...Certainly, the folk-ways of neither Europe nor Africa have ever offered ideal conditions to which we may now fondly look back...
...musical arrangements by J. Rosamond Johnson...
...Although the words of Negro spirituals tend toward the personal rather than toward the communal, nevertheless, as the songs are developed in the process of being sung, they are unquestionably communal...
...If they had, there would have been less of a rush to this continent than past years have shown...
...I cannot forget the numerous occasions on which I was badly frightened by what I supposed was going te be a fight to the death among Negroes of my acquaintance...
...Perhaps that is because so large a proportion of the southern mountaineers is of Scotch ancestry...
...1.50...
...Nevertheless, the outsider who sees them at play does not usually carry away with him a very strong conviction as to either its naturalness or its spontaneity...
...His musical themes, even in the crude form in which he uses them, show great power and originality...
...In fact, often there is a shrewd twinkle in his eye, and he may be highly amused at himself and at others without his giving vent to his emotions in the uproarious fashion which is habitual with the Negro...
...Yet, I have felt always that they gained their full significance only when they were the outpouring of the religious experiences of the group...
...The primitive white as he is left in out-of-the-way nooks of the Appalachian mountains is stoical and suppressed to a degree...
...for both furnish an important part in our wonderfully rich treasure of AfroAmerican music...
...320 THE COMMONWEAL January 27, 1926 Yet, the Negroes laugh, even though the melody and rhythm have left me with an impression of plaintiveness and unreality...
...Just as a similar change is rapidly taking place among the white Baptists and Methodists of America, so, too, among their black brethren there is a marked tendency toward formality in worship...
...When the Southern railway was doubling its tracks between Charlottesville and Lynchburg, Virginia, on one occasion the money for paying off the hands did not arrive as usual...
...Neither can I see in the music of slavery any peculiarities which the music of the free Negro in Africa does not possess...
...for, even when the songs are repeated exactly, as in the case of graphophone records, the result is a type of music like nothing known to Europeans...
...Six months in jail means no more than six months of just what the lover is accustomed to every day—work on a farm...
...They are more self-consciously religious than they used to be...
...Something of the same kind I have seen since then among Latin peoples...
...This belief in eternal salvation is so deeply grounded in his nature that even the most sorrowladen of his songs shows its influence...
...Certainly it is not to be supposed that he, too, will not need to seek some sublimation of his hedonistic tendencies, tendencies which the white race never has been able to shake off even partially, much less completely...
...This loss of popularity is due to a change in attitude among the Negroes themselves...
...To say that the syllables are those of words, the meaning of which the Negroes have forgotten and that their purport is humorous, does not account for the retention of the laugh...
...Of a more broadly humorous nature is Muh Regulah Dram, from the same collection...
...Aw—Darlin', Hit's wuckin' on that county farm...
...The only type of Negro music which has suffered a serious decline is the spiritual...
...This leads me to say, however, that I do not find in Negro music the tragic quality which many attribute to it...
...and some that might well be expected to display greater soberness actually become jubilant as a result of the way in which they are sung...
...3-50...
...Hence, those who wish to sing Negro songs with anything approaching the Negro's barbaric unction hardly can avoid making a trip to the South and spending many hours in sweltering factories, blistering fields, and badly ventilated churches...
...Eight Negro Songs from Bedford County, Virginia, collected by Francis H. Abbot...
...As marking an advance in civilization, this new attitude is to be received with favor...
...Nevertheless, in a retention of some of these forms of community interest seems to lie at least one outlet for misdirected energy...
...Even when they are not sung with four-part harmonies, the effect is not that of singing in unison, because the different voices chime in more or less at will, and because there is prevalent a most peculiar and delightful manner of singing off-key and of introducing notes and embellishments which cannot be written in terms of our staff, and which very few white singers can even imitate...
...There are weirdness and pathos and mirth—but I do not find the genuine heartbreak...
...I always have been sorry that I did not write down both the words and the melody...
...Finally, they would seize a tobacco stick, a cutting knife, a stone, or anything else which happened to be at hand, and would make at each other...
...Every tobacco factory resounds with a richness of music most incongruous and weird when contrasted with the oppressive heat and the pungent smell of the place...
...Not another syllable...
...I cannot think of anything of its kind more replete with feeling than is Dat Lonesome Road from the Abbot collection...
...Neither do I as yet understand the laughter which follows the singing of many of the Negro songs...
...Religion as a racial experience is being suppressed...
...It would seem that, until now, his religion has saved him from despair by enabling him to find release for his emotional tensions and by offering him a recompense in the future for every ill which he has been forced to endure upon earth...
...However much one may lament this change, every thoughtful person must recognize that the Negro cannot advance socially and January 27, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL at the same time retain the habits of his ancestors...
...but, when the transition is made effectively, the result is most amusing...
Vol. 3 • January 1926 • No. 12
