MUSIC AND NEGROES

...Rowing songs were probably the earliest of the secular work tunes...

...William Levi Dawson, director of the Tuskegee Choir for many years, also worked exclusively in the folk idiom...

...They represent a means of communication with the inarticulate and keep alive a vibrant hope for the future: Paul and Silas bound in jail Ain't nobody 'round to go their bail...

...early promise near fulfillment...

...They are also joyous songs whose infectious, syncopated rhythm make people tap their feet and feel good...

...If their creative significance falls short of Russian achievements from a world point of view, this is understandable when one realizes the racial obstacles which yet had to be overcome...

...Still is the most prolific of all Negro composers and has worked with acclaim in all media...

...Done made my vow to the Lord And I never will turn back I will go—/ shall go To see what the end will be...

...Fanny Kemble and Charles Lyell spoke of the "wild and weird" songs of Negro boatmen...

...Men of culture with the Union armies, such as William Allen and Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higgin-son, who published a sympathetic essay, "Negro Spirituals," in the Atlantic Monthly in June, 1867, were among the first to bring them to the fuller attention of the public...

...Today, the script for the drama of freedom is being forged in the church...

...When a great music, steeped in the idiomatic characteristics of the Negro, is writ-ten, probably a Negro will achieve it...

...Covering a total span of nearly a century, they bridged the gap between raw folk music and art music...

...Gang songs achieved great significance also—the railroad section songs preserved by Odum and Johnson in their book, Negro Workaday Songs, and in John and Alan Lomax's Folk Songs in the U.S.A...

...As arranger, composer, and soloist, Henry T. Burleigh was a trail blazer...

...others are playing an important role in the growth of an indigenous American music...

...There are many other young Negro composers who are writing with in-creasingly creative significance...

...The David Bispham medal was awarded White for his Ouanga, an opera based on Haitian life...

...Spiritually expressive of the Negro and deeply representative of the soil from which it sprang, born out of soul-trying times of the remote past, his music is now a bulwark of faith and inspiration...

...The concern should be that opportunity for growth in techniques and growth in musical stature leads to works of clear artistic vision, drawing nourishment from any source...

...From her description we now recognize the familiar "call and response pattern" so characteristic of African singing...

...Thanks to the devoted interest of the Lomax brothers, many old songs in this tradition have been rescued that otherwise would have been lost forever...

...Still has written two operas, Blue Steel and Troubled Island...

...Each speaks of resemblances to songs with which they were familiar—Scotch and Irish airs, camp meeting tunes, and hymns...

...They received recognition throughout America and in Europe— and it must be remembered that this was the Europe of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, Jenny Lind, and Patti...

...This new religion of freedom makes powerful use of the old songs, sometimes with new texts...

...solo and chorus follow each other instantly...

...Robert Nathaniel Dett, like Burleigh, turned his attention to making arrangements—primarily choral— of the Negro spirituals...

...In late years, controversy has surrounded the sources of this great body of music...

...They were unrecorded, and many have been lost...

...When these songs were first brought to national and world-wide attention by the famous Fisk Jubilee Singers in 1871, the New York Tribune called them "The only truly, creative school of American music...

...They were used to relieve the tedium of hard work and constitute the prime impulse for the remarkable growth and wealth of the Afro-American folk song...

...If the "Russian Five" achieved success and recognition for their work in the folk-idiom of their country, then five Negro composers born after 1866 deserve the title, "Afro-American Five...

...Bal-lanta Taylor, the noted African musicologist, describes work songs this way: "Music in Africa is not cultivated for its own sake...

...It was through his guidance, both as singer and musical interpreter, that Dvorak developed his initial interest in the Negro spiritual...

...Like Dett, he was impelled by the desire to identify himself as a composer through the folk idiom of his own people...

...It is even more remarkable that so many could merit recognition from the white press and from cultured persons throughout the country...

...The concern, however, is not that Negro composers write great Negro music...

...Some investigators have felt that the spirituals were imitations of the religious folk song of the white man in the South...

...Today we call it "jazz...

...In many respects R. Nathaniel Dett bears a strong resemblance in his approach to musical composition to the Hungarian, Bela Bartok...

...Historically, little is known about the Negro and his singing on Southern plantations prior to the Civil War...

...The men of the "Afro-American Five" were clearly harbingers of a new idiomatic expression...

...The spiritual strength of such songs as I'm So Glad Trouble Don't Last Always, and Lord, I Want to Be a Christian, the moving urgency of Deep River, the assurance of We are Climbing Jacob's ladder, every round goes higher and higher, and the magnificent symbolism of Go down, Moses—way down in Egypt land, tell ole Pharoah to let my people go are the root essence of American ideals...

...Allen, Ware, and Garrison mention the use of the spirituals as working songs, whose purpose it was to lighten the load...

...In the dynamics of this changing world, where anxiety and fear are manifest in every act or decision, the Negro's gift of music to America may well be the one thing that endures, the constant that can forge unity out of disunity, enrich and give true purpose to the highest ideals of our democracy...

...These songs were used for rowing, and all forms of field work...

...Many of his compositions were played by Kreisler and other noted violinists...

...They were educated in mind, cultured and refined in spirit, highly trained in their art, and recognized for the quality of their creative work...

...Writers like Mrs...

...The work songs are probably the most important of this valuable body of non-religious songs...

...It is always used in connection with dances or to accompany workmen...

...Only in this way can music be produced which will be not so much a reflection of Negro characteristics as an expression of universal emotion...

...It is remarkable that, in spite of slavery and almost impossible limitations of opportunity and education, so many Negro musicians of real ability and training were able to develop...

...In the tradition of the call and response, the words were improvised by the leader and the group responded with simple ejaculatory phrases representing the moment group action begins, straining at the oars or pulling the rope...

...William Grant Still is the first true symphonic composer among Negro musicians...

...Here, again, as in the shanties and the stevedore songs, we see African influence—unison singing, the call and response pattern, syncopated, rhythmic accentuation in the voice and physical motion...

...the chorus is in many instances composed of two or three ejaculatory words, answered by the workmen...

...A spiritual like Git on Board Little Children, sung faster than traditionally and accompanied by poly-rhythmic hand-clapping, became a jazzed-up version of the traditional...

...he opened doors that would never close again...

...Together, they are sparking the most significant civil rights movement since labor's organizing drive in the Thirties...

...It seems ironic that it fell to the lot of the Negro slave to develop America's most original and influential folk songs and, thus, lay the foundation for a native American music...

...The Negro slave found solace in his religion...

...They run the gamut of human emotional expression—except those emotions expressing bitterness or revenge...

...We owe a great debt to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, for the survival and worldwide recognition of the spiritual...

...They are the embodiment of genuine folk quality...

...With the valuable encouragment of Howard Hanson, the distinguished director of the Eastman School of Music, Still's Afro-American Symphony came to public notice...

...Second generation Negroes, attempting to forget everything connected with the tragic suffering and the horror of slavery, were "ashamed" of these songs and looked upon them with disdain...

...This was probably due to increased contact with the hymns of the camp meeting and with whites, and the influence of certain Negro institutions such as Fisk University and Tuskegee and Hampton Institutes...

...Today there are a growing number of outstanding Negro composers whose presence on the American musical scene is an augury for the future...

...While the scope and significance of his creative work remain small and restricted, his arrangements of Negro spirituals for chorus are gems...

...At a time when their folk music had not yet received recognition, Negro musicians had already been acclaimed...

...Clarence Cameron White was a competent violinist-composer who used native folk idioms as the source for his art forms...

...Some are composing without regard to racial backgrounds...

...ragtime translates the other six days of the week...

...Fanny Kemble, one of the first British actresses to appear in the United States, wrote one of the earliest and most detailed accounts of Negroes on Southern plantations...

...among them are Mark Fax, Howard Swanson, Ulysses Kay, Julia Perry, and John Work Jr...

...A writer here and there jotted down observations in his journal, but not until the Civil War did the songs of the Negro and the spirituals, in particular, begin to stir enthusiasm and widespread interest...

...Ragtime and the blues are extremely important in any consideration of the development of popular music and jazz...

...the church was his safety valve...

...They were Henry Thackeray Burleigh, Clarence Cameron White, R. Nathaniel Dett, William Grant Still, and William Levi Dawson...

...The Hyer Sisters, Thomas Bowers, Madame Selika, and Sisseretta Jones, called the "Black Patti," were among the noted performers of the day...

...Louis Blues, believed that "spirituals, ragtime, and jazz form one continuous sequence of Negro music, being different facets of the same jewel...

...In his Tin Pan Alley, Isaac Goldberg perceptively calls it "a balancing of psychological accounts...

...Spirituals, like all cultural developments, doubtless have many sources...

...They are preserved in recordings in the Library of Congress Archives and in a series of Folkway Records...

...Other newspapers reported that "gray haired men wept like children" as they listened to these young students sing the songs of their fathers...

...The rhythmic interest of the song impels them to work and takes away the feeling of drudgery . . . it is mainly rhythmic—short phrases mostly of two or three bars...

...Sorrow songs, or spirituals, the name given to this great body of religious folk music, represent the poignant expression of mass suffering and mass yearning...

...Others have upheld the theory that the "Negro spiritual and all Afro-American music, in general, embodies traits that are fundamentally of African origin though blended with Anglo-Saxon elements...

...Compared favorably with the great sopranos of the day—Sonntag, Patti, and Jenny Lind—her voice had a remarkable compass of three and a quarter octaves...

...She confesses, however, that she heard a number of Negro songs that were "extraordinarily wild and unaccountable" with no recognizable counterpart in any songs familiar to her...

...These sorrow songs, according to leaders in the movement, generate a sense of unity, purpose, and courage...

...But Dett went further than Burleigh in the realm of pure composition...

...WARNER LAWSON is the dean of the College of Fine Arts at Howard University...

...Dvorak's use of the idiom in his major works and his sponsorship of the spirituals stimulated among white and Negro composers a re-birth of concern for the richness of the Negro folk heritage...

...Like Bartok, he made a study of the folk music of his people and he published collections of this music (Religious Folk Songs of the Negro...

...They were never written down...

...Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on...

...There one hears the voice—not merely "influence"— of Dett's Negro heritage...

...Of Still's three ballets, the most successful one, Lenox Avenue, depicts Negro life in Harlem...

...With Burleigh as the base, and Still at the apex, these five Negro composers achieved universal respect for their work and admiration for their creativity...

...As early as 1851, twelve years before the Emancipation Proclamation, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, called the "Black Swan," made a sensational debut in Buffalo...

...Henry Thackeray Burleigh, born just three years after the Civil War, was a distinguished musician, a singer, and a composer...

...In large measure, the creative output of the "Afro-American Five" is as nationalistic as the work of the "Russian Five...

...Rhythm and the instinctive use of the call and response pattern clearly stem from Africa...

...The black stevedores, loading and unloading at the wharves in Philadelphia and Baltimore, were noted for their songs, one man taking the burden of the song and the others answering with the chorus...

...Alan Lomax has referred to the work song as a "spiritual speed-up...

...In the first collection they were called Negro ballads...

...Gradually, unison singing, characteristic of African custom, gave way immediately following the Civil War to part singing...

...Alain Locke, the distinguished Negro scholar, concluded that ragtime is found lurking beneath the ecstasy and rhythms of the more jubilant songs to the Lord, just as in the slower-paced spirituals one hears the mood, though not the peculiar pattern, of the blues...

...All the elements of religious ecstasy, suffering, faith, tragedy, and humor are present...

...The spirituals translate the Bible...

...Music and Negroes by WARNER LAWSON Out of the frustration, suffering, and resentment of human bondage, the Negro slave added the distinctive heritage of a great folk music to the white culture of the United States...

...A second symphony is subtitled Song of a New Race...

...Fourth generation youngsters, as the New York Times in its issue of August 20, 1962, puts it, "are not thinking about pie in the sky, in the bye and bye, but a piece of that pie now...

...These songs, as is customary with all folk songs, were passed in the oral tradition from generation to generation...

...The latter, with a libretto by the Negro poet, Langston Hughes, was produced at New York's City Center in 1949...

...Handy, moreover, insisted that ragtime essentially is nothing more than a pepped-up secular version of the spirituals...

...This great gift of song has come full circle—for these same songs, which for years had gnawed at America's conscience, have become now a vital and powerful weapon in the hands of the Freedom Riders and the "Sit-In Kids...

...Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen, Were You There When they Crucified My Lord, Joshua Fit De Battle of Jericho, and Lil' David Play on Your Harp—these are sad songs that contain all the hopes, dreams, pain, and sorrow of bondage...

...his suite for violin, From the Cotton Fields, was valued for "real imagination and refined musicianship...

...They are not, however, a part of the original folk contribution but are a later adaptation of the same folk spirit...

...His arrangements of spirituals were musically sound...

...They are the philosophical expression of one man's reaction to a given situation or mood: I'm laughing, jes' to keep from crying or Got the blues Too damned mean to cry W. C. Handy, father of the blues and composer of the indestructible St...

...are fine examples...

...Whatever the common base, it is evident that the Negro slave had a transfusive quality that enabled him to absorb the national spirit from the soil and create something original and artistic containing universal appeal...

...They are using hymns and spirituals as the emotional base for a holy crusade—a holy crusade whose ultimate goal is freedom...

...The first collection of spirituals, Slave Songs of the United States, was published in 1867, edited by William Frances Allen, Charles Pickford Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison...

...The work of William Grant Still, American and modern in every respect, broad and varied in type and expressiveness, represents an...

...They experimented successfully with the folk idiom in the large art forms...

...The chain-gang songs are another vital facet of the complex of songs that constitute the Negro's contribution to the folk culture of America...

...Unfortunately, the earliest writers on Negro folk songs stressed the religious songs and neglected his secular songs...

...They are uniquely and characteristically Negro in their creative expression and simple, direct melodies—weirdly sweet at times, and at others, wonderfully strong...

...In Handy's minstrel days they called it "jubing" from the word "jubilee...