[Illustration]
They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days—Sorrow
Songs—for they were weary at heart. And so before each thought that I
have written in this book I have set a phrase, a haunting echo of these
weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men. Ever
since I was a child these songs have stirred me strangely. They came
out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them
as of me and of mine. Then in after years when I came to Nashville I
saw the great temple builded of these songs towering over the pale
city. To me Jubilee Hall seemed ever made of the songs themselves, and
its bricks were red with the blood and dust of toil. Out of them rose
for me morning, noon, and night, bursts of wonderful melody, full of
the voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the voices of the past.
Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God
himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has
expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so
by fateful chance the Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the
slave—stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the
most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas.
It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above
all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but
notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of
the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.
Away back in the thirties the melody of these slave songs stirred the
nation, but the songs were soon half forgotten. Some, like “Near the
lake where drooped the willow,” passed into current airs and their
source was forgotten; others were caricatured on the “minstrel” stage
and their memory died away. Then in war-time came the singular Port
Royal experiment after the capture of Hilton Head, and perhaps for the
first time the North met the Southern slave face to face and heart to
heart with no third witness. The Sea Islands of the Carolinas, where
they met, were filled with a black folk of primitive type, touched and
moulded less by the world about them than any others outside the Black
Belt. Their appearance was uncouth, their language funny, but their
hearts were human and their singing stirred men with a mighty power.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson hastened to tell of these songs, and Miss
McKim and others urged upon the world their rare beauty. But the world
listened only half credulously until the Fisk Jubilee Singers sang the
slave songs so deeply into the world’s heart that it can never wholly
forget them again.
There was once a blacksmith’s son born at Cadiz, New York, who in the
changes of time taught school in Ohio and helped defend Cincinnati from
Kirby Smith. Then he fought at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and
finally served in the Freedmen’s Bureau at Nashville. Here he formed a
Sunday-school class of black children in 1866, and sang with them and
taught them to sing. And then they taught him to sing, and when once
the glory of the Jubilee songs passed into the soul of George L. White,
he knew his life-work was to let those Negroes sing to the world as
they had sung to him. So in 1871 the pilgrimage of the Fisk Jubilee
Singers began. North to Cincinnati they rode,—four half-clothed black
boys and five girl-women,—led by a man with a cause and a purpose. They
stopped at Wilberforce, the oldest of Negro schools, where a black
bishop blessed them. Then they went, fighting cold and starvation, shut
out of hotels, and cheerfully sneered at, ever northward; and ever the
magic of their song kept thrilling hearts, until a burst of applause in
the Congregational Council at Oberlin revealed them to the world. They
came to New York and Henry Ward Beecher dared to welcome them, even
though the metropolitan dailies sneered at his “Nigger Minstrels.” So
their songs conquered till they sang across the land and across the
sea, before Queen and Kaiser, in Scotland and Ireland, Holland and
Switzerland. Seven years they sang, and brought back a hundred and
fifty thousand dollars to found Fisk University.
Since their day they have been imitated—sometimes well, by the singers
of Hampton and Atlanta, sometimes ill, by straggling quartettes.
Caricature has sought again to spoil the quaint beauty of the music,
and has filled the air with many debased melodies which vulgar ears
scarce know from the real. But the true Negro folk-song still lives in
the hearts of those who have heard them truly sung and in the hearts of
the Negro people.
What are these songs, and what do they mean? I know little of music and
can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something of men, and
knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of the
slave to the world. They tell us in these eager days that life was
joyous to the black slave, careless and happy. I can easily believe
this of some, of many. But not all the past South, though it rose from
the dead, can gainsay the heart-touching witness of these songs. They
are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment;
they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer
world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.
The songs are indeed the siftings of centuries; the music is far more
ancient than the words, and in it we can trace here and there signs of
development. My grandfather’s grandmother was seized by an evil Dutch
trader two centuries ago; and coming to the valleys of the Hudson and
Housatonic, black, little, and lithe, she shivered and shrank in the
harsh north winds, looked longingly at the hills, and often crooned a
heathen melody to the child between her knees, thus:
[Illustration]
The child sang it to his children and they to their children’s
children, and so two hundred years it has travelled down to us and we
sing it to our children, knowing as little as our fathers what its
words may mean, but knowing well the meaning of its music.
This was primitive African music; it may be seen in larger form in the
strange chant which heralds “The Coming of John”:
“You may bury me in the East,
You may bury me in the West,
But I’ll hear the trumpet sound in that morning,”
—the voice of exile.
Ten master songs, more or less, one may pluck from the forest of
melody-songs of undoubted Negro origin and wide popular currency, and
songs peculiarly characteristic of the slave. One of these I have just
mentioned. Another whose strains begin this book is “Nobody knows the
trouble I’ve seen.” When, struck with a sudden poverty, the United
States refused to fulfill its promises of land to the freedmen, a
brigadier-general went down to the Sea Islands to carry the news. An
old woman on the outskirts of the throng began singing this song; all
the mass joined with her, swaying. And the soldier wept.
The third song is the cradle-song of death which all men know,—“Swing
low, sweet chariot,”—whose bars begin the life story of “Alexander
Crummell.” Then there is the song of many waters, “Roll, Jordan, roll,”
a mighty chorus with minor cadences. There were many songs of the
fugitive like that which opens “The Wings of Atalanta,” and the more
familiar “Been a-listening.” The seventh is the song of the End and the
Beginning—“My Lord, what a mourning! when the stars begin to fall”; a
strain of this is placed before “The Dawn of Freedom.” The song of
groping—“My way’s cloudy”—begins “The Meaning of Progress”; the ninth
is the song of this chapter—“Wrestlin’ Jacob, the day is a-breaking,”—a
paean of hopeful strife. The last master song is the song of
songs—“Steal away,”—sprung from “The Faith of the Fathers.”
There are many others of the Negro folk-songs as striking and
characteristic as these, as, for instance, the three strains in the
third, eighth, and ninth chapters; and others I am sure could easily
make a selection on more scientific principles. There are, too, songs
that seem to be a step removed from the more primitive types: there is
the maze-like medley, “Bright sparkles,” one phrase of which heads “The
Black Belt”; the Easter carol, “Dust, dust and ashes”; the dirge, “My
mother’s took her flight and gone home”; and that burst of melody
hovering over “The Passing of the First-Born”—“I hope my mother will be
there in that beautiful world on high.”
These represent a third step in the development of the slave song, of
which “You may bury me in the East” is the first, and songs like “March
on” (chapter six) and “Steal away” are the second. The first is African
music, the second Afro-American, while the third is a blending of Negro
music with the music heard in the foster land. The result is still
distinctively Negro and the method of blending original, but the
elements are both Negro and Caucasian. One might go further and find a
fourth step in this development, where the songs of white America have
been distinctively influenced by the slave songs or have incorporated
whole phrases of Negro melody, as “Swanee River” and “Old Black Joe.”
Side by side, too, with the growth has gone the debasements and
imitations—the Negro “minstrel” songs, many of the “gospel” hymns, and
some of the contemporary “coon” songs,—a mass of music in which the
novice may easily lose himself and never find the real Negro melodies.
In these songs, I have said, the slave spoke to the world. Such a
message is naturally veiled and half articulate. Words and music have
lost each other and new and cant phrases of a dimly understood theology
have displaced the older sentiment. Once in a while we catch a strange
word of an unknown tongue, as the “Mighty Myo,” which figures as a
river of death; more often slight words or mere doggerel are joined to
music of singular sweetness. Purely secular songs are few in number,
partly because many of them were turned into hymns by a change of
words, partly because the frolics were seldom heard by the stranger,
and the music less often caught. Of nearly all the songs, however, the
music is distinctly sorrowful. The ten master songs I have mentioned
tell in word and music of trouble and exile, of strife and hiding; they
grope toward some unseen power and sigh for rest in the End.
The words that are left to us are not without interest, and, cleared of
evident dross, they conceal much of real poetry and meaning beneath
conventional theology and unmeaning rhapsody. Like all primitive folk,
the slave stood near to Nature’s heart. Life was a “rough and rolling
sea” like the brown Atlantic of the Sea Islands; the “Wilderness” was
the home of God, and the “lonesome valley” led to the way of life.
“Winter’ll soon be over,” was the picture of life and death to a
tropical imagination. The sudden wild thunderstorms of the South awed
and impressed the Negroes,—at times the rumbling seemed to them
“mournful,” at times imperious:
“My Lord calls me,
He calls me by the thunder,
The trumpet sounds it in my soul.”
The monotonous toil and exposure is painted in many words. One sees the
ploughmen in the hot, moist furrow, singing:
“Dere’s no rain to wet you,
Dere’s no sun to burn you,
Oh, push along, believer,
I want to go home.”
The bowed and bent old man cries, with thrice-repeated wail:
“O Lord, keep me from sinking down,”
and he rebukes the devil of doubt who can whisper:
“Jesus is dead and God’s gone away.”
Yet the soul-hunger is there, the restlessness of the savage, the wail
of the wanderer, and the plaint is put in one little phrase:
[Illustration]
Over the inner thoughts of the slaves and their relations one with
another the shadow of fear ever hung, so that we get but glimpses here
and there, and also with them, eloquent omissions and silences. Mother
and child are sung, but seldom father; fugitive and weary wanderer call
for pity and affection, but there is little of wooing and wedding; the
rocks and the mountains are well known, but home is unknown. Strange
blending of love and helplessness sings through the refrain:
“Yonder’s my ole mudder,
Been waggin’ at de hill so long;
’Bout time she cross over,
Git home bime-by.”
Elsewhere comes the cry of the “motherless” and the “Farewell,
farewell, my only child.”
Love-songs are scarce and fall into two categories—the frivolous and
light, and the sad. Of deep successful love there is ominous silence,
and in one of the oldest of these songs there is a depth of history and
meaning:
[Illustration]
A black woman said of the song, “It can’t be sung without a full heart
and a troubled sperrit.” The same voice sings here that sings in the
German folk-song:
“Jetz Geh i’ an’s brunele, trink’ aber net.”
Of death the Negro showed little fear, but talked of it familiarly and
even fondly as simply a crossing of the waters, perhaps—who knows?—back
to his ancient forests again. Later days transfigured his fatalism, and
amid the dust and dirt the toiler sang:
“Dust, dust and ashes, fly over my grave,
But the Lord shall bear my spirit home.”
The things evidently borrowed from the surrounding world undergo
characteristic change when they enter the mouth of the slave.
Especially is this true of Bible phrases. “Weep, O captive daughter of
Zion,” is quaintly turned into “Zion, weep-a-low,” and the wheels of
Ezekiel are turned every way in the mystic dreaming of the slave, till
he says:
“There’s a little wheel a-turnin’ in-a-my heart.”
As in olden time, the words of these hymns were improvised by some
leading minstrel of the religious band. The circumstances of the
gathering, however, the rhythm of the songs, and the limitations of
allowable thought, confined the poetry for the most part to single or
double lines, and they seldom were expanded to quatrains or longer
tales, although there are some few examples of sustained efforts,
chiefly paraphrases of the Bible. Three short series of verses have
always attracted me,—the one that heads this chapter, of one line of
which Thomas Wentworth Higginson has fittingly said, “Never, it seems
to me, since man first lived and suffered was his infinite longing for
peace uttered more plaintively.” The second and third are descriptions
of the Last Judgment,—the one a late improvisation, with some traces of
outside influence:
“Oh, the stars in the elements are falling,
And the moon drips away into blood,
And the ransomed of the Lord are returning unto God,
Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
And the other earlier and homelier picture from the low coast lands:
“Michael, haul the boat ashore,
Then you’ll hear the horn they blow,
Then you’ll hear the trumpet sound,
Trumpet sound the world around,
Trumpet sound for rich and poor,
Trumpet sound the Jubilee,
Trumpet sound for you and me.”
Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a
faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair
change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in
life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless
justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is
always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their
souls and not by their skins. Is such a hope justified? Do the Sorrow
Songs sing true?
The silently growing assumption of this age is that the probation of
races is past, and that the backward races of to-day are of proven
inefficiency and not worth the saving. Such an assumption is the
arrogance of peoples irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds
of men. A thousand years ago such an assumption, easily possible, would
have made it difficult for the Teuton to prove his right to life. Two
thousand years ago such dogmatism, readily welcome, would have scouted
the idea of blond races ever leading civilization. So wofully
unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the
meaning of “swift” and “slow” in human doing, and the limits of human
perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of
science. Why should Æschylus have sung two thousand years before
Shakespeare was born? Why has civilization flourished in Europe, and
flickered, flamed, and died in Africa? So long as the world stands
meekly dumb before such questions, shall this nation proclaim its
ignorance and unhallowed prejudices by denying freedom of opportunity
to those who brought the Sorrow Songs to the Seats of the Mighty?
Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were
here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours:
a gift of story and song—soft, stirring melody in an ill-harmonized and
unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the
wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast
economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could
have done it; the third, a gift of the Spirit. Around us the history of
the land has centred for thrice a hundred years; out of the nation’s
heart we have called all that was best to throttle and subdue all that
was worst; fire and blood, prayer and sacrifice, have billowed over
this people, and they have found peace only in the altars of the God of
Right. Nor has our gift of the Spirit been merely passive. Actively we
have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation,—we
fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with
theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong,
careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy, and Truth, lest the
nation be smitten with a curse. Our song, our toil, our cheer, and
warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood. Are not
these gifts worth the giving? Is not this work and striving? Would
America have been America without her Negro people?
Even so is the hope that sang in the songs of my fathers well sung. If
somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good,
pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend
the Veil and the prisoned shall go free. Free, free as the sunshine
trickling down the morning into these high windows of mine, free as
yonder fresh young voices welling up to me from the caverns of brick
and mortar below—swelling with song, instinct with life, tremulous
treble and darkening bass. My children, my little children, are singing
to the sunshine, and thus they sing:
[Illustration]
And the traveller girds himself, and sets his face toward the Morning,
and goes his way.