THE AMERICAN FOLK SONG
How black folk sang their sorrow songs in the land of their
bondage and made this music the only American folk music.
“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
today 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 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.”[191]
Around the Negro folk-song there has arisen much of controversy and of
misunderstanding. For a long time they were utterly neglected; then every
once in a while and here and there they forced themselves upon popular
attention. In the thirties, they emerged and in tunes like “Near the lake
where droop the willow” and passed into current song or were caricatured
by the minstrels. Then came Stephen Foster who accompanied a mulatto maid
often to the Negro church and heard the black folk sing; he struck a new
note in songs like “Old Kentucky Home,” “Old Folks at Home” and “Nellie
was a Lady.” But it was left to war and emancipation to discover the real
primitive beauty of this music to the world.
When northern men and women who knew music, met the slaves at Port Royal
after its capture by Federal troops, they set down these songs in their
original form for the first time so that the world might hear and sing
them. The sea islands of the Carolinas where these meetings took place
“with no third witness” were filled with primitive black folk, uncouth
in appearance, and queer in language, but their singing was marvellous.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Miss McKim and others collected these
songs in 1867, making the first serious study of Negro American music.
The preface said:
“The musical capacity of the Negro race has been recognized for so many
years that it is hard to explain why no systematic effort has hitherto
been made to collect and preserve their melodies. More than thirty
years ago those plantation songs made their appearance which were so
extraordinarily popular for a while; and if ‘Coal-black Rose,’ ‘Zip
Coon’ and ‘Ole Virginny nebber tire’ have been succeeded by spurious
imitations, manufactured to suit the somewhat sentimental taste of our
community, the fact that these were called ‘Negro melodies’ was itself a
tribute to the musical genius of the race.
“The public had well-nigh forgotten these genuine slave songs, and with
them the creative power from which they sprung, when a fresh interest
was excited through the educational mission to the Port Royal Islands in
1861.”[192]
Still 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.” The story of the Fisk Jubilee
singers is romantic. In abandoned barracks at Nashville hundreds of
colored children were being taught and the dream of a Negro University
had risen in the minds of the white teachers. But even the lavish
contribution for missionary work, which followed the war, had by 1870
begun to fall off. It happened that the treasurer of Fisk, George L.
White, loved music. He began to instruct the Fisk students in singing
and he used the folk-songs. He met all sorts of difficulties. The white
people of the nation and especially the conventional church folk who were
sending missionary money, were not interested in “minstrel ditties.” The
colored people looked upon these songs as hateful relics of slavery.
Nevertheless, Mr. White persisted, gathered a pioneer band of singers and
in 1871 started north.
“It was the sixth day of October in the year of our Lord, one thousand
eight hundred and seventy-one, when George L. White started out from
Fisk School with his eleven students to raise money, that Fisk might
live. Professor Adam K. Spence, who was principal of the school, gave
Mr. White all the money in his possession save one dollar, which he
held back, that the treasury might not be empty. While friends and
parents wept, waved, and feared, the train puffed out of the station.
All sorts of difficulties, obstacles, oppositions and failures faced
them until through wonderful persistence, they arrived at Oberlin, Ohio.
Here the National Council of Congregational Churches was in session.
After repeated efforts, Mr. White gained permission for his singers to
render one song. Many of the members of the Council objected vigorously
to having such singers. During the time of the session the weather
had been dark and cloudy. The sun had not shone one moment, it had not
cast one ray upon the village. The singers went into the gallery of the
church, unobserved by all save the moderator and a few who were on the
rostrum. At a lull in the proceeding, there floated sweetly to the ears
of the audience the measures of ‘Steal Away to Jesus.’ Suddenly the sun
broke through the clouds, shone through the windows upon the singers,
and verily they were a heavenly choir. For a time the Council forgot its
business and called for more and more. It was at this point that Henry
Ward Beecher almost demanded of Mr. White that he cancel all engagements
and come straight to his church in Brooklyn....”
The New York papers ridiculed and sneered at Beecher’s “nigger
minstrels.” But Beecher stuck to his plan and it was only a matter of
hearing them once when audiences went into ecstasies.
“When the Metropolitan newspapers called the company ‘Nigger Minstrels,’
Mr. White was face to face with a situation as serious as it was
awkward. His company had no appropriate name, and the odium of the title
attributed by the New York newspapers pained him intensely. If they were
to be known as ‘Nigger Minstrels,’ they could never realize his vision;
they were both handicapped and checkmated, and their career was dead....
The suggestiveness of the Hebrew Jubilee had been borne in upon his mind
and with joy of a deep conviction he exclaimed, ‘Children, you are the
Jubilee Singers’.”[193]
For seven years the career of this company of Jubilee Singers was a
continual triumph. They crowded the concert halls of New England; they
began to send money back to Fisk; they went to Great Britain and sang
before Queen Victoria, Lord Shaftesbury and Mr. Gladstone. Gladstone
cried: “It’s wonderful!” Queen Victoria wept. Moody, the evangelist,
brought them again and again to his London meetings, and the singers
were loaded with gifts. Then they went to Germany, and again Kings and
peasants listened to them. In seven years they were able to pay not
only all of their own expenses but to send $150,000 in cash to Fisk
University, and out of this money was built Jubilee Hall, on the spot
that was once a slave market. “There it stands, lifting up its grateful
head to God in His heaven.”
For a long time after some people continued to sneer at Negro music. They
declared it was a “mere imitation,” that it had little intrinsic value,
that it was not the music of Negroes at all. Gradually, however, this
attitude has completely passed and today critics vie with each other in
giving tribute to this wonderful gift of the black man to America.
Damrosch says: “The Negro’s music isn’t ours, it is the Negro’s. It
has become a popular form of musical expression and is interesting,
but it is not ours. Nothing more characteristic of a race exists, but
it is characteristic of the Negro, not the American race. Through it a
primitive people poured out its emotions with wonderful expressiveness.
It no more expresses our emotions than the Indian music does.”
Recently, numbers of serious studies of the Negro folk-song have been
made. James Weldon Johnson says: “In the ‘spirituals,’ or slave songs,
the Negro has given America not only its only folk-songs, but a mass of
noble music. I never think of this music but that I am struck by the
wonder, the miracle of its production. How did the men who originated
these songs manage to do it? The sentiments are easily accounted for;
they are, for the most part, taken from the Bible. But the melodies,
where did they come from? Some of them so weirdly sweet, and others so
wonderfully strong. Take, for instance, ‘Go Down, Moses’; I doubt that
there is a stronger theme in the whole musical literature of the world.
“It is to be noted that whereas the chief characteristic of Ragtime is
rhythm, the chief characteristic of the ‘spirituals’ is melody. The
melodies of ‘Steal Away to Jesus,’ ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,’ ‘Nobody
Knows de Trouble I See,’ ‘I couldn’t hear Nobody Pray,’ ‘Deep River,’
‘O, Freedom Over Me,’ and many others of these songs possess a beauty
that is—what shall I say? Poignant. In the riotous rhythms of Ragtime
the Negro expressed his irrepressible buoyancy, his keen response to the
sheer joy of living; in the ‘spirituals’ he voiced his sense of beauty
and his deep religious feeling.”[194]
H. E. Krehbiel says: “There was sunshine as well as gloom in the life
of the black slaves in the Southern colonies and States, and so we have
songs which are gay as well as grave; but as a rule the finest songs are
the fruits of suffering undergone and the hope of the deliverance from
bondage which was to come with translation to heaven after death. The
oldest of them are the most beautiful, and many of the most striking
have never yet been collected, partly because they contained elements,
melodic as well as rhythmical, which baffled the ingenuity of the early
collectors. Unfortunately, trained musicians have never entered upon the
field, and it is to be feared that it is now too late. The peculiarities
which the collaborators on ‘Slave Songs of the United States’
recognized, but could not imprison on the written page, were elements
which would have been of especial interest to the student of art.
“Is it not the merest quibble to say that these songs are not American?
They were created in America under American influences and by people who
are Americans in the same sense that any other element of our population
is American—every element except the aboriginal.... Is it only an African
who can sojourn here without becoming an American and producing American
things; is it a matter of length of stay in the country? Scarcely that;
or some Negroes would have at least as good a claim on the title as the
descendants of the Puritans and Pilgrims. Negroes figure in the accounts
of his voyages to America made by Columbus.... A year before the English
colonists landed on Plymouth Rock Negroes were sold into servitude in
Virginia.”[195]
The most gifted and sympathetic student of the folk-song in Africa and
America was Natalie Curtis, and it is scarcely necessary to add to what
she has so carefully and sympathetically written. She has traced the
connection between African and Afro-American music which has always been
assumed but never carefully proven. The African rhythm, through the use
of the drum as a leading instrument, produced musical emphasis which we
call syncopation. Primitive music usually shows rhythm and melody of the
voice sung in unison. But in Africa, part singing was developed long
before it appeared in Europe. The great difference between the music of
Africa and the music of Europe lies in rhythm; in Europe the music is
accented on the regular beats of the music while in Africa the accents
fall often on the unstressed beats. It is this that coming down through
the Negro folk-song in America has produced what is known as ragtime.
Mrs. Curtis Burlin shows that the folk-song of the African in America
can be traced direct to Africa: “As a creator of beauty the black man is
capable of contributing to the great art of the world.
“The Negro’s pronounced gift for music is today widely recognized. That
gift, brought to America in slave-ships, was nurtured by that mother of
woe, human slavery, till out of suffering and toil there sprang a music
which speaks to the heart of mankind—the prayer-song of the American
Negro. In Africa is rooted the parent stem of that out-flowering of Negro
folk-song in other lands.
“Through the Negro this country is vocal with a folk-music intimate,
complete and beautiful. It is the Negro music with its by-product of
‘ragtime’ that today most widely influences the popular song-life of
America, and Negro rhythms have indeed captivated the world at large. Nor
may we foretell the impress that the voice of the slave will leave upon
the art of the country—a poetic justice, this! For the Negro everywhere
discriminated against, segregated and shunned, mobbed and murdered—he
it is whose melodies are on all our lips, and whose rhythms impel our
marching feet in a ‘war for democracy.’ The irresistible music that wells
up from this sunny and unresentful people is hummed and whistled, danced
to and marched to, laughed over and wept over, by high and low and rich
and poor throughout the land. The downtrodden black man whose patient
religious faith has kept his heart still unembittered, is fast becoming
the singing voice of all America. And in his song we hear a prophecy of
the dignity and worth of Negro genius.”[196]
The Negro folk-song entered the Church and became the prayer song and
the sorrow song, still with its haunting melody but surrounded by the
inhibitions of a cheap theology and a conventional morality. But the
musical soul of a race unleashed itself violently from these bonds and
in the saloons and brothels of the Mississippi bottoms and gulf coast
flared to that crimson license of expression known as “ragtime,” “jazz”
and the more singular “blues” retaining with all their impossible words
the glamour of rhythm and wild joy. White composers hastily followed with
songs like “A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” and numerous successors
in popular favor.
Out of ragtime grew a further development through both white and black
composers. The “blues,” a curious and intriguing variety of love song
from the levees of the Mississippi, became popular and was spread by the
first colored man who was able to set it down, W. C. Handy of Memphis.
Other men, white and colored, from Stephen Foster to our day, have
taken another side of Negro music and developed its haunting themes
and rippling melody into popular songs and into high and fine forms of
modern music, until today the influence of the Negro reaches every part
of American music, of many foreign masters like Dvorak; and certainly no
program of concert music could be given in America without voicing Negro
composers and Negro themes.
We can best end this chapter with the word of a colored man: “But there
is something deeper than the sensuousness of beauty that makes for the
possibilities of the Negro in the realm of the arts, and that is the soul
of the race. The wail of the old melodies and the plaintive quality that
is ever present in the Negro voice are but the reflection of a background
of tragedy. No race can rise to the greatest heights of art until it has
yearned and suffered. The Russians are a case in point. Such has been
their background in oppression and striving that their literature and
art are today marked by an unmistakable note of power. The same future
beckons to the American Negro. There is something very elemental about
the heart of the race, something that finds its origin in the African
forest, in the sighing of the night wind, and in the falling of the
stars. There is something grim and stern about it all, too, something
that speaks of the lash, of the child torn from its mother’s bosom, of
the dead body riddled with bullets and swinging all night from a limb by
the roadside.”[197]