The Southern Workman
[The Southern Workman has some African-American articles and music from 1871 to 1939. Attached to this page are some of the articles and music. Below is a review of Negro and His Folklore in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals which details addtional sources of African-American songs. R. Matteson 2011]
The Southern Workman (1872-1939), established by Samuel Armstrong to acquaint the public with the aims, purposes, and methods of education adopted by Hampton Institute. It contains direct reports from the heart of black and Indian populations with pictures of reservation, cabin, and plantation life; local sketches; a running account of the Hampton School; and studies in black and Indian folklore and history.
A subject index to religious articles (1872-1936) from the Southern Workman has entries under "Negro Churches," "Negro Ministers," "Religion," "Religion in Education," "Hampton Institute Religious Life," "Missions," "Religious Work," "Religion--The Negro's Attitude Toward Christianity," and "Negro Religion."
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Review: The Negro and His Folklore in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals
by Richard M. Dorson
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 81, No. 322 (Oct. - Dec., 1968), pp. 352-354
BOOK REVIEWS
General Studies
The Negro and His Folklore in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals. E dited with an Introduction by Bruce Jackson. (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1967.
Publications of the American Folklore Society, Bibliographical and Special Series,
Vol. 18, Pp. xxiii, 374. Indexes. $8.50.)
The thirty-five articles, notes, and reviews reprinted from various journals in this substantial volume provide the materials for an intellectual history of white American attitudes toward Negro folklore. We may be surprised that no one had hitherto thought
to gather these scattered pieces, some appearing in well-known periodicals such as the Atlantic Monthly, Century, Lippincott's, and Popular Science Monthly, and others in more specialized outlets such as Dwight's Journal of Music and Southern Workman. The fact is that thirty years ago Herbert Halpert did conceive the idea for such a work, limited to Negro folksongs, but the man carrying the stencils for this WPA publication got drunk and lost them on hearing the WPA project had folded. Now Bruce Jackson has revived and expanded the enterprise, and he enriches his introductions to the selections with informative comments from Halpert and Roger Abrahams.
These resuscitated articles possess a shock value enhanced by the recent upsurge of Negro militancy [this review was written in 1968] , which indeed they help explain. The ante-bellum stereotype of the happy, childlike slave--the black, as he was customarily called-is presented in full view by the white commentators. "A laughing, singing, fiddling, dancing negro is almost invariablya faithful servant"( 1845, P. 32). A sympathetic observer impressed by the emotional religious singing of the slaves thought the "joyless whites" could "learn a lesson from these simple children of Africa" (1859, p. 53). A Virginian doctor describing a spirited beer dance with "banjor" accompaniment to high-stepping jigs and nonsense rhymes believed "Virginia slaves were the happiest of the human race" (1838, p. 9), a truth he felt would be incomprehensible to Northern abolitionists.
As late as I886 George Washington Cable is speaking of the blacks' "simple, savage, musical and superstitiousn ature"( p. 191), which led them into erotics ong and dance. From the slaveholder's stereotype to the stereotype of blackface minstrelsy was a short jump, and some of the writings reflect the curious interaction of Negro and minstrel entertainment. Imitating Yankee minstrels, two groups of Negroes, South Carolina freedmen and waiters in Saratoga, New York, coated their faces with burnt cork (pp. 73, 183), and, according to a floating legend, German critics once denounced an American manager for attempting to palm off imitation darkeys upon them (p. 182). The minstrel caricaturef ound expressiono utide the stage in a dialect humor pillorying the black man. A glimpse of this is seen in a London magazine article of 1839 giving a colloquy between three Philadelphians and two black anti-poedo Baptists who are immersing themselves. "Ceremony, you curious nigger! I should call it a frolic, only you look so eternal shivered. You should have brought some apple-jack with you" (pp. 14-I 5).
Constance Rourke in American Humor treated the "long-tail'd blue" as one of three indigenous comic figures that, along with the Yankeea nd the backwoodsmanw, ere shaping the national c haracter and permeating American literature. In these selections the question of African origins of song, music, dance, tale, and belief is continually judged, especially in the post-bellum years when Northern observers began to take serious n ote of Negro expression and performance. As early a s 1845 a correspondent for the Knickerbocker objects t o the term "African melodists," claiming that the performers, whether genuine blacks or blackened whites, are now by virtue of residence and environment American melodists (p. 27). This is a minority opinion. Cable sets down a song of former Creole Negro slaves "in some African tongue" used to send secret signals from their dugouts to accomplices on shore (p. 241). Reviewing Joel Chandler Harris' first book of Uncle Remus tales, Thomas F. Crane attributed their similarity with those of Brazilian Indians to a common A frican origin, the Indians getting the stories from African slaves in Brazil (p. I66). In 1865 W. F. Allen, who two years later wrote the perceptive introduction to Slave Songs of the United States, decided that Negro music was European rather than African, although elements like the shout might descend from an African dance (p. 81). One critic, Jeanette Robinson Murphy, who had talked with African-born Negroes, concluded that each song must be judged comparatively to determine its African elements, if any, without recourse to any general theory or formula-the position I support.
Besides revealing attitudes and biases of whites toward Negro folklore, these articles also record a number of song and tale texts, pastimes, customs, and beliefs that enable the folklorist to predate his current collections. In addition to such familiar tales as Tar Baby (three texts of 1870, 1877, 1881, pp. 141, 148, 162), Witch Out of Her Skin (p. 43), and Riding-Horse (pp. 152-153), there is an unusual example of Learning to Fear Man (Type I57, pp. I55-156), in which Buh Lion scorns man, to his undoing, but fears partridges. An anonymous contributor t o the Atlantic in 1891 garnered from a colored man "quaint fancies" describing the nature of thunder, wind, air, rocks, clouds, stars, and the origin of the world; Halpert praises them as "one of the best collections of brief cosmological myths and dites and origin legends to be reported from the U. S." p. 257). One piece on religious songs by William E. Barton notes their use in rock tunnel drilling (p. 305), suggesting a connection, as Jackson remarks, with "John Henry" and other work songs. The power of voodoo or hoodoo is made evident in a number of cases, such as that of a scholarly Negro minister who could not attract a congregation until a conjure man prevailed upon him to wear a luck charm next to his heart. For four years he drew vast throngs, then threw it away and never again pulled a crowd. Both the minister and the writer (Jeannette Robinson Murphy, P. 334) construed his episode as an Africanism.
In spite of all these suggestive materials, the present-day reader must acknowledge how thin and impressionistict hey are alongsidep roperlyr ecordede thnologicalr eports. These were after all popularly written essays and epistles whose authors were unconcerned with identifying speakers and singers, other than as slaves or blacks, or in tracing their movements. But these early witnesses sometimes throw out, even if they do not follow up, fertile ideas: Americans should collect songs from the thirty thousand slave plantations, each of which ought to yield at least one good song (1855, p. 50); oral tradition is superior to contemporary written history, as in the "Historic Plantation Ballad" referring to a naval victory of General Jackson (1855, p. 46); Negro preachers exercise powerful influences over their flocks with their oratory and imagery (1863, p. 67).
Jackson does not reprint from the JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE, which from its founding in i888 carried documented articles on Negro folklore, because the JOURNAL is easily accessible, but he does print in an Appendix a useful finding list of these articles from 1888-1900. He also provides an Appendix on "Further Reading," a short list of "Some Other Articles on Negro Folklore in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals," an Index of Authors, Titles of Articles, and Periodicals, 'and an Index of Songs and Verses, but no index of subject items. This valuable volume could well be emulated for other topics and areas of buried writings on American folklore.
Indiana University
RICHARD M. DORSON
Bloomington, Indiana