CHAPTER III
RELIGIOUS CHARACTER OF THE SONGS
The Paucity of Secular Songs among the Slaves — Campmeetings, "Spirituals" and "Shouts" — Work-Songs of the Fields and Rivers — Lafcadio Hearn and Negro Music — African Relics and Voodoo Ceremonies.
Having looked into the genesis of the folksongs of the American negroes, I purpose now to lay a foundation for examination into sorrie of the musical idioms which characterize them, so that, presently, their origin as well as their effect may be discussed. Before then, however, something must be said about the various classes of songs and their use. Here the most striking fact that presents itself is the predominance of hymns, or religious songs. The reason for this will readily be found by those who are willing to accept Herbert Spencer's theory of the origin of music and my definition of folksong. Slavery was the sorrow of the Southern^ blacks; religion was, their comfort and refuge. That religion was not a dogmatic, philosophical OT"eVen ethical system so much as it was an emotional experience. "These hymns," says Mr. Allen in his introduction to "Slave Songs of the United States," "will be found peculiarly interesting in illustrating the feelings, opinions and habits of the slaves. . . . One of their customs, often alluded to in the songs, ... is that of wandering through the woods and swamps when under religious excitement, like the ancient bacchantes."*
"Almost all their songs were thoroughly religious in their tone," says Colonel Higginson, "and were in a minor key, both as to words and music. The attitude is always the same, and, as a commentary on the life of the race, is infinitely pathetic. Nothing but patience for this life — nothing but triumph in the next. Sometimes the present predominates, sometimes the future; but the combination is always implied." *
"Though the words are sometimes rude and the strains often wild, yet they are the outpourings of an ignorant and poverty-stricken people, whose religious language and ideals struggled for expression and found it through limited vocabularies and primitive harmonies. They are not merely poetry, they are life itself — the life of the human soul manifesting itself in rude words, wild strains and curious, though beautiful harmonies," says Robert R. Moton, commandant of Hampton Institute. Booker T. Washington bears this testimony: "The negro folksong has for the negro race the same value that the folksong of any other people has for that people. It reminds the race of the 'rock whence it was hewn,' it fosters race pride, and in the days of slavery it furnished an outlet for the anguish of smitten hearts. . . . The plantation songs known as the 'spirituals' are the spontaneous outbursts of intense religious fervor, and had their origin chiefly in the campmeetings, the revivals, and in other religious exercises. *They breathe a childlike faith in a personal Father and glow with the hope that the children of bondage will ultimately pass out of the wilderness of slavery into the land of freedom."
Writing in "The Century Magazine" for August, 1899, Marion Alexander Haskell said: "The musical talent of the uneducated negro finds almost its only expression in religious song, and for this there is a simple explanation. A race strongly imbued with religious sentiment, one rarely finds among them an adult who has not gone through that emotional experience known as conversion, after which it is considered vanity and sinfulness to indulge in song other than that of a sacred character. The new-found child 'Concerning the prevalent mode of the songs Colonel Higginson is in error; they are predominantly major, not minon The mistake is a common one among persons who have no technical training in music and who have been taught that suffering always expresses itself in the minor mode. A great majority of those who write about savage or primitive music generally set it down as minor whenever it has a melancholy cast.
Ten. I
Ten. II
Bass II
You May Bury Me in the East
Andante sostennto
1. You may bur-y me in the East,
You may bury me in the West, But I'll
hear the trumpet sound In that mom-ing'. In that mom-ing', my Lord,
How I long to go for to hear the trumpet sound in that morn-ing-.
press.
2. Father Gabriel in that day,
He'll take wing-s and fly away,
For to hear the trumpet sound
In that morning', etc.
You may bury him, etc.
3. Good old Christians In that day,
They'll take wings and fly away,
etc.
4. Good old preachers in that day,
They'll take wings, etc.
5. In that dreadful judgment-day
I'll take wings, etc.
Arranged for men's voices for the Mendelssolin Glee Club of New York by Arthur Uees; published here by permission.
[ ]of the church knows but little of that which he must forgo, for his mother before him sang only spirituals, and to these he naturally turns as to old friends whom his own religious experiences have clothed in new dignity and light."
There is nothing strange in the fact that the original collectors of slave songs and later students of slave life in America should thus recognize the psychological origin of floro song, for they were familiar with the phenomena which accompanied it; but it is worthy of note that a foreigner, who approached the subject on its scientific and artistic side only and to whom all such phenomena must have seemed strange, should have been equally appreciative. In his monograph, "La Musique chez les Peuples indigenes de L'Amerique du Nord," M. Julien Tiersot, after describing a campmeeting as he had learned to know it from the descriptions of others, says:
It is indubitable, as all who have made a special study of the question agree, that it is in these superheated religious assemblies that the most genuine (plus clair) songs in the negro repertory had their origin. They use them on all occasions. Like all peoples of low culture, the negroes accompany their manual labors with song. Noteworthy are the "corn songs," which are sung in the harvest season to stimulate the gathering of the grain. The efficiency of these songs is so well recognized that the owners of the plantations pay extra wages to singers capable of leading the chorus of laborers. These songs, however, have no distinctive character; they are religious hymns. The same holds true of the songs sung by negroes for their diversion, when at rest in their cabins, in the family circle or for the dance. Such a use need not surprise us when we have seen their religious meetings degenerate into dishevelled dances under the influence of the same songs. It is the hymn which must sanctify the dance. Carefully do they guard it against any admixture of the profane element! A superstitous dread in this regard is another convincing proof of how completely they have forgotten their African origin. They would believe themselves damned were they to repeat the songs of paganism; to do this would, in their eyes, be to commit original and unpardonable sin.
The "dishevelled dance" to which M. Tiersot alludes is the "shout" which in the days of slavery floyrialied chiefly in Southern Carolina and' the "States south of it." "It appears to be found in Florida," says Mr. Allen in his preface to "Slave Songs," but not in North Carolina or Virginia." I have a hymn taken down from the lips of an old slave woman in Kentucky which the collector^ designated as a "shout," and it is probable that the custom was more widely extended than Mr. Allen and his collaborators, who gleaned chiefly in South Carolina and the Gulf States, knew. Mr. Allen refers to the fact that the term "shouting" is used in Virginia "in reference to a peculiar motion of the body not wholly unlike the Carolina shouting." Very keenly he surmises, too, that it "is not unlikely that this remarkable religious ceremony is a relic of some native African dance, as the Romaika is of the classic Pyrrhic." A secular parody of it can easily be recalled by all persons who remember the old-fashioned minstrel shows, for it was perpetuated in the so-called "walk-around" of those entertainments. "Dixie," which became the war-song of the Southrons during the War of the Rebellion, was written by Dan Emmet as a "walk-around" for Bryant's Minstrels in 1859. I shall let an eyewitness describe the "shout." It is a writer in "The Nation" of May 30, 1867:
There is a ceremony which the white clergymen are inclined to discountenance, and even of the colored elders some of the more discreet try sometimes to put on a face of discouragement; and, although if pressed for Biblical warrant for the "shout," they generally seem to think, "he in de Book," or, "he dere-da in Matchew," still it is not considered blasphemous or improper if "de chillen" and "dem young gal" carry it on in the evening for amusement's sake, and with no well-defined intention of "praise." But the true "shout" takes place on Sundays, or on "praise" nights through the week, and either in the praise-house or in some cabin in which a regular religious meeting has been held. Very likely more than half the population of a plantation is gathered together. Let it be the evening, and a light wood fire burns red before the door of the house and on the hearth. For some time one can hear, .though at a good distance, the vociferous exhortation or prayer of the presiding elder or of the brother who has a gift that way and is not "on the back seat"— a phrase the interpretation of which is "under the censure of the church authorities for bad behavior" — and at regular intervals one hears the elder "deaconing" a hymnbook hymn, which is sung two lines at a time and whose wailing cadences, borne on the night air, are indescribably melancholy.
But the benches are pushed back to the wall when the formal meeting is ever, and old and young, men and women, sprucely dressed young men, grotesquely half-clad field hands — the women generally with gay handkerchiefs twisted about their heads and with short skirts — boys with tattered shirts and men's trousers, young girls bare-footed, all stand up in the middle of the floor, and when the "sperichil" is struck up begin first walking and by and by shuffling around, one after the other, in a ring. The foot is hardly taken from the floor, and the progression is mainly due to a jerking, hitching motion which agitates the entire shouter and soon brings out streams of perspiration. Sometimes they dance silently, sometimes as they shuffle they sing the chorus of the spiritual, and sometimes the song itself is also sung by the dancers. But more frequently a band, composed of some of the best singers and of tired shouters, stand at the sideof the room to "base" the others, singing the body of the song and clapping their hands together or on the knees. Song and dance are alike extremely energetic, and often, when the shout 'lasts into the middle of the night, the inonotonous thud, thud of the feet prevents sleep within half a mile of the praise-house.
The editors of "Slave Songs" were liberal-minded persons, who, though engaged in philanthropic work in behalf of the freedmen, were prompted by cultural rather than religious motives in directing attention to negro songs. They deplored the fact that circumstances made the collection almost wholly religious. Mr. Allen wrote: "I never fairly heard a secular song among the Port Royal freedmen, and never saw a musical instrument among them. The last violin, owned by a 'worldly man,' disappeared from Coffin's Point 'de year gun shoot at Bay Pint' (i. e., November, 1861). In other parts of the South 'fiddle sings,' 'devil songs,' 'corn songs,' 'jig tunes' and what not, are common; all the world knows the banjo and the 'Jim Crow' songs of thirty years ago. We have succeeded in obtaining only a very few songs of this character.
Our intercourse with the colored people has been chiefly through the work of the Freedmen's Commission, which deals with the serious and earnest side of the negro character"; and, discussing the "civilized" character of the songs which he prints, he says: "It is very likely that if we had found it possible to get at more of their secular music we should have come to another conclusion as to the proportion of the barbaric element." Then he makes room for a letter from "a gentleman from Delaware," who makes a number of shrewd observations, as thus:
We must look among their non-religious songs for the purest specimens of negro minstrelsy. It is remarkable that they have themselves transferred the best of these to the uses of their churches, I suppose on Mr. Wesley's principle that "it is not right that the devil should have all the good tunes." Their leaders and preachers have not found this change difficult to effect, or at least they have taken so little pains about it that one often detects the profane cropping out and revealing the origin of their most solemn "hymns" in spite of the best intentions of the poet and artist. Some of the best pure negro songs I have ever heSfd were those that used to be sung by the black stevedores, or perhaps the crews themselves, of the West India vessels, loading and unloading at the wharves in Philadelphia and Baltimore. I have stood for more than an hour, often, listening to them as they hoisted and lowered the hogsheads and boxes of their cargoes, one man taking the burden of the song (and the slack of the rope) and the others striking in with the chorus. They would sing in this way more than a dozen different songs in an hour, most of which might, indeed, be warranted to contain "nothing religious —a few of them, "on the contrary, quite the reverse" — but generally rather innocent and proper in their language and strangely attractive in their music.
A generation ago songs of the character described here were still to be heard from the roustabouts of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, and two of them, together with a paddle song dating back to the time of the Acadians, showing unique characteristics, will be discussed later.
M. Tiersot's generalizations on negro music, to which, it may be said, he denies all African attributes because the blacks have forgotten the language and customs of their ancestors, were based chiefly on reports of plantation life in which old French and Spanish influences were less potent than English. He recognizes the existence of a species of dance-song in which French influences have been predominantly formative, however, and discusses them in an interesting and instructive manner. They are the patois songs of the black Creoles of Louisiana, concerning which I shall have something to say in due time. They are songs of sentiment and songs of satire — the latter characteristic, I believe, a relic of their African source.
There is another, smaller, body of songs outside of the religious domain to which the spirituals give expression which would, I am convinced, have been of large value in proving the persistence of African idioms in exotic American songs if it had been possible to obtain a sufficient number of them to make a comparative study possible. Unfortunately this is not the case, and I very much question whether it will ever be done. The investigation has been postponed too long. The opportunity would have been incalculably greater half a century ago, when the subject was new. I made an effort to get some of these songs thirty-five years or so ago, when much more of this music was in existence than now, and, though I had the help of so enthusiastic a folklorist as the late Lafcadio Hearn, they eluded me. A few specimens came into my hands, but they proved to be of no musical' value, chiefly because it was obvious that they had not been correctly transcribed.
The songs in question are those which were consorted with the mysterious voodoo rites practised by the blacks, who clung to a species of snake-worship which had been brought over from Africa. The preservation of relics of this superstitious worship until a comparatively late date was no doubt due to the negroes who had been brought into American territory long after the abolition of the slave trade. At the outbreak of the War of the Rebellion the number of these people was by no means inconsiderable. Though the slave trade was abolished by the United States in 1808 and those who followed it were declared pirates in 1820, negroes brought over from Africa were smuggled into the States by way of the Antilles for many years. It was not until 1861 that a trader was' convicted under the law and hanged in New York. As late as 1888 Professor Edwards, describing the negro inhabitants of the Bahamas, who had already enjoyed freedom for more than fifty years, could write: "There lives yet in Green Turtle Cay one old negro, 'Unc' Yawk,' who, bowing his grizzled head, will tell you, 'Yah, I wa' fum Haf'ca.' "
It is well to remember facts like these when it is urged, as it is even by so good a musical folklorist as M. Tiersot, that African relics are not to be sought for in the music of the American negroes because they have forgotten the languages (not language) of their African ancestors. In the songs which have been heard by the few people who have left us accounts of the voodoo rites, African words are used, though their meaning has been lost. The phenomenon is not at all singular. Plato found the Egyptian priests using in their prayers, instead of words, the sacred vowels of their language, which they said had been taught their ancestors by Isis and Osiris. Buddhist monks in China, I have been told, still recite prayers in Sanskrit, though they do not understand a single word; small wonder, for nearly two thousand years have passed since Buddhism was introduced into China from India. The Gothic Christians at the time of the venerable Bede recited the Lord's Prayer in Greek. Is it difficult to understand what this means? Religion is a wonderful conservator. A greater sanctity attaches in worship to sounds than to words, for the first prayers were exclamations which came straight from the emotions — not words, but musical cries. It is for this reason that sacred music endures longer than articulate speech.
A veneration which is very much akin to superstition clings to both words and music in many organized religious systems today. Would it be irreverent to account on this ground for the attitude of the Pope and the Congregation of Rites toward the Gregorian Chant? Why is the eifort making to ignore the wise reforms of the sixteenth century and revert to the forms of the tenth? Since it is more than likely that the old dances and superstitious rites of African peoples have left an impress upon the music of their descendants in America, regard must be had for these things, even though we must forgo such an analytical study of the music as we should like to make. In 1878, while Lafcadio Hearn and I were collaborating in an effort to gather material for a study of creole music, I sent him (he was then living in New Orleans) the words of a song which I had got — I do not remember where — for interpretation. In reply he wrote:
Your friend is right, no doubt, about the
"Tig, tig, malaboin
La chelema che tango
Redjoum!"
I asked my black nurse what it meant. She only laughed and shook her head: "Mais c'est Voudoo, 9a; je n'en sais rien!"
"Well," said I, "don't you know anything about Voudoo songs?"
"Yes," she answered; "I know Voudoo songs; but I can't tell you what they mean." And she broke out into the wildest, weirdest ditty I ever heard. I tried to write down the words; but as I did not know what they meant I had to write by sound alone, spelling the words according to the French pronunciation.
He sent me the words and also the words of a creole love-song, whose words ran like this:
"Beautiful American, I love thee!
Beautiful American, I am going to Havana
to cut sugar-cane to give thee, money. I am going to
Havana, friends, to cut sugar-cane, friends, to give thee
money, beautiful woman, Cesaire! I love thee, beautiful
American !"
He got a German amateur musician to write down the music to both songs for him, but it was from his singing that the transcription was made, and when it was repeated to him he found it incorrect. Hearn was not musical.
"As I heard it sung the voodoo melody was really weird, although simple," he wrote me afterward; "there were such curious linkings of long notes to short with microscopic ones. The other, 'Belle Americaine,' seemed to me pretty, but G. has put only two notes where I heard five distinctly." The nurse who sang for him was Louise Roche, "an old black woman of real African blood, an ex-slave having many tales of terror, suspected of voodooism, etc."
Much later (it was in 1885), when I was contemplating a cooperation with Mr. George W. Cable in the articles which he published in the "Century Magazine" for February and April, 1886, on Creole songs and dances, Hearn wrote:
I fear I know nothing about Creole music or Creole negroes. Yes, I have seen them dance; but they danced the Congo and sang a purely African song to the accompaniment of a drygoods box beaten with sticks or bones and a drum made by stretching a skin over a flour barrel. That sort of accompaniment and that sort of music you know all about; it is precisely similar to what a score of travellers have described. There are no harmonies — only a furious contretemps. As for the dance — in which the women do not take their feet off the ground — it is as lascivious as is possible. The men dance very differently, like savages, leaping in the air. I spoke of this spectacle in my short article in the "Century." . . .
The Creole songs which I have heard sung in the city are Frenchy in construction, but possess a few African characteristics of method. The darker the singer, the more marked the oddities of intonation. Unfortunately, the most of those I have heard were quadroons or mulattoes. One black woman sang me a Voudoo song, which I got Cable to write — but I could not sing it as she sang it, so that the music is faulty. I suppose you have seen it already, as it forms part of the collection.
It was about this time (February, 1884, unless I am deceived by a postmark) that Hearn conceived the idea of a book on negro music, of which we were to be joint authors. He was to write "a long preface and occasional picturesque notes" to what he called my "learning and facts." He outlined what he would put in the preface:
He would begin by treating of the negro's musical patriotism — "the strange history of the griots, who furnish so singular an example of musical prostitution, and who, though honored and petted on one way, are otherwise despised by their own people and refused rites of burial." Then he proposed to relate:
Something about the curious wanderings of these griots through the yellow desert northward into the Maghreb country, often a solitary wandering; their performances at Arab camps on the long journey, when the black slaves came out to listen and weep; then the hazardous voyage into Constantinople, where they play old Congo airs for the great black population of Stamboul, whoin no laws or force can keep within doors when the sound of griot music is heard in the street. Then I would speak of how the blacks carry their music with them to Persia and even to mysterious Hadramant, where their voices are held in high esteem by Arab masters. Then I would touch upon the transplantation of negro melody to the Antilles and the two Americas, where its strangest black flowers are gathered by the alchemists of musical science and the perfume thereof extracted by magicians like Gottschalk. (How is that for a beginning?)
Having advanced thus far Hearn proposed to show a relation between physiology and negro music, and he put upon me the burden of finding out whether or not the negro's vocal cords were differently formed and "capable of longer vibrations" than those of white people. He had been led into this branch of the subject by the observation, which he found in some book, that the blood of the African black "has the highest human temperature known — equal to that of the swallow — though it loses that fire In America." I must have been lukewarm in the matter of the project which he outlined with great enthusiasm, despairing, as naturally a sobersided student of folk-music who believed in scientific methods would, of being able to make the physical data keep pace with so riotous an imagination as that of my fantastical friend. I did not even try to find a colored subject for the dissecting table or ask for a laryngoscopical examination of the vocal cords of the "Black Patti." His enthusiasm and method in our joint work are strikingly illustrated in another part of the same letter. As has been intimated, we were looking for unmistakable African relics in the Creole songs of Louisiana:
Here is the only Creole song I know of with an African refrain that is still sung — don't show it to C, it is one of our treasures.
(Pronounce "wenday," "makkiah.")
Ouende, ouende, macaya!
Mo pas barrasse, macaya!
Ouende, ouende, macaya!
Mo bois bon divin, macaya!
Ouende, ouende, macaya!
Mo mange bon poulet, macaya!
Ouende, ouende, macaya!
Mo pas barrasse, macaya!
Ouende, ouende, macaya!
Macaya!
I wrote from the dictation of Louise Roche. She did not know the meaning of the refrain — her mother had taught her, and the mother had learned it from the grandmother. However, I found out the meaning, and asked her if she now remembered. She leaped in the air for joy — apparently. Ouendai, or ouende, has a different meaning in the eastern Soudan; but in the Congo, or Fiot, dialect it means "to go," "to continue to," "to go on." I found the word in Teannest's vocabulary. Then macaya I found in Turiault's infitude sur la Language Creole de la Martinique": "fa veut dire manger tout le temps"— "excessivement." Therefore, here is our translation:
Go on! go on! eat enormously!
I ain't one bit ashamed— eat outrageously!
Go on! go on! eat prodigiously!
I drink good wine! — eat ferociously!
Go on! go on! eat unceasingly! —
I eat good chicken — gorging myself!
Go on! go on! etc.
How is this for a linguistic discovery? The music is almost precisely like the American river music — a chant, almost a recitative, until the end of the line is reached: then for your mocking music!
There is a hint of an African relic in the allusion to the recitative-like character of the feasting song, as we shall see when we come to inquire into the structure of African music.
For a description of the voodoo rites I draw, by per-mission, upon Mr. George W. Cable's article on "Creole Slave Songs," which appeared in "The Century Magazine"^ for April, 1886:
The dance and song entered into the negro worship. That worship was as dark and horrid as bestialized savagely could make the adoration of serpents. So revolting was it, and so morally hideous, that even in the West Indian French possessions a hundred years ago, with the slave trade in full blast, and the West Indian planter and slave what they were, the orgies of the voudoos, were forbidden.
The Aradas, St. Mery tells us, introduced them from their homes beyond the Slave Coast, one of the most dreadfulljr benighted regions of all Africa. He makes the word vaudau. In Louisiana it is written voudou and voodoo and is often changed on the negro's lips to hoodoo. It is the name of an imaginary being of vast supernatural powers, residing in the form of a harmless snake. This spiritual influence, or potency, is the recognized antagonist and opposite of Obi, the great African manitou, or deity, whom the Congos^ vaguely generalize as Zombi. In Louisiana, as I have been told by that learned Creole scholar, the late Alexander Dimitry, Voodoo bore, as a title of greater solemnity, the additional name Maignan, and that even in the Calinda dance, which he had witnessed innumerable times, was sometimes heard at the height of its frenzy the invocation —
"Aie! Aie! Voudoo Maignan!"
The worship of Voodoo is paid to a snake kept in a box. The worshippers are not merely a sect, but in some rude, savage way, also an order. A man and woman, chosen from their own number to be the oracles of the serpent-deity, are called the king and queen. The queen is the more important of the two, and even in the present dilapidated state of the worship in Louisiana, where the king's office has almost or quite disappeared, the queen is still a person of great note. It (voodoo worship) long ago diminished in frequency to once a year, the chosen night always being the eve of St. John. For several years past the annual celebrations have been suspended; but in the summer of 1884 they were — let it be hoped only for the once — resumed. . . .
Now a new applicant for membership steps into the circle. There are a few trivial formalities and the voodoo dance begins. The postulant dances frantically in the middle of the ring, only pausing, from time to time, to receive heavy alcholic draughts in ^real haste and return more wildly to his leapings and writhings until he falls in convulsions. He is lifted, restored, and presently conducted to the altar, takes his oath, and by a ceremonial stroke from one of the sovereigns is admitted a full participant in the privileges and obligations of the devilish free masonry. But the dance goes on about the snake. The contortions of the upper part of the body, especially of the neck and shoulders, are such as to threaten to dislocate them. The queen shakes the box and tinkles the bells, the rum bottle gurgles, the chant alternates between king and chorus:
"Eh! Eh! Bomba hone, hone!
Canga bafio tay.
Canga moon day lay,
Canga do keelah,
Canga li!"
There are swoonings and ravings, nervous tremblings beyond control, incessant writhings and turnings, tearing of garments, even biting of the flesh — every imaginable invention of the devil.
footnotes:
_* Miss Mildred J. Hill, of Louisville, to whom I am indebted for several
interesting specimens.