CHAPTER VI
VARIATIONS FROM THE
MAJOR SCALE
Peculiarities of Negro Singing — Vagueness of Pitch
IN Certain Intervals — Fractional Tones in
Primitive Music— The Pentatonic Scale — The
Flat Seventh — Harmonization of Negro
Melodies
Of the 527 songs examined I have set down in my table
331 as being in the major mode. To these, as emphasizing
the essentially energetic and contented character of Afro-
American music, notwithstanding that it is the fruit of
slavery, must be added iii which are pentatonic. Of
the 331 major songs twenty, or a trifle more than one-
sixteenth, have a flat seventh; seventy-eight — that is,
one fourth — have no seventh, and forty-five, or nearly
one-seventh, have no fourth. Fourth and seventh are
the tones which are lacking in the pentatonic scale, and
the songs without one or the other of them approach the
pentatonic songs in what may be called their psychological
effect. These are the only variations of the major scale
which can be set down as characteristic of the songs. In
the case of the songs in the minor mode, eight, a fraction
under one-eighth, have a major sixth; over one-half have
no sixth at all, and over one-third have the leading-tone
(major seventh), which is not an element of the minor
scale proper, but with the major sixth has been admitted
through the use of accidentals to what musicians call the
harmonic minor scale. In the case of twenty-three songs
I have set down the mode as mixed or vague, because the
scales do not conform to either the major or minor system,
but, in part, to both, or have elements which are obviously
sporadic.
It is necessary for a correct understanding of the nature
of negro songs that the testimony of the collectors touch-
[ 70 ]
VARIATIONS FROM THE MAJOR SCALE
ing some of these aberrant intervals be heard. As I have
set them down, the flat seventh in the major and major
sixth in the minor are more or less approximations to the
tones as they are sung; but the circumstances justify
the classifications which I have made. In my own
defence, though it may not be necessary to make one,
I may say that here I am entirely dependent upon the
evidence adduced by others; I did not hear the songs
sung in slavery, nor did I come in closer touch with
the generation which made them generally known than
many of my readers who heard the Jubilee Singers
of Fisk University on their first concert tour. It was
their singing which interested me in the subject, and
it was forty years ago that I began my observations,
which I was not permitted to extend personally into
the regions where research should have been made, and
where I vainly tried to have it made through other agencies.
"It is difficult," said Miss McKim,^ "to express the
entire character of these negro ballads by mere musical
notes and signs. The odd turns made in the throat and
the curious rhythmic effect produced by single voices
chiming in at different irregular intervals seem almost as
impossible to place on the score as the singing of birds or
the tones of an seoliaa harp."
"Another obstacle to its rendering is the fact that tones
are frequently employedwhichwehavenomusical characters
to represent. Such, for example, is that which I have indi-
cated as nearly as possible by the flat seventh in 'Great
Camp Meetin', 'Hard Trials,' and others," says Thomas
P. Fenner, in the preface to "Cabin and Plantation Songs,"
and he continues: "These tones are variable in pitch,
ranging through an entire interval on different occasions,
according to the inspiration of the singer. They are rarely
discordant, and even add a charm to the performance."
Miss Emily Hallowell's "Calhoun Plantation Songs" bear
evidence of having been more carefully noted than the
FIsk or Hampton collections, though made at a much later
date. In her preface Miss Hallowell says: "I have tried
1 "Slave Songs," page 6.
[ 71 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
to write them down just as they were sung, retaining
all the peculiarities of rhythm, melody, harmony and text;
but those who have heard these or other like songs sung
by the colored people of the South will realize that it is
impossible to more than suggest their beauty and charm;
they depend so largely upon the quality of voice, the un-
erring sense of rhythm and the quaint religious spirit
peculiar to the colored people who have spent their lives
on Alabama cotton plantations, untouched by civilization."
Miss Mildred J. Hill, of Louisville, who gathered for me
some of the most striking songs in my collection from the
singing of an old woman who had been a slave in Boyle
County, Ky., was careful to note all deviations from just
intonation, and from her songs I came to the conclusion
that the negroes were prone to intervallic aberrations,
not only in the case of the seventh, but also in the third.
This is a common phenomenon in folk-music. It was the
observation of the composer Spohr that rural people intone
the third rather sharp, the fourth still sharper, and the
seventh rather flat. Vagaries of this kind emphasize the fact
that the diatonic scale — the tempered scale, at any rate —
as used in artistic music is a scientific evolution, and not
altogether a productofnature, as some persons assume, who
in consequence attribute the slightest fractional variation
from its tones to exquisite appreciation of tonal differences.
The speculations on this point in which some professed
students of the music of the North American Indians
have indulged have reached a degree of absurdity almost
laughable. In one case changes of pitch, which were
most obviously the result of differences of speed in the
revolution of the cylinder of the phonograph used in the
collection of Zuiii songs, were gravely declared to be evi-
dence of a musical sense which could not be satisfied with
the semitones of civilized musicians. The melodies had
been recorded by treadle power and transmitted for no-
tation by electric. To prove the valuelessness of music
thus obtained I experimented with a pitch-pipe aftd a
phonograph, and by varying the speed of the revolutions
of the cylinder in making the record easily ran the pitch
[ 72 ]
VARIATIONS FROM THE MAJOR SCALE
of my C up and down an octave like the voice of a siren.
Why savages who have never developed a musical or any
other art should be supposed to have more refined aesthetic
sensibilities than the peoples who have cultivated music
for centuries, passes my poor powers of understanding.
But the contemplation of savage life seems to have a
tendency to make the imagination (especially that of
sympathetic people) slip its moorings. My own experience
with Indian music has convinced me that the red man
is markedly unmusical. That appears to me to be amply
proved by the paucity of melody in the songs of the Indians,
their adherence to a stereotyped intervallic formula, regard-
less of the use to which the song is put, and their lack of
agreement in pitch when singing. To the Indian music is
chiefly an element of ritual; its practice is obligatory, and
it is not per se an expression of beauty for beauty's sake
or an emotional utterance which a love for euphony has
regulated and moulded into a thing of loveliness. It reaches
its climax in the wild and monotonous chants which
accompany their gambling games and their ghost- dances.
There is a significance which I cannot fathom in the
circumstance that the tones which seem rebellious to the
negro's sense of intervallic propriety are the fourth and
seventh of the diatonic major series and the fourth, sixth
and seventh of the minor. The omission of the fourth and
seventh intervals of the major scale leaves the pentatonic
series on which iiiofthe 527 songs analyzed are built.
The fact is an evidence of the strong inclination of the
American negroes toward this scale, which is even more
pervasive in their music than it is in the folksongs of
Scotland, popularly looked upon as peculiarly the home
of the pentatonic scale. On this imperfect scale the
popular music of China, Japan and Siam rests; it is
common, too, in the music of Ireland, and I have found
many examples in the music of the American Indians
and the peoples of Africa. The melody of the "Warrior's
Song" in Coleridge-Taylor's fine book of pianoforte tran-
scriptions entitled "Twenty-four Negro Melodies,"' is a
* Boston: Oliver Ditson Company.
[ 73 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
pentatonic tune from the Ba-Ronga country, and Cole-
ridge-Taylor says of it that its subject "is certainly not
unworthy of any composer — from Beethoven downward.
It is at once simple, strong and noble, and probably stands
higher than any other example of purely 'savage' music in
these respects." Except that it lent itself so admirably
to artistic treatment, I cannot see why this melody should
have been singled out by Mr. Coleridge-Taylor for such
extraordinary praise; many of the American slave songs
are equally simple, strong and noble and more beautiful.
Yet it is a specially welcome example because it comes
from Africa.
The temptation is strong to look upon the pentatonic
scale as the oldest, as it certainly is the most widespread
and the most serviceable, of intervallic systems. It is the
scale in which melody may be said to be naturally innate.
Play it at random on the black keys of the pianoforte,
and so you keep symmetry of period and rhythm in mind
you cannot help producing an agreeable melody; and it will
be pentatonic. (See "Nobody Knows de Trouble I've
Seen," page 75.)
The history of the pentatonic scale has baffled investi-
gators, for it is older than history. China has a musical
instrument called hiuen, the invention of which is said
(fantastically, no doubt) to date back to B. C. 2800. It
emits only the five tones of the pentatonic scale. Instru-
ments with the same limitations and qualities have been
found among the remains of the lost civilizations of Mexico
and Peru, and are still in -existence in Nubia and Abyssinia.
I have mentioned a Zulu zanze which is in my possession —
a little instrument so stoutly built that it is likely to survive
centuries. It has pentatonic tuning down to two middle
tongues, which emit strangely aberrant tones. The key is
D-flat. The tongues on one side emit the descending order,
D-flat, E-flat and B-flat; on the other, B-flat, F, D-flat and
A-flat. The instrument is played by plucking and snap-
ping the metal tongues with the thumbs; any two plucked
by a thumb simultaneously produce an agreeable con-
cord. Between the right and left rows of tongues lie
[ 74 ]
VARIATIONS FROM THE MAJOR SCALE
Nobody Knows de Trouble TveSeen
ReUgloso
Nobod-y knows de trouble iVe seen, Nobod-y knowsbttt Je>sus,
lOi — [ — 1 In
— -^^
r-r=
-.,,_.., rt>-»»^
Nobod-y knows de
'P'P r r 1
trou-ble I7e seen,
1 n J J 1
Olo-rybal-le •
iJ- Jl 1 J 1
N J II
lu - jaU
n — ^
f ^
^
=3
'• ;ii i
-Mi
j ^^
^
J 1. J 1
ki s a 1
1 3 2
^
■^
' f ^ "
1. Some - times lin up, some - times I'm dowal O yesv LordI Some-
. Wliat makes old Sa - tan hate me so? O yes, Lordl Be .
times I'm al • most to de gronn'; O yes,
cause he g'ot me once, but he let me g-o; O yes.
^
LordI
LordI
f r f
m^
^
"«~
Aa example^ of a melody In ilie pentatonic scale (withoat tne fomfb and seventh degrees).
From "Slave Songs of (he United States;' the a^asgemeat for fhli work by II.T. Burleigh.
[ 75 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
the two which give out the strange, wild notes A and B.
How these tones were melodically introduced only a musi-
cian hearing the instrument played by a native could tell.
In an article on Scottish music in Grove's "Dictionary
of Music and Musicians" Mr. Frank Kidson observes
that "whether this pentatonic series was acquired through
the use of a defective instrument, or from the melodic
taste of a singer or player, must remain mere matter of
conjecture." Scarcely, so far as its hypothetical instru-
mental origin is concerned. The first melodies were
vocal, and among primitive peoples instruments are made
for the music — not music for the instruments. Defects
in instruments are the results of faulty adjustments of
mechanical means to desired ends. Prehistoric whistles,
with finger-holes to produce five tones only, were made
so that melodies with five tones might be played on them.
The melodies were not invented because the makers of
the whistles neglected to make a larger number of finger-
holes or to dispose them differently.
Many years ago the Rev. Dr. Wentworth, the editor of
"The Ladies' Repository," a magazine published by the
Methodist Episcopal Church, who had been a missionary
in China, told me that he had observed that his congrega-
tion became singularly and unaccountably dissonant at
certain places in every hymn-tune adopted from the
Methodist hymnal. When I told him that the Chinese,
while admitting the theoretical existence of the fourth
and seventh intervals of the diatonic scale, eschewed them
in practice, and asked him whether or not they had been
the troublesome tones, he expressed the opinion that I had
explained a fact which he had looked upon as inexplicable.
Not having made the experiment myself, I could not say
whether or not he was right; but it is certainly conceivable
that centuries of habit might atrophy the musical faculty
of a people so as to make the production of a tone as part
of an intervallic system difficult and lead to its modification
when occasion called for its introduction. In some such
manner it is not unlikely that the flat seventh of the major
scale in the music of the American negroes may be ac-
[ 76 ]
VARIATIONS FROM THE MAJOR SCALE
counted for. This, however, is a mere hypothesis. Though
not a common feature of the folksongs of other peoples,
it does occur here. It is found in a Servian kolo dance
printed by Engel in his "Introduction to the Study of
National Music," and also in some Arabic tunes. Students
of the old ecclesiastical modes recognize it as an element
of the Mixolydian mode, with its intervals G, A, B, C, D,
E and F-natural.
Whether the employment of the flat seventh is due to
an innate harmonic sense on the part of its users, which
sometimes discloses itself very markedly in an evident
feeling for the subdominant relationship, or is a purely
melodic factor (as in Gregorian music), is a question which
I shall not undertake to determine. In the case of a very
stirring hymn, "Dere's a Great Campmeetin' " (see page
78), the harmonic impulse seems to me most obvious,
though there is no other song which I have found in which
the flat seventh strikes the ear with such barbaric force
as it does in this. Here the first section of the melody
closes with a perfect cadence in the key of E-flat; the
second section begins abruptly with an apparently unrelated
shout on D-flat — "Gwine to mourn, and nebber tire" —
which leads directly, as the effect shows, into the key of
A-flat, the subdominant of E-flat. The transition has
a singularly bright and enlivening effect and the return
to the original key is easy and natural.
The specimen illustrating the use of the flat seventh
given in the examples of African prototypes in the pre-
ceding chapter was noted at the Chicago World's Fair
by Heinrich Zoellner, the German composer. I was never
fortunate enough in my visits to the Dahoman Village
to hear the dancers sing. Mr. Zoellner witnessed two choral
dances and wrote down the vocal music, which he placed
at my disposal. In the first dance the Dahomans sang
a slow phrase of two measures in C major without the
seventh over and over again, while the band drummed in
double time and the dancers advanced and retreated
without particular regard to the rhythm, some individuals
indulging in fancy steps ad lib. Then there came a change
[ 77 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
A Great Campmeetin'
>h, walk to.^ed-der,cha-dren, Don't you get • a wear-y,
mourn aif nebber tire; Dere's u g-reatcampmeet-m' in de promised land.'
From tte Hampton coUection, "Relfeious Folk-Songs of the Negro'.' A fine e-xample of the ef.
feet produced by the flat seventh. '
[ 78 ]
VARIATIONS FROM THE MAJOR SCALE
of tempo and rhythm, and also in the manner of singing
and dancing. The drummers changed from double to
compound-triple time, the singers separated into two
choirs and sang the antiphonal Allegro phrase printed in
the table of examples, and began to keep step with absolute
precision.
In what key is this phrase? Not in C minor, as the
prevalence of C, E-flat and G would seem to suggest at
first sight; the A is too disturbing for that. But if one
should conceive the phrase as being in F, the explanation
is at hand. Then it will be seen that the phrase illustrates
the use of the flat seventh. This E-flat is now felt as
the essential element of the dominant seventh-chord of the
subdominant key, B-flat. In "A Great Campmeetin' "
the corresponding tone leads into this key as the song is
sung and as it appears in the books ; but it must be observed
that the harmonization was made by Mr. Fenner, who
has not told us to what extent he received hints from his
singers. The Dahomans seemed satisfied to treat the E-flat
as a grace-note and found gratification for their sense of
repose in the F major triad suggested by the concluding
C. When I consulted Mr. Arthur Mees, who gave parti-
cular attention to the ecclesiastical modes when a student
of Weitzmann, in Berlin, as to his opinion on the subject
under consideration, he wrote me: "The use of the flat
seventh seems to be quite common to old melodies. Just
such a one as you quote as being Dahoman I found in an
attempted deciphering of Hebrew melodies from Hebrew
accents. It is, I think, true that the dropping into the
subdominant is a sort of relaxation of musical fancy {Vor-
stellung), while modulation into the dominant is a climb-
ing up process, which can be accomplished by not less
than two chords. (I mean two different roots.) I do not
feel a modulation with the introduction of. the low seventh,
but a melodic peculiarity which is enforced and made
piquant by the mental effort (unconscious) to retain the
original tonality after the flat seventh has been heard." Mr.
Mees added that he felt the scale of the phrase just as he
felt the scale of the Mixolydian mode.
[ 79 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Weeping Mary-
Bass I
Bass II
/weep - ing- Ma- fy,\
tf there's an-y-bod-y here like Jpray-ing- Sam-uel,|
(doubt-ing' Thomas,)
Call up - oa your Je ' sus, and He'll draw nigfa. He'll draw nigh.
0_ g-lo-ry, glo-ry hal-le-ltt -jah, Glo-ry.be to nQrQod.whorulesonliighl
deerese. . " ^ ^
Arranged for men's voices by Arthur Mees, for the Mendelssohn Glee Clnb of New York. By
permission.
[ 80 ]
VARIATIONS FROM THE MAJOR SCALE
Some time afterward Mr. Mees arranged several negro
songs for men's voices and performed them at a concert
of the Mendelssohn Glee Club of New York. One of them
was "Weeping Mary," which is reproduced in this chapter.
(See page 80.) This brought the topic of how the negro
songs ought to and might be harmonized into discussion,
and Mr. Mees wrote me :
It is a most interesting subject.^ The first question that arises in examining
a tone-succession so strange to us is this: Did the people to whom a particular
one is credited intuitively feel a harmonic substratum to the melodies they
invented? So far as the negroes are concerned, I believe that the intuition
of harmony was peculiar to them. I have spoken with many Southern
people, and they all speak of the love of harmony that is peculiar to the
negroes. If that is true, the altered tones they introduce in the scales on
which their melodies are constructed have a harmonic significance, and the
frequent introduction of a minor seventh would point to a tendency toward
the subdominant, as you suggest. This would be true of melodies in the
major mode only, for the seventh in the minor mode, according to Weitzmann
and his followers, is the normal tone in the minor mode, and the large seventh
the variant, introduced because of the requirement in modern music of the
leading-tone to make the cadence authoritative. . . .
In "Weeping Mary," which in my arrangement is in G minor, the E
natural is very interesting and produces a fine effect. It is the raised sixth
in minor. Ziehn in his "Harmonielehre" quotes a striking example of the
same progression from Beethoven.
Mr. Mees's letter has brought us around again to the
subject of the use of harmony in the Afro-American folk-
songs. In "Slave Songs of the United States" the tunes
only are printed, and of their performance Mr. Allen said
in his preface:
There is no singing in parts, as we understand it, and yet no two appear
to be singing the same thing; the leading singer starts the_ words of each verse,
often improvising, and the others, who "base" him, as it is called, strike in
with the refrain, or even join in the solo when the words are familiar. When
the "base" begins the leader often stops, leaving the rest of the words to
be guessed at, or it may be they are taken up by one of the other singers.
And the "basers" themselves seem to follow their own whims, beginning when
they please and leaving off when they please, striking an octave above or
below (in case they have pitched the tune too high), or hitting some other
note that chords, so as to produce the effect of a marvellous complication and
variety and yet with the most perfect time and rarely with any discord. And
what makes it all the harder to unravel a thread of melody out of this strange
network is that, like birds, they seem not infrequently tostrike sounds that
cannot be precisely represented by the gamut and_ abound in "slides from one
note to another and turns and cadences not in articulated notes."
The peculiar style of singing described in the concluding
words has been made familiar by several singers who have
used the songs on the concert platform, particularly by Mrs.
[ 81 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Jeannette Robinson Murphy. In a personal letter to the
writer, dated July i6, 1913, Miss Emily Hallowell says
of her book:
I have always thought that the time would come when some student
would find the "Calhoun Collection" of greater service than most of the
other publications, for two reasons: As far as my ability allowed they were
written precisely as they were sung, while in most collections they have been
arranged for ordinary quartet singing; and as the people of Calhoun are so
much more remote than in most localities, their singing in 1900 was almost
exactly as it was before the war. ... I got most of the songs from young
people, too young to remember slavery, but I have heard many of them sung
by the old people, and the melodies were the same, but the harmonies I have
written were all taken from the pupils in the Calhoun school. The old people's
harmonies seem to arise from each holding to their own version of the melodies
or from limitation of compass,
I have cited instances of the employment of harmony
in Africa. In my notebook I find an interesting example,
which I obtained from Mr. George L. White, teacher and
manager of the Jubilee Singers after their return from their
memorable trip to Germany in 1877. It is a hymn which
Dr. Wangemann heard sung, with great effect, as he
testified, by a congregation of three hundred Kaffirs ia a
Presbyterian mission in Emgravali, Its composition was
attributed to a Kaffir named U-Utrikana, the first member
of his tribe to embrace Christianity, who became a sort
of black Sankey and travelled all over his country as a
singing evangelist. "He was honored as a prophet by his
people," wrote Dr. Wangemann on the transcript of the
hymn which he made from memory for Mr. White. What
the words mean I do not know, but musically the song
consists of two solos and refrains, the solos sung in unison,
the refrains in full harmony, consisting of the tonic and
dominant triads. As a rule, the songs of the Afro-Americans
are so obviously built on a harmonic basis and show so
plainly the influence of civilized music that I have no
doubt the majority of them were sung in simple harmony —
at least the refrains. The phrases containing the "wild
notes," as I call them, wero just as certainly sung in
unison and are most effective when left without har-
mony, as is the rule (though I have made a few exceptions)
in this collection.
[ 82 ]