CHAPTER X
SONGS OF THE BLACK CREOLES
The Language of the Afro-American Folksongs-
Phonetic Changes in English — Grammar of the
Creole Patois— Making French Compact
AND Musical — Dr. Mercier's Pamphlet —
Creole Love-Songs
The circumstance that the folksongs of the slaves were
preserved by oral tradition alone until nearly fifty years
ago, when the first collection was printed, gives peculiar
interest to a study of their language — or rather their
languages, for the songs of the black Creoles of Louisiana
and the Antilles are also American folksongs, though they
are sung in French patois and not in English. In both
cases a fundamental phenomenon confronts us: The
slave had to make the language in which he communicated
with his master, or rather he had to reconstruct it orally
without the help of written or printed books. Having
made his patois, he forgot his own native tongue and per-
petuated the new medium of communication in the same
way in which he had learned and perpetuated the African
language. After this had been done and the new tongue
had become to him a vehicle for his rude artistic utter-
ances, those utterances had to be retained by tradition
and transmitted by word of mouth entirely. This brought
with it a phenomenon with which students of ballads are
familiar — the corruptions of texts due to the habit of accept-
ing sound for sense. The slaves of the States in which the
masters gpoke English, under Protestant influences, heard
the Biblical expressions which appealed powerfully to their
imagination and emotions from their preachers, some of
whom were as illiterate as the multitude they sought to
enlighten. They h6ard their masters use many words of
which they could only surmise the meaning, but which also
appealed to them as resounding and mouth-filling. Like
f 127 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
children they accepted the sounds without inquiring into
the sense, or gave them meanings of their own. Such
terms as "iggle-quarter," "count-aquils" and "ginny-bank"
in the working song "Ho, round the corn, Sally," may be
corruptions of French words heard from the Huguenot
refugees. (Unless, indeed, "iggle-quarter" be eagle-quarter,
"ginny-bank," the Bank of Virginia, and the lines have
a financial sense.) Others have a more or less obvious inter-
pretation. "Oh, my body rock 'long fever" may have
well been carried away from a sickroom as the remark
of master or mistress: "My body has long been racked
by a fever." "Body racked wid pain" is a line in one of
the songs which I have printed — "O'er the Crossing." I
cannot accept the interpretation of "Daniel rock de Hon
joy" as "Daniel racked the lion's jaw," given in a footnote
of "Slave Songs"; "locked the lion's jaw" is too obviously
the correct reading. "An' de nineteen wile in his han"'
is pretty plainly indicated as once having read : "The anoint-
ing oil in his hand" by the context, and "John sittin' on
de golden order" was probably "John sitting on the golden
altar" — a picture which could not fail to appeal to the
fancy of the negroes, though I do not know where they
found it.
The survival of words from African languages seems
much smaller in the songs than in the folktales from Ba-
hama which Professor Edwards prints in his book.i As I
have intimated, these words would naturally be retained ""
in songs connected with superstitious ceremonies and
forbidden dances.
In his preface to "Slave Songs" Mr. Allen points out
that "phonetic" decay had gone very far in the speech of
the slaves, and with it "an extreme simplification of ety-
mology and syntax." Th and v or f had been softened
into d and b; v and w had been interchanged; words had
been shorn of syllables which seemed redundant — as illus-
trated in "lee' bro' " for "little brother." The letters n, v
and r were sometimes used euphonically, perhaps to grat-
ify a melodic sense, as the vowel a frequently was for
' "Bahama Songs and Stories."
[ 128 ]
SONGS OF THE BLACK CREOLES
IS very common.
There were contractions which scarcely call for comment,
in view of what still happens every day among cultured
white people in colloquial speech. The progress of "How
do you do?" through "How d'ye do?" and "How dy'?"
to "Huddy" is very patent, and we can scarcely deplore
it in view of the singularly mellifluous and brisk line "Tell
my Jesus huddy O." The grammatical simplifications were
natural enough, in a people who hadtospeak alanguagewhich
they were not permitted to learn to read or write. Em was a
pronoun which applied to all genders and both numbers;
been and done as the past tenses of verbs are familiar
to-day among other than the blacks in the South, as are
many other peculiarities of grammar of which we cannot
say whether the slaves borrowed them from the illiterate
whites or the whites from them.
It is perhaps a little singular, though not impossible
of explanation, that the negroes who came under the
domination of the French colonists of Louisiana and the
West Indies should have developed a patois or dialect,
which is not only more euphonious than the language from
which it was derived, but also have created a system of
grammar which reflects credit upon their logical capacity
and their musical instincts. The peculiarities of the
English songs referred to are nearly all extinct, but the
Creole patois, though never reduced to writing for its users,
is still a living language. It is the medium of communica-
tion between black nurses and their charges in the French
families of Louisiana to-day, and half a century ago it
was exclusively spoken by French Creoles up to the age of
ten or twelve years. In fact, children had to be weaned
from it with bribes or punishment. It was, besides, the
language which the slave spoke to his master and the
master to him. The need which created it was the same as
that which created the corrupt English of the slaves in
.other parts of the country. The Africans who were brought
[ 129]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
to America had no written language. Among them there
was diversity of speech as well as of tribes and customs.
The need of a medium of communication between them and
their masters was greater than that of a communal lan-
guage for themselves; and in its construction they had the
help of their masters, who were not averse to a simplifica-
tion of their colloquial speech. The African languages were
soon forgotten. Dr. Alfred Mercier, who wrote a de-
lightful brochure on the grammar of the creole patois
some forty or more years ago,' says that there were then
not more than six or seven African words in the language
spoken by the Creoles. His meaning, no doubt, was that
only so many words were employed colloquially, for a
great many more were in use in the incantations which
formed a part of their superstitious rites and in some of
the songs which accompanied their orgiastic dances,
though their meaning was forgotten. How the black
slave proceeded in the construction of a grammar for the
speech which he took from the lips of his master is most
interestingly described by Dr. Mercier in his pamphlet,
on which I have drawn for the following notes :
In the first place, the negro composes the verb. For
his present indicative he takes a pronoun and the adjective
which qualifies a state of being. He says Mo contan (Je
suis content) for "Moi etre content"; he suppresses the
infinitive (etre). The present indicative tells us that the
action expressed by the verb is doing. You present your-
self at the door of a house and say to the negress who opens
to your knock that you want to speak to her master. She
replies that he dines (qu'il dine); i. e., he is dining (qu'il
est dinant); to form the present participle she makes use
of the pronoun lui (which she pronounces li) and places
it before the preposition apres (ape). Of these two words
she makes one, lape, to which she adds the infinitive diner —
lape dinin — (il est apres diner).
The preposition apres plays an important role in the
Creole patois. Dr. Mercier points out that it is used by the
' "Etude sur la Langue Creole en Louisiane," evidently printed for private
circulation, and bearing neither imprint nor date.
[ 130]
SONGS OF THE BLACK CREOLES
negroes in the same sense in which it was employed long
ago in France: etre apres faire quelque chose, to be after
doing something — a locution found in Languedoc.^ The
Creole negro takes the word indicating a state of being and
prefixes the pronoun :
A/o— Je suis — I am
To — ^Tu es — Thou art
Li — II est — He is
Nou — Nous sommes — We are
Vou — Vous etes — You are
Ye — lis sont — They are
malade — ill.
malades — ill.
To express an act in the course of accomplishment re-
course is had to the pronoun joined to the preposition
apres {ape) which is followed by the infinitive: Moi
apres, i. e.. Mo ape, which is contracted into mape, and so
on with the rest:
Mape
Tape
Lape
Nape
Vap'e
Yape
dinin.
the equivalent of
Je suis
Tu es
II est
Nous sommes
Vous etes
lis sont
apres diner.
Nothlng^jenaains of the piSfiSUaj except the sound of
the mitial letter, and these people having no written
language, even the letter does not exist for them. When
the black slave heard his master speak of things in the past
tense it was the sound te which fell most frequently and
persistently into his ear: J'etais, tu etais, il etait, ils
etaient. Upon this te the negro seized as representing
or figuring the past, and joining it to the pronoun he
formed his imperfect indicative of the verb etre:
Mo<^— J'etais.
Tot'e—'XM etais.
Lite — 11 etait.
Noute — Nous etions.
Voute — Vous etiez.
Yete — lis etaient.
1 I might add that it is a form with which the English language has been
enriched by an Irish idiom.
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
The negro hears some one say to the white man who is
expecting an arrival, "II va venir." He recognizes that
"va" as the sign of the future. For "Ce gros bateau a
vapeur ne pourra pas descendre quand I'eau sera basse"
he says : Gro stimhotte-ld pas capab decende can lo va basse. To
"va" he attached the infinitive of the verb to determine the
kind of action, and the pronoun to indicate the actor.
Thus va chante tells us that there is to be singing. Who is
to sing? The pronoun gives the information:
Mo
To
Li
Nou
Fou
Ye
va chante.
This is the primitive stage of the process which in the
mouth of the future Creole undergoes two changes: The
sound va is combined with the pronoun {mova, tova, liva,
nouva, vouva, yeva — chante), and then for economical con-
traction the sounds ov, iv, ouv, ev are elided, the initial
letter of the pronoun is united with the radical sound a,
and we have:
Ma
Ta
La
Na
Va
Ya
chante.
Sometimes there is a still further contraction, the pro-
nominal consonant disappearing, leaving the vowel a alone
to represent the future. For the imperative mood the Creole
uses the infinitive, preceded by the noun or pronoun; for
"Que Jules vienne avec vous" he says: Jule vini ave vou.
The first person plural in the Creole imperative is curious
in that to form it he calls in the help of the imperative
verb "aller," which he pronounces anon; "Traversons cette
rue" becomes anon traverse larue cila. He escapes such
embarrassments as "buvons," "dormons," "cousons" with
the help of his ever-ready anon — anon hoi, anon dormi,
anon coude.
"In its transformation into Creole," says Dr. Mercier,
"French is simplified and acquires either grace or strength.
[ 132 ]
SONGS OF THE BLACK CREOLES
In many cases the verbs 'to be' {etre) and 'to have' {avoir)
disappear: Li vaillan (il est vaillant); Li pas peur (il
n'a pas peur). In French the negative particles are over-
abundant; it is one of the faults of the language. In the
phrase 'II n'a pas peur' there are two negatives, 'ne' and
'pas.' The Creole uses only one and says in three words
what the speaker of French says in five. The diflFerence
is still more apparent in the phrases "Je commence a etre
fatigue; je crois qu'il est temps de nous en retourner" —
fourteen words; Mo comance lasse; mo ere tan nou tournin
— eight. Moreover, fleetness is acquired by the suppression
of the preposition 'a'~and the conjunction 'que.' "
^teying the law of laziness, or following the line of
least resistance, the creole elides the letters which are
difficult of pronunciation, or substitutes easy ones for
them. The lette r r is as difficult for the negro as it is for
the Chinaman; he elides it and says pou for pour, ape
for apres, di for dire, cate for quatre. In Martinique, if I
am to judge by my songs, when he does not dispense with
the letter altogether he gives it a soft sound, like an in-
fusion of w into ou: ouoche for roche. The French sound
of u is as difficult J[or the negro as it is for the Ameri-
can or Englishman ;^e does not struggle with it^ but sub-
stitutes the short sound of ji torti for tortue, jige for juge,
of he uses the continental sound (oo) : la nouite for la nuit,
tou souite for tout de suite. Eu he changes to ai, as in air;
lonair for I'honneur; j and g giving him trouble, he changes
them to z: touzou for toujours, zamais for jamais, manze
for mange. He has no use for the first person pronoun
"je," mo sufficing him; and "tu" he replaces with to and
toi. Words which are too long to suit his convenience he
abbreviates at pleasure: barace, embarrasse; pele, appele;
blie, oublie.
Thus, then, grew the pretty language, soft in the mouth
of the Creole as Bella lingua in bocca toscana, in which the
Creole sang of his love, gave rhythmical impulse to the
dance, or scourged with satire those who fell under his
displeasure — the uses to which the music was put which I
purpose now to discuss. It should be borne in mind that
[ 133 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
the popular notion in the United States that a Creole is a
Louisiana negro is erroneous. Friedenthal discusses the
origin of the word and its application in the introduction
to his book "Musik, Tanz und Dichtung bei den Kreolen
Amerikas." The Spanish word criollo, from which the
French creole is derived, is a derivation from the verb
criar, to create, bring up, breed. From this root other
words are derived; not only substantives like cria (brood),
crianza (education, bringing up), criatura, criador, etc., but
also criada (servant), which in other languages has a
very different etymology {Diener, serviteur, domestique,
servo, etc.). The term criado is a relic of the old patriarchal
system, under which the servants of the household were
brought up by the family. Children of the servants became
servants of the children of the master. So on the plan-
tations of the Southern States slaves were set apart from
childhood to be the playmates and attendants of the
children of the family. Criollo also signifies things bred
at home but born in foreign lands, and thus it came about
that the Spaniard called his children born in foreign lands
criollos; and as these foreign lands were chiefly the American
colonies, the term came to be applied first to the white
inhabitants of the French and Spanish colonies in America
and only secondarily to the offspring of mixed marriages,
regardless of their comparative whiteness or blackness.
When Lafcadio Hearn was looking up creole music for
me in New Orleans in the early 8o's of the last century, he
wrote in one of his letters : "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 into-
nation. Unfortunately, most of those I have heard were
quadroons or mulattoes." In another letter he wrote:
"There could neither have been creole patois nor creole
melodies but for the French and Spanish blooded slaves
of Louisiana and the Antilles. The melancholy, quavering
beauty and weirdness of the negro chant are lightened by
the French influence, -or subdued and deepened by the
Spanish." Hearn was musically illiterate, but his powers
[ 134]
SONGS OF THE BLACK CREOLES
of observation were keen and his intuitions quick and
penetrating. He felt what I have described as the imposi-
tion of French and Spanish melody on African rhythm.
This union of elements is found blended with the French
patois in the songs created by the Creole negroes in Louisiana
and the West Indies. Hearn came across an echo of the
most famous of all Creole love-songs in St. Pierre and in his
fantastic manner gave it a habitation and a name. De-
scribing the plague of smallpox in a chapter of "Two Years
in the French West Indies," he tells of hearing a song com-
ing up through the night, sung by a voice which had "that
peculiar metallic timbre that reveals the young negress."
Always it is one "melancholy chant" :
Pauv' ti Leie,
Pauv' ti Lele!
Li gagnin doule, doule, doule, —
Le gagnin doule
Tout patout!
I want to know who little Lele was, and why she had pains "all over" —
for however artless and childish these Creole songs seem, they are invariably
originated by some real incident. And at last somebody tells me that "poor
little Lele had the reputation of being the most unlucky girl in St. Pierre;
whatever she tried to do resulted only in misfortune; — when it was morning
she wished it were evening, that she might sleep and forget; but when the
night came she could not sleep for thinking of the trouble she had had during
the day, so that she wished it were morning. ..."
Perhaps **Pov' piti Lolotte" (a portion of whose melody
served Gottschalk, a New Orleans creole of pure blood, for
one of his pianoforte pieces) came from the West Indies
originally, but it is known throughout Creoleland now. It
fell under the notice of Alphonse Daudet, who,Tiersot says,
put it in the mouth of one of his characters in a novel. Out
of several versions which I have collected I have put the
song together, words and melody, in the form in which
Mr. Burleigh has arranged it. (See page 136.) It is worth
noting that the coda of the melody was found only in the
transcript made from the singing of the slaves on the
Good Hope plantation, in St. Charles Parish, La., and
that this coda presents a striking use of the rhythmical
snap which I have discussed in connection with the "spirit-
uals," but which is not found in any one of them with so
much emotional effect as here. In his essay in "The Cen-
[ 135 ]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
Pov' piti Lolotte
Andante canta1>lle
Pot' pi-ti Lo-lotte amoidii, Pov' pi-ti Lo-lotte amooiii,
bLiL'^
±
^
^
LJt! C-f
^m
rmn^
T^rv]
^^F
Por'pi-ti Lolotte amonin, Li gagnin bo-bo,bD-bo, Li ga^in don-le, | ,
[ 136]
SONGS OF THE BLACK CREOLES
ion po - te ma-drasse, u po - tS ji - pon^ grar- ni. Ca • la -
quand po - ia la ohaue, A - dieu Gonr-ri tout bon-heur, D'a-mour
ion po - i6 ma-drasse, U po - te ji - pon gar- ni.
qnand po - te la chatne, A- dieu cour-iri tdut bon-beur.
Pov'piti Lolatteamoiiiii,Pov'pi.ti Lolotteamouin, Li gagnin baJ)0,bo-bo,Li gagnin
Words and melody collated feom varioos sources by the asUior. The arrangement made ly
H.T. Barleigh.
[ 137]
AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS
tury Magazine" on Creole songs Mr, Cable wrote:
One of the best of these Creole love-songs ... is the tender lament
of one who sees the girl of his heart's choice the victim of chagrin in beholding
a female rival wearing those vestments of extra quality that could only be
the favors which both women had courted from the hand of some proud
master whence alone such favors should come. "Calalou," says the song,
"has an embroidered petticoat, and Lolotte, or Zizi," as it is often sung, "has
a heartache." Calalou, here, I take to be a derisive nickname. Originally
it is the term for a West Indian dish, a noted ragout. It must be intended
to apply here to the quadroon women who swarmed into New Orleans in
1809 as refugees from Cuba, Guadaloupe and other islands where the war
against Napoleon exposed them to Spanish and British aggression. It was
with this great influx of persons, neither savage nor enlightened, neither
white nor black, neither slave nor truly free, that the famous quadroon caste
arose and flourished. If Calalou, in the verse, was one of these quadroon
fair ones, the song is its own explanation.
In its way the song "Caroline" (see page 139) lets light
into the tragedy as well as the romance of the domestic
life of the young Creole slaves. Marriage, the summit of
a poor girl's ambition, is its subject — that state of blissful
respectability denied to the multitude either by law or
social conditions. I have taken words and melody from
"Slave Songs," but M. Tiersot, who wrote the song down
from the singing of a negress in New Orleans, gives the
name of the heroine as Azelie and divides the poem into
two stanzas separated by a refrain:
Papa dit non, maman dit non,
C'est li m'oule, c'est li ma pren. (Bis)
Un, deux, trois, Azelie.
Pas pare com fa, ma cher! (Bis)
Sam'di I'amour, Dimanch' marie,
Lundi matin piti dans bras;
N'a pas couvert', n'a pas de draps,
N'a pas a rien, piti dans bras!
(Papa says no, mama says no.
It is he whom I want and who will have me.
One, two, three; don't talk that way, my dear!
Saturday, love; Sunday, married;
Monday morning, a little one in arms.
There is no coverlet, no sheets, nothing — little one in arms!)
Tiersot gives the melody of the stanzas in 5-8 time, of the
refrain in 2-4, and describes the movements of the dancers
(the song is a Counjai) as a somewhat languorous turning
with a slight swaying of the body. I have translated
"cabanne" cabin, but in Martinique "caban" signifies a bed,
and in view of M. Tiersot' s variant text this may also
have been the meaning of the term in Louisiana.
[ 138 ]
SONGS OF THE BLACK CREOLES
AQegro
Aine, de, trois, Ca-ro-Une, ja, ^a, ye conune ^a, ma cherel
\§' r r r J' fl B 1 n M . J> , Ji J'l Ml
•^ Aine.
/I ;r ,
, 1
trois,
. 1
Ca- ro -line,
^a, ^a, yS^comme ^a, ma chiref
[i if irj J!^ J^l J 1 J J 1
1 r r f ^ j i H
■■J.
^•r^r, 1
Pa - pa di non, man-man di oui, C'est KmQjDu-le, c^est li mapren. Ya
lar- zan poua-ohete cabanne, C'est limojia-Ie, c'est li mapren.
Words and melody from"Slave Songs of the United States'.' The arrangement, fry John Van
Broekhoren, to a variant of the poem, was printed by Mr. Cable in his essay on The Dance
in Place Congo" and is here reprinted by permission of Mr. Cable and the Century Co., the
words as sung on the Good Hope Plantation, St. Charles Parish, La,being restored. The mean-
tog of the words is; "One, two, three, thaVs the way, my dear. Papa says no, mama says yes;
Tla him I want and he that will have me. There win be no money to buy a cabin:
I 139]