"Sinful Songs" of the Southern Negro
John A. Lomax
The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Apr., 1934), pp. 177-187
"SINFUL SONGS" OF THE SOUTHERN NEGRO
By JOHN A. LOMAX
I FIRST saw Iron-Head as he peered through the bars of the operating room of the hospital for Negroes on the convict farm. He was listening intently to the singing of "Mexico," the Negro trusty hospital-steward, into our recording machine. "I can sing lots of those 'jumped up' songs," said Iron-Head, when I had gone over to the window at his timid invitation. That night and throughout the long day following, Iron-Head proved that he did know the songs of the black man. He and his "partner," Clear-Rock, turn and turn about, sang rhythmic, surging songs of labor; of the jailbird; of the "bleed hounds" tracking the fleeing Negro through river bottoms; of the bull whip ("Black Betty") and cowhide in the hands of an angry "Cap'n"; of the loneliness and dismal monotony of life in the penitentiary; of pathetic longing for his "doney"; of the bold black desperado with his trusty "forty-fo" in his hand and with his enemy lying dead in the smoke pouring from its blue barrel; of his woman "dressed in green, lavender and red," who waited hopefully outside the prison walls for his long deferred coming.
A few songs were gay in tone. Most of them were dominated by sadness. Here was no studied art. The words, the music, the peculiar rhythm, were simple, the natural emotional outpouring of the black man in confinement. The listener found himself swept along with the emotions aroused by this appeal to primitive instinct, and, despite himself, discovered his own body swaying in unison to the urge of Iron-Head's melodies. A triple murderer, an "habitual," as he called himself, "De roughest nigger who ever walked de streets of Dallas; in de pen off an' on for 34 years," according to his own admission, Iron-Head failed to look the part. Only some deeply graven and grim lines about his mouth and eyes made you stop and wonder if any tenderness had ever touched his life. His massive head suggested pictures of blind Homer, with its rugged overhanging brows and deep-set eyes. He had the quiet dignity and reserve of a Roman.
Amid the clamor and excitement of a room full of black convicts, hearing for the first time their voices coming from the recording machine, he alone preserved his gravity and composure. "You have Indian blood," I said; and he nodded. "Sing Shorty George, Iron-Head," begged his companions.
[Photo Chain-Gang in South Carolina.]
And they insisted and urged him until his quiet negative flamed into an outburst of anger: "You niggers know dat song always tears me to pieces. I won't sing it." And he walked away from the crowd to the ironbarred door where he stood leaning against the jamb, looking out into the soft Texas moonlight. Soon he motioned to me. "I'll sing dat song low for you," he said, as if in apology for his outburst. "It makes me restless to see my woman. I'se a trusty an' I has an easy job, I could run down one o' dem corn rows an' git away, any day. But when dey caught me dey would put me back in de 'line' wid de field han's. I'se too old for dat work." Then he sang the story of the convict who gets a letter that he can't read for "cryin'." It tells him that "His woman ain't dead, but she's slowly dyin'." When he reached the last couplet, his low-toned voice swept along with lyric power into the tragic finale:
When dey let my baby down in de ground
I couldn't hear nuffin' but de coffin sound.
Then Iron-Head, sixty-five years old, thrice a murderer, an habitual criminal (in the eyes of the law), a condemned prisoner for life, broke down and sobbed aloud. I put my hand on his shoulder: "My wife is gone forever," I said, "I can never see her again. Your woman is alive." Iron- Head looked out of doors over broad fields of tall corn shimmering and whispering in the moonlight. Bitterness came back to his voice: "She might as well be dead; she cain't come here, an' I cain't go to her."
* *
"Gimme room, niggers,1 gimme room. Let me at dat singin' machine. I'se de out-singingest nigger on dis here plantation. I'm de bes' rhymster in de Brazis[2] bottoms. I'se been in de pen forty-seven years an' I oughta know de songs. Git out o' my way!"
I saved my microphone from being overturned by the eager, confident, self-important, copper-colored man, as he pushed through the throng of black convicts surrounding me. [3] Without exception this pronunciation of the word "Negro" was given by all Negro workers we interviewed. The spelling is retained only for historical accuracy and with no thought of giving offence. "Wait, Clear-Rock," I said, "later we'll try you out." Afterwards when I talked alone with him, I asked him what brought him to the penitentiary as a life-termer.
"I was jes misfortunate, boss, jes misfortunate. It might a-happened to anybody." A well-preserved man, seventy-one years old, unable to read or write, Clear-Rock sang "Bobby" Allen, as he called the old English ballad "Barbara Allen," true to tune but hopelessly mixed with Sir Patrick Spens, Little Lonnie, and a famous cowboy-song entitled The Streets of Larcdo. In fact he sang at times four versions of the same song, the variations being frequent and pronounced. A study of Clear-Rock's singing might furnish interesting data for some ballad-origin disputant. His song buried "Miss Allen" in a desert out in New Mexico with "six pretty maidens all dressed in white" for her pall-bearers, though there seemed water a-plenty for a rose and a brier to grow over her head till they reached the sky and "got twined in a knot and couldn't grow no higher."
Clear-Rock seemed to have caught in his capacious memory every floating folk-song that had been current among the thousands of black convicts who had been his only companions for fifty years. He had a store probably equal in continuous length to the Iliad. He did not sing any song through. Always I had to stop him and ask for another tune. Nor did he hesitate for a word. If he ever forgot (I could not discover), his quick invention supplied a word or line without a moment's pause and in the spirit and rhythm of the song he was singing.
He sang a new version of The Old Chizzum Trail, an endless ballad describing the experiences of a band of cowboys driving a herd of Texas longhorn cattle from Texas to Montana. One of his cowboys, riding an unruly horse, was thrown and left hanging on the limb of a tree along the trail. Clear-Rock sang four stanzas describing this incident and then ended his song.
"That's rather hard on that cowboy," I suggested, "to go on up the trail and leave him sprawling on a limb in what is doubtless an uncomfortable position." "Lemme git him down, boss; I'll git him down!" And at once he sang in perfect tune:
Cowboy lyin' in a tree a-sprawlin',
Come a little wind an' down he come a-fallin'.
Coma ti-yi yippy, yippy yea, yippy yea,
Coma ti-yi yippy, yippy yea.
*
Lightnin's eyes blazed as he sang. He was the leader of a quartet of black convicts brought from their cells into the vacant
hospital room where Lightnin' stood leaning forward towards the microphone, his three companions in a group just behind him.
His color was a deep black, "a blue-black, bad nigger," the stolid guard whispered to me. Lightnin' was still young--not yet thirty
years of age-serving his second term for serious crimes. As his body swayed with the rhythm of the singing, his figure seemed a black Apollo in grace and beauty.
Lightnin' was leading a song describing the days when convicts were leased by the State to owners of large cotton and cane
plantations, sometimes to be driven under the lash until they fell from exhaustion, many, according to rumor, dying from sunstroke amid the sun-baked rows of corn and cane, in "dem long, hot summer days." The song pictures what went on in the minds of a gang of field workers, one of whom was about to be punished.
The Negroes see the "Cap'n" riding up on his horse with a bull
whip in one hand and a cowhide in the other. They work faster.
"Better go to drivin'," says the song. After each excited ejaculation,
the chorus rings out, "Great Godamighty!"
Ridin' in a hurry. Great Godamightyl
Ridin' like he's angry. Great Godamightyl
Well, I wonder whuts de matter? Great Godamightyl
Bull whup in one han', Great Godamightyl
Cowhidein de udder, GreatG odamightyl
Gonna be trouble! Great Godamighty!
Well, de Cap'n went to talkin', Great Godamightyl
"Well, come here an' hol' him." Great Godamightyl
"Bully, low down yo' britchesl" Great Godamightyl
"Cap'n let me off, suh!" Great Godamightyl
"Woncha 'low me a chance, suh?" Great Godamightyl
De bully went to pleadin', Great Godamightyl
De bully went to hollerin', Great Godamightyl
The listeners in the room grew tense as the four strong voices
blended in the terrible sweep of the song. Again the stolid guard
whispered to me: "The goose pimples always come out along my
spine when I hear niggers sing that song." Even outside, in the
adjacent iron-barred dormitory, the chatter and clamor of two
hundred black convicts became stilled into awed and reminiscent
silence as the song swept on, growing in power to the end, while
Lightnin', blue-black, vivid, poised as if for flight, leaned forward
and sang with his three comrades,
"Great Godamighty!"
*
"Sinful Songs" of the Southern Negro 181
The three foregoing incidents are typical of what happened
during the summer of 1933 to my son, Alan, and me when we enjoyed
some unusual experiences during a unique trip. Before
returning to our home in Texas, we had travelled in a Ford car
more than 15,000 miles and had visited and interrogated nearly
10,000 Negro convicts in four Southern states: Texas, Louisiana,
Mississippi, and Tennessee. In addition, we visited groups of
Negroes living in remote communities, where the population was
almost entirely black; also large plantations, where in number the
Negroes greatly exceeded the whites; and lumber camps that
employed only Negro foremen and Negro laborers.
The purpose of our trip was to record on permanent aluminum
or celluloid plates, to be deposited in the Library of Congress,
the folk-songs of the Negro-songs that in musical phrasing and
poetic content are most unlike those of the white race, the least
contaminated by white influence or by the modern Negro jazz.
Through the Music Division in the Library of Congress, we were
provided with the latest improved-model portable-machine for
electrical sound-recording, with all the necessary accessories,
including a fine microphone. Edison batteries, operating a direct
current, enabled us to record singing wherever we found a good
voice, in camp, cabin, or field. Likewise, a music-reproducing
apparatus made it possible to play back at once any song recorded,
to the very great astonishment and enjoyment of our black convict
friends, nearly all of whom manifested an eager and enthusiastic
interest in the project. I am innocent of musical knowledge,
entirely without musical training. Before starting on the trip, I
was impressed with a cautioning word from Mr. Engel, chief of the
Music Division: "Don't take any musician along with you,"
said he; "what the Library wants is the machine's record of
Negro singing and not some musician's interpretation of it; nor
do we wish any musician about, to tell the Negroes how they ought
to sing." The hundred and fifty new tunes that we brought to the
Library at the end of the summer are, therefore, in a very true
sense, sound-photographs of Negro songs, rendered in their own
native element, unrestrained, uninfluenced and undirected by
anyone who had his own notions of how the songs should be
rendered.
Our search was mainly for the reels or so-called "jump-up,"
"made-up," or "sinful songs" of the blacks. On one occasion I
asked a Negro whom I found picking cotton in a Brazos Bottom
cotton field in Texas, to sing for me the famous Negro melody,
"De Ballet ob de Boll Weevil." He shook his head, and said:
182 The Musical Quarterly
"Boss, dat a reel. If you wants to get dat song sung, you'll have
to git one of dese worl'ly niggers to sing it. I belongs to de
church." It was the songs of the "worl'ly nigger" that Alan and
I were looking for, and we hoped to find them in their near purity
among the most completely isolated Negro convicts, as well as on
large, remote cotton plantations and in lumber camps, and Negro
colonies, some of which we likewise visited on this tour. Since it
seems so nearly impossible to transport Negro folk-singers from
the South and keep them untainted by white musical conventions,
the improved recording-machine affords the best means of preserving
this music, widely known and loved for its intrinsic beauty.
Except in Tennessee, all the convicts we visited work on large
cotton, corn, and cane plantations, where they are separated in
companies of three or four hundred men, living in groups of well
kept houses, that are situated in different parts of the big plantations.
Both in Mississippi and Louisiana, the farms comprise
about 25,000 acres each, with about a dozen different headquarters.
The black convicts do not work or eat or sleep in the same buildings
as do the white prisoners. They are kept in entirely separate
units; they even work in separate fields. Thus a long-time Negro
convict spends many years with practically no chance of hearing
a white man speak or sing. Such men slough off the white idiom
they may once have employed in their speech and revert more and
more to the idiom of the Negro common people.
In my judgment, the songs and ballads we found and recorded
this summer, under the conditions indicated, are practically pure
Negro creations, both in words and music. Either that, or
the songs have become so encrusted with Negro accretions that
any trace of white influence is quite obscured. Long-term Negro
convicts, I found, naturally resort to the songs they sang before
coming to the penitentiary. Thus the old songs are kept alive and
growing as they are passed along to successive generations of
convicts. Sometimes an indulgent prison management allows a
talented Negro prisoner to keep his own guitar for the entertainment
of fellow prisoners, to be used occasionally when white
visitors come in. On at least two farms I found well organized and
efficient Negro bands. Perhaps the presence of black and sinister
iron bars, crowds of men in dismal-looking grey stripes, and once a
broad bull-whip hanging by a nail near the entrance door of the
main dormitory, helped to emphasize the impression that a tone
of sadness runs through the songs of Negro convicts.
* *
"Sinful Songs" of the Southern Negro 183
There are particular reasons for the Negro's almost universal
neglect of his secular or "sinful songs," songs far more numerous
than the spirituals, and certainly, it seems to me, more original and
revealing. Negro spirituals abound in idioms and phrases drawn
directly from the Bible and from the older white spirituals. The
secular songs treat of subjects vital to the Negro's life, every day
of the week-his hates, his loves, his earthly trials and privations
(including the injustice of the whites), hunger, thirst, cold, heat,
his physical well-being, his elementary reactions; while the spirituals
devote themselves mainly to the emotions aroused by death,
the fear of Hell, the hope of Heaven, voiced and dwelled upon,
usually, on the Sabbath only. The secular songs deal with situations
as old as the Negro race; the spirituals, with a religion
adopted in comparatively recent times.
Of these two types of musical expression, distinctly separated
into two definite classes by the Negro mind, one, the secular songs,
is taboo, emphatically taboo, to all Negro ministers, all Negro
teachers, and to practically all Negroes of any educational attainments
whatever. They are "sinful songs," songs that definitely
connect them with their former barbaric life. Those that sing them
cannot be church members-they are social outcasts. An intelligent
Negro on the Sabine riverin Texas kept his cabin door carefully
shut while he sang some "plantation hollers," entirely innocent in
content and beautiful in phrasing. Even in the penitentiaries we
were sometimes met with a refusal to sing "sinful songs" by
convicts still under the spell of their ministers, or the sway of
what one guard called "penitentiary religion." "Many catch it,"
he said.
In one large Negro college, visited this summer, the President
assured me of his sympathy and cotiperation in having the students
sing the songs for which I was searching. A stay of two days was
barren of results, because in some secret unknown way the signal
for thumbs down on my project was flashed over the campus.
No so-called "sinful songs" were current there, although I heard
occasionally from the windows of the dormitories snatches of songs
I was eager to record, unwittingly sung by forgetful students.
Black-Sampson, a Negro murderer in the Nashville penitentiary,
would not sing an innocently worded levee camp-song into our
microphone until ordered to do so by the Warden. Even then,
without telling me beforehand, he prefaced the song with an humble
apology to the Lord, explaining the situation and asking forgiveness
for his transgression. That record will forever carry Black184
The Musical Quarterly
Sampson's spoken expiation for his sin of setting down a delightful
tune and story.
It is well known that the Negro is fond of singing. He is
endowed by nature with a strong sense of rhythm. His songs
burst from him, when in his own environment, as naturally and as
freely as those of a bird amid its native trees. There seems to be
no attempt at artificial effects. There are few high dramatic notes
or softened repetitions when the concluding bars are reached. He
sings the last bar of a song with precisely the same emphasis as he
does the first notes. His is the real art of simplicity and naturalness.
Moreover, the Negro in isolation, without books or newspapers,
the radio or the telephone, sings for his own amusement,
to relieve the tension of his loneliness and that of his companions
in misfortune. He recalls the songs known from his childhood;
he memorizes the songs of his companions, fellow convicts, or fellow
workers.
Because they still sing in unison with their work, because of
this almost complete isolation and loneliness, because of the
absence of "free-world" conventions in prison life, the Negro continues
to create what we may rightly call folk-songs. They are not
written out; they are orally handed down; they undergo inevitable
changes in the process; they are seemingly endless; they vary with
the singer and with each singing. Now and then there emerge
lines of notable power and beauty. Two convicts sing a song of
question and reply.
Little boy, little boy, why are you in here so long?
I found my doney in de high sheriff's arms.
* *
The dust rises stifling from a Mississippi River bottom, made
inaccessible to cooling breezes by heavy fringes of surrounding
timber. By three o'clock in the afternoon the black convicts are
tired and worn out from the day's work that started at dawn.
Heat, insupportable heat, seems to pour from a cruelly cloudless
sky. The weary blacks, nevertheless, sing to a mournfully sad
tune, with a wail for a chorus, a song in a slow rhythm fitted to the
work they are doing:
You oughta been here in 1904,
Lawd, Lawd, Lawdl
"Sinful Songs" of the Southern Negro 185
You could find a dead nigger at every turn-row,
Lawd, Lawd, Lawdl
You oughta been here in 1910,
Lawd, Lawd, Lawdl
Dey wuz rollin' de wimmen jus' like dey drove de men.
Lawd, Lawd, Lawdi
Addressing the sun as Ole Hannah, they chant as they pray:
God owno leH annahd, onchar isen o mo',
Lawd, Lawd, Lawdl
If your isea nymob' ringo nj udgmendta y.
Lawd, Lawd, Lawdl
One of their favorite "bad man" songs ends:
Here I is, head bowed down wid shame,
Gota numbeirn steado ba name,
I'se got to stay here de rest of my life-
All I everd onew uzt o kill my wife.
It is my belief that few persons in the United States, other
than Southerners, have ever heard songs of Negro origin, words and
music, sung with the artless simplicity that gives them what is to
me their chief charm. I have listened to many quartets and clubs,
representing Negro colleges; I have heard Negro singing in northern
music halls and on the stage. But as yet I have heard none that
did not inject into the Negro idiom some trait borrowed directly
from conventional music of white origin. A Negro quartetto
give one apposite example-will almost invariably repeat in
softer tones the last line of the last stanza of any spiritual that it
sings. This practice, of dropping into the conventional musical
idiom of the whites, seems to me to be due, at least partially, to
two causes. In the first place, the Negro, living among a people
allegedly his superior, is always strongly tempted to imitate them.
He quickly adopts from the white man musical conventions that
seem to him most effective. Secondly, those very qualities that
render the Negro music distinctive, and often also more beautiful,
he neglects and frequently abandons.
In this connection it is interesting to compare the musical
arrangements used by the first group of the Fisk Jubilee Singers
who went out to astonish America and Europe more than fifty
years ago, with the arrangements of the identical songs as they are
now commonly sung for public entertainment. These later
versions are perhaps more musically ornate and interesting than
were their forbears of the Fisk Singers; but that remains a question
of taste. My point is that the first book of the Fisk Singers con186
The Musical Quarterly
tained music more nearly representative of the singing of spirituals
by the great mass of southern Negroes. They were certainly more
like the original and "made-up" spirituals. Such songs can yet be
heard in their rich and harmonious simplicity if one but goes to the
right places. Those places are the remote Negro communities, or
the sections where the Negro population is largely in excess of the
whites. Negroes grow to resemble white folks where the models
are sufficiently numerous. As a Negro song says:
Niggers growin' mo' lak white folks,
Niggers growin' mo' lak white folks,
Every day.
Niggers learnin' Greek and Latin,
Niggers wearin' silk an' satin,
Niggers growin' mo' lak white folks,
Every day.
The Negro is going farther in becoming "mo' lak white folks,"
than merely to modify his beautiful spirituals. Under the leadership
of his preachers, his teachers, and his men of education,
he is abandoning them as unworthy of perpetuation entirely.
During the past summer, Manassas, Virginia, was recommended
to me as a likely place to find genuine Negro spirituals. I made
a long drive to reach the church, only to be greeted, when the singing
began, by a surpliced choir that marched into the church
to slow waltz-time music, derived from a book of cheap, white
revival-tunes.
Sometimes the Negro's rough, vital creations grow into
happily phrased groups of stanzas that may lay claim to real
lyrical beauty. Here is an example, so far as I know never before
recorded:
IDA RED
I went downtown one day in a lope,
Fooled around till I stole a coat.
Den I come back and done my best,
Fooled around till I got the vest.
Oh, weepl 0 my Ida, fer over dat road
l'se bound to go.
Dey carried me down to de jail house do',
Where I never had been befo'.
De jailer came out wid a key in his han';
Said, "I just got room fer you, young man."
Oh, weepl O my Ida, fer over dat road
I'se bound to go.
"Sinful Songs" of the Southern Negro 187
Sent little Ida down in town
To git somebody fer to go my boun',
But she came back wid a very sad tale:
"Cain't git nobody for to go your bail."
Oh, weepl 0 my Ida, fer over dat road
I'se bound to go.
Dey had me tied wid a ball and chain,
Waitin' all ready for de east-bound train;
And every station we pass by
Seem like I heard little Ida cry.
Oh, weepl 0 my Ida, fer over dat road
I'se bound to go.
If I had listened to what Ida said,
I'd been sleepin' in Ida's bed;
But I paid no mind to my Ida Red,
And now I'se sleepin' in a convict's bed.
Oh, weepl 0 my Ida, fer over dat road
I'se bound to go.
I wash my face and I comb my head,
I'm a mighty fool about Ida Red.
When I git out of dis old shack,
Tell little Ida I'm comin' back.
Oh, weepl 0 my Ida, fer over dat road
I'se bound to go.
FOOTNOTES
From "Roll, Jordan, Roll" by Julia Peterkin, with photographs by Doris Ulmann. (Reproduced by courtesy of Mrs. Ulmann.)
2Brazos river, one of three main arteries in Texas.