The White Man in the Woodpile: Some Influences on Negro Secular Folk-Songs
by Newman I. White
American Speech, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Feb., 1929), pp. 207-215
THE WHITE MAN IN THE WOODPILE SOME INFLUENCES ON NEGRO SECULAR FOLK-SONGS
THE majority of the floating stanzas which in various combinations constitute the Negro secular song originated in the minds of anonymous Negro singers. Some are the improvisations of to-day; others are the survivals of yesterday's-and yesteryear's improvisations. However, there is a surprisingly large element in these songs which had an origin from without the folk-group and even from without the Negro race. It is this element which I hope to clarify, using as a basis the annotations to my own collections of songs. This collection, which includes 680 secular songs, has been published by the Harvard University Press. In the present paper I am mainly generalizing from the annotations given in that volume.
Since the Negro secular song is only a temporary association of independent stanzas, the stanza, and not the song, is the only true unit. This fact, demonstrated by scores of annotations in my volume, can be fairly illustrated by the following example, which also illustrates several of the influences with which this paper deals. I take it purposely from another collection, Charles J. Finger's recent Frontier Ballads, omitting the repetitions of interlines and chorus after the first stanza: [1]
'TAINT GWINA RAIN NO MO'
1. Ole cow die at the mouth of the branch
'Taint gwina rain no mo'
The buzzards had a public dance,
'Taint gwina rain no mo'.
Chorus: 'Taint gwina rain
'Taint gwina hail
'Taint gwina rain no mo'.
2. What did the blackbird say to the crow?
'Taint gwina rain and 'taint gwina snow.
3. Gather up corn in a fine new hat,
Boss he grumble ef you eat much o' that.
4. Monkey, monkey, drink the beer,
How many monkeys are there here?
5. Knew a man named Mister Brown,
Wore his hat on upside down.
This song may be annotated off-hand as follows: First, it is one of several printed versions of 'Taint Gonna Rain No Mo', no two of which that I have seen are exactly alike. Second, each of the first four stanzas occurs, with some variations, in a number of other songs and cannot be said to belong definitely to any one song. The first couplet occurs variously in my collection and in others as
De old cow died at de forks o' de branch
De jay-birds whistled an' de buzzards danced.
and
Way down yonder in de forks o' de branch
De jay-bird say he aint got much chance.
Variants of this stanza occur in antebellum minstrel songs. The second couplet is connected with the following from a song in my collection:
What did the rooster say to the hen?
You aint been around since God knows when.
The third couplet accurs in my collection as:
A cold pot o' peas an' a little bit o' fat
White folks growl if you eat much o' that,
and is found, with only slight variation, in the collections of antebellum minstrel songs. The fourth stanza is part of a counting-out rhyme of the whites that I often heard during my childhood:
Monkey, monkey, bottle o' beer
How many monkeys have we here.
Of course the analogies here given could be further elaborated. The hodge-podge character they illustrate could be explained as the probable result of several circumstances. The minstrel songs and dance songs of the whites which influenced Negro secular song in the mid-Nineteenth Century have exactly this same peculiarity. Also, though the words count for less with the Negro than with the white singer, they must be supplied as long as the tune runs. Since a work song or dance song may run indefinitely, stanzas must be supplied indefinitely, and the only sources of supply are an extensive and scrappy folk-memory and a racial tendency toward variation and improvisation. This extensive but rather inaccurate folk memory preserves, beyond question, a great deal that the original singers, like Tommy Atkins's Homer, "went and took," mostly from the white man.
The sources of these originally extraneous snatches are
(1) traditional songs of the white people
(2) the antebellum minstrel stage
(3) the coonsong writers of the 1890's and 1900's
(4) the vaudeville stage and the "ballet" writer (two distinct sources, but practically impossible to keep separate in working back from the songs they influenced) and
(5) the professional "blues" composer.
Except for the first, they illustrate quite definitely several different stages in the history of the secular song. To put it another way, the Negro secular song is a fairly accurate mirror of several of the more important song-crazes with which the whole country has been blest.
The traditional songs of the white people of which echoes are preserved in Negro secular songs are generally jig-songs, nursery songs, and children's rhymes. They may have been acquired in the white man's nursery, at the corn-shuckings or break-downs of the white man at which there were Negro musicians, on the large plantations where in the eighteenth century the slave sometimes worked side by side with the indentured white man, or on the small farm in the nineteenth century where the slave and his owner often labored together. Although the Negro learned a good many of the traditional English and Scottish ballads, as Miss Scarborough has shown, I can find very little evidence of their influence on the Negro's own songs; neither do I find any surviving traces of the Irish songs and patriotic songs which were so popular with the white man in the early nineteenth century. Such traces of the white man's traditional songs as I find seem to belong to no particular wave of influence. There is probably more of this influence than the notes in my collection indicate, but its volume is on the whole rather less than one might expect. In the 680 secular songs in my collection I find 22 such songs.[2]
A much more extensive connection is that with the antebellum minstrel stage. In 1829 the songs Zip Coon and Long Tail Blue came upon a variety stage already a little bored with the old favorites. They achieved some popularity and were soon followed by Ole Virginny Nebah Tire, Setting on a Rail, and other similar songs. In 1832 "Jim Crow" Rice sang before a New York audience the Jim Crow song-and-dance, elaborated from the performance of a Negro he had observed upon the streets of Louisville. The song received twenty enthusiastic encores. In a short time it had conquered America and had become London's most popular song of the century. Bayard Taylor heard it sung by Hindu minstrels in Delhi. It returned to the plantation to find an echo in Uncle Remus; and at length bequeathed its name to Jim Crow legislation. Numerous minstrel companies were formed under such names as Ethiopian Serenaders, Virginia Minstrels, New Orleans Serenaders, etc. Men like Stephen Foster wrote for such companies almost exclusively.
I can find no record that any of these minstrels were Negroes. Certainly the principal performers, such men as Charles White, "Jim Crow" Rice, Dar, Emmett, Henry H. Paul, T. G. Booth, and "Pickaninny" Coleman were all white men and wrote many of their own songs. Charles White offered a reward of fifty dollars to anyone who could make it appear that he was not the author of some forty of the most popular "Negro" songs. A few of the earlier songs, like Jim Crow, may have had an original Negro basis. A song called "Juba," the substance of which was as indubitably Caucasian as its title was African, was sung at the Drury Lane Theatre, London, as early as November, 1816, and "Opossum up a gum tree" was rightly advertised as a 'real negro melody" by the Theatre Royal, Dublin, in December, 1824.
Practically all such songs, however, were sure, as Jim Crow did, to undergo rapid expansion, parody, and imitation, until most traces of the original disappeared. The earlier ones rapidly established a conventional so-called Negro song, which later minstrels imitated, and which widely differed from such songs as Frances Anne Kemble and other pre-minstrel observers occasionally reported from the lips of the Negroes themselves. In 1855 the author of an article called "Negro Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern"' writing as a Southerner and slaveholder protested that in a whole volume of minstrel songs, he could find "only ten with any trace of genuineness." It seems plain, therefore, that the correspondence between the old minstrel songs and songs now sung by Negroes is not a survival of pre-minstrel Negro folk-song, but is a direct Caucasian influence.
The superficial objection that few Negroes could have attended the minstrel performances breaks down in the face of the fact that everyone sang these songs. The Negro learned them from the white man and on
request sang them back to the white man because the Negro knew it was what the white man wanted. After a while, as in the case of all other similar borrowings, he forgot that they were not originally his own. A complete parallel to this process may be found in the assimilation of factory-made "blues" into Negro folk-song taking place at the present time.
The early minstrel songs survive in numerous collections, such as The Nigga Singers' Own Book, Christy's and White's Ethiopian Melodies, The Ethiopian Glee Book, etc. dating from the late 1840's, the 1850's, and the early 1860's. They were out of print before there was any appreciable number of Negroes who could read them. Hence the passages they contain in common with twentieth-century Negro songs must have been handed down by oral tradition. Incidentally this demonstrates an age of from sixty to ninety years for many fragments of Negro song which have commonly been regarded as contemporary improvisations.
In my own collection, I find 104 secular songs which contain such definite verbal echoes from the old minstrel songs as to leave no doubt as to the original home of the line or stanza concerned. This does not include a considerable number of songs which show probable influence not to be demonstrated by quoting parallel passages, nor does it include, of course, the many parallel passages whose existence I sensed but could not establish by direct reference, nor the many more which it is assumed that any hunter of parallels would miss while trying to hold two or three thousand songs in mental solution. It is not to be forgotten, of course, that these parallels, like those in the song previously analyzed, seldom extend beyond two consecutive lines; but such as they are, I find they hold good for all other collections in about the same ratio as for mine.
There is a considerable variation in the extent to which this influence affects different types of secular songs. Among the eleven classes into which I have divided my secular songs there is only one, Songs About Recent Events, which shows no trace of this influence-for reasons obvious in the classification. The work-songs, which constitute about half the total, show much slighter traces of the old minstrel than do the social songs. Over half the parallels presented are to be found in two groups of social songs, and nearly a third are to be found in the one group of social songs dealing with animals. Most of the songs about animals were originally dance songs, as were those in the other groups of social songs referred to. About half the songs in these two groups show some trace of early minstrel influence.
Sometimes one such song now in tradition will contain passages from several different minstrel songs. Sometimes the converse happens, and one song from the old minstrel books may leave deposits on several different modern songs. Examples of this diffusive tendency are the Creation Song, De Original Ole Jim Crow (which was far from being the original) and What's de Matter, Susey. The latter, as "composed and sung with unbounded applause by the original Old Dan Emmett" [4] runs as follows:
1. Sambo had a son born, he thought it was a daughter,
Yaller Sal de Georgia Stag, de big buck in de water.
Chorus: What's de matter, Susey?
What's de matter, my dear?
What's de matter, Susey?
I'm gwine away to leab you.
2. I floated down de ribber, I landed in Orleans,
I saw where Massa Jackson killed de Packenheens.
3. Nigger on de wood pile, couldn't count eleben,
Put him in de fedder bed, he tink he gwine to heaben.
4. Betwixt de white an' brack folks I'm sure dar is no kin,
De white's hab got de softest head, de niggers de softest skin.
5. Massa on de cellar door, a mendin' ob his shoes
De nigger on de telumgraph a readin' ob de news.
6. Old folks and young folks, you'd better go to bed
You only put de debble in de little nigger's head.
The last line of the chorus is a common sentiment in traditional Negro songs today, but may of course have an independent origin. The third stanza is apparently related to some of the modern "shortnin'-bread" stanzas wherein little niggers are "layin' in de bed" and "tryin' to get to heaben." Stanza four is the same kind of trivial comparison of white folks and Negroes found in many modern Negro songs. So far, while a direct influence upon modern Negro songs may seem probable, none is definitely demonstrable. Stanza five, however, and stanza six, have both descended entire, very little changed in No. XIIIB (c) and number IX 26 in my collection.
The successors to the early minstrel influence were the coon-song writers. As these writers made less of an impression upon the white man's world, their influence on the Negro secular song was proportionately less. Parts of three of Harry von Tilzer's songs, garbled and only partly digested into folksong as yet, appear in my collection.[5]
Other songs of the type similarly represented in my collection are Coon, Coon, Coon,[6] May Irwin's "Mr. Johnson Turn Me Loose"[7] and Bob Cole's "O Didn't He Ramble."[8] While this influence is definitely from outside the folk-group, it is not always from outside the race. Some of the coon-song writers, like Bob Cole, J. Rosamund Johnson, and Ernest Hogan, were Negroes. In my collection there are not more than half a dozen songs which I can trace definitely to any known writer of coonsongs.
But coon-song means to the Negro any popular song, not religious, composed by a white man about the Negro. In this sense the various vaudeville songs about the Negro are simply a continuation of the influence of the old coon-song writers. Nor can the echoes of these songs in the Negro secular song be always distinguished from the influence of the "ballet." A "ballet" by a semi-literate Negro or white man is sold at a fair or picnic and passes at once into oral tradition which sooner or later, by the immemorial process of repetition, amalgamation, addition, and garbling, absorbs it into the current of genuine folk-song.
Moreover, in all these three types of song there is a problem of counter-influence from the folk-song. A "ballet" may simply be an elaboration of an older folk-song and may itself, after a little garbling, perhaps, become a part of other folk-songs. There are "ballets" of the Titanic, "ballet" and folk-song mixtures of the Titanic, and short folk-songs of the Titanic, but before there was a Titanic there was a folk-song about a forgotten Mississippi steam-boat, quoted by Mr. E. C. Perrow in his Songs and Rhymes from the South[9] which is sufficiently like the Titanic songs to show where the first Titanic song started. This principle may operate even in the coon-songs. There are two songs in my collection[10] which contained fragments from Bob Cole's "O Didn't He Ramble" several years before that song was copyrighted by its "author."
Most of the coon-songs and vaudeville songs were of white authorship, whereas most of the "ballets" were probably written by Negroes. In annotating the secular songs it is not always possible to show conclusively that a particular song has been touched by one of these influences, because printed versions of the suspected source are seldom to be had for comparison. Even so, a very large influence from these sources is practically demonstrable. My annotations show 58 songs that are referable either in whole or in part to one or another of these influences. Undoubtedly the influence is greater than these figures indicate.
When we come to the blues, the last great tidal wave of Negro song, we encounter a situation entirely too complex for detailed analysis. Most of the blues in existence before 1915 are folk-songs. But with the vast popularity of the blues since 1915-a popularity which owed its development almost entirely to the white man's cabaret and phonograph- a great change occurred. Numerous song-writers, white and black, turned out blues literally by the thousands. There are more than a thousand phonograph records of blues. Popular cabaret singers wrote their own. The folk themselves had no part in this factory product, other than a few genuine folk-phrases which remained in some of the songs. An examination of any volume of blues, such as W. C. Handy's collection,[11] shows hardly as large a genuine folk-element, at least in the words, as in 1855 the disgusted author of Negro Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern found in the old minstrel songs.
But the tale does not end here. Just as the spurious minstrel songs became naturalized and later passed for original Negro material even among Negroes, so the manufactured blues have come home to the folk Negro, mainly by way of the white man. Recent collections of Negro secular song, such as Odum and Johnson's Negro Workaday Songs,[12] are shot through with its influence. In examining one of their songs [13] these authors found that of the four stanzas the first was the same as a stanza from one phonograph blues record, the second and third were the same as lines from another blues record (the third being a combination and variation of two stanzas), and the fourth was a slight variation from a stanza in still another blues record. By the same process as of old, a new crop of Negro secular songs is in gestation before our eyes, a heritage for future song-collectors. The situation is too fluid at present to attempt to estimate the non-folk element in the blues on anything like a percentage basis.
Thus, out of a total number of 680 secular songs in my collection, we get 22 songs showing traces of white traditional folk songs, 104 showing traces of the ante-bellum minstrel song, and 58 showing traces of coonsongs, vaudeville songs and ballets-a total of 184 songs out of 680- over 27 per cent. This takes no account of the numerous spurious "blues" or of the many parallels that must escape any analyst in a task of this nature. Surely this is enough to demonstrate the peculiar heterogeneous and acquisitive nature of Negro secular folk-song. The same methods applied to the Negro religious songs show a similar result. That they reveal a very considerable white man in the woodpile is inevitable both from the nature of the Negro and the history of his relations with the white man. It is only because everything relating to the Negro is easily liable to distortion by the prevalent extraordinary race-sensitiveness that such a conclusion will seem surprising to those who assume the utter originality of the Negro folkgenius.
And lest this paper, which by necessity has dealt with only the non-original elements in Negro secular folk-songs, may seem to lend undue support to those equally erroneous Nordics who deny the Negro any originality whatever, I must state my conviction that the mixture is in itself typically racial and that-as I said in the beginningmost of the individual stanzas probably originated with anonymous Negro folk-singers.[14]
NEWMAN I. WHITE.
Duke University.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Frontier Ballads. Heard and Gathered by Charles J. Finger. Garden City, N. Y., Doubleday Page & Co. 1927. Reprinted from p. 163 by the kind permission of the publishers and author.
2 For the numbers of all the annotations on which this paper is based, see the footnote at the end (below).
3 Putnam's Monthly, V: 72-79, January, 1855.
4 Page 38 in White's New Illustrated Ethiopian, n.d., but probably belonging to the early 1850's.
5 Namely, Goodbye Eliza Jane, cop. 1903, in No. IV 28; Please Go way and Let Me Sleep, cop. 1902, in No. XIV 32; and What you Goin' to Do When the Rent Comes Round, 1, in No. IV. 43.
6 No. XIII. 1.
7 No. XII. 12.
8 Nos. XI 5 and VI 50.
9 Journal of American Folk-Lore, 26: 123 (1913).
10 No. IV 50 and No. XI 5.
11 Blues; an anthology edited by W. C. Handy, with an introduction by Abbe Niles. New York: A. and C. Boni. 1926.
12 Negro Workaday Songs, by Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson. Chapel Hill, N. C. The University of North Carolina Press. 1926.
13 Page 27.
14 The various influences discussed in this paper are shown by the following
annotations in my collection:
Traditional songs of the white people: Numbers IV 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 29, 31,
42; V 13, 14, 20, 27, 28, 31; VI 1, (A and B), 11, 14, 47; VIII 21; XII 26.
Antebellum Minstrel Songs: III 7, 8, 18, 19, 20, 21, 24 (A, B, C, D), 25; IV 1,
2, 3 (A, B, C, D, E, F, G), 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 13, 17, 18, 21, 23, 29, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 40,
47; V 4, 7, 20, 21, 26; VI 7, 9, 10, 13, 19, 23, 24, 25, 27 (A, B), 28, 29 (A, B), 30,32
(A, B), 37, 40 (A, B, C, D), 41, 42, 43, 47, 48, 49, 50; VII 44, 45, 57, 59, 82 (A), 85;
VIII 1, 3, 17, 22; IX 3, 17, 26, 36; X 16, 33, 59, 61, 65; XII 8, 28, 39 (A, B, C, D, E),
40; XIII 2, 3, 5, 6, 11, 14.
Influence from coon-songs, vaudeville songs and ballets: III 8-23; IV 27, 28,
43, 44, 50, 70; V 2 (A), 8 (A, B, C, D, E, F), 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22,
23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 33, 35, 36; VI 14; X 59; XI 1, 5, 20; XII 12, 43, 44; XIII 1;
XIV 32.