White Pioneers and Black
by John Jacob Niles
The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Jan., 1932), pp. 60-75
WHITE PIONEERS AND BLACK
By JOHN JACOB NILES
HERE was a rattling of anchor chains, for the order to disembark had been given. The Sarah Constant (100 tons burden), The Goodspeed (40 tons burden) and the Discovery (20 tons burden) stood in close to the right bank of the James River, and, quoting from a diary of the times ". .. the colony of 120 men went ashore. They carried their own possessions and later assisted with the stores." All this happened on the 14th of May, 1607. And that day two Anglo-American institutions were established, one being the Dominion of Virginia and the other the Elizabethan influences in the music of the Southeastern states.
Many of the passengers on those three tiny ships looked for all the world as if they had but recently stepped out of a Shakespearian play. The village they were about to found was variously hailed as James City or James Fort, and later as Jamestown. There were no women aboard. But it is safe to say that there were singers among those 120 hearty souls, for, being men about town, they had no doubt sat around in public houses and sung many a rollicking Elizabethan tune. Indeed, the entire party very likely broke into a gay dittie when they found themselves safely on the terra firma of Virginia. For the trip had taken all of six months.
They had watered in the Canaries, traded and restocked in the West Indies, been lost for weeks on end, and had all but decided to set sail for England again when they were overtaken by a devastating storm and almost literally cast into the very lap of Virginia. And for the next 150 years they continued to come-- Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen, and Welshmen. Not all of them to the manner born by any means, but men who brought their language, their customs, and their music. And that is why the music sung by the white folk in some isolated parts of the Southern Appalachians still, to this very day, smacks of the Elizabethan.
It was a wild life those early imigrants led. Marksmen, carpenters, and general house servants were much in demand; but musicians were also valued for their wares. We know this because in 1619, when a mixed cargo of ladies was transported to the Virginia Colonies to become the wives of the planters, the average of these female persons sold for "120 pounds of sweet tobacco," whilst one of their number-"a handsome girl who could turn a tune right prettily"-brought the unbelievable price of 150 pounds of sweet tobacco.
My father always liked to believe that this handsome girl who could turn a tune right prettily was one of his ancestors. I am convinced she was one who could sing all the verses of Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender, and the unexpurgated versions of Little Musgrove and Lady Bernard, and certain grand old sea tunes, and that priceless thing about the old woman who made a cuckold of her husband, and other almost endless ballads from the Scotch and Irish and Welsh. In fact, I like to classify her with the slim sunburned up-and-coming girl of our own times who can sit down to a piano and accompany herself through any of our really great musical epics-"Frankie and Johnnie," something that smacks of the cowboy, a sweet-mamma blues, a lonesome tune from the Kentucky hills, or one of our salt-water Come-all-yes.
Krehbiel tells us that some kind providence always curses unimportant music with the "blessing of transientness." If this be true, then the Elizabethan balladry was important, for thanks to certain quaint folk in Kentucky, Tennessee, North and South Carolina, and Virginia, it has proved almost imperishable. In it we discover the basis of a truly Anglo-American musical idiom, a well-nigh classical background, a style of melody-line and an unmistakable procedure of harmony, that has managed to outlive so many less distinguished expressions.
As the years passed, those early colonists had nothing in the way of music except the things they had inherited from the Elizabethans. Fortunately they were hard-headed folk, and not to be influenced by any local art expression, such as the outbursts of the American Indian.
It is interesting to note Captain John Smith's impressions of the music of the red man. No one expects much in the way of musical criticism from adventurers, explorers or soldiers of fortune, but even so I quote literally from the Captain's diary: ". . . for their musicke they use a thicke cane, on which they pipe as on a recorder... but their chiefe instruments are rattles made of small gourds and pumpeons shells of which they have Bass, Tenor, Countertenor, Meane and Trebel." Continuing, the Captain remarks that the American Indian made a kind of music that was rather more terrifying than edifying, and concludes by signing his name and declaring that "John Smith, writ this with his owne hand."
So the early settlers were not influenced by the American Indians and the American Indians were not influenced by the early settlers; in fact, for a great many years the Indian remained aloof from practically all outside musical influences. There must have been some reason for this condition, but whatever the reason was it cannot be applied to the situation that arose in 1620, when according to John Rolf, ". .. about the last of August came a Dutch man o' warre from the coast of Guinea, that sold us 20 and odd negars. .. ." These black men (according to Mr. Rolf) were not sold as slaves, but served for a term of years as "Indentured servants as twer." We even know the names of eleven of these black pioneers. One of them, having spent some time in a Spanish Colony, had adopted the name Ferdinand after the King current during the Columbus and Isabella episode.
So, for the second time the Virginia Colony beheld the establishment of a great and far-reaching American institution. This time it was an Afro-American institution, namely, the Negro and everything that followed in his wake: his descent into abject slavery, the Civil War, the Emancipation, his attempt to gain a place in the social sun-all the drama of political intrigue performed against a background of superb folk-music, the music of the American Negro.
But this American Negro folk-lore was not a thing that happened quickly. There are those who believe that the African Negro came to this country singing "Deep River."' Nothing could be further from the truth. There are also those who believe that today the African Negro sits in the middle of his almost impenetrable forests and sings Spirituals, moans, blues, reels, and jazz. In spite of the foolishness of these last two suggestions, I have gone to the trouble of investigating the possibility of such extraordinary occurrences taking place.
After searching in some of the world's greatest libraries I am convinced that there was very little written about the habits, customs, manners, and art expressions of the African natives in the 15th century, when the Spanish and the Portuguese seafaring men unfortunately discovered the possibilities of introducing 'This would tend to prove Mr. Nubell Niles Puckett's statement that "the average white man's understanding of the Negro is limited almost completely to practical affairs and consist chiefly in knowing how to make the Negro work."
Negroes into their own countries as agricultural workmen and house servants. Owing to the fact that white men in Spain and Portugal were already unemployed the business of slave-trading had fallen into hard times and was almost given up when Columbus discovered the West Indies and at once a new outlet for African slaves was developed.
We do know that the black men who came to America as slaves could not speak our language. I say "black men," because not all came from the interior of Africa: some came from Madagascar, others were Moors. One eye witness writing in 1705 declares that he saw "on one slave ship negars from more than a score of tributary tribes and divers nations." Furthermore the tempered tuning of the scale as understood by John Sebastian Bach was absolutely unknown to them, because, if the native of today has anything in common with the native of the 15th century, they had no fixed tunings and their scale was rather a short one. And finally they would not have been able to sing spirituals because they had not yet been introduced to the blessings of Christianity, and did not know of the Christian God or Jehova, of Jesus Christ, of Mary, the Prophets, the Apostles, or any of the dramatis personae upon whom the sacred music of the Negro is constructed.
Nor are the present-day African savages any better informed about the intricacies of the English language or the complexities of European music. Even when they are taught our hymn-tunes or secular songs, they make them over to suit their own ideas of what music ought to be as soon as the hardworking missionary turns his back. A German who went out to Africa some 20 years ago to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ had an interesting experience with what he dared call a "rag-time orchestra." This man (a modern indeed) thought he would try to interest the natives by providing enough instruments to make up a dance orchestra, and then (because he was apparently a gifted musician) teach them to play after the manner of orchestras in the civilized world.
Strange to say, the orchestra prospered. The players got on after a fashion. It was up-hill work, but ultimately a certain kind of performance was effected. Then the war came along about that time and the priestly German had to flee the country. Imagine his surprise when, five and one half years later, he returned to find what was left of the orchestra still going strong. But they were not producing the music of Tin Pan Alley, nor the music-hall tunes of London, Paris, or Berlin. They had concocted something they really understood, something after their own hearts. The slide trombone had come into its own. It was an unfretted instrument and greatly prized in a land where the well-tempered clavichord is unknown. Instead of one drum, the German missionary found ten drums and ten drummers. Instead of one man playing the odds and ends of the jazz-band percussions, there was a flock of such persons playing all manner of home- and hand-made contraptions. Five xylophones had also been added. What I regret most about this episode is that no sound-movie apparatus was handy to record this priceless performance, because the missionary (German that he was, and unblessed with a sense of humor) went immediately to work and reorganized and retaught the natives, until now they must be quite as uninteresting a group of players as one will find anywhere in the world.
But in spite of all this evidence to the contrary there are certain elements of similarity between the singing of the present-day African natives and that of the agricultural or so-called "cornfield" Negroes of our own deep South. The similarities have to do with style or method of performance, and in no way with the subject sung about, the scale employed, or the application of words to notes. They include:
Antiphony
Overlap
Part Singing
A highly developed rhythm
The employment of the leitmotif, which allows temporary emotional situations to indicate repetition, rather than the "da capo" which is limited to strict form.
The repetition of very short phrases apparently for the purpose of arousing a sense of ecstasy.
Everyone who has heard American Negro music sung either in concert halls or on southern plantations knows that antiphonal singing is almost the universal rule: the question and answer, or the choral response to a semi-recitative line and the repetitions of "Yes Lord," "Over Jordan," "Carry me home," etc. I have recently recorded what I consider a lovely example of this procedure in a song belonging to what I call "Cabbage Patch Songs," because they came originally from Cabbage Patch, Louisville, Kentucky.
It has an extraordinarily broken rhythm: it is sung to seven measures of music, six of them in 4-4 and one in 3-4.
Dig my grave wid a silver spade (this line is spoken by a soloist]
Angels watching over me [this line by everyone who wants to sing]
Oh look-a-there, look-a-there, look-a-there [soloist again and in 3-4]
Angels watching over me [ensemble].
Other well-known examples of antiphony in the present-day Negro repertory are such things as "Does You Call Dat Religion?" otherwise known as "Scandalize My Name," where the soloist asks the chorus if certain things constitute religion; here we have a definite reason for antiphony, because, to be logical, the song must involve an answering voice or group of voices. There is also a song in which the ensemble answers each time "I really do believe," as though at one time there had been some doubt but now there is not even a shadow of doubt.
This is not greatly unlike the records of a song recently given me by an English scientist, a member of the Oxford Expedition to Central Africa, whose admiring friends had sent him an outboard motor and fifty small tins of petrol. The motor was oiled up and the tank filled with petrol, and before the fascinated eyes of the natives the noisy little thing propelled a small boat at a very fair speed. A week later the scientist heard the story of his outboard motor being sung in an endless ballad. The singer said, among other things, that the extraordinary contraption operated without the necessity of human assistance, and every time he paused for breath the listeners sang a line which might be rendered as "We don't exactly believe it but we might as well listen."
E. M. von Hornbostel's "African Negro Music"' gives us example after example of antiphony: some of the responses are by choruses singing in unison and some by choruses singing in harmony- that is, what is harmony to them, their idea of music being based on melody, so that simultaneous sounds which would represent harmony to their ears would perhaps not be harmonious to us, who have since the early part of the seventeenth century been accustomed to a musical procedure based entirely on an almost stereotyped harmony.
This tendency to melody remains to this very day and is perhaps the reason why unaccompanied Negro singing in the deep South is many times more thrilling and more effective than the accompanied singing of Negroes or of whites even when they sing exactly the same songs. Several of the more successful Negro singing organizations have stuck to the idea of singing spirituals and exaltations unaccompanied, and the effect is unbelievable. Overlap, part-singing, broken rhythms, and short repetitious phrases are truly a part of the Negro's music, and one that he undoubtedly brought with him from Africa, for they are all found in both places today, that is, in the singing of both American and African Negroes.
With the single exception of part-singing, none of these characteristics is to be found in what remains of the Elizabethan music. That is, practically none. The singers in the Southern Appalachian mountains have odd rhythms, and they do repeat; but there is very little similarity between what they sing and how they sing it and what the Negro sings and how he sings it. Occasionally one finds the same verses sung by both. In practically every case it is a song that was originally a white man's song and has been adapted and sung over into the Negro idiom. One example is my father's version of "Careless Love":
When you pass by my door I hang my head and cry,
When my apron string I bow
You pass my door and say hello,
But when my apron string I pin
You pass my door and won't come in.
Don't never trust no railroad man,
He'll break your heart if he but can,
He'll take your love and go his way
Not meanin' anything he say.
Some day my apron string I'll tie
And then I'll lay right down and die,
And you won't know 'cause down in hell
The devil's mean, he will not tell.
Some shameless black man turned this lovely antique into a blues in this manner:
When I wore my apron low,
When I wore my apron low
When I wore my apron low
Boys would pass right by my door.
Now I wear it to my chin
Now I wear it to my chin
Now I wear it to my chin
Boys all pass and dey won't come in.
Another interesting example is "Frog Went a-Courtin'," a white man's song originally, adopted by the Negro and, strange to say, not improved in the process. My family tune of the famous frog song is a very nice rollicking affair that modulates from A flat to B major and back in its few short measures. There is another mountaineer version of this tune involving a great many "umhuhs," which to me is uninteresting. The usual Negro tune is just flat and unimportant.
The Negro's natural admiration for daring leads him to sing songs about villains, highwaymen, famous criminals and gamblers, and such gentry. This inclination is perhaps what prompted some black man to borrow the ancient English ballad about the "Roving Gambler" which is still sung in parts of England and also throughout the Southern Appalachians. In some places the Negroes make a work-song out of it. I quote one of the many verses:
Well now she ask me (agh)[2]
In the parlor, (agh)
An' she cool me (agh)
Wid her fan, (agh)
An' she whisper (agh)
To her mamma, (agh)
"I sure love my (agh)
Gamblin' man." (agh)
And this is the English original:
She took me in the parlor, she cooled me with her fan
She whispered soft in her mother's ear,
"I love my gamblin' man, I love my gamblin' man."
But these similarities are merely a matter of borrowed verses. The tunes employed are entirely unrelated and each race has its
own definite singing technique. The sad, silent mountaineer singer would never give up enough of his inhibitions to "shout"
about anything. And where the Negro is interested in singing about going to heaven, the mountaineer turns to his traditional
ballads, or, if he has a more modern slant, may sing a "fun song" or an "animal song." Or one of his intensely sad love songs.
So we discover that the Negroes (as slaves) must have learned the English language from the early settlers, adopted our idea of the diatonic scale, and discovered our method of applying "text" to melody. When the African natives of today sing their folkmusic they do not as a rule sing poems set to tunes, while the American Negro has (at least as far back as records go) been doing this very thing; and poetry is said to indicate an advanced form of civilization. A great many years ago Anton Dvorik declared that the American Negro had not only provided the world with the only considerable mass of folk-music discovered in modern times, but had supplied a type of material that compared more than favorably with any folk-lore extant.
When we consider that folk-music is "poetry and music which has come into existence without the influence of conscious art, as
a spontaneous utterance, an automatic kind of music, in that it practically composes itself," we must positively stand uncovered
before the memory of those black pioneers now one hundred and fifty years dead, who sang "Steal Away to Jesus"' or "Nobody
Knows the Trouble I See," for the first time.
Not very long ago in London, I listened to a lecture given by an American woman on certain art expressions found in the United
States. She went to great lengths with the American Indian: his music, his pottery, his weaving, his jewelry. She said just a few
words about the American Negro, on the grounds that much had already been said on the subject. What startled me most was
that she classified the Spirituals as "rather unorthodox versions of the standard hymn-tunes." She said that she had spent a great while in the South-years in fact-but she found very little of interest in the Negro secular music.
And that moment I knew why one of the greatest English folk-lorists failed in the last analysis: because he couldn't drink beer. A contemporary of his sat in pubs and waited until the older men got "right" and then the best things were recorded. As a rule, a white woman cannot (or will not) go into the places where the best Negro secular music is sung, and as for the "unorthodox
versions of the standard hymn-tunes"-well, I was inarticulate.
If I had been a Negro, at that moment I should have been both much irritated and highly complimented: irritated that anybody
should be silly enough to apply the rules of orthodox hymns to folk-tunes like Spirituals, and complimented because my people
had been able to take a very ordinary, undistinguished lot of music, and revamp it into something that has caught the popular musical imagination of the civilized world. Did you ever see a concert-hall in Paris, London, Amsterdam, the Hague, Berlin, New
York, or Rome plastered with signs announcing a program of music made up from American Methodist or Baptist hymn tunes?
I think not. But I have seen these halls plastered with signs announcing programs of American Negro Folk-Lore and Kentucky
Mountain Music.
For the Negro is a realist and an individualist. In the revival meetings of our deep South, the black man is unwilling to allow the
biblical miracles to go unexperienced. He must see God with his own eyes, talk and walk with his Blessed Jesus, get on personal terms with the Apostles, and experience the extraordinary happenings related in the bible "his own self."
And his individualism is unbelievable. The fact that someone with a "big name," some important person, has done a thing
a certain way, has very little weight with the Southern agricultural Negro, or any other Negro, for that matter. He may adopt the idea behind the thing brought out by this so-called important person, but, as with the jazz band in Central Africa, he'll make it over to suit his own personal immediate needs. He'll remanufacture something he can understand. Servitude to public or otherwise established opinion, or to the followers of standardized forms would be a kind of mental slavery that the Negro would not endure. He has sung his songs the way he has because they pleased him that way. He is just frivolous enough to have given up singing if it didn't please him a lot. And although he has never known any of these things, beauty of expression is to the Negro an end, not a means to something else. It might have occurred to him that he could trump up a picture of heaven more easily to the accompaniment of lovely music, but I rather doubt it. We may be sure that although the Negro left the beaten path of the published hymnbook- fortunately-he understood and liked all his changes, all his inventions, all his rare rhythms, all his barbaric harmonies.
Whistler's statement in his "Gentle Art of Making Enemies" applies in this respect to the Negro's musical past (I quote from the "10:00 o'clock" lecture):
And what was born of the people went back to them, for it was after their own heart .., .and the great and the small took it unto themselves.
As a soldier in the United States Army during the World War, I recorded endless examples of the Negroes' unwillingness to accept the already made-up soldier songs. They took the war with all its grief and suffering and poeticized it and set it to characteristic tunes-with their tongues in their cheeks a lot of the time. The songs sent out by a so-called "Entertainment Board" operating from Tin Pan Alley, New York, got nowhere with the Negro soldiers. The white soldier sang these flag-waving monstrosities; but the black soldier did things like this (from my own "Songs My Mother Never Taught Me"):
What do the Generals and the Colonels do,
I'll tell you-I'll tell you,
Figure out just how the privates ought to do
The dirty little jobs for Jesus.
Fifty thousand privates died for Democracy,
Dirty little job for Jesus,
Twenty Major Generals got the D.S.C.,
Another dirty little job for Jesus.
This song is a revamped version of a well-known ditty. Preachers, politicians and other propagandists got the idea of the war rather confused with the teachings of the lonely Nazarene, much as they had recently confused the issues of prohibition, and these verses are a result of this confusion of ideas.
A heresy of heresies was committed when the Negro soldiers would not accept "Mademoiselle from Armentiers" out of hand.
They used the form of the verses and the first two repeats, and then introduced their own personal observations. I quote from "Singing Soldiers":
Mademoiselle from Armentiers, parlez-vous,
Mademoiselle from Armentiers, parlez-vous,
I'se glad I is a Buffalo
'Cause we is always on de go.
Inky dinky, parlez-vous.
Mademoiselle from Armentiers, parlez-vous,
Mademoiselle from Armentiers, parlez-vous,
I wouldn't give my high-brown belle
For every mademoiselle dis side o' hell.
Inky dinky, parlez-vous.
In spite of the Negro's realism, his individualism, and his natural musical talent, there were several definite factors that aided him during his early days as a slave-helped him, I mean, to concoct what is today accepted as his own folk-music. First, the slave-masters did not keep the various tribes together. There was no reason for this accident; it merely happened. Negroes from the four corners of Africa could not understand one another, any more than they could understand their white masters. It became immediately necessary for them to understand the language of the white man. And then, they were more or less ready for the religious teachings of Christianity.
The idea of being born again was not news to many of them. There is a Hottentot "Brer Rabbit" legend wherein the Rabbit is sent down from the moon to tell all the people that as the moon dies and comes to life again after two weeks of darkness so must all men die and be born again.
Then the emotional nature of the early religious teaching and preaching received from the hands of those long-ago native
preachers must have pleased the slaves no end. Those early preachers were not educated people; they knew only a few things
about the bible, and these they had by hearsay from their white masters and from chance visits to white churches where they had "sat back" and "kept out of the way." Neither these early preachers nor their communicants could read the bible and so (as
Mr. Nubell Niles Puckett says) "they sang the bible." Their dramatis personae were limited to only a few characters and a few
outstanding situations. This is no doubt the reason why the earlier Spirituals are sung around only a few names and a few
occurrences.
But what influenced the Negro so deeply about the Christian
religion was the fact that it promised a rest hereafter, a rest without
social inequality. A dressed-up existence, with white robes, and
golden crowns, and singing choirs, and endless rest, rest, rest. And
then he beheld the picture of his white master who was also (or
called himself) a Christian. Here was an example of what Christianity
might do, here was better proof than all the promises in a
thousand bibles. Thereupon the Negro became a Christian.'
So we see that the kind lecturing lady from the United States
was not giving her London audiences much in the way of facts.
The London audiences are, fortunately, not very impressionable.
They sit and listen, and go away and think. And yet she was
strangely right in what she said: for the African slave did no
doubt get many of his ideas from the "orthodox" American hymntunes,
and fortunate it is for us that he heard the tunes of the more
dramatic religious beliefs. If these early black pioneers had
learned the music of the Roman Catholic or the Anglican Churches
only, we might never have had a single Spiritual. For it would
have been quite a task, even for a Negro, to construct such things as
1Many modern political thinkers claim that if the Negro had not accepted Christianity
there could not have been any slavery-that is, for a very long while. They
base their conclusion on the fact that the "wait meekly, wait and murmur not" doctrine
kept the Negro in a proper state of mind to submit to the degrading practices of bond
slavery. By historical investigation we find that in other countries where the slaves
(newly imported from Africa) were not impressed with and did not accept Christianity,
they revolted and in many cases set up separate states and even little empires.
72 The Musical Quarterly
"Hurry," "Seven Stars in my Right Hand," "I got a Home in a
Dat Rock, Don't You See?" etc., out of masses by Mozart, Haydn,
or Bach, or out of responses and cantatas by Sir John Stainer or
Sir Edward Elgar.
One English writer, commenting on the relative folk-music
output of the white and black pioneers, suggests that the white men
who came to the Virginia Colonies might have created a more
spontaneous, a more profound, a more original lot of music if they
hadn't had such an easy time of it. We Southerners seem to have
come upon our reputation for laziness quite honestly. For as long
ago as September 29th, 1609, when Captain John Smith departed
for England never to return to the Jamestown Settlement, the
settlers had already become good and lazy. Captain Smith had
worn himself out trying to provide food and safety for the Jamestown
Settlement, while the others were ". . . spending hours in
idleness at Jamestown, playing quoits, and pitching horseshoes
upon the streets." It was a communistic colony, and the early
results of the experiment are not a very convincing argument in
favor of communism. In 1611, when Sir Thomas Dale arrived
with stores and a new supply of man power, he found that "The
chiefe occupation was playing bowls in the streets." Sir Thomas,
being a disciplinarian, changed all this ... and was promptly hated
for it.
How different it was with the Negro! He was "oppressed so
hard he could not stand." Oppressed in every possible way, and
there were no weaklings among his people. For a slave captain
would have been a fool to transport a sickly Negro to America as a
slave, and if he accidentally did, nature stepped in and the sick Negro
died en route. The white men were bothered by political problems,
and Indian massacres, and food shortage, and sickness, but
they were not in bond slavery. They had not been captured and
taken forcibly away from a pleasant African community to be
thrust into the hold of a stinking slave ship and finally herded
ashore, where they were presented with a hoe or a shovel. But all
this apparently had to happen before the world was enriched by a
thousand or more truly grand Negro Spirituals and secular songs.
It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that the descendants
of those early Virginia settlers, the present-day Appalachian
mountaineers, the backwoods white folk of Kentucky, Eastern
Tennessee, Virginia, North and South Carolina, have done neither
White Pioneers and Black 73
constructive nor reconstructive work on the tunes they inherited
from the early Virginia settlers. I say this emphatically, because
I am one of these people and I know from the music of my own family
and the other families I have observed that many new tunes have
been produced. Practically all of them refer in some strange way
to the original type of thing our ancestors did in the seventeenth
century. This reference may be in the type of scale employed, or
in a rather vague Elizabethan quality found in the poems. And
I am not talking about the "hick" music or the things written for
vaudevillians and later adopted by our less dignified neighbors,
because it is something they can more easily understand.
We still have ballads and political lampoons, and such delicious
miniatures as the following:
Go way from my window,
Go way from my door,
Go way from my bedside
And bother me no more.
I'll go tell all my brothers
And all my sisters too,
That the reason why my heart is broke
Is on account of you.
Go on your way be happy,
Go on your way and rest,
Remember, dear, that you're the one
I really did love best.
This song, recorded for the first time by Carl Sandburg in his
monumental "American Songbag," 1927, is presented as a Negro
song coming from the Ozarks. I have known this song since 1910,
and the romance and heart-break that had to do with its creation
(in the form in which I know it) would hardly be believed. Mr.
Sandburg's version and my version do not agree in any way. This
is perfectly natural because the version I sing is a very private and
personal one, and when it was done for the critics in Germany,
Holland, Ehgland, and France this last season they agreed that
they had been listening to something worth while.
There are two other strange little love-songs sung among my
people, each having to do with the girl either taking a bite out of
her lover or consuming him altogether. I call the first one "Loving
You May Make Me Sad":
Ef I was just the water in your spring
I'd see you with your bucket,
Hear you sing,
You'd splash me with your hands
I'd wet your pretty feet,
And if you should ever drink me,
The two of us would meet.
74 The Musical Quarterly
Lovin' you may make me sad,
Lovin' you may make me glad,
Whate'er I get I'll take 'tis true
'Cause all of it will come from you.
The other is about a person named Cindy:
I wish I was an apple
A-hangin' on a tree,
And everytime my sweetheart passed
She'd take a little bite of me.
And the little children in the backwoods' sing about animals
just as the Negroes do:
Now if I was some little rabbit
Hoppin' along o'er some lonesome plain,
With ne'er a place away from the weather,
No place for my head away from the rain,
I'd hop until I come to some haystack,
There I would stay all safe and warm,
I'd rest my head in that nice warm haystack
Bein' real sure I was away from harm.
The second verse is about a tiny fox, and the third about a
ladybug:
Now if I was some ladybug yellow
And my house was on fire as hit mought easy be,
I'd fly away with all o' my children
And take 'em to some place of safety.
It is interesting to note that isolation has helped to preserve
the music of both the Appalachian mountaineer and the American
Negro. If at the close of the Civil War (in Kentucky my father
used to call it "the late unpleasantness") the Negro had been able
1Little children in the Appalachian Mountains are much more interested, as a rule,
in Mother Goose than in Brer Rabbit, or the Tar Baby, or any of the legendary Negro
animals. I say this from long observation, as a native among them, as a school teacher,
and later as a traveler and social investigator. Beside Mother Goose they have a series
of funny (but rather silly) little rhymes intended to teach them the alphabet. These
rhymes concern the usual run of barnyard animals, "tarripins," hoptoads, etc. The
stories told in these rhymes are not excessively dramatic, and seldom involve the refined
criminal qualities of Brer Rabbit, Cunnie Rabbit, or Mr. Spider. Neither Brer Rabbit
nor any of his animal friends are American inventions. They exist in countless African
legends. On the Island of Jamaica legends of the African Spider still persist; his
cunning schemes become the tricks of one "Anansi," an extraordinary spider, one even
greater than the African original, against whom the most potent charms are ineffective.
In this age, when most law-abiding citizens are concerned with the suppression of
crime, the doings of Mother Goose and Brer Rabbit are frowned upon by those engaged
in the teaching of children. By comparison Mother Goose comes off a bit better than
Brer Rabbit (the lovable little villain), whose life-story, according to one of the greatest
authorities on the teaching of music to children, "involves almost all the well-known
crimes except rape. In fact, Brer Rabbit when he became king or over-lord of the
animal kingdom by having the Lion murdered, was perhaps one of the first of our
present-day racketeers who practice what is known as 'muscling in'."
White Pioneers and Black 75
actually to take his place as the social equal of the white man,
the music of his slave days would have been forgotten by this time.
Mr. P. F. Laubenstein' tells us that property-owning Negroes do not
sing, that the pre-occupation with the absorbing task of earning a
living under modern competitive and industrial conditions leaves
him neither time nor inclination to sing his flowering consciousness
into song.
With the Appalachian mountaineers it is much the same. For
the singing of the old songs becomes more rare each year .. . each
year as the older mountaineers die off, and the offspring of this
modern age take their places. These young people, in spite of their
rugged background, have reached a point where a laziness of mind
overtakes them, where creative impotence creeps in through too
much automatic art. For it is easy to wind up a talking machine,
or turn on a wireless set which brings all the latest and newest
things. I am reminded again of Krehbiel's "blessing of transientness,"
and, although by turning a knob a very fair performance of
up-to-date music may be obtained, I am doubtful if these "knobtwisters"
will of their own volition and out of their own hearts
produce anything as lovely as this little family love-song with its
strong Elizabethan tinge:
As when a bird doth call his mate,
Doth call, doth call his mate,
As when a bird doth call his mate,
I call to thee, my pretty dear.
For we are but two mocking birds
Who answer each in other's kind,
For when I say I love thee, dear,
Thou canst not other answer find.
As when a bird doth call his mate,
Doth call, doth call his mate,
As when a bird doth call his mate,
I call to thee, my pretty dear.
1"Race-Values in Aframerican Music," THE MUSICAL QUARTERLY, July, 1930.
FOOTNOTES:
1. Memo. No. 4, issued by the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures.
2. The word agh in parenthesis is the author's idea of representing the sound of the Negro workman's axe as it hits the ground.
3. Mr. Thomas W. Talley of Fiske University, in his splendid "Study of Negro Folk-Rhythms," published 1992, tells us the history of "Steal Away." He says it was merely a parody, and he hopes his readers will not be disappointed when they find this out. "To the slave-master the words mean that his slaves were studying how to get along peaceably, considering after all they would only be here a short time, but to the listening Negro at the far end of the plantation it meant the notification of a meeting of
slaves disobedient enough to get together in the middle of the night. The beautifully poetic verses of the song have since been utilized by emotional religionists for their own purposes."