Chapter I. Folksongs in General

CHAPTER I
FOLKSONGS IN GENERAL

The Characteristics of Folksongs — Folksongs Defined — Creative Influences — Folksong and  Suffering — Modes, Rhythms and Scales —  Russian and Finnish Music — Persistency  of Type — Music and Racial Ties — Britons and Bretons

The purpose of this book Is to study the origin and nature  of what its title calls Afro-American Folksongs. To forefend, as far as it is possible to do so, against misconceptions  it will be well to have an understanding at the outset as  to terms and aims. It is essential, not only to an understanding of the argument but also to a necessary limitation  of the scope of the investigation, that the term "folksong"  be defined. The definition must not include too much  lest, at the last, it prove too compass to little. So as far as  possible the method of presentation must be rational and  scientific rather than rhetorical and sentimental, and the  argument be directed straight and unswervingly toward  the establishment of facts concerning a single and distinct body of song, regardless of any other body even though the  latter be closely related or actually derived from the former.

It is very essential that the word folksong be understood  as having as distinctive a meaning as "folklore," "myth,"  "legend" or "Mdrchen" — which last word, for the sake of  accuracy, English folklorists have been forced to borrow  from the Germans, It will also be necessary in this exposition to appeal to the Germans to enforce a distinction   which is ignored or set aside by the majority of English  writers on folksong — popular writers, that is. The Germans  who write accurately on the subject call what I would  have understood to be folksong das Folkslied; for a larger  body of song, which has community of characteristics with the folksong but is not of it, they have the term volksthumliches Lied. This body of song embraces all vocal compositions which have come to be so fondly liked, loved,  admired by the people that they have become a native  and na'ive popular utterance. So generous, indeed, is the  term that it embraces not only the simple songs based on  genuine folksong-texts which musicians have set to music,  and the large number of artistic compositions which imitate the sentiment and structure of folksongs, but also  many lyrics made with conscious art by eminent composers.  In the family circles of Germany and at popular gatherings  one may hear not only Silcher's setting of "Zu Strassburg  auf der Schanz" (which is music set by an artist to a  folkpoem), but the same composer's melody to "Ich weiss  nicht, was soil es bedeuten" (an artificial folkpoem by  Heine), Weber's "Wir winden dir den Jungfernkranz" and  Schubert's "Am Brunnen vor dem Thore" (which are artistic products in conception and execution). The English  term "popular song" might well and properly be used as  a synonym for the German term and be applied to the  same kind of songs in English without prejudice to the  scientific "folksong," were it not for its degraded and degrading association with the vulgar music hall ditties.  These ditties, which a wise Providence has cursed with the  blessing of transientness, have companionship in this study  with the so-called "coon songs" and "ragtime tunes" in  which some of the elements of the Afro-American folksongs  are employed.

Only because I cannot see how a paraphrase would improve it in respect of sententiousness, clearness or comprehensiveness, I make use of a definition which I wrote a  decade ago for "The Musical Guide" — a dictionary of  terms and much else edited by Rupert Hughes and published by McClure, Phillips' &- Go.:

Folksong is not popular song in the sense in which the word is most frequently used, but the song of the folk; not only the song admired of the people  but, in a strict sense, the song created by the people. It is a body of poetry Mid  music which has come into existence without the influence of conscious art  as a spontaneous utterance, filled with characteristic expression of the feelings  of a people. Such songs are marked by certain peculiarities of rhythm fomi  and melody which are traceable, more or less clearly, to racial (or national)  temperament, modes of life, climatic and political conditions, geographical environment and language. Some of these elements, the spiritual, are elusive, but others can be determined and classified.

Though the present purposes are almost purely musical,  it will be well to consider that in the folksongs of the world  there lies a body of evidence of great value in the study  of many things which enter into the science of ethnology,  such as racial relations, primitive modes of thought,  ancient customs and ancient religions. On this point  something shall be said later.

Folksongs are echoes of the heart-b eats of the vast folk and in them are preserved, feelings, beliefs and habits of  vast antiquity. Not only in the words, which have almost monopolized folksong study thus far, but also in music, and  perhaps more truthfully in the music than in the words. Music cannot lie for the reason that the things which are  at its base, the things without which it could not be, are unconscious, unvolitional human products. We act on a  recognition of this fact when we judge of the feelings of  one with whom we are conversing not so much by what he  says to us as by the manner in which he says it. The feelings which sway him publish themselves in the pitch,  dynamic intensity and timbre of his voice. Try as we  may, if we are powerfully moved we cannot conceal the  fact so we open our mouths for utterance. Involuntarily  the muscles of the vocal organs contract or relax in obedience to an emotional stimulus, and the drama of feeling  playing on the hidden stage of our hearts is betrayed by  the tones which we utter. These tones, without purpose  on our part, have become endowed with the qualities  of gravity and acuteness (pitch), loudness and softness  (dynamics), and emotional color (timbre), and out of the  union and moaulation of these elements comes expressive  melody. Herbert Spencer has formulated the law: "Feelings are muscular stimuli" and "Variations of voice are the  physiological results of variations of feeling." In this lies  the simple explanation of the inherent truthfulness and  expressiveness of the music which a folk creates for itself.

"The folksong composes itself" (Das Volkslied dichtet  sick selbst), said Grimm. This''is true despite the obvious fact that every folksong must once have been the utterance  of an individual. What is meant by the axiom is that the  creator of the folksong is an unindividualized representative  of his people, himself a folk-product. His idioms are taken  off the tongue of the people; his subjects are the things  which make for the joy and sorrow of the people, and once  his song is gone out into the world his identity as its creator  is swallowed up in that of the people. Not only is his  name forgotten, but his song enters at once upon a series of  transformations, which (such is the puissant genius of the  people) adapt it to varying circumstances of time and  place without loss to its vital loveliness. The creator of a  folksong as an individual is a passing phenomenon — like  a wave of the sea. His potentiality is racial or national,  not personal, and for that reason it is enduring, not ephemeral. As a necessary corollary it follows that the music  of the folksong reflects the inner life of the people that  gave it birth, and that its characteristics, like the people's  physical and mental habits, occupations, methods and  feelings are the product of environment, as set forth in the  definitions.

If Herbert Spencer's physiological analysis of the origins  of melody is correct, the finest, because the truest, the  most intimate, folk-music is that provoked by suffering.  The popular mind does not always think so of music. Its  attitude is reflected in the phrase: "Oh, I'm so happy I  could sing all day!" But do we sing when we are happy?  Song, it is true, is a natural expression of the care-free and  light-hearted; but it is oftener an expression of a superficial  than a profound feeling. We leap, run, toss our arms,  indulge in physical action when in an ecstasy of joy; in  sorrow we sit motionless, but, oftener than we are ourselves conscious of the fact, we seek comfort in song. In  the popular nomenclature of music the symbols of gayety  and gravity are the major and minor moods. It is a  broad characterization, and not strictly correct from a  scientific point of view; but it serves to point a general  rule, the exceptions to which (the Afro-American folk- songs forms one of them) invite interesting speculation.

Comparative analysis of the folksongs of widely distributed countries has shown that some peoples are predisposed toward the minor mode, and in some cases explanations of the fact can be found in the geographical, climatic  or political conditions under which these peoples have  lived in the past or are living now. As a general rule, it  will be found that the peoples of high latitudes use the  minor mode rather than the major, A study of one  hundred songs from every one of twenty-two countries  made by Carl Engel, discloses that of the six most predominantly minor countries of Europe five were the most  northern ones, his figures being as follows:

                       Major        Minor       Mixed

Sweden            14               80            6

Russia              35               52            13

Norway            40               56            4

Wallachia         40                52            8

Denmark          47                52            1

Finland             58               50            2

Melancholy is thus seen to be the characteristic note  of Scandinavian music, which reflects the gloom of the  fjords and forests and fearful winters of the northern  peninsula, where nature makes human life a struggle and  death an ever-present though not necessarily terrifying  contemplation.

That geographical and climatic conditions are not the  only determining factors in the choice of modes is evident,  however, from the case of Russia, which extends over  nearly 30 degrees of latitude and has so great a variety of  climate that the statement that the mean temperature  varies from 32 degrees Fahrenheit at Archangel to 58 degrees at Kutais in the Caucasus, conveys only an imperfect  notion of the climatic variability of the country. Yet  the minor mode is dominant even in the Ukraine.

If an attempt were made, therefore, to divide Europe  into major and minor by drawing a line across the map  from west to east along the parallel of the 50th degree of  latitude the rule would become inoperative as soon as the  Russian border was reached. Thence the isomodal line  would take a sharp southward trend of no less than 15 degrees. All Russia is minor; and Russian folksong,  I am prone to think, is the most moving and beautiful  folk-music in the world. Other influences than the ordinary  are therefore at work here, and their discovery need not  detain the reader's mind long. Suffering is suffering,  whether it be physical or spiritual, whether it spring from  the unfriendliness of nature or the harshness of political  and social conditions.

While Russian folksong is thus weighted with sorrow,  Russian folkdance is singularly energetic and boisterous.  This would seem to present a paradox, but the reason  becomes plain when it is remembered that a measured and  decorous mode of popular amusement is the normal expression of equable popular life, while wild and desperate  gayety is frequently the reaction from suffering. There  is a gayety of despair as well as of contentment and happiness. Read this from Dr. Norman McLeod's "Note  Book":

"My father once saw some emigrants from Lochaber  dancing on the deck of an emigrant ship and weeping their  eyes out! This feeling is the mother of Irish music. It  expresses the struggle of a buoyant, merry heart to get  quit of thoughts that often lie too deep for tears. It is the  music of an oppressed, conquered, but deeply feeling, impressible, fanciful and generous people. It is for the harp  in Tara's halls!"

The rhythms of folksongs may be said to be primarily  the product of folkdances, but as these, as a rule, are inspired by the songs which are sung for their regulation,  it follows that there is also a verbal basis for rhythms.  Whether or not this is true of the rhythmical elements  which have entered into Afro-American folksongs cannot  be said, for want of knowledge of the languages spoken by  the peoples (not people, for they were many and of many  kinds) who were brought from Africa to America as slaves.  An analogy for the "snap," which is the most pervasive  element in the music which came from the Southern plantations (the idiom which has been degraded into "ragtime"), is found in the folk-music of the Magyars of Hungary; and there it is indubitably a' product of the poems.

Intervallic peculiarities are more difficult to explain than  rhythmic, and are in greater likelihood survivals of primitive elements. Despite its widespread use, the diatonic  scale is an artistic or scientific evolution, not an inspiration  or a discovery in the natural world of sound; and though  it may have existed in primitive music before it became the  basis of an art, there was no uniformity in its use. The  most idiomatic music of the Finns, who are an older race  in the northern European peninsula than any of the Germanic tribes which are their rulers, is confined to the first  five tones of the minor scale; old Irish and Scotch songs  share the familiar pentatonic scale (by which I mean the  modern diatonic series omitting the fourth and seventh  steps) with the popular music of China, Japan, Slam and  other countries. It is of frequent occurrence in the melodies  of the American negroes, and found not infrequently in  those of North American Indians; it is probably the oldest  tonal system in the world and the most widely dispersed.

Cesar Cui remarks the prevalence in Russia of two  major scales, one without the fourth and the other without  the third and seventh. Hungarian melodies employ largely  the interval called an augmented, or superfluous, second,  which is composed of three semitones. The Magyars are  Scythians and racially related to the Finns and Turks, and  not to their neighbors, the Poles and Russians; yet the  same peculiarity is found in Slavic music — In the songs  of the Serbs, Bulgarians, Montenegrins and all the other  mixed peoples that inhabit the Balkan Peninsula. The  idiom is Oriental and a marked feature of the popular and synagogal music of the Jews.

Facts like these indicate the possibility of employing  folksong as an aid in the determination of ethnological and  ethnographical questions; for its elements have a marvellous  tenacity of life. Let this be remembered when the specific  study of American folksong is attempted. The persistency  of a type of song in spite of a change of environment of  sufficient influence to modify the civilization of a people  has a convincing illustration in Finland. Though the Finns  have mixed with their Germanic neighbors for many centuries, there was originally no affinity of race between  them and their conquerors. Their origin is in doubt, but it is supposed that they are Mongols and therefore relatives  of the Magyars. The influence of the Swedes uppn their culture began in the twelfth century, when Christianity  was forced upon them, and it has never ceased, though  Sweden was compelled by the allied powers to cede Finland  to Russia in 1809. Now Russia, though she signed a solemn pact to permit the liberty of language, education and  religion to the Finns, is engaged in stamping out the last vestiges of nationalism in the country so beautifully called  Suomi by its people.

The active cultivation of music as an art in the modern  sense began in Finland toward the close of the eighteenth  century, and the composers, directors and teachers were  either Germans or Scandinavians educated in Germany.  The artistic music of the Finns, therefore, is identified as  closely as possible with that of the Scandinavian people,  though it has of late received something of a Russian impress; but the vigor and power of primitive influences is  attested by the unmistakable elements in the Finnish  folksongs. The ancient Finns had the Northern love for  music, and their legendary Orpheus was even a more  picturesque and potent theurgist than the Greek. His  name was Wainamoinen, and when he — tuned his lyre with pleasing woe,  Rivers forgot to run, and winds to blow;  While listening forests covered, as he played,  The soft musician in a moving shade.

To Wainamoinen was attributed the invention of the  kantele, a harp which originally had five strings tuned to  the notes which, as has been said, are the basis of the  Finnish songs, especially those called runo songs, which are  still sung. The five-four time which modern composers are  now affecting (as is seen in the second movement of  Tschaikowsky's "Pathetic" symphony) is an element of  the meter of the national Finnish epic, the "Kalevala,"  whence Longfellow borrowed it for his American epic,  "Hiawatha." It, too, is found in many runo songs.

Music is a marvellous conservator. One reason of this  is that it is the most efficient of all memory-helps. Another  is that among primitive peoples all over the world music  became associated with religious worship at so early a  period in the development of religion that it acquired even  a greater sanctity than words or eucharistic posturing.  So the early secular song, as well as the early sacred, is  sometimes preserved long after its meaning is forgotten.  In this particular, too, folksong becomes an adjunct to  ethnology. A striking story is told of how in the middle  of the eighteenth century a folksong established fraternal  relations between two peoples who had forgotten for centuries that they were of one blood. The tale comes from a French book,' but is thus related in an essay on "Some  Breton Folksongs," published by Theodore Bacon in "The  Atlantic Monthly" for November, 1892:

In September, 1758, an English force effected a descent  upon the Breton coast, at Saint-Cast. A company of  Lower Bretons, from the neighborhood of Treguire and  Saint-Pol do Leon, was marching against a detachment  of Welsh mountaineers, which was coming briskly forward  singing a national air, when all at once the Bretons of the  French army stopped short in amazement. The air their  enemies were singing was one which every day may be  heard sounding over the hearths of Brittany. "Electrified,"  says the historian, grandson himself of an eyewitness,  "by accents which spoke to their hearts, they gave way to  a sudden enthusiasm, and joined in the same patriotic  refrain. The Welsh, in their turn, stood motionless in their ranks. On both sides officers gave the command to fire;  but it was in the same language, and the soldiers stood as  if petrified. This hesitation continued, however, but a  moment: a common emotion was too strong for discipline;  the weapons fell from their hands, and the descendants  from the ancient Celts renewed upon the battlefield the  fraternal ties which had formerly united their fathers."

[M. Th. Hersart de la Villemarque, in his "Barzaz-Breiz," a collection of Breton folksongs, prints two ballads, "Combat de Saint-Cast, par M. de Saint-Pern Couelan," 1836.]

in one of which the battle of Saint-Cast is celebrated, together with two other repulses of English invaders of the  Breton coast (at Camaret, in i486, and Guidel, in 1694).  Concerning the encounter at Saint-Cast Villemarque advances the theory that the singers were the French sol-diers, and that the reason why the Welshmen stopped in  amazement was that they suspected treachery when they  heard their own song. The point is of little consequence,  but not so the melody which Villemarque prints as that to  which the old ballad is sung. This, as it appears in "Barzaz-Breiz," is, note for note, the Welsh tune known as  "Captain Morgan's March." The same melody is sung  to another ballad describing the siege of Guingamp, which took place in 1488. Now, according to Welsh legend, the  Morgan whose name is preserved in the ancient Rhyfelgyrch Cadpen Morgan was "Captain of the Glamorganshire  men, about the year 1294, who gallantly defended his  country from the incursion of the Saxons and who dispossessed the Earl of Gloucester of those lands which had  formerly been taken from Morgan's forefathers," If the  air is as old as that it may well be older still, and, indeed,  may have been carried into ancient Armorica by the immigrants from Great Britain who crossed the Channel in  large numbers in the fifth and sixth centuries. Other relics  of their earlier home besides those of language survive  among the people of lower Brittany. Had the soldiers  at Saint-Cast sat down together and regaled each other  with hero legend and fairy tale they would have found that Arthur and Merlin and the korrigan (little fairies)  were their common glory and delight. "King Arthur is  not dead!" may be heard in Brittany to-day as often as in  Cornwall. Moreover, the Welsh song which is sung to the  tune of "Captain Morgan's March" and the Breton ballad  "Emgann Sant-Kast""- have one vigorous sentiment in  common: "Cursed be the Saxon!"