Chapter III. Religious Character of the Songs

CHAPTER III
RELIGIOUS CHARACTER OF THE SONGS

The Paucity of Secular Songs among the Slaves —  Campmeetings, "Spirituals" and "Shouts" —  Work-Songs of the Fields and Rivers —  Lafcadio Hearn and Negro Music —  African Relics and Voodoo Ceremonies.

Having looked into the genesis of the folksongs of the  American negroes, I purpose now to lay a foundation for  examination into sorrie of the musical idioms which characterize them, so that, presently, their origin as well as their  effect may be discussed. Before then, however, something  must be said about the various classes of songs and their use. Here the most striking fact that presents itself is  the predominance of hymns, or religious songs. The reason  for this will readily be found by those who are willing  to accept Herbert Spencer's theory of the origin of music and my definition of folksong. Slavery was the sorrow  of the Southern^ blacks; religion was, their comfort and  refuge. That religion was not a dogmatic, philosophical OT"eVen ethical system so much as it was an emotional  experience. "These hymns," says Mr. Allen in his introduction to "Slave Songs of the United States," "will be found peculiarly interesting in illustrating the feelings,  opinions and habits of the slaves. . . . One of their customs, often alluded to in the songs, ... is that of wandering through the woods and swamps when under  religious excitement, like the ancient bacchantes."*

"Almost all their songs were thoroughly religious in their  tone," says Colonel Higginson, "and were in a minor key,  both as to words and music. The attitude is always the  same, and, as a commentary on the life of the race, is infinitely pathetic. Nothing but patience for this life — nothing but triumph in the next. Sometimes the present  predominates, sometimes the future; but the combination  is always implied." *

"Though the words are sometimes rude and the strains  often wild, yet they are the outpourings of an ignorant and poverty-stricken people, whose religious language and ideals  struggled for expression and found it through limited  vocabularies and primitive harmonies. They are not  merely poetry, they are life itself — the life of the human  soul manifesting itself in rude words, wild strains and  curious, though beautiful harmonies," says Robert R.  Moton, commandant of Hampton Institute. Booker T.  Washington bears this testimony: "The negro folksong has  for the negro race the same value that the folksong of any other people has for that people. It reminds the race  of the 'rock whence it was hewn,' it fosters race pride, and in the days of slavery it furnished an outlet for the anguish  of smitten hearts. . . . The plantation songs known  as the 'spirituals' are the spontaneous outbursts of intense  religious fervor, and had their origin chiefly in the campmeetings, the revivals, and in other religious exercises.  *They breathe a childlike faith in a personal Father and  glow with the hope that the children of bondage will ultimately pass out of the wilderness of slavery into the land of freedom."

Writing in "The Century Magazine" for August, 1899, Marion Alexander Haskell said: "The musical talent of the uneducated negro finds almost its only expression in religious song, and for this there is a simple explanation. A race strongly imbued with religious sentiment, one rarely finds among them an adult who has not gone through that emotional experience known as conversion, after which it is considered vanity and sinfulness to indulge in song other than that of a sacred character. The new-found child 'Concerning the prevalent mode of the songs Colonel Higginson is in error; they are predominantly major, not minon The mistake is a common  one among persons who have no technical training in music and who have  been taught that suffering always expresses itself in the minor mode. A great majority of those who write about savage or primitive music generally  set it down as minor whenever it has a melancholy cast.

  

Ten. I
Ten. II

Bass II

 

You May Bury Me in the East

Andante sostennto

 


1. You may bur-y me in the East,
You may bury me in the West, But I'll
hear the trumpet sound In that mom-ing'. In that mom-ing', my Lord,
How I long to go for to hear the trumpet sound in that morn-ing-.
press.

2. Father Gabriel in that day,
He'll take wing-s and fly away,
For to hear the trumpet sound

In that morning', etc.
You may bury him, etc.

3. Good old Christians In that day,
They'll take wings and fly away,

etc.

4. Good old preachers in that day,
They'll take wings, etc.

5. In that dreadful judgment-day
I'll take wings, etc.

Arranged for men's voices for the Mendelssolin Glee Club of New York by Arthur Uees; published here by permission.

 

[ ]of the church knows but little of that which he must forgo,  for his mother before him sang only spirituals, and to these  he naturally turns as to old friends whom his own religious  experiences have clothed in new dignity and light."

There is nothing strange in the fact that the original  collectors of slave songs and later students of slave life  in America should thus recognize the psychological origin of floro song, for they were familiar with the phenomena  which accompanied it; but it is worthy of note that a  foreigner, who approached the subject on its scientific and  artistic side only and to whom all such phenomena must  have seemed strange, should have been equally appreciative. In his monograph, "La Musique chez les Peuples indigenes de L'Amerique du Nord," M. Julien Tiersot,  after describing a campmeeting as he had learned to know  it from the descriptions of others, says:

It is indubitable, as all who have made a special study of the question  agree, that it is in these superheated religious assemblies that the most genuine  (plus clair) songs in the negro repertory had their origin. They use them on  all occasions. Like all peoples of low culture, the negroes accompany their  manual labors with song. Noteworthy are the "corn songs," which are sung in the harvest season to stimulate the gathering of the grain. The efficiency  of these songs is so well recognized that the owners of the plantations pay  extra wages to singers capable of leading the chorus of laborers. These songs,  however, have no distinctive character; they are religious hymns. The same  holds true of the songs sung by negroes for their diversion, when at rest in  their cabins, in the family circle or for the dance. Such a use need not surprise  us when we have seen their religious meetings degenerate into dishevelled  dances under the influence of the same songs. It is the hymn which must sanctify the dance. Carefully do they guard it against any admixture of the  profane element! A superstitous dread in this regard is another convincing  proof of how completely they have forgotten their African origin. They would  believe themselves damned were they to repeat the songs of paganism; to  do this would, in their eyes, be to commit original and unpardonable sin.

The "dishevelled dance" to which M. Tiersot alludes  is the "shout" which in the days of slavery floyrialied  chiefly in Southern Carolina and' the "States south of it."  "It appears to be found in Florida," says Mr. Allen in his  preface to "Slave Songs," but not in North Carolina or  Virginia." I have a hymn taken down from the lips of  an old slave woman in Kentucky which the collector^  designated as a "shout," and it is probable that the custom  was more widely extended than Mr. Allen and his collaborators, who gleaned chiefly in South Carolina and the Gulf  States, knew. Mr. Allen refers to the fact that the term "shouting" is used in Virginia "in reference to a peculiar  motion of the body not wholly unlike the Carolina shouting." Very keenly he surmises, too, that it "is not unlikely that this remarkable religious ceremony is a relic of some  native African dance, as the Romaika is of the classic  Pyrrhic." A secular parody of it can easily be recalled by  all persons who remember the old-fashioned minstrel shows,  for it was perpetuated in the so-called "walk-around" of  those entertainments. "Dixie," which became the war-song of the Southrons during the War of the Rebellion, was  written by Dan Emmet as a "walk-around" for Bryant's  Minstrels in 1859. I shall let an eyewitness describe the  "shout." It is a writer in "The Nation" of May 30, 1867:

There is a ceremony which the white clergymen are inclined to discountenance, and even of the colored elders some of the more discreet try sometimes  to put on a face of discouragement; and, although if pressed for Biblical  warrant for the "shout," they generally seem to think, "he in de Book," or,  "he dere-da in Matchew," still it is not considered blasphemous or improper  if "de chillen" and "dem young gal" carry it on in the evening for amusement's sake, and with no well-defined intention of "praise." But the true  "shout" takes place on Sundays, or on "praise" nights through the week, and  either in the praise-house or in some cabin in which a regular religious meeting  has been held. Very likely more than half the population of a plantation is  gathered together. Let it be the evening, and a light wood fire burns red  before the door of the house and on the hearth. For some time one can hear,  .though at a good distance, the vociferous exhortation or prayer of the presiding elder or of the brother who has a gift that way and is not "on the back  seat"— a phrase the interpretation of which is "under the censure of the  church authorities for bad behavior" — and at regular intervals one hears  the elder "deaconing" a hymnbook hymn, which is sung two lines at a  time and whose wailing cadences, borne on the night air, are indescribably  melancholy.

But the benches are pushed back to the wall when the formal meeting is  ever, and old and young, men and women, sprucely dressed young men,  grotesquely half-clad field hands — the women generally with gay handkerchiefs twisted about their heads and with short skirts — boys with tattered  shirts and men's trousers, young girls bare-footed, all stand up in the middle of the floor, and when the "sperichil" is struck up begin first walking and  by and by shuffling around, one after the other, in a ring. The foot is hardly taken from the floor, and the progression is mainly due to a jerking, hitching motion which agitates the entire shouter and soon brings out streams of  perspiration. Sometimes they dance silently, sometimes as they shuffle they sing the chorus of the spiritual, and sometimes the song itself is also sung by  the dancers. But more frequently a band, composed of some of the best  singers and of tired shouters, stand at the sideof the room to "base" the others,  singing the body of the song and clapping their hands together or on the knees.  Song and dance are alike extremely energetic, and often, when the shout  'lasts into the middle of the night, the inonotonous thud, thud of the feet prevents sleep within half a mile of the praise-house.

The editors of "Slave Songs" were liberal-minded persons, who, though engaged in philanthropic work in behalf  of the freedmen, were prompted by cultural rather than  religious motives in directing attention to negro songs.  They deplored the fact that circumstances made the collection almost wholly religious. Mr. Allen wrote: "I never fairly heard a secular song among the Port Royal  freedmen, and never saw a musical instrument among  them. The last violin, owned by a 'worldly man,' disappeared from Coffin's Point 'de year gun shoot at Bay  Pint' (i. e., November, 1861). In other parts of the South 'fiddle sings,' 'devil songs,' 'corn songs,' 'jig tunes' and  what not, are common; all the world knows the banjo and  the 'Jim Crow' songs of thirty years ago. We have succeeded in obtaining only a very few songs of this character.

Our intercourse with the colored people has been chiefly  through the work of the Freedmen's Commission, which  deals with the serious and earnest side of the negro character"; and, discussing the "civilized" character of the  songs which he prints, he says: "It is very likely that if  we had found it possible to get at more of their secular music we should have come to another conclusion as to the proportion of the barbaric element."  Then he makes room for a letter from "a gentleman  from Delaware," who makes a number of shrewd observations, as thus:

We must look among their non-religious songs for the purest specimens  of negro minstrelsy. It is remarkable that they have themselves transferred  the best of these to the uses of their churches, I suppose on Mr. Wesley's  principle that "it is not right that the devil should have all the good tunes."  Their leaders and preachers have not found this change difficult to effect, or at least they have taken so little pains about it that one often detects the  profane cropping out and revealing the origin of their most solemn "hymns"  in spite of the best intentions of the poet and artist. Some of the best pure  negro songs I have ever heSfd were those that used to be sung by the black  stevedores, or perhaps the crews themselves, of the West India vessels, loading and unloading at the wharves in Philadelphia and Baltimore. I  have stood for more than an hour, often, listening to them as they hoisted  and lowered the hogsheads and boxes of their cargoes, one man taking the  burden of the song (and the slack of the rope) and the others striking in with  the chorus. They would sing in this way more than a dozen different songs in an hour, most of which might, indeed, be warranted to contain "nothing  religious —a few of them, "on the contrary, quite the reverse" — but generally rather innocent and proper in their language and strangely attractive  in their music.

A generation ago songs of the character described here  were still to be heard from the roustabouts of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, and two of them, together with a  paddle song dating back to the time of the Acadians,  showing unique characteristics, will be discussed later.

M. Tiersot's generalizations on negro music, to which,  it may be said, he denies all African attributes because the  blacks have forgotten the language and customs of their  ancestors, were based chiefly on reports of plantation life  in which old French and Spanish influences were less  potent than English. He recognizes the existence of a  species of dance-song in which French influences have  been predominantly formative, however, and discusses  them in an interesting and instructive manner. They are  the patois songs of the black Creoles of Louisiana, concerning which I shall have something to say in due time. They are songs of sentiment and songs of satire — the latter  characteristic, I believe, a relic of their African source.

There is another, smaller, body of songs outside of the  religious domain to which the spirituals give expression  which would, I am convinced, have been of large value in  proving the persistence of African idioms in exotic American songs if it had been possible to obtain a sufficient  number of them to make a comparative study possible. Unfortunately this is not the case, and I very much question  whether it will ever be done. The investigation has been  postponed too long. The opportunity would have been  incalculably greater half a century ago, when the subject  was new. I made an effort to get some of these songs thirty-five years or so ago, when much more of this music  was in existence than now, and, though I had the help  of so enthusiastic a folklorist as the late Lafcadio Hearn,  they eluded me. A few specimens came into my hands,  but they proved to be of no musical' value, chiefly because  it was obvious that they had not been correctly transcribed.

The songs in question are those which were consorted  with the mysterious voodoo rites practised by the blacks, who clung to a species of snake-worship which had been brought over from Africa. The preservation of relics of this superstitious worship until a comparatively late date  was no doubt due to the negroes who had been brought  into American territory long after the abolition of the slave  trade. At the outbreak of the War of the Rebellion the  number of these people was by no means inconsiderable.  Though the slave trade was abolished by the United  States in 1808 and those who followed it were declared pirates in 1820, negroes brought over from Africa were  smuggled into the States by way of the Antilles for many  years. It was not until 1861 that a trader was' convicted under the law and hanged in New York. As late as 1888 Professor Edwards, describing the negro inhabitants of the  Bahamas, who had already enjoyed freedom for more than  fifty years, could write: "There lives yet in Green Turtle Cay one old negro, 'Unc' Yawk,' who, bowing his grizzled head, will tell you, 'Yah, I wa' fum Haf'ca.' "

It is well to remember facts like these when it is urged,  as it is even by so good a musical folklorist as M. Tiersot,  that African relics are not to be sought for in the music of  the American negroes because they have forgotten the  languages (not language) of their African ancestors. In the  songs which have been heard by the few people who have left us accounts of the voodoo rites, African words are  used, though their meaning has been lost. The phenomenon  is not at all singular. Plato found the Egyptian priests  using in their prayers, instead of words, the sacred vowels  of their language, which they said had been taught their ancestors by Isis and Osiris. Buddhist monks in China,  I have been told, still recite prayers in Sanskrit, though they  do not understand a single word; small wonder, for nearly  two thousand years have passed since Buddhism was introduced into China from India. The Gothic Christians at the  time of the venerable Bede recited the Lord's Prayer in  Greek. Is it difficult to understand what this means?  Religion is a wonderful conservator. A greater sanctity attaches in worship to sounds than to words, for the  first prayers were exclamations which came straight from  the emotions — not words, but musical cries. It is for this  reason that sacred music endures longer than articulate speech.

A veneration which is very much akin to superstition clings to both words and music in many organized  religious systems today. Would it be irreverent to account on this ground for the attitude of the Pope and the Congregation of Rites toward the Gregorian Chant? Why is the  eifort making to ignore the wise reforms of the sixteenth  century and revert to the forms of the tenth? Since it  is more than likely that the old dances and superstitious  rites of African peoples have left an impress upon the music of their descendants in America, regard must be  had for these things, even though we must forgo such  an analytical study of the music as we should like to make.  In 1878, while Lafcadio Hearn and I were collaborating  in an effort to gather material for a study of creole music,  I sent him (he was then living in New Orleans) the words  of a song which I had got — I do not remember where —  for interpretation. In reply he wrote:

Your friend is right, no doubt, about the

"Tig, tig, malaboin
La chelema che tango
Redjoum!"

I asked my black nurse what it meant. She only laughed and shook her head: "Mais c'est Voudoo, 9a; je n'en sais rien!"

"Well," said I, "don't you  know anything about Voudoo songs?"

"Yes," she answered; "I know Voudoo  songs; but I can't tell you what they mean." And she broke out into the wildest, weirdest ditty I ever heard. I tried to write down the words; but as  I did not know what they meant I had to write by sound alone, spelling the  words according to the French pronunciation.

He sent me the words and also the words of a creole  love-song, whose words ran like this:

"Beautiful American, I love thee!
Beautiful American, I am going to Havana
to cut sugar-cane to give thee, money. I am going to
Havana, friends, to cut sugar-cane, friends, to give thee
money, beautiful woman, Cesaire! I love thee, beautiful
American !"

He got a German amateur musician to write  down the music to both songs for him, but it was from his  singing that the transcription was made, and when it was repeated to him he found it incorrect. Hearn was not  musical.

"As I heard it sung the voodoo melody was  really weird, although simple," he wrote me afterward; "there were such curious linkings of long notes to short  with microscopic ones. The other, 'Belle Americaine,' seemed to me pretty, but G. has put only two notes where  I heard five distinctly." The nurse who sang for him was Louise Roche, "an old black woman of real African blood,  an ex-slave having many tales of terror, suspected of  voodooism, etc."

Much later (it was in 1885), when I was contemplating a  cooperation with Mr. George W. Cable in the articles  which he published in the "Century Magazine" for February and April, 1886, on Creole songs and dances, Hearn  wrote:

I fear I know nothing about Creole music or Creole negroes. Yes, I have  seen them dance; but they danced the Congo and sang a purely African song  to the accompaniment of a drygoods box beaten with sticks or bones and a  drum made by stretching a skin over a flour barrel. That sort of accompaniment and that sort of music you know all about; it is precisely similar to what  a score of travellers have described. There are no harmonies — only a furious  contretemps. As for the dance — in which the women do not take their feet  off the ground — it is as lascivious as is possible. The men dance very differently, like savages, leaping in the air. I spoke of this spectacle in my short  article in the "Century." . . .

The Creole songs which I have heard sung in the city are Frenchy in  construction, but possess a few African characteristics of method. The darker  the singer, the more marked the oddities of intonation. Unfortunately, the  most of those I have heard were quadroons or mulattoes. One black woman  sang me a Voudoo song, which I got Cable to write — but I could not sing it as she sang it, so that the music is faulty. I suppose you have seen it already,  as it forms part of the collection.

It was about this time (February, 1884, unless I am  deceived by a postmark) that Hearn conceived the idea  of a book on negro music, of which we were to be joint  authors. He was to write "a long preface and occasional  picturesque notes" to what he called my "learning and  facts." He outlined what he would put in the preface:

He would begin by treating of the negro's musical patriotism — "the strange history of the griots, who furnish  so singular an example of musical prostitution, and who,  though honored and petted on one way, are otherwise  despised by their own people and refused rites of burial."  Then he proposed to relate:

Something about the curious wanderings of these griots through the yellow  desert northward into the Maghreb country, often a solitary wandering;  their performances at Arab camps on the long journey, when the black slaves  came out to listen and weep; then the hazardous voyage into Constantinople,  where they play old Congo airs for the great black population of Stamboul,  whoin no laws or force can keep within doors when the sound of griot music is  heard in the street. Then I would speak of how the blacks carry their music with them to Persia and even to mysterious Hadramant, where their voices are held in high esteem by Arab masters. Then I would touch upon the  transplantation of negro melody to the Antilles and the two Americas, where  its strangest black flowers are gathered by the alchemists of musical science  and the perfume thereof extracted by magicians like Gottschalk. (How is  that for a beginning?)

Having advanced thus far Hearn proposed to show a  relation between physiology and negro music, and he put  upon me the burden of finding out whether or not the  negro's vocal cords were differently formed and "capable  of longer vibrations" than those of white people. He had  been led into this branch of the subject by the observation,  which he found in some book, that the blood of the African black "has the highest human temperature known —  equal to that of the swallow — though it loses that fire  In America." I must have been lukewarm in the matter  of the project which he outlined with great enthusiasm,  despairing, as naturally a sobersided student of folk-music  who believed in scientific methods would, of being able  to make the physical data keep pace with so riotous an  imagination as that of my fantastical friend. I did not  even try to find a colored subject for the dissecting table or  ask for a laryngoscopical examination of the vocal cords  of the "Black Patti." His enthusiasm and method in our  joint work are strikingly illustrated in another part of the  same letter. As has been intimated, we were looking for  unmistakable African relics in the Creole songs of Louisiana:

Here is the only Creole song I know of with an African refrain that is still  sung — don't show it to C, it is one of our treasures.
(Pronounce "wenday," "makkiah.")

Ouende, ouende, macaya!

Mo pas barrasse, macaya!
Ouende, ouende, macaya!

Mo bois bon divin, macaya!
Ouende, ouende, macaya!

Mo mange bon poulet, macaya!
Ouende, ouende, macaya!

Mo pas barrasse, macaya!
Ouende, ouende, macaya!
Macaya!

I wrote from the dictation of Louise Roche. She did not know the meaning  of the refrain — her mother had taught her, and the mother had learned it  from the grandmother. However, I found out the meaning, and asked her  if she now remembered. She leaped in the air for joy — apparently. Ouendai,  or ouende, has a different meaning in the eastern Soudan; but in the Congo, or Fiot, dialect it means "to go," "to continue to," "to go on." I found the word in Teannest's vocabulary. Then macaya I found in Turiault's infitude sur la Language Creole de la Martinique": "fa veut dire manger tout le  temps"— "excessivement." Therefore, here is our translation:

Go on! go on! eat enormously!
I ain't one bit ashamed— eat outrageously!
Go on! go on! eat prodigiously!

I drink good wine! — eat ferociously!
Go on! go on! eat unceasingly! —
I eat good chicken — gorging myself!
Go on! go on! etc.

How is this for a linguistic discovery? The music is almost precisely like  the American river music — a chant, almost a recitative, until the end of  the line is reached: then for your mocking music!

There is a hint of an African relic in the allusion to the  recitative-like character of the feasting song, as we shall  see when we come to inquire into the structure of African  music.

For a description of the voodoo rites I draw, by per-mission, upon Mr. George W. Cable's article on "Creole Slave Songs," which appeared in "The Century Magazine"^ for April, 1886:

The dance and song entered into the negro worship. That worship was as  dark and horrid as bestialized savagely could make the adoration of serpents. So revolting was it, and so morally hideous, that even in the West Indian French  possessions a hundred years ago, with the slave trade in full blast, and the  West Indian planter and slave what they were, the orgies of the voudoos, were forbidden.

The Aradas, St. Mery tells us, introduced them from their homes beyond  the Slave Coast, one of the most dreadfulljr benighted regions of all Africa.  He makes the word vaudau. In Louisiana it is written voudou and voodoo  and is often changed on the negro's lips to hoodoo. It is the name of an  imaginary being of vast supernatural powers, residing in the form of a harmless  snake. This spiritual influence, or potency, is the recognized antagonist  and opposite of Obi, the great African manitou, or deity, whom the Congos^  vaguely generalize as Zombi. In Louisiana, as I have been told by that learned Creole scholar, the late Alexander Dimitry, Voodoo bore, as a title of greater solemnity, the additional name Maignan, and that even in the Calinda dance, which he had witnessed innumerable times, was sometimes heard at the height  of its frenzy the invocation —

"Aie! Aie! Voudoo Maignan!"

The worship of Voodoo is paid to a snake kept in a box. The worshippers  are not merely a sect, but in some rude, savage way, also an order. A man and  woman, chosen from their own number to be the oracles of the serpent-deity, are called the king and queen. The queen is the more important of the two,  and even in the present dilapidated state of the worship in Louisiana, where the  king's office has almost or quite disappeared, the queen is still a person of  great note. It (voodoo worship) long ago diminished in frequency to once a  year, the chosen night always being the eve of St. John. For several years  past the annual celebrations have been suspended; but in the summer of  1884 they were — let it be hoped only for the once — resumed. . . .

Now a new applicant for membership steps into the circle. There are a  few trivial formalities and the voodoo dance begins. The postulant dances  frantically in the middle of the ring, only pausing, from time to time, to receive heavy alcholic draughts in ^real haste and return more wildly to his  leapings and writhings until he falls in convulsions. He is lifted, restored, and presently conducted to the altar, takes his oath, and by a ceremonial stroke  from one of the sovereigns is admitted a full participant in the privileges and  obligations of the devilish free masonry. But the dance goes on about the  snake. The contortions of the upper part of the body, especially of the neck and shoulders, are such as to threaten to dislocate them. The queen shakes the box and tinkles the bells, the rum bottle gurgles, the chant alternates  between king and chorus:

"Eh! Eh! Bomba hone, hone!
Canga bafio tay.
Canga moon day lay,
Canga do keelah,
Canga li!"

There are swoonings and ravings, nervous tremblings beyond control,  incessant writhings and turnings, tearing of garments, even biting of the  flesh — every imaginable invention of the devil.

 footnotes:

_* Miss Mildred J. Hill, of Louisville, to whom I am indebted for several
interesting specimens.