The Encyclopedia Britannica describes Barbershop Quartet singing as being distinguished by close harmony and variations of tempo, diction, and phrasing. The arrangements “usually employ syncopated ragtime.”
The Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America (SPEBSQSA) managed for over fifty years to preserve the American public in a state of ignorance about the origins of Barbershop singing. In fact, the Society itself had a Whites-only membership policy until 1960. The deception was exposed by Lynn Abbott in a 36-page article, with 183 footnotes, in the journal American Music in 1992. Barbershop is a microcosm of the larger American cultural/racial scandal and serves as a case study of denial and revelation.
Two quartets join up
In the 1880s, said one vaudeville actor, “about every four dark faces you met was a quartet.”[i] In the 1890s, quartet singing was one of the main diversions of Black men in the South. Taking up where older vocal group traditions from the plantation had left off, they featured improvisation of harmonies, notably the “swipe” or “snake”—an upward slide by the baritone coupled with a downward slide by the tenor. All this could be heard whenever and wherever Black men congregated, especially in barbershops. Before the Civil War, most southern barbers were free Blacks, and the tradition persisted through the century. Whites came to their shops to spiff up, and spiffed up their music appreciation in the process. James Weldon Johnson wrote in 1940,
…every barber shop had its quartet, and the men spent their leisure time playing on the guitar—not banjo, mind you—and “harmonizing.” I have witnessed some of these explorations in the field of harmony and the scenes of hilarity and back-slapping when a new and peculiarly rich chord was discovered. There would be demands for repetitions, and cries of “Hold it! Hold it!” until it was firmly mastered…the “barber-shop chord” is the foundation of the close harmony method adopted by American musicians in making arrangements for male voices.[ii]
“The Confederates”
W.C. Handy, self-styled Father of the Blues, sang in a quartet in Alabama. Later the Mills Brothers, an important pop vocal quartet, learned their harmony from their father at his barbershop in Ohio. Jelly Roll Morton sang in a quartet. An eleven year-old named Louis Armstrong started his own. Much later, the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartette, a religious singing group, was formed in a barbershop in Virginia.[1] In 1910 a song called “Play That Barber Shop Chord” was sung to great acclaim by Bert Williams, Ma Rainey and other black performers. The song was about black singers and a black style. In 1912 Irving Berlin published a song, “When Johnson’s Quartet Harmonize,” with an illustration of a black singing group on the cover.
[1] Some barbers of note: Jelly Roll Morton’s uncle and Perry Como. Also Richard Milburn of Philadelphia, who was singing and whistling his “Listen to the Mocking-Bird” in the 1850s; it was transcribed for him by someone who took his name off the credits.
I have not found a single African American barbershop video….!
In spite of all this, Barbershop’s official historians promulgated a “White origins” theory, postulating a link between a “harsh, discordant” style heard in barbershops in Elizabethan England and the modern mellifluous tones of the American salon. Sigmund Spaeth, a Barbershop singer and writer, wrote in his 1925 collection, Barbershop Ballads, of the many Black barbershops in Jacksonville, Florida that boasted their own quartets. Yet in the 1940 edition he hedged, pushing the Elizabethan link. [2] Turn of the century Barbershopper C.T. “Deac” Martin wrote in 1932 that
America’s musical debt to our colored people is beyond calculation, since negro influence has been felt almost from the inception of Native American music [sic]. And as to close harmony, a rich sheen in the blending of untrained negro voices makes trained white harmony hard, brittle, artificial by comparison.[iii]
[2] Spaeth also wrote an article in 1928 titled “Jazz Is Not Music.”
Which is to say, you ain’t heard Barbershop done right if you’ve only heard it done White. Or as Lynn Abbott puts it, the Black tradition was “more spontaneous, free-spirited, and at ease with itself than in the self-conscious, nostalgia-tinged habitat of white neobarbershop quartets.”
Yet Martin too found reason to fudge; when he became the official historian of the Society he wrote that “This barbers’ music came to our shores along with other old world customs.” It was not until 1970 that he would write, with the hindsight of age—or of community sentiment overtaking him—of his own first introduction to Barbershop, by a Black quartet in a park at the turn of the century.
Signature – Somebody to Love (Queen cover)
The historical sleight of hand was nearly exposed when a Black group from New York, the Grand Central Red Caps, won a SPEBSQSA-organized regional contest in 1941, and was barred from the national finals. Among the notables who resigned from the organization as a result were former Governor Alfred E. Smith and the inventor of the freeway, Robert Moses, who said “if American ballads of Negro origin are to be ruled out of barber shop singing, most of the best songs we have will be blacklisted.”[iv]
The songs were not blacklisted: the harmonizers weren’t about to neglect such musical treasures just because they were neglecting their creators. Instead, they were blackfaced; this antique performance rite continued within the Society right up to 1979.
In 1988’s version of the official story, the new Society historian allowed as to how Black quartets did exist, and were one of many influences on Barbershop. The “Jacksonville connection” went unmentioned.
Why does it matter? For one thing, there’s the diminished seventh chord. It makes a smooth transition, semi-sophisticated, used in classical music and elsewhere. But it went directly from Barbershop into Scott Joplin’s rags.[v] And what makes a New Orleans brass band different from the European marching bands that went before? The jazz bands improvised collectively, the different instruments exploring new harmonic possibilities together, as voices did in Barbershop. The instrumental slurs in jazz are straight out of Barbershop. From the start, jazz players specialized in imitating vocal sounds. The pervasive vocal traditions of Black southerners had a lot to do with the evolution of jazz. Satchmo said so, and he might know.
Never gonna give you up
It was a member of the Barbershop Society who directed me to Lynn Abbott’s article, and the Society kindly provided a copy of their response, essentially a summary of Abbott’s paper, published in the January-February 1994 issue of their periodical, The Harmonizer. They called the essay “remarkable,” and said that “barbershoppers of today owe Lynn Abbott a great debt,” but had no comment on why they had not managed to correct the record themselves. Beyond this rather self-serving and belated acceptance, an enthusiastic apology and embrace of Black quartet traditions would set an example for soul-searching, truth-telling, and multicultural celebration that could be used as a model for educational programs. We wait with bated breath.
[i] Bill McClain, in Clarke, 60. [ii] Johnson, James Weldon and J. Rosamond, 1944, 36. [iii] C.T. “Deac” Martin 1932, 15. [iv] Hicks, Val, Heritage of Harmony, Friendship, WI: New Past Press (SPEBSQSA), 1988, 35, quoted in Abbott, American Music, 301. [v] Clarke, 60.
Meanwhile, something not entirely else had been percolating: the blues, a uniquely American music concocted by African‑Americans, melding African‑ and European‑American folk musics. It arose in the South around the turn of the century, around the same time as ragtime, jazz, gospel, and barbershop harmony, all of which can be seen as part of a period of struggle for dignity and expression in the face of Jim Crow, the official project for thwarting the dream of the end of White domination.[i]
Memphis Minnie, vocal, guitar; Little Son Joe, guitar. 1941.
In the southern countryside, especially in the area around the Mississippi Delta and Memphis, White sharecroppers would come from miles around to Black parties to marvel at the syncopated sounds. The hills around the delta preserved in isolation some old West African musical forms, and you can hear them peeking through in those blues renditions from before recording technology, and the standardization of the form that came with it.
Blues music was characterized by the “blue note,” a slight flatting of the 3rd, 7th, and sometimes 5th notes. Or sometimes not a single note, but a slurring or wavering that demonstrates an effort to square a circle. Musicologists argue: these flatted notes are either an attempt to fit a larger West African scale (including “microtones”) into the cracks in the Europeans’ diatonic scale, or an effort to square their traditional five-note scale with the new seven-based universe. And not only is the blue note African American, it’s southern: it didn’t show up in the early music of Blacks in the northeast. Blacks there were further from West Africa culturally and were trying to put more distance between themselves and the old South, which they didn’t miss much, “Dixie” notwithstanding.
The blues also feature a vocal style usually described as “sung speech.” This music, and jazz as well, reflect the melodic quality of some West African languages, in which different pitch and intonation lend different meanings to the same words, as occurs in Chinese. Call and response, typical of so much African music, is embedded partly through the three-line form, in which the first line is repeated once, then followed by a third line that answers or completes the thought, and rhymes. Meanwhile: falsetto breaks (reminiscent of African tradition), syncopation, improvisation, some variant of blues scale, verses floating around the tradition from one song to another, and other aspects worthy of the many books on the subject.
Blues are commonly understood to hew to a three-chord pattern, but sometimes there are only two or even one (check out John Lee Hooker), and on the other extreme there are sometimes passing chords, more common with jazz bands playing blues numbers, and later on generally across blues genres. The blues form is not so different from that of the western European ballads African Americans heard in the South, except that the vocal lines are shorter, leaving room for the instrument or band to talk back.
The blues may have taken its name from a 16th century British expression, “blue devils,” meaning melancholy.[ii] Or not, depending on your source. In any case, it evolved from slavery-era field hollers—work songs that persisted later in penitentiary chain gangs,[1] and from similar patterns used in church services. It was carried on by levee workers hauling dirt uphill to hold back the Mississippi River. It evolved from the wrenching social life of Blacks: they were at the bottom of the labor ladder and as such were often forced to travel in search of work. This didn’t do much for their family life, as any blues singer will tell you, in a song.[iii]
And don’t let’s forget that blues evolved in tandem with religious singing. Same singers—or sometimes different people from the same families. Gospel absorbed blues and vice versa. Much as some people would like to keep Saturday night separate from Sunday morning—keep the world out of the church—people are people.
Charley Patton
The Dockery Plantation near Tutwiler, Mississippi was the place where folks would come to hear the earliest blues musicians we know of today. Charley Patton came to Dockery’s in 1897; many bluesmen learned from and played with him. He in turn learned from Henry Sloan, an older resident at Dockery who has been credited by some as “inventing” the blues. He was never recorded. From the surrounding Delta came Son House, Bukka (Booker) White, Skip James, Robert Johnson, and Johnny Shines. Later additions to the circle included Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson, Honeyboy Edwards, and Pops Staples.
The blues developed early in east Texas too, and found there a more open field for the interplay of different musics. Texas gave us Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb. Blacks, Cajuns, Mexicans, Anglos, Germans and others mixed waltzes, polkas, ragtime, blues, and jazz, and have continued to breed diverse musical variants. White Texans may have first heard the blues when Black musicians played at White country dances in the nineteenth century.[iv]
The Southeast incubated its own variant of the blues, with artists like Blind Blake and Blind Boy Fuller, and later Reverend Gary Davis, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGee, incorporating some ragtime as well as Appalachian musical characteristics.[v]
The blues developed both in the countryside—generally sung solo by a man with a guitar–and in traveling vaudeville troupes in which women sang a similar style but with backup by piano or a band. Ma Rainey sang blues in a minstrel show in 1902 and was the first to record “See See Rider,” already an old tune. She encouraged Bessie Smith, who became the first blues star. Other luminaries were Alberta Hunter, Victoria Spivey and Sippie Wallace; they mixed the blues in with a variety of showbiz styles.
But before there were stars, there were “jook joints”—the places where southern Blacks gathered to dance, drink and listen to the early blues. There were jooks[2] in the country towns and the bigger cities, and they were the next step over the levee in the Black community’s musical development. So my teenage informant wasn’t far off after all: rock and roll did come through a juke box, which was named after a house where the blues blew through.
Boogie-woogie was a blues variant played on piano that came out of Kansas City and the Texas honky-tonks in the thirties. Its near relative from southern lumber camps was called barrelhouse—the bar next to the piano being held up by whiskey barrels.[3] Some say players developed a hyperactive left hand style (Beat me Daddy, Eight to the Bar) so their right could reach for the bottle. The style included some rough ragtime feel—rougher than the more formal, polite boogie that would soon become popular mainly among White folks. It rode to Chicago and hit it big in the forties. Chief exponents were Jimmy Yancey, Meade Lux Lewis, Pete Johnson, and Albert Ammons. Boogie-woogie was widely played at “rent parties,” as was skiffle, or jug band music. Jug band, more a type of instrumentation than a type of music, can be found widely on old records because the records were cheap to make, the musicians often being paid a jug—of gin.[vi]
3] My own first enthusiasm for playing music came from a teacher who suckered me into piano lessons by playing a bit of boogie. But by then, at ten, I had already been listening to top 40 records that were, unbeknownst to me, by Black artists – notably Lloyd Price’s hoppin’ version of Stagger Lee. And jazz, as we’ll see.
Memphis, the town where Elvis erupted, has an interesting history: the town was wiped out by yellow fever in 1878 and entirely restocked with poor folks from around the South. Blacks and Whites together made a new town and, eventually, a new music. By day they worked and prayed; by night they strutted and played. Beale Street was the night: it was jazz, swing, and the blues. The blues came in from the cotton fields and took over the streets and gambling houses, mixing with jazz and country music and evolving towards rhythm and blues and rock and roll.
Bessie Smith
In Memphis, a classically trained Black musician named W.C. Handy synthesized and regularized what he first heard in Tutwiler, Mississippi, in 1903. His formalized version of the blues was the one that society at large came to know. In fact, when Bessie Smith recorded his “St. Louis Blues,” in her only film appearance, Handy was hired as a consultant. The result was a startling bar scene incorporating the influence of the spiritual style, with barflies as choir.[vii]
W.C. Handy wrote his songs down in sheet music and thus developed the formal concept of the “blue note.” He also incorporated the tango rhythm, often said to be a “White” Argentinian contribution without African influence—a myth that rests partly on the relative paucity of Afro-Argentinians, relative to neighboring Uruguay and of course many other Latin American countries. But Robert Farris Thompson traced the African—specifically Kongo Kingdom—influences in great detail, and Argentinian pianist Juan Carlos Cáceres demonstrated them vividly.[viii]Variations on this rhythm are heard in Cuba, Brazil, the Bahamas, and elsewhere in Black America.
Handy’s 1909 composition “The Memphis Blues,” didn’t do so well, so he sold it to a White promoter, who made a mint from it. Years later Handy was denied permission to include it in his anthology.[ix] Having enriched the publishers, Handy went bankrupt.
The first blues recording was made in 1920: Mamie Smith sang “Crazy Blues,” and it sold like crazy. Bessie Smith began recording in 1923, using top musicians such as Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson. Recording of the rural male blues singers lagged; the influential Texas bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson first recorded in 1926, Charley Patton in 1929, and Robert Johnson (“Crossroads,” etc.) in 1936.
Charles Anderson, who began as a comedian in 1909, was recording as a blues singer in 1923. His assertion that the blues was Black people’s opera was taken up widely in the press, and he became famous for his ability to hold a note for sixty seconds, lending credence to his claim.[x]
The addition of the guitar to the voice melded field hollers with syncopated rhythms. In the late nineteenth century, rural southern Blacks danced to blues—played on a single guitar—in a sensual manner, dare we say erotically, derived from West African tradition. You can see something similar today in the Maypole dances of Belize and in the sambas of Brazil. Today’s rock and roll dancing echoes this sensuality and style, and is conspicuously West African in origin.
♬substitution: Observe, either at a dance concert or on film, the dancing that accompanies folk music from northern and western European countries; compare this to West African, Brazilian, or Haitian dancing. Specifically, compare solo highland dancing from Scotland with solo rock and roll dancing. Note differences and similarities. Try dancing highland style to your favorite style of rock music. Do this when no one is looking.
There’s a blues festival in Helena, Arkansas that features a lot of old-style performers from the Mississippi Delta area. The town is on the tourist map basically for that one day each year. Main Street is closed and merchants rake it in. In summer 2000, the Black merchants called for a boycott of the festival on the grounds that their businesses, off on the side streets, were actually losing money during the fest.
The lead editorial writer for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Little Rock) objected, saying “Last time I checked, the blues were for everybody.” As a folklorist working in the state at the time, I demurred in print, noting that blues expressed the struggles of the people who originated them, as all cultural expressions express—well, culture. If you want to appreciate other people’s culture, you might stop to appreciate their struggles while you’re there. Especially when it’s right there in your face asking to be noticed.
The next day I was approached by a local accountant, of the White persuasion, who had read my letter; he admonished me: “stop blaming me for slavery—I wasn’t here.” Touched a nerve, I guess. Maybe your granddaddy was here. Anyhow, touchy touchy. And why so? Could it be that one woman’s songs of work and struggle are another man’s source of leisure? Could it be that recognition of the unfairness of certain cultural interactions could open up Pandora’s boxes of guilt? Angela Davis suggests the importance of social context for true music appreciation:
Hope for the hopeless has been conjured within the religious context…Hope for the hopeless has been conjured aesthetically by the blues women and blues men…Like John the Conqueror [Bessie Smith] brought song and laughter as she evoked the harshest and cruelest experiences of Black people in America, and she brought a promise that ‘the sun’s gonna shine in my back door some day.’[xi]
Professor Davis wasn’t there at the time, but Black songwriter-musicians Porter Grainger and Bob Ricketts were, offering blues fans (especially White ones) a 1926 pamphlet called How to Play and Sing the Blues like the Phonograph and Stage Artists, including this gem:
If one can temporarily play the role of the oppressed or the depressed, injecting into his or her rendition a spirit of hopeful prayer, the effect will be more natural and successful…. Without the necessary moan, croon or slur, no blues number is properly sung.[xii]
Within a decade of the rural blues boom, the southern sound would move north, electrify, and join with offshoots of swing bands to create the popular music that would take the world by storm. We’ll get to that several chapters down the road. But while we’re still in the South, let’s check in at the local Black barbershop and see what’s shakin’.
After the Civil War, Black and White cultures were thrown into new relationships. For a time there was a predominance of White, often Irish, song styles. Some hits of the era were “When You and I Were Young, Maggie” (1866), “Silver Threads Among the Gold” (1872), “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” (1875), “Grandfather’s Clock” (1875), and “Clementine.” Popular songs were sold in sheet music to be sung in parlors with pianos, and on the stage.
Kristen Mosca
But something else was afoot. Out of the ashes of slavery came Black musicians filling the streets of the South, and out of the ashes of minstrelsy arose the Black musicians who developed ragtime. As Donald Clarke put it, “The history of modern popular music may be seen as the repeated rescuing of a moribund scene by the music of African-Americans.”[i]
Ragtime was an African‑American version of European march music, combined with Black dance rhythms, played on the banjo, then the piano, and later by brass bands. Rhythmically, it descended from a minstrel march known as the patrol, which had become syncopated by the 1880s,[ii] and from the cakewalk, its immediate predecessor as a commercial craze. The first ragtime piano piece was subtitled a “Banjo Imitation,” indicating its probable origins among African-American minstrels.[iii] Among the pianists who wrote ragtime were Scott Joplin—inspired by his mother’s banjo picking—and Tom Turpin, James Scott, and Eubie Blake, along with Joseph Lamb, a White musician and friend of Joplin’s. Other White rag writers included May Aufderheide and Irene Giblin.[iv]
Scott Joplin
The distinctive rhythms may also have descended from the African-American body percussion tradition known as “patting juba,” a slapping, tapping, and hand-clapping described thus in 1899:
The division of one of the beats into two short notes [in ragtime] is perhaps traceable to the hand-clapping; every American is familiar with the way the darkey pats his hands with two quick slaps alternating with the time-beating of the foot…The so-called “snap” may be traced to the quick slap of the heel and toe of the foot in sharp succession.[v]
All this slapping, clapping, and tapping had served as substitute for the banned drums, and had long since infiltrated into Euro-American cultural life. Mark Twain, in the 1870s, entertained his party guests with his versions of African American dances, and wrote in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn of White boatsmen who patted juba.[vi], [1]
[1] This practice has been traced to the zuba dance of the African Kongo kingdom. (Thompson, 65, 309 n.42)
Ragtime achieved colossal popularity among Whites, partly because it was similar to music they already knew, yet with a twist of syncopation that snapped them awake. The bass remained true to the march, but the melody was syncopated: notes were sounded across main beats and bar lines, followed by notes starting on weak beats, so the melody floated around the rhythm.
James P. Johnson
Rag derived from both European ballroom dance traditions, like the polka and schottische, and Afro-American dances like the cakewalk and buck dancing. Especially the cakewalk, because both the walk and the rag were clearly Black impressions of White styles. Clear to Blacks, anyway. Louis Moreau Gottschalk, a very influential composer and pianist, wrote pieces associated with the cakewalk. He hailed from New Orleans and, like Christy, was an observer of the Congo Square scene. The dancing there was described in 1886 as being in “ragged” time.[vii]
Eventually ragtime would feed into tap dancing, which combined northern English clogging, Irish step-dancing, West African stomping and African-American buck and wing. Rag was also an influence on stride piano, pioneered in New York by James P. Johnson, Eubie Blake, Willie “The Lion” Smith and Fats Waller; it is heard in southeastern blues guitar and even in Barbershop.
Besides syncopation, ragtime used techniques such as the break—a sudden stop in the rhythm, filled by a melodic line—that would become standard in jazz. Ragtime style persisted in country string bands and jug bands of a later period, and it permeates later solo guitar styles like that of Chet Atkins; it can be heard in bluegrass music to this day. Indeed, the infusion of a syncopated version of marching band music into backwoods White folks’ string music is a pretty good indication of how entangled our roots are.
Ragtime was a breakthrough because it allowed Blacks to perform without the intermediary of blackface. “Coon songs,” stereotyping the life and music of southern Blacks, had become a staple of Tin Pan Alley. These vestiges of minstrelsy traded in insulting stereotypes set to slight syncopation. For the moment, coon songs continued to be pervasive, taking on rag’s increased syncopation to become even more popular. One of the most notorious was “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” composed and sung by a Black performer, Ernest Hogan. He may have cribbed the lyrics, substituting “coons” for “pimps:”
All coons look alike to me I’ve got another beau, you see
But the title became a central American cliché, and Hogan lived to regret it.[viii] He also never got paid—that is, for the ragtime reworking of the song by Max Hoffman .[ix]
That song aside, ragtime was a big step beyond coon songs and caricature. It was a step toward jazz.[x] It was also a breakthrough for certain White songwriters, who were able to turn the tunes into money by cleaning up the lyrics, simplifying the rhythms a bit, and presto: “There’ll Be A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”—thought of ever since as a Fun White Song.[xi] Likewise “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay!” (1891). Both tunes were first heard at Babe Connor’s, a Black brothel in St. Louis.[xii] And of course, show biz having been invented, it was necessary to crown a White artist as the “Creator of Ragtime;” the false honor went to Ben Harney for his 1895 tune “You’ve Been a Good Old Wagon, but You’ve Done Broke Down.” It didn’t stick.
White authority, however, was not enthusiastic: the American Federation of Musicians at its 1901 convention condemned it and urged musicians not to play it—a truly crusading union. And people caught doing the various disreputable ragtime dances occasionally lost their jobs or found themselves in court![xiii]
Ragtime became the dominant form in the first era of widespread distribution of popular music. Early recordings by John Philip Sousa’s band (1900-1910) featured ragtime pieces. And Tin Pan Alley, the fabled street of popular songwriting, got an important injection of material from ragtime.[2] As William Schafer writes in The Art of Ragtime,
Ragtime also solidified the economic positions of many major publishers. In effect, it created Tin Pan Alley as a going business proposition…Significantly, most histories of popular music have slighted the direct influence of ragtime and original black composition in the rise of the commercial business…[This] has helped gild and gloss over the crassness and veniality [sic] of the commercial music industry…This is symptomatic of the dominant white culture’s urge to shape its social myths in its own image.[xiv]
And to maximize its mass market potential, the Whites who appropriated the style and the songs also removed or watered down the dialect, hiding the Black roots and making it easier for Whites to adopt the songs as their own national popular music. The White scribes who scribbled and sold the songs also took composer’s credits.[xv] After all, they found the folk elements and wrote them down! Soon the source of the music was all but forgotten.
[i] Clarke, 56. [ii] Berlin, 107.| [iii] Gilbert Chase, America’s Music, 438-39. [iv] Clarke, 60-61. [v] Rupert Hughes, “A Eulogy of Ragtime,” 158. [vi]Fishkin 1993, 111. [vii] Clarke, 57-58. [viii] Clarke, 62, and Weldon Johnson, 1930, 114. [ix]Locke 1936, 61. [x] Schafer 1973, Ch. 1. [xi] Butcher, 66, and Berlin, 5, 17. This 1896 composition was cited as a ragtime song in the following decade by Cosmopolitan, New York Age,American Musician, and Art Journal. [xii] Berlin, 17. [xiii] Leonard, 26. [xiv] Schafer, 116-18. [xv] James Weldon Johnson 1926, 16-17.
The spiritual, the musical development credited with begetting so many American popular musical forms, was jump-started in the White communities of the South around 1800 when British evangelists brought their spirited, pull-out-the-stops style to America. Their revival meetings featured lively group singing, many melodies being imported from secular British traditions like folk tunes and tavern singing.
The high‑energy worship appealed to those unsatisfied with the sedate Puritan style; it certainly appealed to African Americans, whose own traditions had never divorced music from group participation or spirit from body. Unlikely as it may seem from our vantage point over the present Sunday morning racial chasm, from about the 1820s Blacks attended the same revivals.[1] Though the proceedings were not necessarily integrated, a key musical interchange took place here.
[1] The sentiment for racial separation and control in the deep South was not entirely shared by poor Whites in the hills further north, away from the plantations.
In much the same way that Blacks in South Africa adapted European hymns and sang them in their own style as freedom songs, Blacks in the US South infused the White spirituals with their own musical and social sensibilities. For example, the group repetition of an unchanging line as the song leader progresses through a text was a West African retention, first noted in the “ring shouts” from slavery times. As described by a visitor to the Sea Islands off South Carolina in 1864:
The children form a ring, and move around in a kind of shuffling dance, singing all the time. Four or five stand apart, and sing very energetically, clapping their hands, stamping their feet, and rocking their bodies to and fro. These are the musicians, to whose performance the shouters keep perfect time.[i]
They kept perfect time for a good reason: the lyrics being shouted were dance instructions, called by callers.[ii] Could this have been the birth of square dance callers? Some say so. We will hear these calls again from Black banjo artists who played for dancers just before the advent of string bands.
The debate over who influenced whom often focuses on these shared camp meetings. There’s no doubt of the European source of many of the songs. Many musical characteristics were shared between the White and Black, the Anglo-Celtic and African, notably pentatonic scales and a slight flatting of thirds and sevenths. But attention should also be paid to the differences in performance, which are accentuated once camp ends and Blacks and Whites decamp down their different roads through history.
Ralph Stanley, “Gloryland”
Blacks borrowed selectively, taking songs that meshed well with their sense of musical style, and transformed them in order to make them their own. African American style featured syncopation, poly-rhythmic hand-clapping, and dancing. All these practices were and are rare in White congregations.[iii] The African American style, as Bruno Nettl summarized it, featured “hot rhythm, much variation, preference for part-singing, antiphony, and response.”[iv] The entire process was described by D.K. Wilgus as a sort of semi-hybridizing:
The Negro has preserved, borrowed, and re-created, as has the white. The two races share a tradition which they tend to treat distinctively.[v]
Soon Blacks had their own camp meetings. Here were born such tunes as “Nobody Knows,” “O Susanna,” “Go Down Moses,” “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho,” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”
Outside of camp meetings, how were spirituals written, or developed, or made up? One informant explained:
I’ll tell you, it’s dis way. My master call me up and order me a short peck of corn and a hundred lash. My friends see it, and is sorry for me. When dey come to de praise-meeting dat night dey sing about it. Some’s very good singers and know how; and dey work it in—work it in, you know, till they get it right; and dat’s de way.[vi]
Some of these “very good singers” could have been the Mahalia Jacksons, Aretha Franklins or Al Greens of their day.
Rockin’ spiritual
And of course the songs served double duty, as did Christianity in general for African-Americans. Songs about heaven were also songs about escape from slavery. Dual meanings abounded, as they did in the blues, where sexual innuendo was more easily deciphered than some of the references to White and Black social interactions. Due to the dual life Blacks lead in White-dominated society, the practice of dual meaning in art and religion has come to pervade even the larger society, as we saw with minstrelsy. This veil over hidden meanings is occasionally lifted:
Got one mind for white folks to see, ‘Nother for what I know is me; He don’t know, he don’t know my mind, When he see me laughing Just laughing to keep from crying.[vii]
And in fact, one could say the intertwined Black, White and other roots of modern American art forms reveal at least dual messages when they are unraveled for their hidden content.
The spirituals would in time be smoothed out and made more regular, as would the blues, but in their original state they were something quite apart both from the White version and from what was to come. Zora Neale Hurston, a leading Black writer on folklore who was active in the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, described the difference with a parable:
A white man built a house. So he got it built and he told the man: “Plaster it good so that nobody can see the beams and uprights.” So he did. Then he had it papered with beautiful paper, and painted the outside. And a Negro built him a house. So when he got the beams and all in, he carved beautiful grotesques over all the sills and stanchions, and beams and rafters. So both went to live in their houses and were happy.[viii]
Gospel, 1930s
The prevalence of pentatonic scales in both the Scottish and West African traditions helped facilitate interchange. Studies collected by George Pullen Jackson in the 1930s show numerous cases of the revivalists’ “shape note” songs”[2] moving from White tradition to Black, and Jackson notes that many of the tunes that did make this move shared scales with traditional West African music.
[2] So named for their depiction in sheet music employing a distinctive shape for each note, to facilitate reading by unschooled singers.
In the interest of fundraising, Black college groups presented Jubilee singing, initiated by Nashville’s Fisk University in the 1870s. Spirituals from the slavery era were brought forth in a more polished form by troupes of formerly enslaved Black students who toured the country; for the first time, large numbers of Whites heard serious presentations of Black spiritual music.
This singing movement was furthered by the matriculation at Fisk of hundreds of schoolteachers, all rigorously trained in the singing and teaching of the Jubilee style—a style, once again, that incorporated Afro and Euro elements. This time, there was more of a European manner constructed on mixed Euro-African matter. It was a style of great dignity, criticized as lacking in passion by those who preferred more rustic, untutored styles. The choirs were, after all, trained by George White, a White man, to sing in a controlled, precise manner. But they were a big hit throughout the country and in Europe, and shaped Black religious singing for decades.[ix] Mark Twain, who relaxed at home by singing Negro spirituals, hosted the Fisk singers in 1897 and commented on their music:
It is utterly beautiful, to me…and I wish it were a foreign product so that [America] would worship it and lavish money on it and go properly crazy over it.[x]
Fisk Jubilee Singers
Modern gospel music has its roots in White religious movements in the South around the 1870s. It would not really take hold in the Black community for a generation, and when it did, the character of performance was again altered, from restraint to passion. Words like hoarse, coarse, raspy, gravelly, and shrill give us a clue.[xi] Black gospel quartets in the 1920s placed more emphasis on lead voices instead of an exclusively ensemble presentation. This opened the way for nonsense syllables as background for the lead singer—a direct antecedent of doo-wop. The new arrangements also featured blue notes, syncopation, and faster versions—gospel has always absorbed new Black popular styles, and vice versa. In the forties, guitars were added, and the later addition of more instruments led to still further diversification of vocal arrangements.[xii]
Fisk Jubilee Singers
Later, White gospel quartets would pick up pieces of the styles of their Black counterparts and of barbershop groups, adding syncopation and antiphony where before there had been only strictly in-time renditions. They would adapt Black gospel numbers like Thomas Dorsey’s “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” and Charles Tindley’s “We’ll Understand It Better By and By.” But they never picked up the growling, repeating, bending, and generally wringing the guts out of a word.
Indirectly, though, White artists and fans did pick up big doses of Black gospel’s feeling, as it coursed through secular music. Without gospel, there would be no rhythm and blues, nor its various children. Without the quartets, choirs, and continuing morphing of gospel styles back and forth with Black popular music, no Mick Jagger. Perhaps we can thank the Pentecostal church (along with various musicians around Memphis) for the music of one of its members, young Mr. Presley. We can thank Ray Charles for secularizing gospel, though not everyone was thankful at the time. Then again, Mahalia Jackson was a Bessie Smith fan. Thank the Lord for that, too.
[i] Forten, Charlotte, “Life on the Sea Islands,” 1864, in The Negro Caravan, 657.[ii]Abrahams, 105. [iii]Oliver, 13. [iv] Wilgus 1981, 80. [v] loc. cit. [vi]Brown, 413. [vii] Lawrence Gellert, “Me and My Captain,” reprinted in The Negro Caravan, 471. [viii] Zora Neale Hurston, “Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals,” in Cunard, 224. [ix] Doug Seroff, “Nashville – Historic Capital of Spiritual Singing”, in Nashville Gospel Arts Day program, June 19, 1988; Lynn Abbott, personal communication, September 14, 1994. [x]cited in Fishkin 1993, p. 5. [xi] Stephens, Robert, 26-27. [xii] Doug Seroff, Nashville Gospel Arts Day, program, June 18, 1989, 9.
Chanteys, Chanties, Shanties: although it’s generally been pronounced with a sh, the spelling was never standardized, and neither was the music. Sung on sailing ships the world over in the 1800s, chanteys are often thought of as Anglo-American, but in fact no greater variety of influences can be found anywhere. Ships do call at ports, after all.
On the English and American ships there was a prevalence of converted work songs from Ireland, Scotland, England and America. Sailors found a song in every port, and picked up lots of Black folks’ songs and styles, especially in the American South and the Caribbean. Black stevedores worked many of the ports, and Black sailors enlisted on the same ships. (Often these ships were not so integrated as that might imply: “chequerboard crews,” which consisted of separate White and Black watches, were common.) One authority tells us, with quaint prejudice,
The southern negroes are not gifted to sing a chorus in union and consequently they employed their harmonious faculties on the chantey, with the result that the whites soon began to imitate them, picking up heavier choruses until the chanties reached their zenith in the 1870s.[i]
Adam Neely on Chanties
A more laudatory view is taken by Stan Hugill, whose extensive 1961 study Shanties From the Seven Seas mentions songs of Black origin and Black stylistic influence hundreds of times. Hugill, a sailor and “shantyman” himself, is rare among writers on this subject in crediting large numbers of songs to African-Americans, including “Blow the Man Down,”[ii] “Roll the Cotton Down,” and “Shenandoah.”[iii
Georgia Sea Island Singers, “Pay Me My Money Down”
Pay Me the Money Down—Assassin’s Creed Rogue Shanties – A Celtic version
After all, African-Americans didn’t only pick cotton—they loaded it on ships. They brought their cotton-pickin’ songs down to the port, where they became cotton-packin’ songs. Many songs from the plantation made their way around the world before they burst back onto the American scene and transformed American music. We noted earlier a relationship between corn-shucking songs and the high seas. Consider:
Seven years a-boiling Ho-ma-hala-way Seven years a-baking Ho-ma-hala-way
The blowed the horn for dinner Ho-ma-hala-way The people could not eat her Ho-ma-hala-way[iv]
Roger Abrahams notes a similarity here to the common haul away refrain of many chanteys, explaining that work songs are highly adaptable and can travel from plantation to convict labor camp to the seven seas. And not only do the songs travel, but their uses as well: these songs are not just a way to while away idle hours but also a way to continue the conversation about important matters. They often carry coded messages, with the wild goose in both examples representing something more important—a captive laborer resisting her/his status, perhaps. Thus a living tradition rolls on through the call and response between shucker and sailor, captive and convict, downtrodden workers all. We will see this tradition reiterated in the blues, and everything that follows.
Adieu, Fare-You- Well—Anguilla singers, 1962
Leighton Robinson and Friends: Goodbye, Fare Thee Well, U.S. 1939
Other types of work songs went to sea too, especially railroad-building songs. Yet another song source was the minstrel show, which muddied the waters with stereotyped White imitations picked up in port by White sailors.
Many of the songs brought to the waves by Blacks were reworked English folksongs. Many others were Irish or of some other European origin, with the result that American, British and Irish sailors ended up singing European songs in African-American fashion.
We All Going Ashore – Florence Brooks and Eugenie Carter, Anguilla, 1962
Blacks from the West Indies or the U.S. South worked the high seas in great numbers, as did the Irish, and these two groups together accounted for a large percentage of the songs of the sea. I use the word “together” advisedly, for the cooperative work led to cooperative songmaking, chequerboard watches notwithstanding. These two groups were also responsible for much of the railroad track laid through America beginning in the 1880s. Hugill cites many songs as being “probably a Negro-Irish mixture,” indicating that sometimes “the tune came from Ireland to Mobile, where the Negroes took it in hand and then at a later date it returned to sea with a few more alterations.”[v]
And aside from the songs themselves, Blacks introduced a style of singing so exceptional that most of the White sailors never got it, and wouldn’t even attempt certain songs unless a Black singer was on board to lead the tune. In Hugill’s account,
One of the reasons why Negro shantymen were so good at their job was because of their ability to handle these wild falsetto “yodels” (hardly the correct term though!) much better than white men. Sailors called these yells “hitches” and they were performed either by a break or several breaks in the voice on a certain note, or else by emitting a high yelp at the end of a solo line.[vi]
Jerzy Brzeziński provides (approximately) the Harding version
He goes on to tell of a West Indian sailor known as “Harding, the Barbadian Barbarian,” who “would give vent to many wild ‘hitches,’ absolutely impossible for a white man to copy, although white sailors did execute a poor shadow of these Negro yelps.”[vii] The other significant difference in style was that Blacks normally, after the first couple of verses, improvised lyrics from their storehouse of stock characters, situations, and expressions. Whites tended to recount a song’s tale intact, reproducing the tradition as noted earlier.
Buffalo Soldiers[1]—Black troops sent to help win the West—are well known nowadays, but what about Buffalo Cowboys? We think of Western music, which blended with the Country styles of the eastern South to give birth to “Country & Western,” as a guaranteed-sure-fire-pure White genre, the soundtrack of bedrock Euro-six-gun-swashbuckling heartland America, no other influences need apply.
From 1870 to 1890, 12 million cattle were driven north from Texas, in herds of thousands. They drove all the way to Montana in search of good grass (for cows), and to Kansas and Nebraska for railroads that went straight to Chicago and other beef-buying centers further east.
Home on the Range
But who were the cowhands?[2] A cowboy memoir written in 1885 by Charlie Siringo noted a number of Black cowboys and farmers and ranchers along the cattle trail. What number? The literature is all over the chart. Statistics are given with alleged authority: In some places 50% of cowboys were Black, said Jesse Chisholm, founder of the Chisholm Trail. According to Bailey C. Hanes, “about one cowboy in every six or seven was Mexican; a similar proportion was black.”[i] Hal Cannon allowed that “No one is sure how many African-Americans worked as cowboys in the trail drives, but estimates run as high as 1 in 4.” Other researchers have found that “The typical trail crew of eight usually included two black cowboys.”[ii] William Loren Katz concluded that between 1868 and 1895, 35,000 cowhands were on the trail, one-third Black and Mexican. Quintard Taylor says there were 9,000 African American cowboys in the West, of a total of 61,000. But he reckoned only 4% of Texas herders were African American in 1880, 2.6% in 1890. (That could be because of the decline and fall of the trail overall, with the expansion of railroads to the south and of farms in the Great Plains grazing areas.)
“The Old Chisholm Trail,” sung by Moses “Clear Rock” Platt, 1933Cattle trails
A key moment in this story comes early: enslaved Africans were already cowhands in Texas before the great trail drives. Think about that: enslaved cowboys in Texas before “cowboys” were invented. But consider their history. Not all enslaved Africans were shackled to crops that were new to them. Africans from various countries had expertise in particular crops and industries: Ghana and Gambia, for example, were known for cattle herding. The slaveocracy in the Southwest, and even as far east as the Carolinas, made use of their skills.
Others came west in the wake of slavery: Irwin Silber wrote that “Many an emancipated Negro decided to try his luck in the west,” offering a stanza from a Kentucky ballad, “Goin’ From The Cotton Fields”:
Away out there in Kansas So many miles away, The colored folks are flocking ‘Case they are getting better pay.[iii]
American cowhands were a diverse community of Wild Western workers, later to be bleached on the shores of Hollywood. Although some crews were segregated, some were not. Think of the US army in Vietnam, or restaurant workers today, as examples of frontiers in race relations. Multi-cultural America found an early home on the range. And African Americans worked in other jobs in the ranches, camps, and trails—cooks especially, and don’t forget the barbers.
“Western Cowboy,” sung by Leadbelly, 1934. Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly) was not only a great source for cowboy songs (among many other types) but in fact had worked at herding cattle himself, and for his 16th birthday was given a horse and saddle.
Let’s not forget that most of this cow-handling took place in a land recently grabbed from Mexico, which means it was still populated, as today, by bona-fide Mexicans.[3] A song called “Pinto,” sung in English, begins “I am a vaquero by trade.” According to Alan Lomax, Mexicans taught Black and White alike the use of La Reata, the lariat, and chaps as well.[iv]
And why shouldn’t the same workers who developed cotton-pickin’ songs and railroad track-linin’ songs develop some cow tunes as well? Cowboys/hands sang on the trail, adding verses as they went. “The trail boss would never pick on (employ) a fellow that couldn’t sing and whistle.”[v] Workers coming from another camp were expected to contribute their songs, and their own verses to already-common songs.
On the trail, sharp yells were employed to stir the cattle, lullabies to soothe them and prevent stampedes. Ranches held marathons and groomed champion singers to compete with other ranches.
Edward Abbot rode the trail at the height of its glory, and wrote of Black cowhands singing to the cows and each other. Charley Willis was a de-shackled laborer who rode the Wyoming trail during the 1870s. As his great-grandson Franklin tells it,
He had a knack for singing. He had a gift, if you will. His voice was real soothing to the cattle, and this is why they wanted him to participate in these big cattle drives, because he would sing to them and just make them relax.[vi]
Hollywood wasn’t the first to bleach the cowboys: the commercial cowboy industry, in the form of the Wild West shows of the early 20th century, featured almost entirely White performers, reflecting the Jim Crow era well.[vii] In the same period, the early 1900s, John Lomax—Mr. Folksong himself—was gathering cattle trail songs in for his book Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. He traced the genre’s inspiration primarily to Anglo ballads that had taken root further east. But Don Edwards (1939-2022), a White Texan traditional cowboy singer, disagreed:
You take a song like, ‘I’m a poor lonesome cowboy, I’m a poor lonesome cowboy, I’m a poor lonesome cowboy, I’m a long long way from my home.’ Is that a blues form? It’s the earliest blues form there is — three lines and a tag line….If you go down to deep south Texas where this music was really born, on that coastal bend down there, you had white cowboys, black cowboys and Mexican vaqueros — who were very musical people. And so the white guys learned a lot of that stuff, and that’s why a lot of that stuff sounded like the blues.[4]
Ballad scholar Roger Renwick seconded the notion, observing that many of the songs in question do not tell a straight story as in the old Anglo ballads, but are “elliptical”:
Indeed, some scholars have called this a distinct African-American genre of the blues ballad, because it synthesizes the more emotional blues approach. And we suddenly see some influence like that on some of the cowboy songs.
Lomax did attribute some songs, including “Goodbye Old Paint,” to African American singers. This particular credit was seconded by Jess Morris, who traced the song through his father F.J. Morris to Charley Willis, a formerly enchained worker hired by Morris in 1865.
The Anglo error was later rectified by Lomax’ son Alan, some of whose 1933-46 recordings for the Library of Congress are available on the CD Deep River of Song: Black Texicans (Rounder, 1999).
Patrick Joseph O’Connor, in “Cowboy Blues: Early Black Music In The West,” opined that
…the black cowboys brought to the range their stirring ability to entertain and relate in song. Albert Friedman felt that “musically…Negro folk songs are the most interesting we have.[viii] This particular black facility had been noted since slave days, and serves to underscore the importance of African-American participation in cowboy songs.[ix]
Black cowboys were an integral part of the East Texas experience, and their music was part of the shaping of cowboy music, both in structure—traditional three chord ballads—and content—personalized stories and poignant impressions of life. Let’s look at a few songs that might flesh out the story. For starters, John Lomax collected “Home On The Range” and “Git Along Little Dogies” from a Black retired trail cook in 1908.[x] He tells the story in Adventures of a Ballad Hunter. Jack Thorpe, an early archivist of cowboy songs, came upon “Dodgin’ Joe” in 1889. It was sung around the campfire of a Black trail crew. In general, Thorpe found most “cowboy” songs to be imports and variants of songs cribbed from other industries and locations: loggers, farmers, railroad workers, and Black styles dating back to field hollers.
“Whose Old Cow?” recounts a debate over the dubious branding of some disputed cows. A Black cowpoke named Addison Jones rides in and argues, in dialect:
White folks smartern’ Add, and maybe I’se wrong But here’s six months wages dat I’ll give If anyone’ll tell me when I reads dis mark To who dis longhorned cow belong![xi]
An African American undertaker in Austin who had been a cattle camp cook sang an Australian song, “Jack Donahoe,”[xii], the refrain of which summed up the aversion to slavery, sharecropping, and second-class status generally:
We’ll wander over mountains we’ll wander over plains For we scorn to live in slavery, bound down in iron chains
In his study of supposedly White-rooted cowboy songs, O’Connor looked at “composing techniques and stylistic phrasings” traceable to African American communities. Similar styles can be noted in Black versions of songs picked up from White colleagues. Then again, some songs rooted in the mists of time have thoroughly unknown origins. Listen to Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick’s 1969 record Square Dance With Soul[5] for another take on Black and White styles.
In East Texas, slavery died last—recall the delayed announcement of emancipation that later gave rise to the “Juneteenth” celebrations—and Black musicians there dipped deep into the Anglo songbag. Sometimes they hewed closer to White styles, depending on their audiences; other times not so much.
To close out this section, let’s consider Augusta State University’s Mike Searles’ take on the consequences of misrepresenting history:
Many people see the West as the birthplace of America,” he says. “If they only see it as the birthplace of White America, it means basically that all other people are interlopers — they’re not part of the core of what makes an American. But if they understand that African-Americans were cowboys, even Native Americans were cowboys, Mexicans were cowboys, it really opens the door for us to think about America as a multiethnic, multiracial place. Not just in the last decade or century, but from the very beginning.[xiii]
[i] Colonel Bailey C. Hanes, Bill Pickett, Bulldogger (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977) 3 [ii] William Loren Katz, The Black West (Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1971) 146. [iii] William Loren Katz, The Black West, Harlem Moon, 2005. 147. [iv] A. Lomax, Black Texicans CD notes [v]Lomax, John, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, xv. [vi]Hal Cannon, Who Were the Cowboys Behind ‘Cowboy Songs’? https://www.npr.org/2010/12/05/131761541/we-ve-all-heard-cowboy-songs-but-who-were-the-cowboys [vii] Irwin Silber, Songs Of The Great American West (New York: MacMillan, 1967) 159. [viii] Albert B. Friedman, ed., The Viking Book of Folk Ballads of the English-Speaking World New York: Viking Press, 1956, xxxii. [ix] Patrick Joseph O’Connor, Cowboy Blues: Early Black Music In The West. Studies In Popular Culture (University of Louisville) April 1994. [x] Wolfe and Lornell, The Life and Legend of Leadbelly (New York: HarperCollins, 1992) 109. [xi] Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, 118. [xii] ibid, 209. [xiii] Cannon, op cit.
Minstrel shows were the first form of public entertainment in the nation’s history in which White folks procured their culture from Blacks, via imitators. But this show biz milestone came in the wake of a long private practice of something similar that was played out at or near home by White southerners. There are reports from the eighteenth century of Whites dancing in the style of the Africans, such as this one from The Virginia Gazette in 1753, reporting on a Richmond dance featuring two enslaved musicians playing for the rich and powerful revelers:
To the music of Gilliat’s fiddle and Brigg’s flute, all sorts of capers were cut…sometimes a Congo was danced and then the music grew fast and furious when a jig climaxed the evening.[i]
This could be our first report of what Alan Lomax later called “the hot Negro square-dance fiddle.”[ii] A private tutor’s journal entry in 1774 tells of two young White men attending an African-American party:
This Evening the Negroes collected themselves…& began to play the Fiddle, & dance…Ben & Harry were of the company—Harry was dancing with his Coat off—I dispersed them however immediately.[iii]
And consider this travel report from Virginia, published in Dublin in 1776:
Towards the close of an evening, when the company are pretty well tired with country-dances, it is usual to dance jigs; a practice originally borrowed, I am informed, from the Negroes.[iv]
Carolina Chocolate Drops: Snowden’s Jig
This over-simplification obscures the constant interplay between Black and White dance styles. Two examples of the complexity: when Black musicians played for White plantation dances their music probably oscillated towards something the planter families were comfortable with, influencing their playing style—not to mention the choice of instruments—while subtly infusing among the Whites an appreciation for Black musical styles. And the fact that planters’ children danced with the workforce after their work hours meant that these kids imbibed the Africans’ styles and sentiments early on. This long and intricate and ongoing process should remind us of H.L. Mencken’s dictum: For every problem, there’s an answer that’s simple, plausible, and wrong.
Thomas Jefferson had, as we know, some intercourse with Black society. He even wrote a description of the banjo and its playing style. And his brother Randolph was described by Isaac, a Jefferson family captive worker, as “a mighty simple man: used to come out among Black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night.”[v] Whites danced to Black banjo music in Virginia and North Carolina from the late 1700s, a peak period of the slave trade. Imagine, the Africanization of White America didn’t have to wait for Elvis. Consider this report of a White folks’ ball in Virginia, 1755:
Betwixt the Country dances they have what I call everlasting jigs. A couple gets up and begins to dance a jig (to some Negro tune) others comes and cuts them out, and these dances always last as long as the Fiddler can play…[it] looks more like a Bacchanalian dance than one in a polite assembly.”[vi]
We don’t know the age of the dancers, but it certainly sounds like latter-day generational culture wars—jazz, Elvis, rap—“they call that dancing?!” On the other hand, whites had been entertained by Blacks’ dancing from the beginning, or even before: captives on the slave ships of the Middle Passage were forced, at the point of a cat-o’-nine-tails, to dance on deck. The purpose of “dancing the slaves” was to keep them in good shape for their impending sale.
Then there was the imitation factor. By 1862, notes Abrahams, “playing black was one of the conventional ways in which Whites might amuse each other on social occasions of many sorts.”[vii] And well they might: there was a “Negro dance, in character” on stage as early as 1767.[viii]
Oregon, 1850s
Most people think of “old-timey” music, string bands, and other roots of modern Country music as White traditions. But as we’ve seen, southern Blacks played a string or two themselves. Grand Ole Opry harmonica player DeFord Bailey called it “black hillbilly music.”[ix] They played the fiddle in a more rhythmic style than Whites did, usually together with a banjo, through it took generations for that combo to form, possibly because of tuning problems.[1] Black string style is moaning, rhythmic, abrasive, vigorous and energetic.[x] It’s also marked by syncopation. Alan Jabbour delineated a difference in the bowing style of Whites in the Appalachians compared to those in the deep South: the uplanders are partial to “groupings of notes in a complex fabric of threes and twos, stylized anticipations of the beat, and other devices closely resembling the syncopations characteristic of twentieth-century American popular music.”[xi] He credited this style to the African American fiddlers present in the area.[2]
In the late nineteenth century, realizing they might not realize an extravagant income from fiddling, some Black fiddlers turned their hands to building railroads. Their contribution to the progress of the railroads took them into the Appalachian Mountains, heartland of the Scots/Irish-based “hillbilly” music, where they worked and sang together with the locals. Around the turn of the century this industrial progress changed the course of folk music history, ushering in an era of increased Black and White song sharing.
One reason people don’t know about Black string bands is that recording companies separated the Black and White music traditions for marketing purposes and then recorded and promoted according to their own conceptions of the market. They recorded White string bands and Black blues, period.[xii] Brownie McGhee, for one, recalled being refused permission to record hillbilly songs.[xiii] This narrowed and stereotyped the concept of African American music, all the while fostering a false impression that White hillbilly music grew up by itself without Black influence. Add this to the list of recording industry sins, under “omission.” [3]
Another reason people are unaware of this historical interchange is that most Blacks long ago quit playing the fiddle and the banjo. These instruments reminded them of slavery days and minstrel stereotypes, and they were consciously putting all that behind them in order to move on up to higher ground. Others just quit playing because they couldn’t get recorded. And in many cases, they simply moved on musically as Whites adopted the instruments, in an early example of a basic American cultural progression: Blacks innovate to strengthen or re-define a culture of their own, Whites discover and imitate it, and Blacks move on to the next innovation.[4] Banjo historian Cecilia Conway identifies the essence of White-Black culture interaction as apprenticeship.
Minstrels turned the Black songs that came with the banjo into the first popular music of the nation.[xiv] But note that the two parts of the South where Blacks played banjoes were also the places where the instrument was carried forward into new musical forms. In the Appalachians it became a core component of mountain music and later bluegrass; in New Orleans its four-string “tenor” version was essential in New Orleans jazz.[xv]
World War I
The banjo was a significant addition to White folk music. Before the banjo, Whites had fiddles, which were played in unison with the vocals but didn’t provide rhythm the way the banjo did (guitars came later, in the second half of the nineteenth century[xvi]). Old songs were adapted to the new instrument (which was new only to that region—it had been observed in similar form in West Africa in 1621, in the Caribbean in 1678, and in Maryland by 1744,[xvii] and had roots not only in West Africa but in the Middle East). In those times and places it was a gourd affair with gut strings. In the United States it was played only by Blacks and was concentrated in Virginia and nearby areas—it did not make it to the Deep South, except New Orleans, before 1835. This may be in part because of different African origins of captive workers in different regions of the South. And it helps explain why Joel Chandler Harris said he never saw a banjo played on a plantation down south.
To understand the dignity of the banjo—take a breath—we must recall its forbears, the halams of Mali and related instruments—and the fact that they were the lutes used by griots—the oral historians of Africa. Many Wolof people, from the Senegal area, came to America, among them halam players. In Jamaica in 1744 and again in 1793 we hear of the Jamaican variant, the superbly named merrywang. (There is today an International Merrywang Society, banjo players all. Or both, anyway.) Descriptions of the style of playing employed seem to match the downstroking style of US banjo players. And, retracing the route, an American visiting Mali in the late twentieth century picked up an ngouni, relative of the halam, and began frailing in banjo style. “Where did you learn to play the ngouni?” the Malian musicians exclaimed. Recall the tendency among White folk artists to preserve and protect old styles; in this case those were Black styles—African, in fact. We may ask ourselves: is this my beautiful music?
To call today’s banjo the descendent of the original gourd device may seem a stretch, but the changes from one to the other are arguably within the family. The gut, hemp or horsehair strings remained past the civil war, but the gourd was replaced by round cheese boxes (1850s) and then wood more generally. Minstrel (and southerner) Joel Sweeney may have invented the wooden rim, or may have been one of several who did. The sound chamber was covered by any animal unfortunate enough to meet the banjo’s maker. In fact, an instrument made with a cat skin resonator and using cat-gut strings should have been called a catbox. Cats, ever since, thank God for plastic and wire.
This brings us to the matter of the fifth string. Some say Sweeney may have added that too, but others say the string he added wasn’t the now-famous short, high-pitched drone string plucked with the thumb, but rather a bass string. Logically, a high-pitched drone string would be present because of its particular use, and Sweeney didn’t invent that. In the African halam, there are only two melody strings, and up to three strings tuned higher and used as fixed-pitch drones. Playing with a high drone string, says Conway, was “the only method of banjo playing documented before the end of the nineteenth century.” Yet there is no concrete evidence of a short, high drone in the American banjo before the Celtic innovators, aka Sweeney.
Later the banjo style morphed in new directions, as a rhythm instrument, mainly strummed. We hear it in the jug bands, and in early jazz, where the tenor banjo, a new mutation, was essential in the classic Dixieland period.
By the time of the civil war, the banjo had already been in White hands for a generation, notably those of Joel Sweeney’s brother Sam, who entertained his fellow Confederate troops with “Negro melodies”—Black culture giving solace to a pro-slavery army![xviii]
Whites probably began to strum the banjo around the 1830s when minstrel shows began. The big debate about Appalachian mountain banjo players is about whether they got their styles and chops from White minstrels or from Black players. The point is not as pointed as it might seem, since the minstrels played pretty much the same style as Black players—frailing, which is to say downstroking, which is to say clawhammer style. Circuses and medicine shows as well as minstrels traveled this region. And when you talk about mountains you also must consider rivers. In the 1850s there were minstrels steamboating down the Ohio, Cumberland, Tennessee and Mississippi, bringing banjos and brawls to the small towns on their way.
But riverboats came and went in a day.[5] And mountain players never reproduced the minstrel group—fiddle, banjo, and bones—nor its theatrical structures. Moreover, by the time Whites were playing banjo in the hills, in the 1840s, Blacks had been playing for a century right next door in the Piedmont, the area of rich cultural interaction in Virginia and North Carolina. Some Whites traveled between the regions, and some Blacks, both free and enchained, did live in the mountain area proper. Some had been brought as early as the 1770s by settlers fleeing British oppression. We have reports of Black banjo players in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1798, and drawings of others in Asheville, North Carolina after the civil war. And mountains have trails, trade routes, passageways, and crossroads where people meet. After the Civil War, Blacks came into the mountains to build railroads, and banjoes came with them.
Conway makes the case for the banjo as the link between slavery era music and the blues, the work song and the blues, and the work song and the entertainment song.[xix] Quite a résumé for a drum with strings. But then again, it’s the link between the drum and strings, too. The drum, after all, was banned in these United States, leaving the banjo to carry on with the song. The banjo precedes the blues, as it precedes ragtime—both of them indelibly stamped with banjoisms. And too, the banjo is a link to Africa. Africans played some variety of it, in fact, literally en route to becoming Americans: on slave ships.
In 1798 Black musicians played the banjo for a White dance in Knoxville, and a hundred years later, reports Conway, a White Appalachian man “played the Banjo Clog for a colored man to dance and he danced with his back to him and his foot hit the floor every time he hit a string. He never seen such a dancer in his life.”[xx] Frailer and hoofer together: it had become their beautiful music.
WHAT’S THE MATTER, WHAT’S THE MANNER?
From their Black counterparts the White mountain musicians learned railroad songs like “John Henry” and “Casey Jones.”[6] They learned new techniques on the fiddle, like left-hand slides and syncopations.
♬substitution: Compare White American fiddlers with Scottish and Irish fiddlers from the old country to get a feel for the Black influence. (This is a useful exercise whenever you’re looking for the hidden strands in hybrid music.) American fiddle music is hotter than its European roots, and more fluid. This can be ascribed partly to the wild frontier lifestyle, partly to Black influence.
Complicated fingerpicking guitar styles picked up by Whites from Black musicians were commonly referred to as “nigger pickin’,”[xxi] later more politely as “chicken pickin’.” They are played to this day by Country musicians—who may know where they came from—for Country fans, who almost unanimously don’t.[7]
Let’s zoom in here on three important aspects of music in which African styles were influential: improvisation, syncopation, and call and response.
Improvisation: White folk musicians tended to conserve a song more or less in the form and style of an early version—not necessarily the one they brought from over the sea, but a local update. They tended to play it repeatedly the same way, valuing the inheritance rather than any changes that might grow out of their new situation or changing conditions. For an example, note the note-for-note renditions of the older fiddle tunes that old-time fans are fond of, sounding remarkably similar to their British-Celtic sources.
Bill Malone cites the defensiveness of White southerners against attacks on slavery as a reason they “committed their region to a course of arrested development,”[xxii] which tended to freeze culture at a point that other parts of the country left behind. More rapid urbanization and industrialization in the North may have been more important factors, as we can see by comparing with other regions passed over by these developments, e.g. Canada’s Atlantic provinces and their neighbors in northern New England.
Improvisation, on the other hand, made a tune always new. It was the combination of past tradition with the current moment—the creation of a live statement by the performer identifying dynamically with their culture—that gave African-American musicians a thrill. There are deep differences among cultures that make it take a long time for a transplanted person to feel at home. Ernest Borneman comments that in spoken language,
[T]he African tradition aims at circumlocution rather than at exact definition. The direct statement is considered crude and unimaginative; the veiling of all contents in ever-changing paraphrases is considered the criterion of intelligence and personality.[xxiii]
Eubie Blake
Syncopation: a lively rhythmic musical way of life that loosens up the hips and sometimes even makes you laugh out loud. You can syncopate anything. Eubie Blake once syncopated a classical piece on the piano, then turned to a White friend and said “That’s your ragtime.” In 1919 James Europe’s big band favored the Manhattan Opera House with a syncopated version of Peer Gynt, “with respectful apologies to Mr. Grieg.” In the 1940s, Lennie Tristano’s trio would jazz up Bach simply by moving the accents around. The melodies endured the conversion and even took on new life. That’s exactly what happened to European folk music in the American South as European-derived tunes encountered African rhythmic practices.
Call and response: In a typical example of the West African tradition, a leader sings a line and is answered by a male chorus and separately by a female chorus. In solo music, this was expressed through the use of the guitar to answer the vocal, and it crossed over into White folk traditions, as Malone describes:
Primarily through the influence of the Negro, the guitar came to be more than a simple accompanying instrument; it came to be a device for punctuating the moods and sentiments expressed…in effect, serving as a second voice.”[xxiv]
It also flourished in gospel singing and is heard in Black churches today, whether between parts of a choir or between the minister and the congregation. For a good example of music performed with and without call and response, see the film Cajun Country, in which we see the revelers participating as responders in the Black Cajun parties, but not so at the White gatherings.
Call and response is one of the main earmarks of West African music, and also occurs in certain European-based traditions. It is characteristic of community, and in particular communal manual labor—sea chanteys, for instance. In Europe, community long ago diversified and stratified, dissipating the call and response traditions and sending them to sea. In America, both community and communal work persisted among Africans for long enough to perpetuate the old style in forms of music like spirituals and jazz, and on into the various “White” forms, like Country and rock and roll, which were and are in reality combinations of African and European elements.
There are other call and response traditions throughout the world; for example, Indian classical music features improvised trading of riffs back and forth between drum and sitar, sitar and voice, etc. The important thing about the American scene is that the West African tradition opened the door for Europeans to re-enter that sector of the musical world, re-invigorating their improvisational capacity. Call and response often takes the form of trading phrases back and forth between instruments, very common today in Country music and rock but unknown in pre-Africanized southern White music.
Share And Share, But Not Alike
Anglo-Celtic folk and West African music had some elements in common: certain African-American musical mannerisms like the slight flattening of some notes (blue notes), vibrato, and pentatonic (five-note) scales already existed in the Anglo-Celtic tradition, and were reinforced and accentuated among Whites by their interaction with Blacks, who emphasized those stylistic devices to an even greater degree.[xxv] This process is called syncretism—a blending that requires points in common to build on.
In other words, the things the two traditions had in common were magnified. After all, Celtic and West African musics are not as different as, say, German and Chinese. In fact, many of the British songs preserved in the South dated back several centuries to a pre-diatonic Europe, when scales were “modal,” commonly pentatonic, as opposed to the major and minor scales we are familiar with today.[xxvi] This was partly due to the practice of singing without instruments or with simple accompaniment, which tends to reinforce simpler scales.
There were also, naturally, important White influences on the music of Blacks. During slavery, Blacks heard traveling musicians who brought various styles of music to places that wouldn’t have heard them otherwise. This is the land-locked version of the musical smorgasbord available in so many port cities. And in the upland border states, free Blacks heard and absorbed the backwoods variants of the Anglo-Celtic music. It was here that Blacks heard the White spirituals that would exert a strong influence on their own sacred song development (see below under Old Time Religion).
Having been stripped of much of their musical heritage, Africans in America naturally made use of the available materials, mainly White folk music. That’s why it’s so hard to dope out who originated any one song—it may be a Black composition in a White form with black stylistic changes, later popularized by a White singer—or it may not be. Long before wax cylinder recording, Black and White folk forms had blended and hybridized, permanently. As D.K. Wilgus wrote, “Matter tends to be European, and manner African…The resulting hybrid is a folk music which sounds African in the Negro tradition and European in the white tradition.”[xxvii] Or as Portia Maultsby called it, “unique ways of doing things and making things happen.”[xxviii] Denis-Constant Martin expressed it this way:
According to who was on the dance floor, black musicians, slave or free, selected rhythms and melodies which were eventually merged. Each racial and social community had music it considered its own, but with the passing of time the groups tended to become more interested in emerging new mixtures.[xxix]
Blacks adapted Anglo-Celtic music they heard in the hills, so that by the time they influenced the White string bands, they were already handing back something they had borrowed and altered to their taste. The effects can still be heard today: syncopation provides a jumpiness, dare we say a swing to the musics we call Country and bluegrass that wasn’t there before the music was colorized. Compare almost any modern Country rendition to the same song or one from the same genre from the old country—Scottish, Irish, English ballads—and you’ll hear that difference. You can also hear it in some of the older recordings of mountain music that were less blended with Black influences. But nothing is pure; listen for differences in the degree of cross-influence.
Blacks and Whites shared a body of song known as “common stock,” sometimes referred to as “Afro-Celtic tradition.”[xxx] At this late date it’s often hard to know where a song started; there came to be various versions, White, Black, or indifferent, of “Staggerlee,” “Mama Don’t Allow,” “Salty Dog,” “Corrina,” “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor,” “Buffalo Gals,” “Old Joe Clark,” “Get Along Home, Cindy,” “Arkansas Traveler,” and “Give Me That Old Time Religion.”
It was in the regions of greatest racial mixing that songs tended to cross back and forth over the color line—around Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia—the birthplace of Country music. Blacks and Whites became neighbors and borrowed each other’s music, returning it the better for wear.
Big Bill Broonzy told of gatherings called “two-way” picnics where the Blacks and Whites swapped songs.[xxxi] Dances, too: The folks around the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee already had a tradition of solo “flatfoot” dancing that adapted well to the Black tradition of “buck dancing.” The Black dancers were more polyrhythmic and looser, with energy flowing from the midsection in a way that was outside of most White dancers’ protocol. Blacks adapted White dances like the Irish jigs to their own style and gave them back.[8] The influences can still be seen today in old-time dance contests in the region (see the film Appalachian Journey). Clogging, an Appalachian development that combined numerous old-world folk dances, still uses buck dance steps, notably an alternation of heel and toe to make a “patter” sound. “Buck and wing” was a minstrel appellation for buck dancing, and that term is still used in clogging.[xxxii]
In set dances, reels and quadrilles, where the couples must execute the steps as a group, the caller intercedes between musician and dancer to coordinate and direct. We think of this caller as the icon of Euro-American square dance. But the calling is perhaps a bit less square than it looks: in its rhymed form it is very likely an African American contribution, dating to plantation corn frolics. Consider this, from the recollection of one former chained worker:
All eight balance, and all eight swing All left allemond, and right hand grand Meet your partner and promenade, eight Then march till you come straight First lady out to couple on the right, Swing Mr. Adam and swing Miss Eve, Swing old Adam before you leave
John Szwed and Morton Marks make the case that these calls are more elaborate, humorous and subtle than European dance directions, and trace them to the
Afro-American dance instruction tradition which extends from “Ballin’ the Jack” to “The Twist” and beyond…at least partly rooted in the older tradition in which African master drummers signal and direct dancers.
Finally, consider this elaborate and witty call:
Great big fat man down in the corner Dance to de gal wid de blue dress on her; You little bit er feller widout eny vest Dance to de gal in de caliker dress. Git up, Jake, an’ turn your partner, Shake dem feet as you kno’ you ‘orter
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FRANK JOHNSON
One notable Black dance caller was also a notable fiddler and led his own group, the Frank Johnson Band, for decades starting around 1830. Working throughout the South, they played at picnics, state fairs, and college commencement balls (e.g., at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, an entirely White and male campus). Johnson played “square dances all the time — and, O, my, how Old Frank Johnson could call the figures: ‘Balance All.’ ‘Swing Your Partner,’ ‘Ladies’ Change,’ ‘Back Again, Doocee-do,’ ‘Swing Corners All,’ etc., etc.”[xxxiii] The New Bern Times proclaimed in 1866, “Frank Johnson has grown into an institution. He has brought the science of brass band music to such a high state of perfection that few dare to compete with him, and as to the violin, it’s no use talking.” [xxxiv]
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The Black vocal styles, like the calling and the dancing, were more flowing and improvisatory too. The White hillbilly singers sang in a tight-throated style, achieving beauty through ornamentation. Bluegrass maintains much of this old style. Why? In the old backwoods days, Puritanism held sway and gripped the country folk with a certain attitude about looseness of expression. They were agin it; not only that, it made them nervous. They may have been free in a non-slavery sort of way, but they were not so liberated sensually, if I may be allowed such an opinion. Blacks, to the contrary, were more enslaved socially and economically but were less burdened by guilt over hip movement; let us simply say that their African spiritual and cultural roots were somewhat at variance with Calvinism.
West African cultures traditionally use music and dance in a functional way, in connection with other doings in their lives. This integration of art and life has been largely lost in cultures that have developed class stratifications, separation of city dwellers from country folks and mental labor from manual, and the like. Only vestiges of such integration can be found in Western European cultures. Work songs, for example, are mainly found where there is group manual work, and coming of age songs are associated with various religions. But a society that integrates religion, art, nature, work, and community will produce a markedly more function-oriented art than a society that has developed different classes with different educations and social/economic roles—art will move in those societies toward the narrower realm of performance and spectation.
Work songs, Africa and America
Africans in America were forcibly cut off from African culture, so they became Americans, i.e., African-Americans. They retained some essentials of their music, and culture generally, but much was lost. They used the songs and forms they found, imbuing them with their own styles and attitudes and rhythms, which in turn added something their White neighbors and even their masters needed. Blacks did such a bang-up job of adapting the music that surrounded them that Whites adapted it right back. Some of the adaptations were rhythmic, some were form (call and response); some were minor tuneups and some were overhauls. Thus was born the litter of delightful variations that comprise American music.[9]
No wonder, then, that Whites have gravitated toward Black culture. It is an integrative tradition; it expresses group experience and history and represents both the individual’s struggle for self-expression and the group’s struggle for survival, both undertaken against oppressive odds. This community communication is thus severely and embarrassingly reduced when it is taken by others for mere entertainment. This music is more than that. It offers an antidote, an anti-don’t. It provides a way out to a more relaxed, more earthy style, less akin to Puritanism than to the Celtic pantheistic roots so assiduously stamped out by Christianity in the old country. When we partake of this cultural product, we re-contact lost roots of our own as well as those of others. It is potentially an integrative recreation in that it is both a way back and a way forward. Abrahams put it this way:
[O]ne of the realities of American life is that certain features of African American performance style will remain strange and alluring to those outside the culture…Simply fighting through to understandings of the primordial exuberance and the historical continuities of African American culture unlocks a message of cultural vitality in the face of adversity that should provide food for the soul for some time.[xxxv]
Songwriter Gus Kahn described the double-edged sword more brutally:
The South is the romantic home of our Negro; he made it a symbol of longing that we, half in profiteering cold blood, but half in surrender to the poetry of the black, carried over into our American song.[xxxvi]
Unfortunately, much of the interplay between the cultures was later obscured through the use of the work of highly respected folklorists like England’s Cecil Sharp and Harvard’s Francis James Child. Sharp came to Appalachia in 1916 in search of a trove of Old English ballads, and simply didn’t record anything he hadn’t come searching for.[xxxvii],[10] When it came time to tell the story of folk music, a narrow view of the Appalachians as a pure European cultural incubator prevailed. This view persisted despite the birth in this region of Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Clara Smith, Maceo Pinkard, Howard Armstrong, Leslie Riddle, Brownie McGhee, Josh White, Odetta, and Arnold Shultz, many of whom we’ll meet up with further along in the story.
Sharp and his American guide, Olive Dame Campbell, did notice a difference in performance between the Appalachian White singers and those of the British Isles:
They have one vocal peculiarity, however, which I have never noticed amongst English folk-singers, namely, the habit of dwelling arbitrarily upon certain notes of the melody, generally the weakest accents. This practice, which is almost universal, by disguising the rhythm and breaking up the monotonous regularity of the phrases produces an effect of improvisation and freedom from rule which is very pleasing.[xxxviii]
What they didn’t notice was how prevalent that habit was in African American music. When folklorists note differences between populations in diaspora, they need to look around for the source of the difference. It could be an innovation based on new circumstances, but it could also be an influence from often invisible neighbors.
A generation before, the Spanish-American War had been accompanied by “a renewed emphasis on the mission of America’s “Anglo-Saxon” people,”[xxxix] to put it politely. Given the changes then being wrought by urbanization, industrialization, migration, and war, some folklorists were concerned that “White” folk culture was being polluted by other influences. Their efforts to guard its purity included folkloric studies that concealed the true mixed origins of our musical roots for generations to come. Here lies an early lesson in the power of the media to distort by omission: a false picture painted by wishful Whites, bequeathing to a diverse, pluralist nation a dangerously distorted perception of itself. Dangerous? Ralph Ellison put it this way:
[T]o think unclearly about that segment of reality in which I find my existence is to do myself violence. To allow others to go unchallenged when they distort that reality is to participate not only in that distortion but to accept…a violence inflicted…[xl]
The work of the British folklorists was centered in the old Celtic areas of the Appalachians, but similar operations occurred beyond that realm. Cowboy music—later “Country and Western”—was in fact a creation of White, Black and Mexican hands, but is perceived as an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon. Through these operations we came to appear as something other than what we are. Let’s have another look.
[i] Cited in Rublowsky, 71. [ii] Lomax, Esquire, 108. [iii] Fithian, Philip Vickers, 1957, 61-62. [iv] A Concise Historical Account of All the British Colonies in North-America…, Dublin: Printed for C. Jenkin, 1776, 213. [v] “Memoirs of a Monticello Slave,” in Bear, James A., Jr., ed., Jefferson at Monticello, Charlottesville:U. Press of Virginia, 1967, 22. [vi] Nichoas Creswell, quoted in Epstein, 121. [vii] Abrahams, 137. [viii] New York Journal, in Clarke, 21. [ix] Wolfe 1990, 32. [x] Conway 1995, 13. [xi]Jabbour, 254-255. [xii] Wolfe 1990, 33. [xiii] Titon, 55. [xiv] Cantwell, 91. [xv] Conway 1995, 59. [xvi] Douglas Green, 1976, 50. [xvii] Cantwell, 91; Conway, 56. This section relies heavily on Conway, 175-198. [xviii] Conway 1995, 109. [xix] Op. cit., 26. [xx] Op. cit., 159, story from Andy Cahan and Alice Gerrard. [xxi] Lomax 1960, 276. [xxii] Malone 1968, 4. [xxiii] Ernest Borneman, “The Roots of Jazz”.17. Cited in Pratt, 87. [xxiv] Malone 1968. [xxv] Wilgus, 359-60. [xxvi] Nettl, 42. [xxvii] Wilgus 1959, 363. [xxviii]Maultsby, in Holloway, 205. [xxix] Martin, op. cit., p 33-34. [xxx] Wald, Sing Out, 39:1, 11. [xxxi] Clarke, 145. [xxxii] Royce, 116. [xxxiii](Woodson, Frank S. (14 February 1901). “Recollections of the Band that Excelled Sousa”. The Gold Leaf. 20 (10). Henderson, N.C. p. 1 – via Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress.) [xxxiv]Chaney, Matt (2017-12-01).“Blacks Electrified Early American Music and Dance”.ChaneysBlog. Retrieved 2019-05-15. [xxxv] Abrahams, 152-53. [xxxvi]Locke 1936, 50. [xxxvii] Malone 1979, 31. [xxxviii]Campbell and Sharp 1917, x, quoted in Hay, 8. [xxxix] ibid., 29. [xl] Ralph Ellison, “The World and the Jug,” New Leader, February 3, 1964.
The key ingredient in the jelling of American popular music in the nineteenth century was the minstrel show. Traveling troupes of White musicians brought a smorgasbord of cultural influences to small towns and plantations from the early 1800s into the next century. Borrowing, stealing, humiliating, and remixing, they created the first secular music that was truly American.
Many of the early minstrels were Irish or Scots-Irish. Many thousands of Irish people had been displaced by English conquest, and Scots had been cleared from their highlands to be replaced by sheep. Later, thousands of Irish fled the famine of the 1840s; in great numbers they came to America. The Irish were an economically and culturally marginal group,[1] and the populace at large found their songs and accents amusing, as they would come to find Black culture, as purveyed by the Irish. The Irish held a special underclass status in America, in keeping with their colonized status back at home. Many convicts and prisoners of war had been sent from Ireland to Jamaica (as well as to Australia and elsewhere) after 1664 as indentured servants. One of their roles there was to guard against Black rebellions. Intercourse ensued; among the Black musicians with Irish ancestry are Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley.
[1] No Irish needed apply to many occupations, which drove them into disreputable pursuits such as show business and police work.
Meanwhile, some of the best singers of Irish dialect songs in the 1870s were said to be Black stevedores in Ohio.[i] The interplay was endless: an old Irish folk tune—or was it a frontier fiddle tune? or both?—became “Zip Coon,” a song that fostered an enduring stereotype of a pretentious Black dandy; the same song with its lyrics removed became “Turkey in the Straw.”[ii] In Chicago in 1870 an Irish/coon caricature duo was a big hit.[iii]
American minstrels brought new instruments to the British Isles: tambourine, bones, banjo. Meanwhile English performers also had an influence on minstrelsy: British troupes toured the U.S., blackface and all, from about 1822. Many of the British minstrels were Cockneys—lower class Brits entertaining by imitating lowest class Americans.
One Cincinnati day[2] in 1828, a minstrel named Thomas “Daddy” Rice happened upon an old Black groom named—well, we don’t know his name, of course—but as he went about his work he was singing and dancing a little number:
Turn about and wheel about and do just so, And every time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow[3]
[2] or Louisville; historians don’t know for sure.
Rice pursued the artiste, copped the riff, blacked his face, and out popped a hit. The old fellow who caught his performer’s eye was not only Black but also physically afflicted, or at least possessed by rheumatism, and thus his movements were not only exotic but peculiar—today we would call the imitation “victim humor.” In any case, the new bit was a smash, and it changed show business, not unlike an early-day Twist.[4]
Other minstrels took notice. Performers from the South visited plantations—if they didn’t live on them themselves – and were swept away by the artistry of those in bondage. The largest part of the resulting material was an imitation of the plantation entertainments, including the song and dance styles. A contemporary observer recalled a plantation festival in Virginia as being full of “laughter and song, antics and buffoonery which would make a modern minstrel show appear tame…”[iv] Having Pat Booned or Vanilla Iced it down a bit, the promoters gave their shows names such as “Plantation Revels” and “Plantation Frolics.” The shows customarily ended with a cakewalk, just as actual plantation revels did.
Minstrel show, 1913
As the nation was a diverse stew of peoples, if not a melting pot, so with the music. John Rublowsky describes minstrel music as “an Anglo-American modification of an Afro-American modification of African, English, Scotch, Irish, German, French and Spanish originals.”[v]
In this connection, Old Dan Tucker can help guide us back through the mists of time and shed some light on the mysteries of cultural origins. Most of us think of Dan in connection with an amusing square dance tune, but let’s hit the roots trail. The song was scribbled by Dan Emmett of the Virginia Minstrels around 1830, and was blown up into a skit with Dan playing Dan, White playing Black. The humor was the usual minstrel mix; today’s bleached version retains the humor while covering the tracks of its tears. Take a look at the sheet music of the day to see where folks got their entertainment. Emmett’s other tunes included “I’m Gwine Ober De Mountains” and “The Fine Old Colored Gentleman.”
The arts of this period were characterized by gross caricatures of ethnic groups—something that has been, more or less, diminishing with time. All kinds of groups came in for stereotyping, most of all the lowest of the low. Minstrelsy often portrayed Blacks as lazy, cowardly and stupid; yet at other times their characters were witty and talented. The “lower” Black characters, Tambo and Bones—named for their musical instruments—were the customary winners in the tricky and sophisticated punning contests, beating the supposedly superior “interlocutor” (MC) and the audience as well.[vi] Their rattling instruments told the audience it was time to laugh, and constituted perhaps the first laugh track, or at least cue card.[vii]
And there were instances of outright reversal of racial stereotypes, including one story in which Cain and Abel were Black, with Cain turning white in fear of God after murdering his brother. Another story has Adam and Eve turning white in fear of God after their own transgression.[viii]
Minstrel show, 1935
The standard critique of minstrelsy is that it was pure racism on the stage. But William F. Stowe and David Grimsted critiqued the critique by exposing the multiple functions of the form: the White performers were making fun of Blacks, but at the same time identifying with them, or at least with their idea of them. “White men put on black masks and became another self, one which was loose of limb, innocent of obligation to anything outside itself…and thus a creature totally devoid of tension and deep anxiety.”[ix]
As simplistic and caricatured as that is, it is not antagonistic. Many performers were acclaimed for accurate, even “profound” impressions of Black styles. The original minstrels, who hailed from the south, learned their musicianship from Blacks; they would go on to teach their northern colleagues, who had less direct contact with the source. A White banjoist from Virginia named Ferguson, for example, was described around 1840 as “nigger all over except in color.”[x] A wannabe? Or just another White dude appreciating Black culture? Contemporary descriptions of the minstrel shows indicate that White audiences were able to identify with the black images on the stage, which included “Wit and buffoonery, music sentimental and comic, dancing stately and grotesque, pretension and simplicity, pathos and farce.”[xi]For White audiences there was always a tension between, on the one hand, the desire to dominate Blacks by reducing them to caricatures; and on the other, the desire to become one with them, to identify with them, through appreciation of their artistic expression. Appreciation vs. appropriation—such racial schizophrenia continues to this day.
Excerpt from “A Complete Authentic Minstrel Show,” 1958
The rerouting of emotional issues through caricatured characters by use of the “mask” opened the possibility of social criticism, which dealt with class as well as race questions. Stowe and Grimsted quote one exchange in which the interlocutor maintains that American society equalizes rich and poor, to which Tambo replies, “Sho, de rich gets ice in summer, and de poor gets it in winter.”[xii] The authors go on to point out that although it’s true that the stereotyped characters were buffoons, it’s also true that court jesters of old were buffoons: that was precisely the cover that allowed them to make sharp social commentary.
Many enduring elements of American show business have their roots in minstrelsy: soft-shoe dancing, vaudeville humor, political caricature, and of course, music. George Christy, of Christy’s Minstrels, was the first to bring Stephen Foster’s tunes to a wide audience. He had observed Black musicians up close at Congo Square in New Orleans, where the captured Africans were allowed to maintain African culture with drum and dance.[xiii] Minstrel Lew Dockstader got Al Jolson started in blackface, and Broadway producer George M. Cohan had his beginnings as a minstrel company manager.[xiv] Minstrel-style humor can be viewed in the Marx Brothers’ movies, and in much of stand-up comedy.
The minstrels copied songs that were originally sung by a kidnapped workforce to survive the backbreaking labor that built the South.[xv] Here we have a clear case of talking the talk without walking the walk: the White audience wants the style without the content, the gain without the pain. They receive, or seize, as Greg Tate pointed out, everything but the burden.[5] They are able to enjoy the earthy, grounded, fluid music and movement that has sprung from physical labor, without thinking about how their own lives have been softened by the labors of others. It is not unlike tourists in a tropical clime, admiring the bronze bodies of the natives who cannot afford the luxury tourist hotels. No pain, but vicarious gain.
The blackface rendition was the dominant form of musical entertainment right up into the 20th century. Minstrel shows were often advertised, straightforwardly enough, as “imitations,” and were described by an actress of the day as “faint, feeble, impotent—in a word, pale Northern reproductions of that ineffable black conception.”[xvi] Such treatments form part of what Cecilia Conway would call the “mental terrorism” of inter-cultural relations.[xvii]
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STEPHEN FOSTER
In the late slavery period we encounter the first quintessential American songwriter, Stephen Foster. Born near Pittsburgh in 1826, he frequented a Black church from age seven, escorted by one of his family’s two illegally enslaved staff (slavery being already outlawed in that section of the country). The “bound girl,” Olivia “Lieve” Pise, attended a church of “shouting colored people,” and Stephen was permanently impressed by the music. He is said to have preserved melodies he heard there in his “Hard Times Come Again No More” and “Oh, Boys, Carry Me ‘Long.”[xviii]
There was a large Black community in Pittsburgh and an underground railroad station, and Foster came in contact with freedmen, escaped bondswomen, and their families, along with his family’s “own.” He became a star performer in a childhood theatre company with his friends, singing “Zip Coon,” “Long-tailed Blue,” and “Jim Crow.”[xix],[6] While still a child, Foster saw “Daddy” Rice perform. Later he submitted songs to him, and they became friends.[xx]
As a young man, Foster lived in Cincinnati, where he heard Black stevedores singing as they loaded boats on the Mississippi. He was supposed to be working a day job at his brother’s warehouse, but biographer John Tasker Howard tells us
[H]is heart was not in his work. He was more interested in the Negro roustabouts who sang and danced on the nearby river wharves.[xxi]
He went on to a smashing career in songwriting, his works being featured by major minstrel companies. His hits included “Oh! Susanna,” “The Old Folks at Home (Swannee River),” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Old Black Joe,” and “Camptown Races.”
♬SUBSTITUTION: Compare “Camptown” with the Spiritual “Roll, Jordan Roll.” Was one substituted for the other?
Foster originally published his “Ethiopian” or “Plantation” tunes under a pseudonym, thinking they would detract from his reputation as a ballad-writer of such successes as “Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair.” Eventually he realized what a hit he was making with the less reputable style, and reclaimed his authorship.[xxii]
Foster engaged in some considerable struggle over the content and use of his work. He gradually eliminated demeaning dialect and offensive words from his songs, and changed their generic title from “Ethiopian Melodies” to “Plantation Melodies.” He penned realistic lyrics showing the harshness of the subjugated life, eschewed insulting caricatures on his sheet music covers, and tried to elevate the tone of the genre so that it might be more generally accepted. All of this was rather unusual in the 1840s minstrel world. He sold one song to Daddy Rice—”Long-Ago Day”—that was never heard because, according to Foster, a Rice colleague said it was a bit anti-slavery and would be rejected in the South.[xxiii]His efforts at social-musical uplift are little known because of his family’s ties to the slave-ocracy[7] and a brother who destroyed much evidence of Stephen’s deviance in the course of executing the estate.[xxiv]
Because of the subject matter as well as the style of his work, Foster’s career is a matchless example of the centrality not only of Black musical influence, but of the race question in general to life in the United States. Brilliant songwriter he was, no question, but there always remains the matter of Blacknowledgements; J.K. Kennard in Knickerbocker Magazine (1845) noted of singing bonds(wo)men:
Let one of them, in the swamps of Carolina, compose a new song, and it no sooner reaches the ear of a white amateur, than it is written down, amended (that is, almost spoilt), printed, and then put upon a course of rapid dissemination, to cease only with the utmost bounds of Anglo-Saxondom, perhaps with the world. Meanwhile, the poor author digs away with his hoe, utterly ignorant of his greatness.[xxv]
These comments were, it is said, satire. Kennard apparently was less than jazzed by the works of untutored swamp songsters. Despite this disdain, the point intrigues. Alain Locke would later compare Foster to Joel Chandler Harris and his relationship (through Uncle Remus) to Black storytelling:
Both watered the original down just enough to give it the touch of universality, and yet not enough to destroy entirely its unique folk flavor…the sentimental side of the plantation legend wormed its way into the heart of America for better or worse, mostly worse.[xxvi]
And as Rod Stewart would point out a bit later, “There are a lot of colored guys who can sing me off the stage. But half the battle is selling it, not singing it. It’s the image, not what you sing.”[xxvii] Stewart’s words ring true, as do Kennard’s, despite being a poorly-informed satire against those who championed the Black origins of minstrel style.[8]
In the minstrel tradition, the real thing was never enough—or maybe it was a bit too much—so when Blacks themselves entered the field, even they had to black up, lest they be taken too seriously as, let us say, people. A notable example was Rhode Island’s William Henry Lane, who danced under the name of Juba.[9] He outdid all the other dancers, Black and White alike, and was hired by P.T. Barnum around 1841. Charles Dickens described Juba’s dancing thus:
Single shuffle, double shuffle, cut and cross-cut, snapping his fingers, rolling his eyes, turning in his knees, presenting the backs of his legs in front, spinning about on his toes and heels like nothing but the man’s fingers on the tambourine…[He dances] with two left legs, two right legs, two wooden legs, two wire legs, two spring legs, all sorts of legs and no legs…he finishes by leaping gloriously on the bar-counter and calling for something to drink…[xxviii],[10]
“[H]e was a genuine negro; and there was not an audience in America that would not have resented, in a very energetic fashion, the insult of being asked to look at the dancing of a real negro…”[xxix]
Barnum blacked him up, topped him off with a wig, and presented him as an excellent White imitation of a Black dancer. This particular form of debasement didn’t last long; he was soon receiving top billing on his own, in theaters where only Whites had trod the boards before Juba. Advertisements for his shows promised he would imitate the principal dancers of the day—those who had imitated him—and then offer “an imitation of himself.” The single person most credited with the development of tap dance, Juba took some inspiration from White Appalachian clogging– itself influenced by African American dancing—and Scottish dances known for a kind of syncopation called the “Scottish snap.”[xxx] He also got a lot of steps from Jim Lowe, a Black saloon dancer who remained on the margins of show biz.[xxxi]
White minstrel dancer John Diamond challenged “any other white person” to dance competitions, circumventing a pointless meeting with his master.[xxxii]
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Minstrelsy disturbed not only those who were the targets of its insults but also those who saw Black culture gaining in popularity through these entertainments. James K. Kennard wrote in 1845 of the “Jim Crows, the Zip Coons, and the Dandy Jims, who have electrified the world,”[xxxiii] fearing that Black style would swamp European culture. For Kennard and others, the great fear was the “blackening of America.”[xxxiv] As Kennard agonized, minstrel man Joel Sweeney would nightly “steal off to some Negro hut to hear the darkeys sing and see them dance.” He had learned banjo as a child from the imprisoned workers on his family plantation in Virginia. He was credited as the man to “distill the native musical genius of the American Negro into…an art form.”[xxxv]
Minstrels, 1959
The work of the minstrels spread African-American music, in a caricatured form, to Whites throughout the country. The minstrel shows, caricature and insult though they were, paved the way for later successes by Blacks themselves. They were the nation’s major form of entertainment for many decades. Eventually there would be minstrels without blackface, and even mixed-race groups: In 1848 the Ethiopian Serenaders, a group of three White and three Black minstrels, dropped their blackface, and 1893 saw a tour by The Forty Whites and Thirty Blacks. African American troupes came to the fore in the 1860s, putting more emphasis on music and amusements than on insults and denigration, though they still expended artistic energy imitating the imitations of themselves. The Georgia Minstrels formed in 1865, followed in 1882 by Callender’s Consolidated Spectacular Colored Minstrels. James Bland, a New Yorker of Black, White, and indigenous heritage, wrote “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers” and “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.” Trouper Sam Lucas joined forces with non-minstrel singers to produce musicals like Out of Bondage and The Underground Railroad.
Much of our entertainment today is a more genteel version of minstrelsy: Whites acting, singing and dancing Black, but without the blackface.[11] Whites continue to use and enjoy Black styles like so much rubber, spice, petroleum or any other resource. And the appropriation continues to soften up the White populace for the eventual arrival of the original article. It’s not justice, it’s just cultural trickle down. Or up. It’s a combination of racial insult with racial envy, a “peculiarly American structure of racial feeling”[xxxvi] that was first expressed artistically in minstrelsy. The envy was summed up eloquently in an African-American version of “Jim Crow” from 1833:
