by Kip Lornell
Regardless of their origins, work songs fulfilled several basic functions. One was to pass the time while workers carried out monotonous, repetitive jobs such as hoeing a row of cotton, chopping or pulling weeds, caulking a boat’s hull, or loading a truck. Work songs also provided the singers with a sense of solidarity by participating in a communal act. The singing gave workers a greater measure of control, co-opting that role from their boss or overseer. An even closer tie was forged by those whose task required special pacing or timing, such as spike driving, track laying, or hauling in fish nets. Crushed, mangled fingers resulted when the timing of a song leader heading a spike-driving crew wavered or faltered, so understanding the task and an ability to time the work, rather than possessing a marvelously powerful voice, was a prime requirement for a respected song leader. Finally, early work songs relieved tension by allowing blacks to complain about their living conditions and treatment by their employers or overseers.
Texas prisoners chopping wood in the 1930s. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Though only circumstantial evidence backs this up, work songs tended to be short and repetitive. This permitted almost anyone to join in their singing. A work song might consist of a half-dozen words improvised by the leader and a (usually repetitive) response by fellow workers. The musical phrases were brief, usually no more than four or five measures. But the key to avoiding true repetition was slight melodic and textual variations. The success of a song leader depended on his ability to improvise to make the singing more interesting. This ability, as we shall see, is another key element to high in-group respect accorded to African American musicians.
* * *
MUSICAL EXAMPLE
Prison work songs are a part of our musical past, though they could be heard in some sections of the South as recently as the 1970s. Such songs were most widely documented on wire recordings by the Library of Congress in the 1940s and later by other collectors. This selection was recorded in the early 1950s by a group, which included Pete Seeger, who traveled to Texas looking for work songs. They recorded a number of solo “arhoolies” as well as group work songs similar to this well-known hoe chopping song about breaking new ground for planting. Its themes of hard work and separation are common in work songs.
Title “Chopping in the New Ground”
Performers Texas Prisoners
Instruments one lead voice and six voices in response
Length 1:38
Musical Characteristics
1. You hear seven a cappella voices singing in antiphonal style.
2. There is a loose, unison response to the song leader.
3. The lead voice sings in a relatively tense vocal style.
4. A conjunctive pentatonic melody is heard in the response.
5. The piece has a very steady, moderate rhythm.
Oh, Captain Charlie
(Good God A’mighty)
Oh, Captain Charlie
(Oh, my Lord)
[These responses alternate throughout the rest of the song]
I’m chopping in the new ground
I’m chopping in the new ground
I’m chopping my way back
I’m chopping my way back
My way back home, sir
My way back home, sir
Oh, Captain Charlie
Oh, you remember what I told you
If you didn’t row, sir
Oh, you would not make it
Make it back to Rosie
To Rosie and the baby
Oh, Captain Charlie
We’re chopping in the new ground.
We’re chopping all day long
Chopping all day long, sir
Oh, Captain Charlie
Oh, do you remember
Remember how she looked, sir
We’re choppin’ in the live oak
Way down in Brazos
Way down in the Brazos
Oh, Captain Charlie
Oh, Captain Charlie
This selection is from Smithsonian Folkways 4475.
* * *
Today work songs have all but disappeared due to mechanization and, in some states, relatively recent changes in prison systems. The well-documented conservative atmosphere maintained in the Texas penal system remained until the 1970s when court orders forced it to change. Significantly, the work song tradition continued within this inhuman system well into the final third of the twentieth century. In 1972 Bruce Jackson recorded the same songs that previous generations of prisoners sang. One of these, “Alberta,” became a group work song sung in unison as the prisoners weeded and is clearly influenced by the blues.
See Alberta comin’ down that road (x3)
Walkin’ just like she got a heavy load.
Wo, ’Berta, don’t you hear me gal? (x2)
Twenty-one hammers fallin’ in a line (x3)
None a them hammers, boys, that ring a like mine.
Ring like silver and it shine like gold (x3)
Price a my hammer, boys, ain’t never been told.
Big Leg ’Berta, if you come and be mine (x3)
Have to do nothin’ in the summertime. (Jackson 1972, 280)
STRING BANDS
Many rural musicians around the entire United States, and from all racial and national origins, play in informal, small string ensembles. Though poorly documented, we know that black folk musicians performed together in string bands across the South. In fact, black string bands were once quite widespread, particularly in the southeastern United States. Some slaves were inevitably exposed to European music in the form of Haydn’s Sonatas and other popular eighteenth-century composers, but most no doubt played country dance tunes on fiddles. Individual musicians or small string ensembles also filled the air during less formal occasions: cornhuskings, beer gardens on a Saturday evening, and parties. Occasionally blacks were encouraged to develop their musical skills on pianos, violins, as well as on a variety of brass instruments. Slave owners often fostered musical interests because blacks sometimes provided musical entertainment. African musical practices, particularly drumming, were almost always discouraged.
Slaves also performed dance tunes on fiddles and banjolike instruments. Throughout the South they played for Anglo-American balls and assemblies, but they also played for their own enjoyment and recreation. Many brief accounts of black music exist in the diaries, newspapers, and contemporary written accounts of the period between 1700 and 1800. Unfortunately this music was not notated on staff paper, and since sound-recording equipment was not developed until the 1880s, these fleeting recollections must suffice. As early as 1754 a runaway Maryland slave’s most distinctive identifiable trait was as a “banjer” player. So pervasive were the accounts of black banjo playing that by the early 1800s it was described in an offhand manner as though it were part of everyday life.
The fiddle was quite popular among the colonists, who used it in formal parlor performances and to accompany dances of all types. Slaves not only played fiddles, but they also crafted them. One early reference to a runaway slave describes him as “a black Virginia born Negro fellow named Sambo, about 6 ft. high, about 32 years old. He makes fiddles, and can play upon the fiddle, and work at the carpenter’s trade” (Southern 1983, 64).
Despite the popularity of the banjo and fiddle, the two are rarely mentioned in the same references. Apparently most blacks played one or the other. Nor were these instruments played in tandem, as they are so often paired today. But during the 1830s such duets had become a staple in early minstrel shows and there are many drawings and paintings of such musicians. By the turn of the century the guitar (and on rare occasions a mandolin) was added to this basic unit, creating a fuller and richer sound. But the fiddle and banjo remained at the core of these string bands.
Joe and Odell Thompson, cousins from Orange County, North Carolina, played together into the 1990s. Courtesy of Kip Lornell.
All-black rural dances almost always included a fiddle or banjo, sometimes augmented by
a rhythmic instrument (often bones or a washboard). Rhythms, often polyrhythms, and the use of various percussion instruments are certainly one of the most fundamental contribution by blacks to American music. It could be as simply performed as “patting juba”—patting hands together, on thighs or the chest, the antecedent of the hambone games found among black children today. Sticks or the jawbone of a large animal provided two more percussive instruments.
Based on rather sketchy twentieth-century aural evidence the following observations about black string bands appear to be true. The banjo playing itself betrays two basic traits. First, the melody played is simplified to the point that it basically sketches out the melodic line with little improvisation. Second, rhythmic complexities are held in high regard, even to the point of virtuosity. There seem to be some direct links between black banjo playing and early blues guitar playing, particularly those from Mississippi. In Piedmont, North Carolina, several of the black banjo players that I documented in the 1970s transposed their banjo technique to guitar, even to the point of tuning their guitar like a banjo. There are also some striking similarities to black banjo-picking techniques and the open-tuned frailing style of a delta blues man, such as Bukka White.
Similar observations can be made about black fiddle playing. The emphasis is generally upon rhythmic rather than melodic improvisation. Their playing seems to be more forceful and intent upon driving the 2/4 or 4/4 beat home for dancing instead of creating a beautiful melodic line. When the instruments play together it is usually in a simple ab tune form.
Lyrics for other forms of black secular music are even simpler. Prior to the emergence of blues about 1900, a large number of short lyric songs constituted a major body of African American music. Some, such as “Old Black Joe,” came from the minstrel stage, but the majority were brief ditties that came from dance tunes. Such tunes were performed for solo dancing as well as for square dances, which were integral to the black tradition well into the twentieth century. Many are part of a shared black/white repertoire that reflects late-nineteenth-century rural American life more than it betrays racial origins. Tunes or songs like “Roundtown Gals,” “Molly Put the Kettle On,” “Soldiers Joy,” “Georgia Buck,” and “John Henry” were favored by rural musicians across much of America. The lyrics of “Georgia Buck” are racially neutral and underscore the simple forms (ab in this case) of most banjo tunes:
A: Georgia Buck is dead
The last word he said
B: “Never let a woman have her way.”
A: She’ll lead you astray
Try to have her way
B: “Never let a woman have her way.”
FIFE AND DRUM BANDS
Fife and drum band music is perhaps the best example of a regional style of black American folk music undocumented on race series. Once a tradition that existed in several sections of the South, by the race record era fife and drum bands were largely confined to the deep mid-South. This music evolved from the military tradition and became transformed by black musicians after the Civil War into the twentieth century. In central and northern Mississippi fife and drum bands sometimes played for funerals, but they primarily came to provide entertainment for dances and other less-somber community functions. Fife and drum bands in some respects were the Mississippi equivalent of the black fiddle and banjo tradition that flourished and still exists in Virginia and North Carolina.
Napoleon Strickland fife and drum band performing at the Festival or American Folklife in the 1980s. Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution.
The music itself was played on two primary instruments, drums and cane fifes, constituting a small ensemble. Two snare drums and a bass drum constitute the drum section, while the cane fife usually has four or five holes. The cane provides the main melodic interest, though with a very limited range of about an octave. Drums provide this music with its strong rhythmic interest, a marked duple meter (2/4) with an underlying polyrhythmic feeling as at least one of the drums plays an improvisatory line. Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress’s Folksong Archive undertook the only prewar recording of this music: the Hemphill Band of northern Mississippi. This Como County band consisted of family and neighbors who played locally for many years. Hemphill also played the ten-hole quill, another wind instrument that is almost never heard in modern America.
Northern Mississippi remains about the only place that fife and drum band music is still performed. The major summer holidays—Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day—provide the context for this music, a legacy of its military heritage. Picnics featuring barbecued goat and plenty of liquor begin in the afternoon and run well into the night, while the fife and drum bands play and people march behind or dance to the music. These picnics are male-dominated functions, both musically and socially, though many women attend them. Finally, the level of musical improvisation in fife and drum band music has increased with the passage of time and the integration of blues and other forms into this interesting tradition.
RAGTIME AND COON SONGS
Ragtime is yet another black musical style to emerge in the late nineteenth century. Initially a midwestern innovation, by the turn of the century it was being performed across the country. This music developed among itinerant piano players who made their living performing in rough sporting houses, juke joints, and bars where drinking, gambling, and prostitution were commonplace. They started playing highly syncopated tunes (later called rags) based on established and popular polkas, marches, and schottisches. Ragtimelike tunes were being published and heard on the minstrel stage by the late 1880s.
Ragtime itself synthesized classical piano technique and distinctly African American folk dance tunes, such as the slave-dance-derived “cakewalk.” J. Russell Robinson, Scott Joplin, Tom Turpin, and James Scott were among the pioneering pianists whose rags were eventually published in sheet music and issued on piano rolls. The popularity of ragtime dramatically increased during the mid- to late 1890s and the concurrent publication of ragtime on sheet music. The classic rags of the first decade of the twentieth century, many of which were published by John Stark, compared themselves with the best of the contemporary European music. The popular era for ragtime lasted until World War I, when jazz began to establish itself and composers like Zez Confrey began composing popular songs with roots in both idioms.
This dramatic instrumental music was characterized by its use of complex duple meters in the treble, which often contrasted with simpler (often 2/4) meter in the bass. Ragtime’s classic form tended toward a march (ababa) or a quadrille (abacd). Most rags are written in major keys, though some of their strains are in minor keys. The clearest vernacular influence is found in the scales that often feature flattened third- and seventh-scale degrees, similar to its contemporary style—blues. Ragtime’s commercialization marked the second time that white America had “discovered” black regional music and brought it to the attention of the entire country. What began as an unwritten folk music informally passed from one piano player to another was quickly embraced by the music publishing business, which reduced ragtime to notation and piano rolls in order to enhance its dissemination.
In addition to the published piano rags, the pens of the Tin Pan Alley songwriters developed the “coon song” genre, affording whites another opportunity to lampoon black Americans. Once more white America reveled in its celebration of the musical image of smiling, gap-toothed, chicken pie–eating, and oversexed Negroes. Ernest Hogan’s 1896 composition, “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” kicked off the coon song era. Another song from this era, Ben Harney’s “Mr. Johnson,” comes from the same mold:
A big black coon was lookin’ fer chickens
When a great big bulldog got to raisin’ de dickens,
De coon got higher, de chicken got nigher,
Just den Johnson opened up fire.
And now he’s playing seben eleben,
Way up yonder de nigger
heaben,
Oh! Mr. Johnson, made him good.
Such songs inspired a generation of songwriters, including Irving Berlin and George M. Cohan, whose own work greatly influenced twentieth-century American popular song.
BALLADS
Just as in the Anglo-American tradition ballads associated with black American culture also relate a story. By the early twentieth century, ballads had become integrated into the repertoire of African American rural songsters. A singer such as Lead Belly (born Huddie Ledbetter) was a repository for ballads, particularly those associated with Texas (“Ella Speed” or “Midnight Special”) as well as from African American culture in general (“John Henry”). Lead Belly’s versions of these songs remind us that the African American ballad tradition is distinguished from its Anglo-American neighbor by a lack of narrative coherence and linear narrative, its subjectivity, and a tendency to glorify events.
Ballads in the black tradition are also often centonical—they borrow thematic elements from a variety of sources to build something new. Such songs have generally been called “blues ballads.” More recently the term “nodal ballad” has been suggested because they tend to take a theme and use it as a point of departure for casual storytelling.