Guy Benton Johnson

“ Eloquent successors to the old spirituals with their sorrow-feeling, these songs of the lonesome road have gathered power and numbers and artistic interpretation until they defy description and record. Today the laborer, the migrant, the black man offender constitute types as distinctive and inimitable as the old jubilee singers and those whom they represented. Wherever Negroes work, or loaf, or await judgment, there may be heard the weary and lonesome blues so strange and varied as to reveal a sort of superhuman evidence of the folk soul. ”

“ It is important to note the extent to which the notable popular blues of today, more formal embodiment of the Negro’s workaday sorrow songs, have come from these workaday products. Here are true descendants of the old worshipers who sang so well of the Rock in a weary land. And echoing from Southern distances, from Memphis and Natchez, from New Orleans and Macon, from Charleston and Atlanta, and from wayside roads and camps, from jail and chain gang, come unmeasured volume of harmony, unnumbered outbursts of song, perfect technique of plaintive appeal. ”

“ And if one wishes to obtain anything like an adequate or accurate picture of the workaday Negro he will surely find much of his best setting in the chain gang, prison, or in the situations of the ever-fleeing fugitive from “chain-gang houn’,” high sheriff or policeman. “I ain’t free, Lawd, I ain’t free,” sings the prisoner who bemoans the bad luck in which he had “nobody to pay my fine.” Never did the old spiritual, as in “Go down, Moses, tell ol’ Pharaoh, let my people go,” express more determined call for freedom than the Negro singer behind the bars. ”

“ Whoever has seen a railroad section gang of five score Negroes working with pick and shovel and hammer and bars and other tools, and has heard them singing together will scarcely question the effectiveness of the scene. Likewise steel drivers and pick-and-shovel men sing down a road that is anything but “lonesome” now. Four pickmen of the road sing, swinging pick up, whirling it now round and round and now down again, movement well punctuated with nasal grunt and swelling song. Another group unloading coal, another asphalt, another lime, or sand, sing unnumbered songs and improvisations. ”

“ The more educated and sophisticated Negro not only does not as a rule coöperate, but looks with considerable condescension upon those who seek his help. There are many who believe that all songs desired are for immediate transcription to printed music or phonograph record. These are of little assistance. Others feel that some hidden motive is back of the request. Still others for various reasons do not coöperate. Nor will the Negro student or musician himself find ready coöperation among his common folk who feel constrained to withhold their folk art from the learned of their own race. ”

“ Before continuing Left Wing’s story, giving something more of the scope of his adventures, perhaps the best further introduction will be the exact record of some of his songs in the order in which he gave them. Wing had practically no variation in his tunes and technique of singing. A high-pitched voice, varied with occasional low tones, was the most important part of his repertoire. But what variation in words and scenes, phrases and verses, the recording of which would exhaust the time and endurance of the listener and call for an ever-recording instrument! ”

“ Among the blues singers who have gained a more or less national recognition there is scarcely a man’s name to be found.
It is doubtful whether the history of song affords a parallel to the American situation with regard to the blues. Here we have the phenomenon of a type of folk song becoming a great fad and being exploited in every conceivable form; of hundreds of blues, some of which are based directly upon folk productions, being distributed literally by the million among the American people; and the Negro’s assimilation of these blues into his everyday song life. ”

“ It is the heart and soul of the blues. The Negro bad man is often pictured as being bad because of a woman. The jail and chain gang songs abound in plaintive references to woman and sweetheart, and the worker in railroad gang and construction camp often sings to his “cap’n” about his woman. Likewise, in the songs of woman, man plays the leading rôle. These man and woman songs are of such significance that special attention must be given to them as a type of Negro song in order to round out the picture of Negro workaday life which this volume is trying to present. ”

“ The old spirituals sang mostly of the heavenly home of dreams and ideals as opposed to the experience in which “this ol’ world been a hell to me.” In his wanderer song of today the Negro’s wish-dream to be back home appears an equally striking contrast. Nowhere in the workaday songs is childlike and wishful yearning so marked as in these constant songs of homesickness and of the desire for something that is not. ”

“ Again and again the Negro wanderer portrays home, parents, brothers and sisters, friends, as the most highly esteemed of life’s values—striking paradox to the realism of his practice. Idealism in song and dreams, in workaday songs as well as spirituals, [9] alongside sordidness in living conditions and physical surroundings, appear logical and direct developments from the type of habitation which the Negro common man has ever known. ”

“ Here man’s song of woman is most varied and original, and woman’s song of man is best echoed from days and nights of other times. Here are reflected the epics of John Henry, Lazarus, Dupree, and the others. Here are folk fragments, cries and “hollers,” songs to help with work, physical satisfaction and solace, the “Lawdy-Lawdy” vibrato of evening melancholy and morning yodel. Here may be found the subliminal jazz, rare rhythm and movement, coöperative harmony as characteristic as ever the old spirituals revealed. ”

“ The Negro worker sings of a more earthly yet equally miraculous light to guide his pathway, when he complains,
Now ev’y time I,
Time I start ’round mountain,
My light goes out,
Lawd, Lawd, my light goes out.
I’m gonna buy me,
Buy me magnified lantern, [4]
It won’t go out,
Lawd, Lawd, it won’t go out.
How much of symbolism is to be found in the Negro’s workaday songs? How much subjective imagery, how much unconscious allegory? There are abundant examples of the free use of symbolism in his love songs and popular jazz appeals. ”

“ Many work songs, of course, are not really work songs except in the sense that they are sung during work. When the work is such that it does not necessitate continuous rhythmic movements, one song is about as good as another. But rhythmic movements, being especially adapted to song accompaniment, have given rise to a distinct type of work song. Digging, hammering, steel-driving, rowing, and many other kinds of work fall in the rhythmic class. The technique for all of these is practically the same.
Let us take digging as an example, since it is a very common type of Negro labor in the South. ”

“ They may recognize in it parts of songs long familiar to them and think that it is just another piece which some songster has put together. Their desire to invent a different version, their skill at adapting stanzas of old favorites to the new music, and sometimes their misunderstanding of the words of the new song, result in the transformation of the song into many local variants. In other words, the folk creative process operates upon a song, the origin of which may already be mixed, and produces in turn variations that may later become the bases of other formal blues. ”

“ One may listen to high-pitched voices, plaintive and wailing, until the haunting melody will abide for days. The prisoners sing of every known experience from childhood and home to “hard luck in the family, sho’ God, fell on me.” One youngster about twenty-one years of age, periodic offender with experience on the chain gang and in jail, sang more than one hundred songs or fragments and the end was not yet. They cannot be described; selections are not representative. ”

“ But there is still another feature of the blues which is probably responsible more than any other one thing for their appeal and fascination, and that is their lack of conventionality, their naïveté of expression. The Negro wastes no time in roundabout or stilted modes of speech. His tale is brief, his metaphor striking, his imagery perfect, his humor plaintive. Expressions like the following have made the blues famous. ”

“ WORKADAY SORROW SONGS
No story of the workaday song life of the Negro can proceed far without taking into account the kind of song known as the blues, for, next to the spirituals, the blues are probably the Negro’s most distinctive contribution to American art. They have not been taken seriously, because they have never been thoroughly understood. ”

“ Now a youngster of eight, father and mother dead, off to Texas to an uncle, then—“po’ mistreated boy”—he goes to Louisiana, then to Mississippi, then to Georgia, across South Carolina, back home to North Carolina, then off to Philadelphia, to Pittsburg, to Ohio, to Chicago, then back to the East and Harlem and back South again. He is typical of a part of the Negro movement of the decade. But there is continuously a stream of moving laborers from country to town, from town to town, from city to city, from state to state, from South to North. ”

“ Many interesting questions may find their solutions if the scientific method is applied to the study of Negro singing ability. Is the vibrato a native endowment? Is the vibrato more frequent among Negroes than among whites? At what age does it appear in the voice? [101] What other qualities cause the rank and file of Negroes to excel as singers? Is the Negro’s capacity for harmony greater than the white man’s? Is his sense of rhythm better? These are some of the questions which science should be able to answer in the near future. ”

“ Some of them are clearly songs of the chain gang as well as of free labor construction work. That they are fairly accurate portrayals of the worker and his task, of the captain and his ways, of the thoughts and customs of the worker and singer will be evident to any one who knows the field. To the uninitiated the laborer is merely a laborer, silent, reserved, certainly keeping back from the white man his innermost thoughts, wishes, and feelings. ”

“ If the bad man can be turned into song and verse, with the picture of adventure and romance becoming more and more mythical, the Negro will profit by the evolution. For the present, however, here are samples of the portrayals most commonly sung, with apologies to all improvisators, minstrel artists, and white-folk imitators of Negro verse. ”