Guy Johnson

“ Johnson lived in great affluence at Guy Hall, Tryon county, New York, where his intemperate loyalty is said to have precipitated the revolutionary troubles. He returned to Staten Island, after a visit to England, in August 1776. His estates were confiscated by the Americans, but through the war he continued to act as superintendent of the Indian department. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Of the grand old “saints,” white haired “Uncles” and “Aunties,” we have viewed from near and far scores of inimitable examples. Of the thousands of musicianers, songsters and workers, and those who sing “down that lonesome road,” recent epochs have mirrored many. ”

“ If the reader will grasp the basic points of difference between Negro and white speech and will then keep in mind the principle of economy, he will have no difficulty in following the peculiarities of dialect.
[4] The Negro and His Songs, pp. 9-11, 293-94. There is a good discussion of dialect in James Weldon Johnson’s Book of American Negro Spirituals, pp. 42-46.
The principle of economy will be found to operate at high efficiency in Negro speech. It will nearly always explain the apparent inconsistencies in dialect. For example, the Negro often says ’bout and ’roun’ for about and around. ”

“ In the first place, blues are characterized by a tone of plaintiveness. Both words and music give the impression of loneliness and melancholy. In fact, it was this quality, combined with the Negro’s peculiar use of the word “blues,” which gave the songs their name. In the second place, the theme of most blues is that of the love relation between man and woman. There are many blues built around homesickness and hard luck in general, but the love theme is the principal one. ”

“ 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. ”

“ See James Weldon Johnson, The Book of American Negro Poetry, pp. x-xiv; and Dorothy Scarborough, On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs, pp. 269-70.
In the last ten years the phonograph record has surpassed sheet music as a conveyor of blues to the public. Sheet music, however, is still important. In fact, practically every “hit” is issued in both the published and phonographed form. But the phonograph record obviously has certain advantages, and it is largely responsible for the present popularity of the blues. ”

“ He is known far and wide in song and story and he is the hero of hundreds of thousands of black toilers. Negroes who do work that requires rhythmic movements, such as digging or driving steel, naturally like to dwell upon the thought of the great [236] John Henry, and they make work songs about the great hero. The four songs which follow are not only good examples of this kind of work song, but reveal something of the worker’s feeling for John Henry. ”

“ There are fragments, pick-and-shovel songs, driving songs, mostly short, which are sung perhaps more often than any others by the group of workers. This chapter will present, first, some of the miscellaneous and more artistic songs that are most difficult to classify except as “just songs to help with work.” Then will follow certain types, corruptions from blues, jazz and minstrel, but sung on any and all occasions, one as well as another, in the kitchen, on the road, in the field, in the alley, in the barber shop, or on the street. ”

“ Wing says he never stays in any place more than three weeks, “leastwise never mo’ ’n fo’.” Sometimes he walks, sometimes he rides the rods, sometimes when money is plentiful he rides in the cars. He has had his tragic and his comic experiences. The spirit of the road is irrevocably fixed in him and he can think in no other terms. Some day a Negro artist will paint him, a Negro story teller will tell his story, a “high she’ff” will arrest him, a “jedge” will sentence him, a “cap’n” will “cuss” him, he will “row here few days longer,” then he’ll be gone. ”

“ When the pick strikes the ground, the worker gives a grunt, loosens the pick, and raises it. It is during this loosening and upward movement that he sings. The down-stroke calls for much more effort than raising the pick, so he rarely ever sings on the down-stroke. The time required for a digging stroke is, however, shorter than the time required for loosening and raising the pick, so that ordinarily the pauses in the song are relatively brief.
It is in a group that the work song is to be heard at its best. When a group is digging and singing, picks are swung in unison. ”

“ The secular songs have nothing like the standardization of words and music that the spirituals have, simply because they have not been preserved. It is inevitable, however, that due attention will be given to Negro secular music. Indeed much has recently been done toward that end. [95] But the task of recording the majority of Negro secular tunes is yet to be done. It is to be hoped that the forthcoming volume of secular songs which is being edited by James Weldon Johnson will go a long way toward giving the Negro’s secular music the place which it deserves. ”

“ Litt. 286. Roll. Abr. 575.) Thus, a bailee, or common carrier, or sheriff, may maintain this action, and expressly against one who has them by delivery or finding. (2 Saund. 47. Cro. Jac. 73. et passim.) ”

“ Johnson was an author almost by accident; it is the man who is dear to us, the man with all his dogmatic prejudices, his stoical courage, his profound melancholy, his hatred of sentimental palliatives, his fits of narrowness, his tenderness to all human frailty. If he has had less reputation than he deserves as a writer, it is because he has overshadowed his own fame. His success with the pen is like the success of a personal friend; it pleases us, and enables us to vindicate our affection in the presence of those who have not yet learned to love him. ”

“ The days of a scholar are frequently not distinguished by varieties even as unimportant as these. Johnson found his mind grow stagnant by a constant residence in the neighbourhood of Charing-cross itself, where he thought human happiness at its flood: and once, when moving rapidly along the road in a carriage with Boswell, cried out to his fellow-traveller, "Sir, life has few things better than this." In the winter of 1766 he went to Oxford, where he resided for a month, and formed an intimacy with Chambers, afterwards one of the judges in India. ”

“ Goldsmith said to him, very wittily and very justly, "If you were to write a fable about little fishes, doctor, you would make the little fishes talk like whales." No man surely ever had so little talent for personation as Johnson. Whether he wrote in the character of a disappointed legacy-hunter or an empty town fop, of a crazy virtuoso or a flippant coquette, he wrote in the same pompous and unbending style. His speech, like Sir Piercy Shafton's Euphuistic eloquence, bewrayed him under every disguise. Euphelia and Rhodoclea talk as finely as Imlac the poet or Seged, Emperor of Ethiopia. ”

“ In 1764, Johnson founded the celebrated "Literary Club,"—perhaps the most remarkable cluster of distinguished men that ever existed; and in 1765 he was created LL.D. by Trinity College, Dublin. In 1765, too, he published his "Shakspeare;" and he became intimate with the Thrales,—the husband being a great brewer in Southwark; the wife, a lady of literary tastes, better known as Madame Piozzi, the author of "Anecdotes of Dr Johnson;" both distinguished for their attachment to him. He was often domesticated in their house for months together. ”

“ Johnson’s appearance, and could hardly help thinking him a [Pg 152] madman for some time, as he sat waving over his breakfast like a lunatic. He is a very large man, and was dressed in a dirty brown coat and waistcoat, with breeches that were brown also (although they had been crimson) , and an old black wig; his shirt collar and sleeves were unbuttoned; his stockings were down about his feet, which had on them, by way of slippers, an old pair of shoes.... ”

“ He long continued to live upon the fame which he had already won. He was honoured by the University of Oxford with a Doctor's degree, by the Royal Academy with a professorship, and by the King with an interview, in which his Majesty most graciously expressed a hope that so excellent a writer would not cease to write. In the interval, however, between 1765 and 1775 Johnson published only two or three political tracks, the longest of which he could have produced in forty-eight hours, if he had worked as he worked on the life of Savage and on Rasselas. ”

“ The next few years are a pitiful struggle to make a living as tutor, apothecary's assistant, comedian, usher in a country school, and finally as a physician in Southwark. Gradually he drifted into literature, and lived from hand to mouth by doing hack work for the London booksellers. Some of his essays and his Citizen of the World (1760-1761) brought him to the attention of Johnson, who looked him up, was attracted first by his poverty and then by his genius, and presently declared him to be "one of the first men we now have as an author." ”

“ Wishing to know what ideas had made Johnson popular, he turned over the pages of his Dictionary, his eight volumes of essays, his biographies, his numberless articles, his conversation so carefully collected, and he yawned. ‘His truths,’ says this critic, ‘are too true, we already know his precepts by heart. We learn from him that life is short, and we ought to improve the few moments granted us; that a mother ought not to bring up her son as a fop; that a man ought to repent of his faults and yet avoid superstition; that in everything we ought to be active and not hurried. ”

“ However dogmatic and fierce Johnson’s conversation may have been, it was always extraordinarily free from egotism. He takes the floor with all comers, and does not make for himself a place apart, sheltered and superior. He has no exquisite reasons, and looks at life, not from a delicate angle of his own, but from the broad standing-ground of common humanity. A very large number of his most famous sayings are cast in a single mould ”

“ Johnson's personality, too, cannot be fairly judged by its more grotesque expression. Beneath the rough surface he was a man not only of very vigorous intellect and great learning, but of sincere piety, a very warm heart, unusual sympathy and kindness, and the most unselfish, though eccentric, generosity. Fine ladies were often fascinated by him, and he was no stranger to good society. ”

“ Intellect 130 and beneficence, from whatever causes, will always command respect; and we may gladly compound, for their sakes, with foibles which belong to the common chances of humanity. If Johnson has added nothing very new to the general stock, he has contributed (especially by the help of his biographer) a great deal that is striking and entertaining. ”

“ Johnson then was not only a great writer, a conversationalist so unique that his sayings have passed more into current speech than those of any other Englishman, but he was also a great moralist—a superb inspiration to a better life. We should not love Johnson so much were he not presented to us as a man of many weaknesses and faults akin to our own, not a saint by any means, and therefore not so far removed from us as some more ethereal characters of whom we may read. ”

“ His new position in society by that time demanded more money to support it properly than his literary efforts brought in; and as poker games were not always on hand, and sometimes turned out the wrong way, Johnson actually decided to work. His free, proud soul had been so effectually tamed by respectability and harnessed by civilization that he accepted every odd job of work that came along by which he could earn money. ”

“ To do nothing is in every man’s power; we can never want an opportunity of omitting duties.’ The topics of The Rambler are many, but the great majority of them are drawn from the graver aspects of life, and it is when he treats of fundamental duties and inevitable sorrows, bereavement, and disease, and death, that Johnson rises to his full stature. When he ventures to emulate the tea-table morality of the Spectator he has not a light or happy touch. ”

“ The laugh and the frisk and the peaches are so many hall-marks to assure us that the philosopher is still a man and has not forgotten that he was once a boy: that he has always had five senses like the rest of us; and {119} that if he bids us take a grave view of life it is not because he knows nothing about it.
Another note of catholicity in Johnson is his wide experience of social conditions. The man in him never for an instant disappeared in the "gentleman." Very few of our great men of letters have ever known poverty in the real sense of the word, in the way the really poor know it. ”