The record changer (Jan-Dec 1944)

years of the controversy came from the other side of the Atlantic: "The great mass of these songs are real folksongs of American Negro origin . . . they are not imitations, nor are they African songs influenced by the white man, but they are songs made by the Negro, in European style. Had the Negro slaves been taken to China instead of to America, they would have developed folksongs in Chinese style . . . this .facility for adaptation is by no means a sign of inferiority. Only a race so highly gifted for music could do this." And again : "The American Negro songs are European in style and pattern. They are American folksongs as far as they have originated amidst American folk and culture; they are African when sung by Negroes, and only then."2 The transformation is mainly one of rhythm, inflection .and vibrato. "At first sight, when comparing the written music of African and American Negroes, one would think that _they have nothing in common." But "you will readily recognize an African Negro by seeing him dance and by hearing him sing . . . This wa)' of the Negro is identical in Africa and in America."2 "The rhythm of the spirituals, when they are sung by the Negroes themselves, is marked by a swaying of the body for the purpose of beating out the fundamental pulse of the music, while the movements of the head seem to hit it off into smaller irregular fragments : and correspondingly, the voices play with the tune without ever impairing its main character."3 All these characteristics can be found with even greater perfection in the songs improvised collectively by a preacher and his congregation and in the ring shouts which are straight adaptations of African ceremonialism to Christian liturgy. This description of a ring shout, one of the first and best in American literature, occurs in the New York Nation of 1867 : "The true 'shout' takes place on Sundays or on 'praise nights' through the week, and either in the praise house or in some cabin in which a regular religious meeting has been held . , . The benches are pushed back to the wall when the formal meeting is over, and old and young, men and women ... all stand up in the middle of the floor, and when the 'sperchil' is struck up, begin first walking and by-and-by shuffling round, one after the other, in a ring. The foot is hardly taken from the floor, and the progression is mainly due to a jerking, hitching motion which agitates the entire shoulder and soon brings out streams of perspiration. Sometimes they dance silently, sometimes, as they shuffle, they sing the chorus of the spiritual, and "sometimes the song itself is also sung by the dancers. But more frequently a band, composed of some of the best singers and of tired shouters, stand at the side of the room to 'base' the others, singing the body of the song and clapping their hands together or on their knees. Song and dance alike are extremely energetic and often, when the shout lasts into the middle of the night, the monotonous thud of the feet prevents sleep itself within half a mile of the praise house." Herskovits, in a more recent description of a ring shout, points out that "the place of the song in the religious service, and its accompaniment by handclapping, tapping the feet, and instruments of percussion such as the tambourine, do not partake of European cultural behavior. Spirit possession (by the Holy Ghost) manifested through dances — 'shouts' . . . is clearly African . . . among these 'shouting' sects the communion service partakes largely, in both psychological implication and outward ritual, of very different elements than are found to mark the corresponding rite in the white churches . . . the place of the spirituals in the rituals of the Negro churches is markedly non-European . . . the underlying psychological sanctions that furnish the reason for their existence rather than their exterior musical structure as such give these songs significance for the problem being discussed here."4 Songs of this type have provided, and are still providing, one of the main sources of Negro jazz. Lucy McKim Garrison's 1862 letter to Divight's Magazine contains the first reliable crossreference between spirituals, ring shouts, camp meeting songs and jubilee hymns, and her 1867 collection of Negro songs contains ecclesiastical examples of blue notes, shifted accents, ragged time, rhythmical counterpart and all those other characteristics out of which ragtime, jazz and the rest of secular Negro music grew during the next five or six decades. During this whole period, secular Negro music can be seen limping a step or two behind its ecclesiastical forerunners. Ten years before the first ragtime was published, Negro spirituals had ragtime accompaniments in theirx published piano transcriptions. Mr. Roy Carew's collection contains . the sheet music of a spiritual written in 1 883 Good Lord'll Help Me on My Way, . -"The Greatest Negro Song of the Day," which could easily pass for fin-de-siecle ragtime. (Continued on page, 51) 6