Negro workaday songs

To discover and present authentic pictures of the Negro’s folk background as found in his workaday songs is a large and promising task of which there are many phases. Here are s...

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 proba...

The blues _par excellence_ are, of course, to be found in those songs of sorrow and disappointment and longing which center around the love relation.[22] But the song of the “po...

There is this fortunate circumstance which contributes to the completeness and vividness of the Negro portraits as found in workaday songs: the whole picture is often epitomized...

Not all Negro “bad men” achieve an abiding place in jail or chain gang. Not all Negroes in jail or chain gang are “bad men”--not by long odds. And yet the prison population of t...

In the old days--and sometimes in more recent years--there were characteristic and unforgettable scenes of groups of Negroes singing in the fields. Here was a picture of late af...

Modern scenes, however different, are no less impressive. Whoever has seen a railroad section gang of five score Negroes working with pick and shovel and hammer and bars and oth...

Turning from the songs of construction or railroad gangs, some of the mixed songs, partly remnants of former years, partly products of sophistication, may be cited. There are ma...

In some respects it is unfortunate that classification of the Negro workaday songs must be attempted, for, strictly speaking, accurate classification is not possible. There is m...

There is probably no theme which comes nearer being common to all types of Negro songs than the theme of the relation of man and woman. It is the heart and soul of the blues. Th...

Woman’s song of man is in most respects parallel to man’s song of woman. Her themes are about the same. She sings of her “man” or “daddy,” of her disappointments and failures in...

One of the most interesting of all the Negro’s secular songs is the folk minstrel type. This minstrel song is similar to the original minstrel, in which one or more wandering mu...

Many a laborer, although singing his full quota of secular songs, still finds his workaday solace best in his favorite heritage of church and religious melodies. There is surcea...

Here is a construction camp which employs largely Negro workers. In four years 8,504 laborers were employed and there was an average labor turnover of once each month, or forty-...

Left Wing Gordon was and is a very real person, “traveling man” de luxe in the flesh and blood. Not so John Henry, who was most probably a mythical character. Whatever other stu...

We have pointed out again and again the utter futility of trying to describe accurately the singing of a group of Negroes when they are at their best. A group of twenty workers...

We have referred often in these pages to the wealth of material found in the great variety and number of the Negro’s songs. We have appraised the collections which have been pub...