he recording of the Negro songs in
this collection, wherein I have noted the four-part harmony as sung
extemporaneously by colored boys who had had no musical training
whatever. Some of the most beautiful improvisational part-singing that
I ever heard arose from the throats of utterly illiterate black
laborers in a tobacco factory. One has but to attend a colored church,
whether North or South, to hear men and women break naturally into
alto, tenor or bass parts (and even subdivisions of these), to realize
how instinctively the Negro musical mind thinks harmonies. I have
heard players in colored bands perform one part on an instrument and
sing another while all those around him were playing and singing still
different parts. Yet it has been asserted by some people that the
harmonic sense of the Negro is a product of white environment and that
the black man owes his intuitive gift to the slave-holders who sang
hymns, ballads and popular songs in his hearing! With all due
allowance for white influence, which has been great, of course, the
fact remains that in savage Africa, remote from European culture, many
of the most primitive pagan songs are sung in parts with elaborate
interludes on drums tuned to different pitches. Indeed the music of
the Dark Continent is rich in polyphonic as well as rhythmic
suggestions for the European. Perhaps the war may help to prick some
of the vanity of the white race, which, looking down with self-assumed
superiority upon other races, is quick to condemn delinquencies as
native characteristics, and to ascribe to its own influences anything
worthy; whereas the reverse is, alas, all too often the case.
Certainly the art of Africa, of India, of the Orient and of North
America owes to the Anglo-Saxon only corruption and commercialization.
As for American Negro music, those songs that are most like the music
of the white people--and they are not few--are the least interesting;
they are sentimental, tame, and uneventful both in melody and rhythm.
On the other hand, such melodies as 'Go down Moses,' 'Four and Twenty
Eiders on Their Knees,' 'Run, Mary, Run,' these speak from the very
soul of the black race and no white man could have conceived them.
They have a dignity barbaric, aloof and wholly individual which lifts
them cloud-high above any 'White' hymns that the Negro might have
overheard. Austere as Egyptian bas-relief, simple as Congo sculpture,
they are mighty melodies, and they are Negro."