II
From this intensely musical England came the band of colonists who landed at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. About half of them were 'gentlemen' and the remainder were soldiers and servants. The proportion of gentlemen—'unruly gallants,' as Capt. John Smith calls them—was less in later emigrations, though it was always comparatively high. Many soldiers came, and some convicts and young vagrants picked up in the streets of London were sent out as servants. Starvation, disease, and the attacks of Indians left very few survivors among those who came to Virginia during the first ten years. Afterward the population grew very rapidly and contained, on the whole, representative elements of all classes in England, with a comparatively large proportion of the upper classes. In 1619, as we learn from a statement of John Rolfe, quoted in John Smith's 'Generali Historie,' the first negro slaves were introduced into Virginia. A description in the 'Briefe Declaration' shows Virginia about two years later as a country already in the enjoyment of peace and prosperity. 'The plenty of these times,' says the writer, 'unlike the old days of death and confusion, was such that every man gave free entertainment to friends and strangers.' About that time land was laid out for a free school at Charles City and for a university and college at Henrico, but the project was not then carried through. As yet, however, there was not any pressing demand for public educational advantages, as the proportion of children was still very small. Later years saw a great increase in the population, both native and English born. During the Civil War there was a large exodus from England of cavaliers, as well as merchants, yeomen, and other substantial people, who found the troubles at home little to their taste or profit. There must have been little to distinguish the Virginia society about the middle of the seventeenth century from English society of the same period. The colonists lived well; they were prosperous; they had good, substantial houses equipped with good, substantial English furniture; they entertained with open-handed freedom and generosity. 'The Virginia planter,' says George Park Fisher, 'was essentially a transplanted Englishman in tastes and convictions and imitated the social amenities and culture of the mother country. Thus in time was formed a society distinguished for its refinement, executive ability and generous hospitality for which the Ancient Dominion is proverbial.'[5]
The population of Virginia always remained largely rural, but nevertheless there was social life aplenty. Education was mainly in the hands of the clergy, who, as a rule, were Englishmen of culture. But steps toward public education were taken at a very early period. The attempt of 1621 failed, as we have noticed, but in 1635—three years before John Harvard made his bequest—Benjamin Syms left an endowment for a free school in Virginia. This, to quote a recent writer, 'was the first legacy by a resident of the American plantations for the promotion of education.' Another free school was established in 1655 by Captain Henry King, and two in 1659 by Thomas Eaton and Captain William Whittingdon. In 1670, according to a report from Sir William Berkeley to the Commissioners of Foreign Plantations, the population of Virginia consisted of 40,000 persons, of whom 2,000 were negro slaves and 5,000 white servants. The 2,000 negro slaves probably included a number of mulattoes, for even then there must have been traffic between white men and negro women, as we may infer from the law which gave to a child the status of its mother. The remainder of the population was almost exclusively English. What we have said of Virginia in the seventeenth century applies also in a general way to Maryland and Carolina, both as to population and conditions, though the Huguenot emigration to Carolina in 1685 made a decided difference in the character of the population there subsequent to that date.
This brief incursion into general history has been made, not to prove anything, but to bring forward a few facts which may be found suggestive. The Southern colonists during the seventeenth century were predominantly English people of the first and second generations. They were fairly representative of contemporary English society, though the proportion of 'gentlemen' was higher among them than at home. They came, as we have seen, from a country where music was practised enthusiastically by all classes. It is preposterous to think that in the new country they discarded their musical tastes like a worn-out garment. There is no reason why they should have done so. After the first years of famine and turmoil and death they were comparatively peaceful and prosperous. There were among them, it is true, a certain number of stern-faced Puritans, melancholy preachers of the sinfulness of pleasure; but on the whole the attitude of the Southern colonists toward life was that of the gay, gallant, laughter-loving cavaliers. There is little doubt that these same gallant gentlemen kept up in the colonies that devotion to the joyeuse science for which they had been famed since the days of Cœur de Lion. In the announcements of the early concerts at Charleston in the first half of the eighteenth century we find that the orchestra was often composed in part of neighboring gentlemen, who were good enough to lend their services for the occasion, or sometimes that certain gentlemen, of their courtesy, obliged with instrumental or vocal selections. Whence we may infer that the custom of keeping a chest of viols in his house for the use of his family and his guests, so generally observed by the English gentleman at the beginning of the seventeenth century, was still honored by the colonial gentleman at the beginning of the eighteenth.
The cultured colonists followed English fashions very closely in all things, and the music they played was doubtless the music in vogue in London drawing-rooms and concert halls. The humble colonists, presumably, were less concerned with the mode, and sang and played the old English tunes which they and their fathers and their grandfathers had brought across the sea. American historians have taken for granted, with a good deal of smug complacency, that there was no real musical life among these people. The assumption seems to be based—if it has any basis—on the fact that the population of the South was preëminently rural. But that there was little urban life does not mean that there was little community life. On the contrary, life in the South was much more intimately gregarious than is usual in towns and cities, and it is in hospitable social gatherings rather than in stiff-backed attendance at concerts and operas that the musical soul of a people finds real expression. Furthermore, the Southern colonists had a communal consciousness, as we may see from their early essays in public education, and it is probable that this consciousness expressed itself in other ways of which we have no evidence. The churches brought them together, also, perhaps for social as well as religious gatherings. It is, indeed, a plausible surmise that musical reunions of some sort, apart from purely private entertainments, were not unknown to them.
The music of the colonial proletariat was English, that of the gentlefolk largely so. Among the common people this music may have undergone some alteration in the course of time, and certain gifted ones among them may have made original music of their own. We can conceive that the gentlefolk occasionally occupied themselves with musical composition, and some of their efforts, perchance, percolated through the classes and became the property of all the people. We cannot say, but it is possible; it is even probable. If English music did not undergo a change in Virginia and Maryland and Carolina, we can be sure that it altered somewhat in the hands of the pioneers who carried it to Kentucky, to Missouri, to Texas. One hears in the Southwest many quaint, characteristic old songs and tunes of unmistakably English origin. We can safely assume that by the time they reached Missouri and Texas from England they had absorbed quite a little local color.
Nor must we forget that the music of the American negroes is the music of the English colonists strained through the African temperament; or perhaps we should say the African temperament strained through the music of the English colonists. In any case, Afro-American music is a blend, and the mixing, we may suppose, began with the beginning of slavery in the Southern colonies. The negro slaves were an ignorant, impressionable people set down in the middle of a white civilization from which they naturally and immediately began to absorb the things that were appreciable to their senses. The most easily appreciable, perhaps, of these things was music, and such music as the negroes heard among the white people they absorbed and, to some extent, assimilated.[6]
Just how much all this has to do with American music we cannot say, any more than we can say just what is American music. National music, we take it, is the composite musical inheritance of a people, molded and colored by their composite characteristics, inherited and acquired. And the music of the South is undoubtedly part of the musical inheritance of the American people. How much of that inheritance we have rejected and how much retained will not appear until some historian arises with enough scholarship to analyze our musical heritage in detail; with enough genius in research to trace its elements to their sources; and with enough patriotic enthusiasm to lend him patience for the task. In the meantime, surface conditions fail to justify the arbitrary ruling out of the South as an utterly negligible factor in our musical development.