Longest train I ever saw
Was nineteen coaches long.
Darlin’ what have I done to you?
What makes you treat me so?
An’ I won’t be treated this-a way.
[26] For the music of this song, see [Chapter XIV]. A song of this name has been found in the Kentucky mountains, and a phonograph record (Lonesome Road Blues) based on it has recently appeared. Cf. also The Lonesome Road in Miss Scarborough’s On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs, p. 73.
CHAPTER IV
BAD MAN BALLADS AND JAMBOREE
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 in each of several characters or types of singers and their songs. Thus the picture may be viewed from all sides and from different angles, with such leisure and repetition as will insure accurate impressions. One of these types is the “po’ boy long way from home” singing down “that lonesome road,” as represented in the previous [chapter]. Whether in his ordinary daily task, or on his pilgrimages afar, or in the meshes of the law, this singer approaches perfection in the delineation of his type. Another type is that to be found in the story of Left Wing Gordon as presented in [Chapter XII], and of John Henry in [Chapter XIII]. Likewise, the songs of jail and chain gang, the songs of women and love, and the specialized road songs all embody that fine quality of full and complete reflection of the folk spirit in the Negro’s workaday life and experience.
There is perhaps no type, however, which comes more nearly summarizing certain situations, experiences, and backgrounds than the Negro “bad man,” whose story will make an heroic tale of considerable proportions. In many ways the “bad man from bad man’s land” is a favorite. He is eulogized by the youngsters and sung by the worker by the side of the road. One preacher even described Christ as a man who would “stand no foolin’ wid.” “Jesus such great man, no one lak him. Lord, he could pop lion’s head off jes’ lak he wus fryin’-size chicken an’ could take piece o’ mountain top and throw it across the world.” And as for that other bad man, “Nicotemus,” why Jesus, when he got through with him, had him following behind a donkey like any other slave.[27] There was that other young Negro who “was no comfort to preacher, but was a hawk like pizen. Mens like him and wimmin belonged to him wid his winnin’ ways.” In a previous volume[28] we pointed out some of the characteristic experiences and modes of the Negro bum, “bully of this town,” Railroad Bill, Stagolee, Brady, and the others, of twenty years ago. Since that time the tribe has apparently not diminished and flourishes well in the atmosphere of modern life, migration, and the changing conditions of race relations. Of the statistical and environmental aspects of the Negro criminal much will be reported in another study.[29] In this chapter we are concerned with the portrait of a type, perhaps inexorably drawn into the maelstrom of his day and turned into an inevitable product. He is no less an artist than the wanderer, the “travelin’ man,” or Left Wing Gordon. He is the personification of badness mixed with humor, of the bad man and the champion of exploits. We have already referred to the Negro who “wus so mean wus skeered of hisself,” competitor to that other one whose
... eyes wus red an’ his gums wus blue,