“Dar was jes’ one little matter I mought ’a’ mentioned at de fust, suh (not dat it made no difference whatsomever; de fam’ly, maybe, wouldn’t keer to have me speak o’ sech a trifle), but de dear deceased was a sister!”
Then it was that W. turned an agonized face upon our convulsed group:
“For Heaven’s sake, is there a back door or window by which a fellow can get out of this place?”
The choir of the “Old African” was one of the shows of the city. Few members of it could read the words of the hymns and anthems. Every one of them could read the notes, and follow them aright. The parts were well-balanced and well-sustained. Those who have heard the Fisk University Jubilee singers do not need the assurance that the quality of the negro voice is rarely sweet and rich, and that, as a race, they have a passion for music. Visitors from Northern cities who spent the Sabbath in Richmond seldom failed to hear the famed choir of the Old African. On this afternoon, the then popular and always beautiful Jerusalem, My Happy Home, was rendered with exquisite skill and feeling. George F. Root, who heard the choir more than once while he was our guest, could not say enough of the beauty of this anthem-hymn as given by the colored band. He declared that one soloist had “the finest natural tenor he ever heard.”
But these were not the representative singers of the race. Still less should airs, composed by white musicians and sung all over the country as “negro melodies,” pass as characteristic. They are the white man’s conception of what the expatriated tribes should think and feel and sing.
More than thirty years after the maiden sermon of which I have written, our little party of American travellers drew back against the wall of the reputed “house of Simon the Tanner” in Jaffa (the ancient Joppa), to let a funeral procession pass. The dead man, borne without a coffin, upon the shoulders of four gigantic Nubians, was of their race. Two-thirds of the crowd, that trudged, barefooted, through the muddy streets behind the bier, were of the same nationality. And as they plodded through the mire, they chanted the identical “wild, wailing measure” familiar to me from my infancy, which was sung that Sunday afternoon to the words “We’ll pass over Jordan”—even to the oft-iterated refrain, “Honor, my chillun, honor de Lamb!”
The gutterals of the outlandish tongue were all that was unlike. The air was precisely the same, and the time and intonations.
We have taken great pains to trace the negro folk-lore back to its root. The musical antiquarian is yet to arise who will track to their home the unwritten tunes and chants the liberated negro is trying to forget, and to which his grandparents clung lovingly, all unaware that they were an inheritance more than a dozen generations old.
Trained choirs might learn “book music,” and scorn the airs crooned over their cradles, and shouted and wailed in prayer and camp meetings, by mothers and fathers. The common people held obstinately to their very own music, and were not to be shaken loose by the “notions” of “young folks who hadn’t got the egg-shells offen they hades.”
I asked once, during a concert given by students from Hampton Institute, if the leader would call upon them for certain of the old songs—naming two or three. I was told that they objected to learning them, because they were associated with the days of their bondage. I did not take the trouble to convince the spruce maestro that what I wished to hear were memorials of the days of wildest liberty, when their forbears hunted “big game” in their tangled native forests, and paddled their boats upon rivers the white man had never explored.