These songs were sometimes called “choruses,” for they are often really nothing else,—detached choruses, the text varied a bit from verse to verse, functioning as complete songs.
The last word in brevity of text is where simply one short phrase or sentence, sung over and over, is made to fill out the whole tune frame as a stanza. ‘[Death, Ain’t You Got No Shame]’, in this collection is one example among many. Such songs as this were too meager to be welcomed warmly into the old song books. They survive therefore chiefly in oral tradition. But meagerness of text is not, we must remember, any criterion of the worth of a religious folk-song. ‘Hebrew Children,’ for example, the song from which I have just cited a stanza, is at once extremely chary of words and rich in tonal beauty. This becomes evident when one sees Annabal Morris Buchanan’s arrangement of it for modern chorus.
It was the spiritual songs, rather than the hymns or the ballads, which appealed subsequently most deeply to the negroes and have reappeared most often among the religious songs of that race. In White Spirituals I presented twenty different negro songs and traced them, both tunes and texts, directly to as many early religious songs of the white people. In the present collection upwards of 60 songs have been found to be the legitimate tune-and-words forebears of the same number of negro spirituals. (Incidentally, all of the songs just used here to illustrate the steps in text simplification have been borrowed by the black man and made over.) These negro offspring songs are mentioned by title, and information as to where I found them is given in the notes under each of the songs concerned.[5]
The tunes of the secular folk-songs came into the religious environment—into the folk-hymns and spiritual songs—with little change. What one could sing by himself to secular words all could sing in a gathering to religious words. The new surroundings made only one added demand,—that the singers indulge in fewer vocal liberties than they might have enjoyed when singing the same tunes in their homes and alone. I refer to those liberties in personal interpretation, a quaint characteristic of individual folk singing which has given the collectors their numerous variants of one and the same song. Group singers had now to agree on one version of a tune and stick fairly closely to it. I say fairly closely, for the religious singers allowed but few of their tunes to become completely standardized. This will become clear when one studies the variants of certain folk-hymn and spiritual-song tunes in this compilation.
Folk-Song Collectors of Yore
In the earlier years of the camp-meeting movement, few if any of the songs produced in and for that environment appeared in print. The whole body of revival song was therefore generally known as “unwritten music.” The first recordings were of the texts only. They appeared in the form of booklets and bore some such title as “Hymns and Spiritual Songs / for the Pious of all Denominations / as Sung in Camp Meetings.” They were prepared first by itinerant preachers or song leaders who saw in the Great Revival a chance to serve the cause, and perhaps to make money. That these books filled a great need is attested by their ubiquity during the period which may be designated roughly as from 1800 to 1840.
The musical notation of the tunes they sang was the least concern of the revival folk. It is quite probable that the camp-meeting crowds of those times never saw their tunes in musical notation. It is evident that the first recordings of this unwritten music were not made by the revivalists themselves, and that the first book collections of such recordings were not made primarily for use in revivals. The books in which these tunes first appeared were the country singing manuals of which I have spoken above. The singing masters were quick to recognize the value of the rousing revival songs and saw to it that their own institution benefitted from their vogue. The Christian Harmony, published in New Hampshire in 1805 was perhaps the first book to record the revival tunes. The Olive Leaf, a Georgia book of 1878 was the last.[6]
We sometimes have the compiler’s own story of his sources. In the preface to William Caldwell’s Union Harmony for example, the compiler tells us that “many of the airs which the author has reduced to system [notated] and harmonized have been selected from the unwritten music in general use” among Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians. William Walker says, in the preface to his Southern Harmony, “I have composed parts to a great many good airs, which I could not find in any publication or in manuscript, and assigned my name as the author.” William Hauser’s preface to his compendious Hesperian Harp is lacking in my copy of his work (the only copy in existence, I believe); but the compiler’s method of finding songs becomes clear when we peruse his pages of song. On the page with ‘[Patton]’, for example, he notes that he first heard the Rev. William Patton, of Missouri, sing the song which bears his name “at a camp-meeting, North Cove, Burk Country, North Carolina, in 1831 or 1832.” The song entitled ‘Houston’ was an “air I learned from my mother when a small child.” As to ‘[Land of Rest]’ he states that the “inspiration of this tune [was] caught from a female voice at a distance, at Barbee’s Hotel, High Point, N. C., June 9th, 1868.” Under the song entitled ‘Rev. James Axley’s Song,’ in the same compiler’s Olive Leaf, he tells who the Rev. Axley was and how he, Hauser, came to record the preacher’s favorite tune. John G. McCurry gives a song called ‘Good-By’ in his Social Harp and tells that he put it down “as played on the accordion by Mrs. Martha Hodges of Hartwell,” Georgia.
Instances like these cited above are numerous. They all go to convince us of the great service rendered by the rural singing masters of yore in the preservation of a body of song, in the collecting and publishing of which no one else seems to have been interested.
The country singing books on which I have drawn for most of the songs of this collection, are in the main those which were at my disposal while I was preparing White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands. From the Georgia-Carolina section were The Southern Harmony in its 1835 and 1854 editions; The Southern and Western Pocket Harmonist (1845); The Sacred Harp which first appeared in 1844 but whose oldest edition at my disposal has been that of 1859; its three descendants, The Union Harp (1909), The Sacred Harp (Cooper edition, 1902 and four subsequent printings; I consulted the fifth reprint), and The Original Sacred Harp (1911);[7] The Hesperian Harp (1848); The Social Harp (1855); The Christian Harmony (1866); and The Olive Leaf (1878). Among the books originating in the eastern half of Tennessee I searched The Western Harmony (1824); The Columbian Harmony (1825); The Union Harmony (1837); The Knoxville Harmony (1838); The Harp of Columbia (1848); and The Western Psalmodist (1853). From the Valley of Virginia I used The Kentucky Harmony (1814); the German Choral-Music (1816); The Supplement to the Kentucky Harmony (1820); The Virginia Harmony (1831); Genuine Church Music (1832); and The Union Harmony (1848). From Saint Louis I had The Missouri Harmony (1820). I found also some material in two publications which are still in use among the Primitive Baptists, The Primitive Baptist Hymn and Tune Book (1902) and Good Old Songs (1913).[8] Two books, invaluable compendiums of the very sort of songs I was seeking, came to my hand too late for consideration in White Spirituals. They were The Revivalist, published in Troy, New York, in 1868; and Jeremiah Ingalls’ Christian Harmony, published in New Hampshire in 1805. The latter contains scores of religious folk-songs—among them many spiritual songs—which duplicate, though in variant forms, the songs which are found in abundance in the southern country-song manuals. The Revivalist, more than 60 years younger, is a veritable treasure trove of the same sorts of song. Together the two books open new vistas as to the spread and active life period of the song movement under observation. The New Hampshire book, made by a Vermont compiler, proves beyond doubt that the movement did not remain in the South—the section of its first prevalence presumably and of its present persistence—but spread early also into New England. The New York book points definitely to the persistence of the tradition in the northeastern section far longer than we would, without this evidence, have been warranted in assuming.