[67] In the collection entitled 'Jubilee and Plantation Songs' (Oliver Ditson, 1887) the melody only is given. Mr. Krehbiel gives two harmonizations, but it is a question whether they are satisfactory reproductions of the 'native' spirit of the song. Mr. Henry F. Gilbert has used it in his 'Negro Rhapsody' with most telling effect.
[68] For an example of a pentatonic melody we refer the reader to 'Nobody Knows de Trouble I've Seen'; for the major seventh in a minor key (the use of the augmented second) to the 'Baptizing Hymn' ('Freely Go') and 'Father Abraham' ('Tell It'). This peculiar oriental effect may be, as Mr. Krehbiel thinks, due to a feeling that was natural to the Moors, the Mohammedan negroes who made up a small part of the American colored stock. A specimen of a song in the whole-tone scale is 'O Rock Me, Julie,' in which the refrain is each time a fifth lower than the verse.
[69] 'Slave Songs in the United States.'
[70] James Augustus Grant in 'A Walk Across Africa' says that his people when cleaning rice were always followed by singers who accompanied the workers with clapping of hands and stamping of feet. 'Whenever companies of negroes were working together in the cotton fields and tobacco factories, on the levees and steamboats or sugar plantations and chiefly in the fervor of religious gatherings, these melodies sprang into life.' (Booker T. Washington, in preface to Coleridge-Taylor's 'Twenty-four Negro Melodies.')
[71] Remnants of voodooism have survived in Louisiana to our day. The language of the creole negro is a French patois. In his songs this patois is sometimes intermingled with strange words of African origin. Some still have an African refrain, though the negroes no longer understand its meaning. Lafcadio Hearn, upon asking the meaning of the words of one of these songs of a negro woman in Louisiana, received the answer: Mais c'est Voudoo, ça; je n'en sais rien! With the help of philological references Hearn actually traced the words to Africa and made sense out of them in connection with their context.
[72] 'Century Magazine,' Aug., 1899.
[73] Mr. Allen says that the shout is not found in North Carolina and Virginia, though Mr. Krehbiel knows of an example from Kentucky. Mr. Allen says, however, that the term 'shouting' is used in Virginia in reference to a peculiar motion of the body wholly unlike the Carolina shouting.
[74] La Musique ches les peuples indigènes de l'Amérique du Nord.
[75] Musik, Tanz und Dichtung bei den Kreolen Amerikas.
[76] George W. Cable in 'Century Magazine.'