The Negro and His Songs — Odum, Howard W.; Johnson, Guy B.

A. LIBRARY OF WELLESLEY COLLEGE Jm < PURCHASES FROM HORSFOHD FOTFD - ! • «-——r '

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2011 with funding from Boston Library Consortium Member Libraries http://www.archive.org/details/negrohissongsstuOOodum

THE NEGRO AND HIS SONGS A STUDY OF TYPICAL NEGRO SONGS IN THE SOUTH BY HOWARD W. ODUM, Ph.D. KENAN PROFESSOR OP SOCIOLOGY ANDT>IRECTOR OF THE SCHOOL OP PUBLIC WELFARE, UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AND GUY B. JOHNSON, A.M. INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH IN SOCIAL SCIENCE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA CHAPEL HILL THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1925

PREFACE This volume is presented simply as a part of the story of the Negro. Other volumes are planned to follow: another collection of songs brought more nearly up to date; a presentation of song and story centered around case studies; a series of efforts to portray objectively the story of race progress in the United States in the last half dozen decades. In each case the material will be presented simply for what it is and not for cosmic generalizations or ethnic interpretation. In the present volume the use of the term Negro refers only to the Negro singer and to that which he represents. The term folk song is used in this collection in a general way and for comparative reference. In neither case are the terms employed with an all-inclusive and technically comprehensive meaning. The Negroes in this book are real Negroes, but they do not represent all the Negro race; the songs are real songs, but many of them are not folk songs in the accurate sense of the word. The volume will be found to abound in paradoxes and contradictions. The songs are not alike; the dialect is not consistent. There are lyrics of power and appeal, and there are verses crude and sordid. There are lines of elegance and inelegance. There are ballads of worth and disjointed, inconsequential lines of trash. There is sorrow and there is joy; pathos stands alongside humor. If, as W. T. Dawson says, the secret of true poetry is to see and to feel, then there is poetry in the Negro songs. If images and allegories are better than material things, then the Negro singer is good. But if one is to find poetry, like some Richard

VI Preface Jeffries, dwelling on the mystery and beauty of the flesh, on the sensitive elegance of nature and the soul, or like Wordsworth's man-to-man poet, there will be many who dissent from such a judgment of crude creative effort. For there abounds much coarseness. Well it is that this collection has no duty to evaluate overweening physical expression alongside spiritual aspiration, to judge whether buttercups are grazing grass or the substance of sun-spilt immortal gold! Other contrasts there are: stately measures and broken rhythm, forced triseme and ragged trochee, illogical asyndeton and mixed meters, and such other untamed technique as will undoubtedly do justice to the singer of the songs. But here are the songs as they were found with something of their setting. Some of them have been published in The Journal of American Folklore, and some in The American Journal of Religious Psychology. Acknowledgment of previous publication in these journals is here rendered. Considerable material could not be included in this collection but will follow in the next. This material includes a group of songs collected in Tennessee by Anna Kranz Odum, to whom we are indebted for much help in the utilization of the material in this volume; new songs recently collected in North Carolina and other localities; and a miscellaneous collection of rhymes, games, improvisations, original compositions and riddles. The songs in this volume were collected in Northern Mississippi, counties of Pontotoc and LaFayette, and in Northern Georgia, counties of Newton and Rockdale. A few other songs and fragments, chiefly from North Carolina and Tennessee, have been used here and there for comparative purposes.