04 Sold Down the River

WORK SONGS

All accounts of travel through the Deep South in the 1830s make mention that the slaves sang as they worked in the cane-fields. When it came to researching this book, the question of what exactly they sang proved to be a difficult one.

Until almost the eve of the Civil War, most rural plantation slaves were only nominally Christian, if that. House-servants were probably given some instruction in Christianity, depending on the master. Many urban slaves attended Christian worship, though in New Orleans particularly, the legally mandated Catholicism was frequently blended with voodoo. In the countryside, most small slaveowners-not of the planter class-who owned one, two, or possibly half a dozen slaves who divided their duties between farm work and the house, might convert, or instruct, their bondsmen.

But the majority of rural slaves-and a goodly number of urban ones-did not become Christians in any real sense of the word until the Evangelical movement of the 1840s. Up to the 1830s many whites refused to tolerate black congregations, arguing that any gathering of blacks would provide a seedbed of rebellion and pointing out that the two great leaders of early nineteenth-century rebellions, Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, were both preachers. Spirituals-the quintessential form (with blues) of black music in America-did not exist until the late 1840s or 1850s. So what did they sing?

I've done the best I can in assembling what phonetic fragments of presumably African songs survive in the works of such writers as George Washington Cable, and the old Creole songs that were popular then. There are contemporary or near-contemporary (1840s and 1850s) accounts of both ring-shouts and the field hollers, and the similarity of these hollers to descriptions of street-vendors' cries is striking.

Descriptions agree that the songs were extremely odd and frequently unpleasant to Western ears: words like wailing, monotonous, and caterwauling are used, and frequent reference is made to the call-and-response form that was later absorbed into spirituals. Accounts agree on the very African emphasis on rhythm-in fact on many plantations possession of a drum was a whipping offense. What is clear is that music played a critical part in the lives of the displaced Africans; that it was a vital link to the world from which they, or their parents or grandparents, had been ripped. When plantation blacks did come to Christianity, either through campmeetings in the 1840s or through the often-secret efforts of preachers from urban black congregations, they naturally adapted Protestant hymns to African needs and African modes of song, giving rise to spirituals in the same way that European cotillions and Irish clog dancing morphed into characteristic black dance.

Field Work Songs hollers blended imperceptibly into the blues, the casual weaving of songs from and into everyday activities. "Playing the dozens," the game of insults and counter-insults, is attested to in slave-related literature well back into the eighteenth century.