The Camden chronicle. (Camden, Tenn.) 1890-current, 1892-07-08
THE NEGROES SONG.
It Breathes a Sadness Induced by
the Wrongs His Race Has Borne.
No other Music Can Match 1t In Melan-
ChOly Sweetness, and 1t Was the Only
Thing That Slavery Left Hlm-Rea-
sons for Its Excellence.

Ninety years ago in little grass
matted hut beside the Niger river a
white traveller lay tossing in the ago
MES of tropical fever. Sometimes in
his delirium he murmured broken
fragments of Scottish songs-some-
times, as the pangs of the fever mo-
mentarily abated, the sound of the
bagpipes seemed to ring in his ears,
and, reused to semi-consciousness by
the sweet illusion, the sick man would
rise from his couch of reeds and cry:
"Play the Blue Bells of Scotland
piper-play the Blue Bells ,"
Then woman, dark Of face, and
clad only in blue cotton skirt, entered
the hut. Sitting down beside the in
valid she began to softly Groom song
of wondrous melody. In the music of
that African song pathos, sympathy
and anxiety seemed to blend with hope
and confidence, while the sound, ever
soft and low, touched gently the ears of
the sufferer, and Soothed him to rest
and sleep, from which he awoke, weak,
but free from the fever's grasp
That traveller, says the Chicago Globe,
was Mungo Park. In his memoirs he
says: 81 am firmly convinced that the
soft music of that negro woman's song
saved my life and gave me new strength
for my undertaking"
How or when the negro acquired his
love of music history cannot tell. He
rodotus tells of the sounding bows" of
the Ethiopians-black bows whose
strings gave out melody sweeter than
the notes of Tyre or cithera, and which
were in great demand at festivals In
Roman times the Mauritanian blacks
were noted for their musical skill, and
the chroniclers of the middle ages often
speak of the sable musicians who de-
lighted the lordly Saracens with their
talent. In the strange, mysterious
land of Africa the negro has little to
do and abundance wherewith to sup
port life. Doubtless, in the earlier ages,
he lounged about his hut day after day,
until at last from sheer ennui, he turned
to music as a means of employing his
idle time. AS the centuries rolled on
the black became more and more
skilled in musical art until, when his
race first began to see the shores of
America, he was already vocal and in
Strumental genius of high merit.
But it was among the negro slaves
that the divine art" reached it's per-
lection. The poor African, torn from
his native land. and sent from ease and
idlenesS to hard work, under an exact
ing master, could not express his
thoughts in the ordinary language of
common conversation, but all the pa
thos, all the sorrow of his misfortunes
and his surroundings, acting upon his
sensitive and romantic nature, COM
bined to produce type of song which
the world has never seen surpassed.
Perhaps wife or child would be sold
into servitude, far away from the poor
slave who composed the song; perhaps
a kindly master would pass beyond
deaths river; perhaps the slave himself
would be sent into a distant state,
never again to see the home which had
but, whatever the cause, the negro
songs remain matchless in their
melancholy sweetness, marvellous in
their patient resignation to fate and
''massa's" will.
But there were CLEANS of light and
happiness in the life of the slave. In
the evening, when the work was over,
the darkies would assemble in the
Quarters" and, while the 'possum and
the hoe cake, the sweet potatoes and
the corn were being cooked to perfec-
ton by the skillful ''aunties, the fiddle
and the banjo sounded merrily and the
uproarious chorus mingled with the
shuttle of the dancing feet
a From these festive occasions sprang
the idea of negro minstrelsy, which has
since, become so distorted that not one
person in fifty north of Mason and Dix
on's line has any idea of real plantation
music or of the real depth and richness
of those unique and matchless melodies.
Since the war the negro has been free,
but he has not forgotten his music, and
he, and his descendants, even those in
whose veins fingers hardly a drop of
negro blood, still sing the songs that
once delighted young massa" and rose
sadly around 'old massa's" grave. But
even among the negroes there was
60 a great variety of music, tinged by local
Ity, of course, and often by the ances-
trail tribe of the negro. Thus, in New
Orleans the blacks had a list CT songs
much different from the music of Vir-
gina or the Carolinas The songs of
Carolina dwelt upon cotton lands and
rice fields; those of Louisiana less upon
material surroundings and more upon
sentiment and love.
Much French blood ran in the veins of
these people and their music showed
the combination of races. Even now, in
Louisiana, the creole women-women of
whom a southerner once SAID that they
Al