The truest African mode and
rhythm would seem to be preserved here; to tell the truth, there is
great danger of their loss unless they are soon recorded.]
In a certain view, it would seem that by the fate of servitude the
American negro has become the element in our own national life that
alone produces true folk-song,--that corresponds to the peasant and serf
of Europe, the class that must find in song the refuge and solace for
its loss of material joys. So Dvorak perhaps is right, with a far seeing
eye, when he singles the song of the despised race as the national type.
Another consideration fits here. It has been suggested that the
imitative sense of the negro has led him to absorb elements of other
song. It is very difficult to separate original African elements of song
from those that may thus have been borrowed. At any rate, there is no
disparagement of the negro's musical genius in this theory. On the
contrary, it would be almost impossible to imagine a musical people that
would resist the softer tones of surrounding and intermingling races.
We know, to be sure, that Stephen Foster, the author of "The Old Folks
at Home," "Massa's in the Cold, Cold Ground," and other famous ballads,
was a Northerner, though his mother came from the South. We hear, too,
that he studied negro music eagerly. It is not at all inconceivable,
however, Foster's song may have been devoid of negro elements, that the
colored race absorbed, wittingly or unwittingly, something of the vein
into their plaints or lullabies,--that, indeed, Foster's songs may have
been a true type that stirred their own imitation.
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