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CHAPTER XI |
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SATIRICAL SONGS OF THE CREOLES |
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A Classification of Slave Songs—The Use of Music in Satire—African Minstrels—The Carnival in Martinique—West Indian Pillards—Old Boscoyo's Song in New Orleans—Conclusion—An American School of Composition |
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In an appendix to his "Bahama Songs and Stories" Professor Edwards cites John Mason Brown as giving the following classification of the songs of the slave in an article printed in "Lippincott's Magazine" for December, 1868:
1. Religious songs, e. g., "The Old Ship oi Zion," where the refrain of "Glory, halleloo,, in the chorus keeps the congregation well together in the singing and allows time for the leader to recall the next verse.
2. River songs, composed of single lines separated by a barbarous and unmeaning chorus and sung by the deck hands and roustabouts mainly for the howl.
3. Plantation songs, accompanying the mowers at harvest, in which the strong emphasis of rhythm was more important than the words.
4. Songs of longing; dreamy, sad( and plaintive airs describing the most sorrowful pictures of slave life, sung in the dusk when returning home from the day's work.
5. Songs of mirth, (whose origin and meaning, in most cases forgotten, were preserved for the jingle of rhyme and tune and sung with merry laughter and with dancing in the evening by the cabin fireside.
6. Descriptive songs, sung in chanting style, with marked emphasis and the prolongation of the concluding syllable of each line. One of these songs, founded upon the incidents of a famous horse race, became almost an epidemic among the negroeB of the slave-holding States.
In this enumeration there is a significant omission. On the plantations where Latin influences were dominant, in New Orleans and the urban communities of the Antilles, the satirical song was greatly in vogue. It might be said that the use of song for purposes of satire cannot be said to be peculiar to any one race or people or time; in fact, Professor Henry T. Fowler, of Brown University, in his "History of the Literature of Ancient Israel,"1 intimates
1 New York: The Macmillan Company, 1912, page IS. |
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