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HOLLERS AND BLUES |
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"Hollering songs" represent a distinct type of Negro folk singing. Usually they consist of a two-line stanza in which the singer repeats the first verse two or three times and the last verse once—the whole introduced and followed by long drawn-out moaning or "yodling" or shouts in the tempo and mood of the tune he has been singing. They are sung with an open throat—shouted, howled, growled, or moaned in such fashion that they will fill a stretch of country and satisfy the wild and lonely and brooding spirit of the worker. The holler is a musical platform from which the singer can freely state his individual woes, satirize his enemies, and talk about his woman.
The country Negro worker lightens the tedium of his labor by these musical cries: a plowman, turning sandy furrows in the long cotton rows of a lonely swamp field7 the mule skinner, driving his team, with trace chains clanking, up and down in the dust of a levee bank; a roustabout, shouting the beat for the feet of his companions as, like an endless chain, they stagger under a load up the gangplank or, in double-time, hurry down on the other side—"them niggers keep hollerin' all the time." The melodies are so free that it is impossible to give an adequate picture of them even by transcribing entire songs in musical notation. In mood they run the gamut of the worker's emotional life: his loves and sorrows, his hope and despair, his weariness, his resentment.
c<Oo—oo—oo—oo—uh! If I feels tomorrow like I feels today Take a long freight train wid a red caboose to carry my blues away."
"That's Enoch hollering" said Mrs. Tartt one night, as we sat on her porch near Livingston, Alabama. *
Although the singer was some distance away, the cry seemed to fill completely the void of dark silence about us. The pitch started high but grew to a climax unbelievably high for a deep voice like his, and then faded gradually into a mournful wail, ending in a jumble of words. The call was thrice repeated. |
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