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Our Singing Country |
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4 Well, he run away to see Miss Mary, Long summer day,
Well, he run right away to see his baby, Long summer day.
5 Well, the white man sont and got him a doctor, etc.
6 Well, "Go back to the field, you got no fever," etc.
7 Well, the summer day makes a nigger feel lazy, etc.
GODAMIGHTY DRAG
From the singing- of Alan Lomax, learned from Augustus Haggerty and group of Negroes. Huntsville Penitentiary, Texas, 1934.
His nickname was Track Horse, and he's dead now. His body was a thick wedge of strength that could tie a rainbow round his shoulder * all day under the hot broiling sun, and he had the voice of a lead man for both work songs and spirituals. The lead man has to have a strong carrying voice, but most of all he has to dare to thrust out ahead of the rhythm with his verse lines so that the refrain bursts out of the gang like beer out of a bunghole.
In his "Godamighty Drag"—"drag" here meaning a hot, syncopated tempo—each prisoner tells his own story. When one leader slacks his singing, another prisoner speaks his individual mind, and the group roars assent —"Wo, Lawdy!"—as if to say, "That's true for you and the same damn thing happened to me."
"I" and "me" in the Negro work songs, blues, and hollers are always thus expressions of the feeling of the Negro community as well as of the individual who is singing. The first person singular means, "I, the Negro woman or man"—not self-consciously so, but because, as the song passes from one singer to another with its burden of common experience, it can invisibly and immediately belong to the individual singer. The melodic and literary forms involved are so universally familiar that the material can be remolded with facility by each victim of "the blues." The root of this communal quality is the community tragedy in the life of the Southern Negro.
* * #
Look over yonder where the sun done gone} It may be a cemeteryy but it's my home,
* * * * The shimmering arc of the whirling axe. |
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