Historical voices

The songs are indeed the siftings of centuries; the music is far more ancient than the words, and in it we can trace here and there signs of development.

They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.

But not all the past South, though it rose from the dead, can gainsay the heart-touching witness of these songs.

I know little of music and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something of men, and knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of the slave to the world.

But the true Negro folk-song still lives in the hearts of those who have heard them truly sung and in the hearts of the Negro people.

They came to New York and Henry Ward Beecher dared to welcome them, even though the metropolitan dailies sneered at his “Nigger Minstrels.” So their songs conquered till they sang across the land and across the sea, before Queen and…

Then they went, fighting cold and starvation, shut out of hotels, and cheerfully sneered at, ever northward; and ever the magic of their song kept thrilling hearts, until a burst of applause in the Congregational Council at Oberlin…

But the world listened only half credulously until the Fisk Jubilee Singers sang the slave songs so deeply into the world’s heart that it can never wholly forget them again.

Their appearance was uncouth, their language funny, but their hearts were human and their singing stirred men with a mighty power.

Some, like “Near the lake where drooped the willow,” passed into current airs and their source was forgotten; others were caricatured on the “minstrel” stage and their memory died away.

It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of…

And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas.

Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty.

Out of them rose for me morning, noon, and night, bursts of wonderful melody, full of the voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the voices of the past.

To me Jubilee Hall seemed ever made of the songs themselves, and its bricks were red with the blood and dust of toil.

Then in after years when I came to Nashville I saw the great temple builded of these songs towering over the pale city.

They came out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me and of mine.

Ever since I was a child these songs have stirred me strangely.

And so before each thought that I have written in this book I have set a phrase, a haunting echo of these weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men.

They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days—Sorrow Songs—for they were weary at heart.

And all the time he had meant right,—and yet, and yet, somehow he found it so hard and strange to fit his old surroundings again, to find his place in the world about him.

If he but had some master-work, some life-service, hard,—aye, bitter hard, but without the cringing and sickening servility, without the cruel hurt that hardened his heart and soul.

Then, leaning back with a sigh, he said, “This is the World.” The notion suddenly seized him to see where the world was going; since many of the richer and brighter seemed hurrying all one way.

A tinge of sarcasm crept into his speech, and a vague bitterness into his life; and he sat long hours wondering and planning a way around these crooked things.