Page:Natalie Curtis - Negro Folk-Songs Book 1.djvu/5



HAMPTON NORMAL AND AGRICULTURAL INSTITUTE, the pioneer industrial school for Negroes and Indians in America, was founded in 1868 by General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, who first conceived the idea that training in "labor for the sake of character" as well as for economic necessity, should be the initial step in the development of backward races. The school numbers about nine hundred students, drawn from all over the United States, while thousands of graduates have spread the Hampton spirit of service throughout the country and even far across the seas; for a few West Indians, Filipinos, Chinese, Japanese and Africans have also profited by Hampton's training and have gone back to their people to teach and lead them. Hampton believes in the good in every race; worthy traits are studied and developed; the folk-lore of Negroes and Indians is preserved and encouraged; and the singing of racial music is a part of the life of the school.

These notations of Negro folk-songs are faithful efforts to place on paper an exact record of the old traditional plantation songs as sung by Negroes. The harmonies are the Negroes' own. I have added nothing and I have striven to omit nothing. Every note in every voice was written down as sung by groups of Negroes, utterly untaught musically, who harmonized the old melodies as they sang, simply because it was natural for them to do so. The Negroes possess an intuitive gift for part-singing, which is an African inheritance. The music of most primitive or savage peoples usually consists in rhythm and melody only. But the native of Africa has a rudimentary harmonic sense, distinctly manifested in some of the African folk-songs that I have studied and recorded.1 This instinct, transplanted to America and influenced by European music, has flowered into the truly extraordinary harmonic talent found in the singing of even the most ignorant Negroes of our Southern States. It seemed to me an obvious artistic duty to set down these intuitive harmonies and to note, in so far as possible, the emotional and dynamic qualities of Negro singing, as well as the forceful, yet subtle rhythmic peculiarities of the music.

No two groups of Negroes harmonize a song in the same way. These records are therefore musical photographs of particular groups, not composite pictures. The singing of plantation songs at Hampton is spontaneous and natural. No one teaches Negro songs. In one group of boys that sang for me, the tenor was learning to be a bricklayer and came to our meetings still grimed with toil; another was studying to teach school in a rural district; a third had learned the tinsmith's trade, and a fourth was ploughing the fields. These young men simply met and sang, each making up his own part and combining with the others till all together they produced a harmony that pleased them. In a general way, certain rudimentary harmonies for the old

1 For a fuller exposition of the whole subject of Negro Song, see Foreword to Book II of this Series.