Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 5 1887.djvu/17

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Chorus.Take back, &c.

Chorus.Take back, &c.

Chorus.Take back, &c.

Chorus.Take back", &c.

These songs are sung on the Carrington Estate in Barbados, and were obtained for me by Miss Elizabeth Carrington, of Great Missenden Abbey, who had them written down by the negroes themselves. It is stated that the coloured people of the United States are fast losing their characteristic minstrelsy. In the preface to the valuable little collection of Slave Songs, published by Simpson and Co., New York, 1867, the editors remark—"It is, we repeat, already becoming difficult to obtain these songs. Even the 'spirituals' are going out of use on the plantations, superseded by the new style of religious music 'closely imitated from the white people. Of secular songs there are in that collection very few indeed, and those few are mostly composed in the French dialect, spoken by the negroes of LousianaLouisiana [sic]. Mr. Joel Chandler Harris has succeeded in finding some further specimens, but a recent writer in the Atlantic Monthly confirms