W. E. B. Du Bois
American Social Reformer
1868-1963 A selection from
THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK
Narrated by Jeffrey Gilbert
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The Sorrow of Songs
They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days—
Sorrow Songs—for they were weary at heart. 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. Ever since I was a child
these songs have stirred me strangely. 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. Then in after years when I came
to Nashville I saw the great temple built of these songs
towering over the pale city. To me Jubilee Hall seemed ever
made of the songs themselves, and its bricks were red with
the blood and dust of toil. 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.
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. 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. 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
the Negro people.
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.
There was once a blacksmith's son born at Cadiz, New
York, who in the changes of time taught school in Ohio and
helped defend Cincinnati from Kirby Smith. Then he fought at
Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and finally served in the
Freedmen's Bureau at Nashville. Here he formed a Sunday-
school class of black children in 1866, and sang with them
and taught them to sing. And then they taught him to sing, and
when once the glory of the Jubilee songs passed into the soul
of George L. White, he knew his life-work was to let those
Negroes sing to the world as they had sung to him. So in
1871 the pilgrimage of the Fisk Jubilee Singers began. North
to Cincinnati they rode,—four half-clothed black boys and
five girl-women,—led by a man with a cause and a purpose.
They stopped at Wilberforce, the oldest of Negro schools,
where a black bishop blessed them. 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 Congrega-
tional Council at Oberlin revealed them to the world. They
came to New York and Henry Ward Beecher dared to wel-
come them. So their songs conquered till they
sang across the land and across the sea, before Queen and
Kaiser, in Scotland and Ireland, Holland and Switzerland.
Seven years they sang, and brought back a hundred and fifty
thousand dollars to found Fisk University.
Since their day they have been imitated—sometimes well,
by the singers of Hampton and Atlanta, sometimes ill, by
straggling quartettes. Caricature has sought again to spoil the
quaint beauty of the music, and has filled the air with many
debased melodies which vulgar ears scarce know from the
real. 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.
What are these songs, and what do they mean? 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.
They tell us in these eager days that life was joyous to the
black slave, careless and happy. I can easily believe this of
some, of many. But not all the past South, though it rose from
the dead, can gainsay the heart-touching witness of these
songs. 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 wander-
ings and hidden ways.
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. My grandfather's grand-
mother was seized by an evil Dutch trader two centuries ago;
and coming to the valleys of the Hudson and Housatonic,
black, little, and lithe, she shivered and shrank in the harsh
north winds, looked longingly at the hills, and often crooned
a heathen melody to the child between her knees, thus:
Do ba-na co-ba, ge-ne me, ge-ne me!
Do ba-na co-ba, ge-ne me, ge-ne me!
Ben d' nu-li, nu-li, nu-li, ben d' le.
The child sang it to his children and they to their children's
children, and so two hundred years it has travelled down to us
and we sing it to our children, knowing as little as our fathers
what its words may mean, but knowing well the meaning of
its music.
This was primitive African music; it may be seen in larger
form in the strange chant which heralds "The Coming of John":
"You may bury me in the East,
You may bury me in the West,
But I'll hear the trumpet sound in that morning,"
In these songs, the slave spoke to the world.
Such a message is naturally veiled and half articulate. Words
and music have lost each other and new and cant phrases of a
dimly understood theology have displaced the older senti-
ment. Once in a while we catch a strange word of an un-
known tongue; more often slight words or mere doggerel are
joined to music of singular sweetness. Purely secular songs are
few in number, partly because many of them were turned into
hymns by a change of words, partly because the frolics were
seldom heard by the stranger, and the music less often caught.
Of nearly all the songs, however, the music is distinctly
sorrowful.
The words that are left to us are not without interest, and,
cleared of evident dross, they conceal much of real poetry
and meaning beneath conventional theology and unmeaning
rhapsody. Like all primitive folk, the slave stood near to
Nature's heart. Life was a "rough and rolling sea" like the
brown Atlantic of the Sea Islands; the "Wilderness" was the
home of God, and the "lonesome valley" led to the way of
life. "Winter'll soon be over," was the picture of life and
death to a tropical imagination.
As in olden time, the words of these hymns were impro-
vised by some leading minstrel of the religious band. The
circumstances of the gathering, however, the rhythm of the
songs, and the limitations of allowable thought, confined the
poetry for the most part to single or double lines, and they
seldom were expanded to quatrains or longer tales, although
there are some few examples of sustained efforts, chiefly
paraphrases of the Bible.
Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes
a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor
cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confi-
dence. Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in
death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair
world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always
clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by
their souls and not by their skins. Is such a hope justified? Do
the Sorrow Songs sing true? More information about W. E. B. Du Bois from Wikipedia
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