Barrelhouse Blues

In his book The Negro and His Music, chapter 4, Alain Locke observed that it had “become fashionable to collect Negro folk ditties and work songs; and even the ‘blues’ have taken on musical respectability. We now see in them unique expressions of Negro emotion, folk-wit and musical inventiveness.” Locke considered the secular themes in the songs to be “far more fragmentary than the spirituals, but being a combination of folk poetry and folk music, the words are welded closer to the music than in the case of the spirituals.” Such seculars “were more of a direct improvisation than the spirituals, which in thought were too influenced by the evangelical hymns after which they were originally modelled.” So Locke was curious about why the seculars had been neglected by the early nineteenth-century collectors of slave and African songs.

In those early days, many song collectors frequently emphasized the sacred nature of the spirituals in order to place the singers in a good light. The earliest major collection, Slave Songs of the United States, was gathered and compiled by Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim, and published in New York in 1867. It consisted of 178 songs, predominantly religious in content, that were collected in Port Royal, South Carolina, near the Sea Islands. The introductory text did mention “shouts” and loading songs sung by Black stevedores, as well as a “gentleman from Delaware” who had observed that “some of the best of our Negro songs I have ever heard were those that used to be sung by the Black stevedores.” One such apparent work song was “Heave Away,” whose words were minimal:

Among the few seculars included in Slave Songs were “Shock Along John” and “Round the Corn Sally,” whose lyrics went as follows:

A similar lack was evident in other early collections, such as E. McIlhenny’s Befo’ de War Spirituals, which cited 122 songs obtained from former slaves on his family’s plantation on Avery Island, Louisiana: “By the time I was ten years of age, I think I knew every religious song of our community, and often joined lustily in their singing during the Sunday gatherings,” McIlhenny recalled. The song collections of R. Emmet Kennedy, the son of another plantation owner, were broader in scope, however. His Mellows: A Chronicle of Unknown Singers (1925) included five straight and “harmonized folk songs,” half a dozen “Street Cries of New Orleans,” and five work songs among others that were primarily secular in content. (The term “mellows” was used by Louisiana Blacks and was derived from “melodies.”) Kennedy also produced a second collection, More Mellows (1931), in which he added a few more seculars, one being “Sugar Babe.”

No doubt many slaves were aware that the White people who were interested in their songs placed special emphasis on the spirituals. When the African American writer James Weldon Johnson published The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925), followed by a second volume in 1926, neither included seculars. It may appear to some that these collections concentrated on religious rather than secular songs as a gesture toward the slaves’ faith. But it is more likely that most of the songs sung by slaves were religious, for biblical themes frequently promised freedom and expressed feelings that likely carried a metaphoric meaning for slaves, such as “Steal Away” or “Crossing the River of Jordan.”

Few (if any) nineteenth-century song collectors concentrated solely on secular songs, but I’ve obtained some examples nonetheless. The White colonel of the first Black regiment in the Civil War, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, collected many songs from his servicemen. Most were thoroughly religious in tone but often served other functions too. “The Coming Day” was a boat song that “timed well with the tug of the air.” “‘The Driver,’” he observed, “is quite secular in its character, yet its author called it a ‘spiritual.’”

The best collections of seculars were made by relatives of plantation owners and others who had a long association with their informants. At the time when Locke was writing, Lydia Parrish was completing Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands in which she discussed boat songs, shanties, loading calls, and other songs that accompanied rice beating, lumber pulling, ballast rolling, and similar heavy labor. Collectors often interwove traditional spirituals with more recent gospel songs as well as secular songs. Only the earliest collectors would have been able to identify the earliest form of the songs.

Two hundred years of a song being passed down in one family, such as a tradition described by W. E. B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk, may have no published parallels. Yet the “steps of development” of the African, Afro-American, and “foster-land” blend that he identified were probably widely applicable, if rarely noted. Along the same lines, Lydia Parrish summarized examples of African survivals, Afro-American shout songs, ring play, dance, and fiddle songs, over thirty religious songs, and nearly as many work songs. Parrish included both texts and music, together with related examples. In my book Savannah Syncopators: African Retentions in the Blues (1970), based on music I heard in the West African savannah region, I showed how African elements in music and song were retained among the slaves’ descendants until the late twentieth century. The earliest forms of African American music may never be defined with absolute certainty. But musical elements related to the African inheritance, as well as to Anglo-Scots settlers, by way of proto-blues seculars, can still be traced in the blues. The European secular song traditions converged and were sustained in the widespread popularity of ballads. Although folk ballads are centuries older than the blues, their relationship should not be dismissed. There is no evidence that blues appeared in a distinct form until the late nineteenth century. While the sorrow songs that DuBois wrote about would appear to be precursors of the blues, he related them instead to the later development of the spirituals, as did Emmett Kennedy when he wrote about the mellows.

The era of the development of “gospel song” was important in African American religious life, as the spirituals and anthems had declined in popularity. It is however, a parallel story, one which also involves the recording of their singing and that of gospel choirs and quartets, and the preachers of the Baptist churches and the new sects, especially that of the Church of God in Christ.

The precise origin of blues may never be determined. Broadly, it may be considered to be the South, or for some authors such as Robert Palmer, the Deep South, if the early development of the music is implied in the phrase. Mississippi is most frequently identified as the source, specifically the region between the confluence of the Yazoo River and the Mississippi River, which embraces a large flat area of black soil. These flatlands of the so-called Mississippi Delta (as distinguished from the true delta at the mouth of the Mississippi River) lent themselves to cotton cultivation and supported numerous large plantations that employed many slave descendants. Certain townships such as Clarksdale and settlements such as Drew were home to many blues singers. However, comparable towns throughout the zones of Negro seculars Locke referred to have supported innumerable blues singers and musicians.