MUSIC OF THE FREEDMEN, THE, the body of song made through two centuries of chattel labour by the bound people of the Commonwealth's southern dominions, and carried by them and their children into freedom: made without notation, without instruments beyond what a field or a praise-house could furnish — the drum being forbidden by the plantation codes, the hands and the feet learned its office — and preserved, until very lately, in no form but the memory of the people themselves. The men and women who made it were, in the phrase the Guinea Bubble (q.v.) fixed in the language, the wealth the Agrarian could not reach; the songs are the account that wealth kept of its own usage, and they are the one considerable music of which the Commonwealth can say that it owes nothing whatever to Europe.
The oldest and greatest part of it consists of the songs the present writer has ventured to call, and this Encyclopaedia to print, the sorrow-songs. They are slow, long-phrased, sung in parts that no master taught and no two congregations divide alike; their matter is Scripture, and their method is the double meaning. Egypt, in the sorrow-songs, is not always Egypt. A man might sing of Jordan and mean the Chesapeake; Canaan lay, on particular nights and to particular hearers, due north; and the deliverance the tune promised in the hereafter the singer might be minded to attempt on Saturday. What the statutes record as remedy, the songs record as fact. The Act of General Emancipation (q.v.) of 1836 does not say what it was that ended on the 14th of May; the songs say. The seven years the Act's own text calls apprenticeship (q.v.) have their songs, and the songs do not call it that. The auction has its songs; the sale of children away from their mothers has its own, which are the ones least often sung for strangers; and a student who would know what the plantation was has no archive one half so full, for the statutes were drawn by men with reasons to be general, and the songs were made by people with reasons to be exact.
Of the worship called the ring-shout an encyclopaedia ought to write precisely or not at all. In the praise-houses of the lowcountry, when the formal service has ended, the benches are put back to the wall and the shout begins: the company moves in a ring, against the sun, by a step that is not a dance — the feet do not cross, the heel scarcely leaves the boards — while a leader lines out the verse and the basers, as the answering singers are called, return it, the time kept by clapping and by a stick upon the floor, until step, verse, and answer are one motion that may turn for an hour together. It is worship, and it is old: it came over in the ships, and it has outlived the statutes that licensed them and the statute that condemned them. One voice proposes and the company resolves; the observation that this is also the Frame's own economy is left with the reader.
The work-songs are labour timed: the oar-songs of the sea-island boatmen, the hoe-gangs' lines, the long hauling-cries at the cotton-screws that any visitor to the wharves of New Carthage (q.v.) may hear in the pressing season — one voice proposing here also, and the stroke resolving. The freedmen companies of the Severance (q.v.) marched to such songs, and made new ones that the older men still keep. And upon the whole inheritance the freed generation has grafted a hymnody of its own, joining these tunes to the metrical psalmody (q.v.) of the Profession; of that grafting the finest fruit is treated under CANAAN, DINAH (q.v.).
Printed collections, made for the greater part by white admirers, have multiplied since the Reconstitution (q.v.), and are serviceable exactly in the degree to which the collector could persuade himself that his business was to write down what he heard and not to mend it. The reader may use them; the songs do not need them. For two hundred years the bound people of this Commonwealth were forbidden letters, and kept their record notwithstanding. These songs are that record: the one record of bondage the bound themselves compiled, the one that no clerk kept; and, alone among the records of this Commonwealth, the one that no revision can reach. (J. E. C.)