Negro workaday songs

There is this fortunate circumstance which contributes to the completeness and vividness of the Negro portraits as found in workaday songs: the whole picture is often epitomized in each of several characters or types of singers and their songs. Thus the picture may be viewed from all sides and from different angles, with such leisure and repetition as will insure accurate impressions. One of these types is the “po’ boy long way from home” singing down “that lonesome road,” as represented in the previous chapter. Whether in his ordinary daily task, or on his pilgrimages afar, or in the meshes of the law, this singer approaches perfection in the delineation of his type. Another type is that to be found in the story of Left Wing Gordon as presented in Chapter XII, and of John Henry in Chapter XIII. Likewise, the songs of jail and chain gang, the songs of women and love, and the specialized road songs all embody that fine quality of full and complete reflection of the folk spirit in the Negro’s workaday life and experience.

There is perhaps no type, however, which comes more nearly summarizing certain situations, experiences, and backgrounds than the Negro “bad man,” whose story will make an heroic tale of considerable proportions. In many ways the “bad man from bad man’s land” is a favorite. He is eulogized by the youngsters and sung by the worker by the side of the road. One preacher even described Christ as a man who would “stand no foolin’ wid.” “Jesus such great man, no one lak him. Lord, he could pop lion’s head off jes’ lak he wus fryin’-size chicken an’ could take piece o’ mountain top and throw it across the world.” And as for that other bad man, “Nicotemus,” why Jesus, when he got through with him, had him following behind a donkey like any other slave.[27] There was that other young Negro who “was no comfort to preacher, but was a hawk like pizen. Mens like him and wimmin belonged to him wid his winnin’ ways.” In a previous volume[28] we pointed out some of the characteristic experiences and modes of the Negro bum, “bully of this town,” Railroad Bill, Stagolee, Brady, and the others, of twenty years ago. Since that time the tribe has apparently not diminished and flourishes well in the atmosphere of modern life, migration, and the changing conditions of race relations. Of the statistical and environmental aspects of the Negro criminal much will be reported in another study.[29] In this chapter we are concerned with the portrait of a type, perhaps inexorably drawn into the maelstrom of his day and turned into an inevitable product. He is no less an artist than the wanderer, the “travelin’ man,” or Left Wing Gordon. He is the personification of badness mixed with humor, of the bad man and the champion of exploits. We have already referred to the Negro who “wus so mean wus skeered of hisself,” competitor to that other one whose

There were still other companions to these in Slippery Jim, Slewfoot Pete, and Ann-Eliza Stone, “mean wid her habbits on” and breaking up the “jamboree.”[30] A common phrase, indeed, threatened always to “break up dis jamboree” in exchange for slighting one’s “repertation.”

Many are the bad men, and vivid the descriptions. Said one, “Lawd, cap’n, take me till tomorrow night to tell ’bout dat boy. Eve’ybody skeered uv him. John Wilson jes nachelly bully, double j’inted, awful big man, didn’t fear ’roun’ nobody. Would break up ev’y do he ’tended. Go to picnic, take all money off’n table. Couldn’t do nothin’ wid him. Seen feller shoot at him nine times once an’ didn’t do nothin’ to him, an’ he run an’ caught up wid feller an’ bit chunk meat out o’ his back, ... but one man got him wid britch loader an’ stop ’im from suckin’ eggs.”

We have found no black bad-man ballads superior to the old ones, Railroad Bill, Stagolee, That Bully of this Town, Desperado Bill, Eddy Jones, Joe Turner, Brady,[31] and the others. And yet, the current stories sung on the road are more accurate portrayals of actual characters and experiences, and perhaps less finished songs, less formal rhyme. Take Lazarus, for instance, a hard luck story, portraying something of Negro sympathy, burial custom, general reaction. Here is a character more to be pitied than censured, according to his companions. Listen to three pick-and-shovel men, tracing “po’ Lazarus” from the work camp where he, poor foolish fellow, robbed the commissary camp and then took to his heels. Thence between the mountains where the high sheriff shot him down, back to the camp and burying ground, with mother, wife, brothers, sisters, comrades weeping, attending the funeral, where they “put po’ Lazarus away at half pas’ nine.”

It would be difficult to find a scene and setting more appealing than this ballad being sung by a group of workingmen in unison, with remarkable harmony, fine voices, inimitable manner. “Doesn’t this singing hinder you in your work?” we asked one of the pick-and-shovel men, just to see what type of reply he would make. With first a slow look of surprise, then a sort of pity for the man who would ask such a question, then a “Lawdy-Lawd-Cap’n” outburst of laughter, “Cap’n dat’s whut makes us work so much better, an’ it nuthin’ else but.” And one of the group acted the part of the “shouter” very much like the hearers in the church. He would sing a while, then dig away in silence, then burst out with some exhorter’s exclamation about the song, giving zest to the singing, contrast to the imagery, authority to the story. Once as the singers recorded the shooting of Lazarus, he shouted, “Yes, yes, Lawd, Lawd, I seed ’em, I wus dere”; and again when they sang of his mother weeping, “Yes, Lawd, I wus right dere when she come a-runnin’. I know it’s true.” Taken all in all, the sorrowful story of Lazarus, with its painstaking sequence and its melody as sung on this occasion, it is doubtful if ever Negro spiritual surpassed it in beauty and poignancy.

The above version was heard at Danielsville, Georgia. A similar but shorter one, current in North Carolina, is called Billy Bob Russell. “Reason why dey calls it dat is Billy Bob Russell an’ Lazarus been buddies for years, pretty mean boys til dey gits grown. Billy Bob Russell, he’s from Georgia an’ I think Lazarus act sorta like robber or highway robber or somethin’, follow road camp all time.”[32]

In contrast to the more finished rhyming stanzas of Railroad Bill and the earlier heroic epics, note the simple, vivid ballad-in-the-making type of unrhymed song so common as a type of pick-and-shovel melody. Note the accuracy of the picture, its trueness to actual workaday experience, the phrase description. Such a song in the making and in the rendering defies description or competition as a folk-mirror. Differing somewhat and yet of the same general sort of characterization is the current story of Dupree, versions of which have been taken from Asheville, North Carolina, and various other places in Georgia and North Carolina. One of the most interesting aspects of this Dupree song is that it may be compared with the Atlanta ballad of the white Frank Dupree as popularly sung on the phonograph records. The story of the white culprit warns his young friends in the usual way and asks them to meet him in heaven. His crime was, first, snatching a diamond ring for his sweetheart, then shooting the policeman to death, then fleeing but coming back because he could not stay away from his “Betty.” There is little similarity of expression between the white version and the Negro one. Here is the more finished of the Negro songs.

In striking contrast to the Dupree just given is one sung by a young Negro who had been in the chain gang a number of times and whose major repertoire consisted of the plaintive chain gang songs. Here the singer has translated the version into his own vernacular, varying lines, eschewing rhyme, carrying his story through the regular channels of the prison type. The lines are given exactly as sung, repetitions and irregularities constituting their chief distinction. And yet something of the same story runs through it. It is perhaps a little nearer the Atlanta version, and the singer adds still another interpretation that Dupree and Betty had quarreled and as a result Dupree had killed her and hidden her body in the sawdust. An interesting local color is that Dupree was sent to Milledgeville, Georgia, where as a matter of fact is situated the combined state prison and hospital. Here, then, is the song with its mixed imagery and reflection of a certain mentality.

A popular bad man song of many versions is the Travelin’ Man. No one has ever outdistanced him. A long story, rapidly moving, miraculously achieving, triumphantly ending, it represents jazz song, phonograph record, banjo ballad, quartet favorite, although it is not easy to capture. Three versions have been found in the actual singing, one by a quartet which came to Dayton, Tennessee, to help entertain the evolution mongers; another by Kid Ellis, of Spartanburg, South Carolina, himself a professed traveling man; a third by a North Carolina Negro youth who had, however, migrated to Pennsylvania and returned after traveling in seven or eight other states of the union. The South Carolina version, which is given here, is of the Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’ type of vaudeville and ballad mixture.

For the rest of this picture of the bad man the simple presentation of songs and fragments in sufficient numbers to illustrate main types will suffice. His name is legion, and he ranks all the way from the “polish man” to the “boll-weevil nigger,” much despised of the common man of the better sort. Bad men come into peaceful and industrious communities and disturb the peace. They flow in from other states to add to the number of offenders, yet in spite of their numbers and character, the church throng, the picnic, the funeral and other social occasions seem to have much fewer murders and fracases than formerly. If the bad man can be turned into song and verse, with the picture of adventure and romance becoming more and more mythical, the Negro will profit by the evolution. For the present, however, here are samples of the portrayals most commonly sung, with apologies to all improvisators, minstrel artists, and white-folk imitators of Negro verse.