WHEN DARKIES SING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 18, 27 October 1939, Page 23

WHEN DARKIES SING

Out of the Cottonfields Came Jazz

HEY were dark days in American history, the days of slavery in the Southern cotton fields and slave trading of unfortunate negroes from Africa. But while the black man’s shoulders smarted under the white man’s whip, he was creating an art which was to become famous. On the plantations, the darkies sang their melancholy songs. One would have thought that their music would be full of the strident call for revenge, that their songs would be vindictive. Instead their music was sad, wistful, full of a gentle resignation to the black man’s burden. Their early music evolved from that of the land of their ancestors — they used the five-note scale, as in such choruses as "Go Down Moses." Later, when. they were swept away by the evangelistic fervour inculcated by revival meetings of Baptists and Methodists, they chanted their own arrangement of hymn tunes. Few races have a_ stronger natural sense of rhythm. In the Negro music came a curious hesitancy, a half beat, an unexpected stress. It became the syncopation craze which crashed into the ballrooms of the world, and still holds sway disguised by the titles of

"ragtime" and "swing," and qualified by "sweet" and "corny." The white races have made a fetish of rhythm. The negro has . "got rhythm," but he was sophisticated enough not to acclaim it constantly as a phenomenon of recent dis closure. From a literary point of view the words of the negro songs are sometimes very crude; but they have a certain dramatic strength. God, Christ, the Devil, and heroes and heroines of the Old and New Testaments are all highly dramatised characters. In some negro religious services, the community push back the benches to the wall and march round singing — sometimes for hours on end. This is called a "Shout." Realisation of negro musical powers came when the " Jubilee" Singers of the negro Fisk University began making concert tours. They sang in many European countries, and appeared before Queen Victoria. On Monday, October 30, at 9.25 p.m., "Negro Music and Musicians" will be heard from 2YA Wellington. This item will be presented by R. B. Williams, who was himself once a member of the far-famed Fisk Jubilee Singers, and who brings to this programme his special knowledge of the music of his countrymen.