laborators on ‘Slave Songs of the United States’
recognized, but could not imprison on the written
page, were elements which would have been of
especial interest to the student of art.
“Is it not the merest quibble to say that these songs are not American? They were created in America under American influences and by people who are Americans in the same sense that any other element of our population is American—every element except the aboriginal. . . . Is it only an African who can sojourn here without becoming an American and producing American things; is it a matter of length of stay in the country? Scarcely that; or some Negroes would have at least as good a claim on the title as the descendants of the Puritans and Pilgrims. Negroes figure in the accounts of his voyages to America made by Columbus. . . . A year before the English colonists landed on Plymouth Rock Negroes were sold into servitude in Virginia.”[1]
The most gifted and sympathetic student of the folk-song in Africa and America was Natalie Curtis, and it is scarcely necessary to add to what she has so carefully and sympathetically written. She has traced the connection between African and Afro-American music which has always been
- ↑ H. E. Krehbiel, Afro-American Folksongs, New York, 1914; cf. also John W. Work, Folksong of the American Negro, Nashville, Tenn., 1915.
