Lizzie, and Come Along, I'm Through With Worrying. Of this song a special word can be said. It is based on Swing Low, Sweet Chariot and imposes on that melody a negro theme (the shiftlessness and assurance of "gonna live until I die") and a musical structure similar to that applied to the same original by Anton Dvorak in the New World Symphony. I am only a moderate admirer of this work; I am not trying to put Come Along into the same category, for its value is wholly independent of its comparative merits; nor am I claiming that jazz is equal to or greater or less than symphonic music. But I do feel that the treatment of a negro melody, by negros, to make a popular and beautiful song for Americans ought not to be always neglected, always despised. I say also that our serious composers have missed so much in not seeing what the ragtime composers have done, that (like Lady Bracknell) they ought to be exposed to comment on the platform.
If they cannot hear the almost unearthly cry of the Beale Street Blues I can only be sorry for them; the whole of Handy's work is melodically of the greatest interest and is to me so versatile, so changing in quality, that I am incapable of suggesting its elements. Observed in the works of others the blues retain some of this elusive nature—they are equivocal between simplicity, sadness, irony, and something approaching frenzy. The original negro spiritual has had more respect, but the elements have been sparsely used, and one fancies that even in looking at these our serious composers have felt the presence of a regrettable vulgarity in syncopation and in melodic line. Jesus Heal' de Sick is negro from the Bahamas; its syncopation, its cry, Bow low! are repeated in any number of others; the spirituals themselves were often made out of the common songs in which common feeling rose to intense and poetic expression—as in Round About de Mountain, a funeral song with the Resurrection in a magnificent phrase: "an' she'll rise in His arms." The only place we have these things left, whether you call the present version de- based or sophisticated, gain or loss, is in ragtime, in jazz. I do not think that the negro (in African plastic or in American rag) is our salvation. But he has kept alive things without which our lives would be perceptibly meaner, paler, and nearer to atrophy and decay.
I say the negro is not our salvation because with all my feeling for what he instinctively offers, for his desirable indifference to our
