W.EGRO
TOUTH
SPEAKS
205
soun’s it in-a’ my soul,” which is obviously a singing device, a. subtle phrase-molding element from a musical point of view, even if on verbal surface value, it suggests illiteracy. Emotionally, these folks songs are far from simple. They are not only spread over the whole gamut of human moods, with the traditional religious overtone adroitly insinuated in each instance, but there is further a sudden change of mood in the single song, baffling to formal classification. Interesting and intriguing as was Dr. Du Bois’s analysis of their emotional themes, modern interpretation must break with that mode of analysis, and relate these songs to the folk activities that they motivated, classifying them by their respective song-types. From this point of view we have essentially four classes, the almost ritualistic prayer songs or pure Spirituals, the freer and more unrestrained evangelical “shouts” or camp-meeting songs, the folk ballads so overlaid with the tradition of the Spirituals proper that their distinctive type quality has almost been un¬ noticed until lately, and the work and labor songs of strictly secular character. In choral and musical idiom closely related these song types are gradually coming to be regarded as more and more separate, with the term Spiritual reserved almost exclusively for the songs of intensest religious significance and function. Indeed, in the pure Spirituals one can trace the broken fragments of an evangelical folk liturgy, with confes¬ sion, exhortation, “mourning,” conversion and “love-feast” rejoicing as the general stages of a Protestant folk-mass. The instinctive feeling for these differences is almost wholly lost, and it will require the most careful study of the communal life as it still lingers in isolated spots to set the groupings even approximately straight. Perhaps after all the final appeal will have to be made to the sensitive race interpreter, but at present many a half secularized ballad is mistaken for a “spiritual ” and many a camp-meeting shout for a folk hymn. It is not a question of religious content or allusion,—for the great ma¬ jority of the Negro songs have this—but a more delicate ques¬ tion of caliber of feeling and type of folk use. From this important point of view, Negro folk song has yet to be studied. The distinctiveness of the Spirituals after all, and their finest
