Berea Quarterly, February 1899

              OLD  PLANTATION  HYMNS.
 
By William E. Barton, D. D.
 
songs not already familiar. The grow­ing conditions among the negroes are unfavorable to the making of new songs, and the ground has been pretty well hunted over for the old ones. It would be a thing quite worth while to discover a new or old one as sweet as "Swing low, sweet chariot," or as quaint as "Turn back Pharaoh's ar­my," or as pathetic and powerful as "Steal away." If anyone knows any such, he ought to see.that they are preserved, both words and music.
It was the writer's privilege to live in the South from 1880 till 1887, and to come into contact with a good many kinds of people. During the earlier years especially he made care­ful records of most that interested him, and he supplemented these rec­ords as the years went by with what­ever came in his way. One of the things which never was allowed to es­cape was an odd song, secular or re­ligious ; and wherever possible the quaint air as well as the words was written down at the time. These have waited for eleven years, and it is time that they were printed if they are to appear at all. It is possible that some have been printed already; but even if so, the variations will be of interest. The most of them, however, are prob­ably new to almost all who will see them here, and many, I am confident, have never been printed or even writ­ten before.
Conspicuous among the religious songs of the colored people, as of the white people in the Cumberland Mountains, is the large group of "Family Songs," in which the chief or only variation in the successive stan­zas is the substitution of "father," "mother," or other relative in order. One of the most unique of these is,
ONE of the most genuine surprises ever given to lovers of music oc-cured in 1871, when a company of students from Fisk University started North, to earn money for that school by singing the plantation hymns of their parents. When Henry Ward Beecher admitted them to Ply­mouth Church, the papers had not a little to say in a joking way of "Beech-er's Negro Minstrels." To the sur­prise of everybody, the moderate suc­cess for which the promoters of the scheme had hoped and the dismal fail­ure which the beginnings of the enter­prise prophesied were both forgotten in a most brilliant campaign upon both sides of the ocean, resulting in the building of Jubilee Hall and in the publication of the "Jubilee Songs," by voice and press, wherever the English language is known and even beyond. The story of these negro boys and girls singing their quaint, weird songs before crowned heads reads like a ro­mance. The continued popularity of the airs then first introduced is at­tested by their use at all manner of oc­casions, from funerals to yachting par­ties, and their republication in all manner of books, from collections of Sunday-school melodies to books of college songs. Whatever the critic may say about them,-and what he says is usually divided between praise and as­tonishment,-there is no denying their power. Many of us have seen great congregations swayed by them as a field of grain before the wind. Dvorak calls their tunes our only characteris­tic American music, and his suite based on their airs is well known. To critics and to common people they are alike enjoyable.
There is a good deal of danger that we shall not discover many of these
old plantation hymns.
Copyright, 1898, by Warren F. Kellogg.
1899, by William E. Barton.