The African Roots of Field Hollers and Work Songs (Continued)
Noted Ethiopian scholar Ashenafi Kebede differentiates calls from cries as heard in the video Amazing African Tribe Vocal Samples. Whereas slaves may have used calls primarily to communicate information-to alert a dozing friend of a fast-approaching White overseer-cries, on the other hand, express a deeply felt emotional experience, such as hunger, loneliness, or lovesickness. Cries are half-sung and half-yelled and often intermix vocables in the text. Slaves performed these melodies in a free and spontaneous style.
Amazing African Tribe Vocal Samples
Recorded by Ashenafi Kebede
These are often ornamented and employ many African vocal devices, such as yodels, echolike falsetto, tonal glides, embellished melismas, and microtonal inflections that are frequently impossible to represent in European staff notation. We are grouping all of these vocal devices under the category of vocalizations. "There is no doubt," he writes, "that these calls were African in derivation and that they were sung in African dialects in the early part of slave history" (Kebede 1982, n.p.). Those cries, Kebede believes, evolved into the religious songs or spirituals of African Americans.
Frederick Law Olmsted wrote one of the earliest-and most eloquent-depictions of field hollers in 1853:
Suddenly [a slave] raised such a sound as I had never heard before, a long, loud musical shout, rising and falling, and breaking into falsetto, his voice ringing through the woods in the clear frosty night air, like a bugle call. As he finished, the melody was caught up by another, and then, another, and then, by several in chorus.
(Olmsted 1856, n.p.)
It is important to remember that field hollers and work songs could also be religious. As in Africa, slaves made no distinction between the "religious" and "nonreligious" aspects of their life. William C. Turner says that Africans believe that music is "numinous" -it manifests as the most primordial force in life and is the providence of deities (Spencer 1987, 69).
Drinking of the Wine
Bernice Johnson Reagon
As Robert Darden writes in People Get Ready, "Harvest-related elements sometimes appear in the spirituals, just as sacred elements sometimes appear in the work songs and field hollers. Lydia Parrish recorded several heavily rhythmic chain gang work songs while on the Sea Islands off Georgia," including the song "Drinkin' of the Wine" (Darden, 2004).
Luke 9:62, NKJV
No one, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God
Ashenafi Kebede
There is no doubt that these calls were African in derivation and that they were sung in African dialects in the early part of slave history.