CHAPTER 4 | TRADITIONAL AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSIC MAKING 89
plantation on a holiday and saw slaves dancing to a unique kind of accompani-
ment, called patting juba: placing one foot “a little in advance of the other, rais-
ing the ball of the foot from the ground, and striking it in regular time, while,
in connection, the hands are struck slightly together, and then upon the thighs.”
Patting juba was a transformation of African drumming practice, using the
human body as a substitute for the outlawed percussion instruments.
Travelers in the South were also struck by the way slaves sang while they
worked. Frederick Law Olmsted in 1853 described a slave’s fi eld holler as “a long,
loud, musical shout, rising and falling and breaking into falsetto.” Communal
work songs helped workers fulfi ll their tasks by pacing their activity, coordi-
nating their movements, and rallying their spirits. Observers often described
responsorial singing with strict rhythm and short phrases, the leader improvis-
ing calls and the group responding.
Slaves were “generally expected to sing as well as to work,” recalled Frederick
Douglass, born a slave in Maryland around 1818. “A silent slave is not liked by mas-
ters or overseers,” he explained: “‘Make a noise,’ ‘make a noise,’ and ‘bear a hand,’ are
the words usually addressed to the slaves when there is silence amongst them.
This may account for the almost constant singing heard in the southern states.”
Douglass’s statement points to the unique conditions in which blacks made music
in antebellum America (that is, the United States in the decades before the Civil
War). Aware that slaves’ bodies were easier to control than their minds, masters
could command singing to track their workers’ whereabouts and monitor their
mood. When slaves sang of brutality, injustice, or liberation within white hear-
ing, they often disguised their meanings; it has long been understood that what
slaves sang about was not always obvious from the words of their songs. To a
slave, Douglass wrote, songs “represent the sorrows, rather than the joys of his
heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.”
Work songs were sung by stevedores hauling cargo on or off ships, by fi eld
workers hoeing and weeding cotton, and by work crews clearing brush and tim-
ber with axes. After the Civil War, new work songs were created and old ones
adapted by railroad crews driving spikes and by prison chain gangs repairing
roads and performing other menial tasks. Though surely not identical to the
songs of slavery, these later work songs offer the historian a glimpse of how those
earlier songs might have sounded.
Both before and after the Civil
War, the job of the work song was
to coordinate group efforts, such
as the pull of the stevedores’ ropes,
and more generally to set a sustain-
able pace for repetitive actions such
as swinging a hoe. A good leader
needed a strong voice and an abil-
ity to remember or improvise long
strings of calls. Most important,
though, was an ability to combine
a good sense of time with a knowl-
edge of the work at hand in order
to set and sustain the correct pace.
A prisoner in the Mississippi StateAnonymous Portrayal of Stevedores
in Mobile, Alabama, as They Unload a
Steamboat, 1857T
he men keep the most perfect time by means of their songs.
These ditties, nearly meaningless, have much music in
them, and as all join in the perpetually recurring chorus, a rough
harmony is produced, by no means unpleasing. I think the leader
improvises the words... he singing one line alone, and the whole
then giving the chorus, which is repeated without change at every
line, till the general chorus concludes the stanza.In their own words
work songs172028_04_086-105_r2_vs.indd 89 23/01/13 10:07 AM