196 Culture, Identity, and Community: From Slavery to the Presentcries,” the most favored type, featuring elaborate vocalizing
that cannot be recorded with standard musical notation;
and “coloratura cries,” the most amazing and remarkable
feats in folk music. As agriculture and other manual labor
in the South became mechanized, the holler became in-
creasingly rare. Even so, it lived on in folk preaching, dance
calling, and gospel, blues, and jazz singing, and according
to James, its infl uence is even to be heard in the singing of
popular white crooners.
Th e holler’s infl uence is nowhere stronger than in the
blues. Enslaved Africans used their culturally more sophis-
ticated understanding of tone to vocally simulate sounds
from the world around them. Th is included vocal simula-
tions of European musical instruments, especially horns.
Later, when African Americans were able to obtain Euro-
pean instruments, they adapted them to the aesthetic of
the holler by muting and plunging them, bending notes,
and so forth. Like the holler, blues is solo vocalizing, of a
melancholic character, which emphasizes tone quality and
variation. As a vocal genre, the blues, like the holler, allow
for and displays great freedom. It is through the blues and
black gospel that African American music of the second
half of the 20th century absorbed this aesthetic, perhaps
witnessed nowhere more spectacularly than in the live per-
formances of James Brown and the carefully controlled and
tonally complex shrieks and hollers they featured.
See also: Africanisms; Blues Music; Call-and-Response;
Douglass, Frederick; Field Hands; Slave CultureFred J. HayBibliography
Courlander, Harold. Negro Folk Music U.S.A. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1963.
Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. New York:
Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855.
James, Willis Laurence. “Th e Romance of the Negro Folk Cry in
America.” In Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Read-
ings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore, ed. Alan
Dundes. Englewood Cliff s, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973.Fitzgerald, Ella
Known as the First Lady of Song, Ella Fitzgerald (1917–
1996) was an accomplished jazz musician who charmed au-
diences and critics alike from the time she won the ApolloGutman, Herbert. Th e Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1 750–
19 25. New York: Pantheon, 1976.
Hill, Robert. Strengths of Black Families. New York: Emerson Hull,
1972.
Martin, Joanne M., and Elmer Martin. Th e Helping Tradition in the
Black Family and Community. Washington, D.C.: National
Association of Social Workers Press, 1985.
Moynihan, Daniel. Th e Negro Family: Th e Case for National Ac-
tion. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Labor, Offi ce of
Policy Planning and Research, 1965.
Field Hollers
Field hollers—also known as whooping, arhoolies, cries,
and hollers—were a form of communication between en-
slaved people on cotton, rice, and sugar plantations. Along
with work songs, fi eld hollers were vocal expressions that
allowed slaves to articulate religious zeal, feelings of frus-
tration, and even secret messages about escaping slavery.
Yet unlike collective work songs, fi eld hollers were a solitary
expression, sung for one’s own joy, grief, relief, and so on;
to communicate one’s location or other information to oth-
ers; to call the hunting dogs; to let one’s family and neigh-
bors know one is returning home, and so on. Even so, there
was oft en a call-and-response component to fi eld hollers,
in which the holler might be echoed by other workers or
passed from one to another.
Drawing on African musical styles, fi eld hollers fol-
lowed specifi c patterns; they were sung with recognizable
lyrics or as meaningless embellished sounds, they tended
to be highly improvisational, and they were characterized
by a nuanced control of tone and pitch. Early writers, in-
cluding renowned black abolitionist Frederick Douglass,
wrote of the hollers’ vocal gymnastics and their character-
istic melancholic cast. Scholars have likewise suggested that
antebellum hollers, which whites oft en described as “mean-
ingless,” may, in fact, have been sung in African languages
not recognized by the overseers, thus serving as subversive
and clandestine communication among the enslaved.
Moreover, music educator Willis Laurence James rec-
ognized that fi eld hollers possessed a common African ori-
gin with other types of black vocal expression. He grouped
fi eld hollers with other African American cries, from street
peddler’s calls to the hollers of black drill sergeants and
baseball umpires, and classifi ed hollers into three catego-
ries: “plain cries,” the simplest in form and structure; “fl orid