[Review of] John N. Work, Composer and Arranger, American Negro Songs for Mixed Voices (Philadelphia: Theodore Presser Co., 1948, 259 pp., $1.50)

Summary

This collection is obviously a re-publication from the same plates as the 1940 edition published under the same title by Howell, Soskin, and Company, and it is therefore already a well-known contribution. Since, however, it has not been reviewed in these pages, and since its re-publication by a music publisher gives this outstanding collection now to a new and undoubtedly wider, singing public, an evaluation eight years later is not out of order.

The initial five chapters preceding the 230 songs are of distinct value, with the first two of special significance: Origins, The Spiritual, The Blues, Work Songs, and Social and Miscellaneous Songs. The songs themselves are for the most part spiritual songs, with a few fine work songs at the end, a few social songs, and a scattering of three-phrase songs suggesting blues relationship. In full appreciation of the fact that many spiritual songs and work songs have common roots, I venture to suggest that a more accurate title, indicating the preponderance of the spiritual songs, might have been found.

Mr. Work ably enters the discussion carried on these past fifteen years concerning the Negro versus white origins in Negro spiritual songs. The points he makes are well taken. It has seemed to me for some time that claims for preponderance of white origin in Negro spiritual music have laid too great weight on the importance of tonal skeleton and the written source, and too little on the rhythmic and tonal flesh in which the skeleton is clothed by the rich and varied singing style of this oral tradition. Also given too little consideration is the fact that in any creative process, either in fine art or folk music, the utilization of materials already current in the tradition is to be taken for granted; that any live tradition, fine art or folk, lives by means of a process such as Mr. Work terms “re-assembling” (I prefer “re-composing”); and that as Mr. Work points out there is a big difference between this process and “imitation.” Certainly, the Negro seized upon elements that were vital in the European-American tradition with which he found himself surrounded. Certainly, too, he contributed elements that were vital and had survived in his own tradition.