Some Current Folk-Songs of the Negro — A Reader’s Guide

Produced by Tor Martin Kristiansen, Joseph Cooper and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

SOME CURRENT FOLK-SONGS OF THE NEGRO

BY W. H. THOMAS, College Station, Texas

_Read before the Folk-Lore Society of Texas, 1912_

PUBLISHED BY THE FOLK-LORE SOCIETY OF TEXAS

WILL THOMAS AND THE TEXAS FOLK-LORE SOCIETY

Now that this brochure is being reprinted by the Texas Folk-Lore Society, I take the opportunity to say a word concerning its author and its history.

Although not a numbered publication, =Some Current Folk-Songs of the Negro= (1912) was the first item produced by the Texas Folk-Lore Society. At the time dues to the Society were two-bits a year--not enough to allow a very extensive publication. Number I (now reprinted under the title of =Round the Levee=) was not issued until 1916; then it was seven more years before another volume was issued, since which time, 1923, the Society has sent out a book annually to its members. The credit for initiating the Society's policy of recording the lore of Texas and the Southwest belongs to Will H. Thomas.

At the time his pamphlet was issued, he was president of the organization, to which office he was elected again in 1923. His idea was that people who work with folk-lore should not only collect it but interpret it and also enjoy it. This view is expressed in his delightful essay on "The Decline and Decadence of Folk Metaphor," in =Publications= Number II (=Coffee in the Gourd=) of the Society.

The view is thoroughly representative of the man, for Will Thomas was a vigorous, sane man with a vigorous, sane mind. He had a sense of humor and, therefore, a sense of the fitness of things. For nearly thirty years he taught English in the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, and I have often wished that more professors of English in the colleges and universities over the country saw into the shams and futilities and sheer nonsense that passes for "scholarship" as thoroughly as he saw into them. Yet he was tolerant. He was a salt-of-the-earth kind of man.

He was born of the best of old-time Texas stock on a farm in Fayette County, January 11, 1880; he got his collegiate training at Austin College, Sherman, and the University of Texas and then took his Master's degree at Columbia University. He was co-editor, with Stewart Morgan, of two volumes of essays designed for collegians. He died March 1, 1935. Gates Thomas, Professor of English in Southwestern State Teachers College at San Marcos, who has done notable work in Negro folk songs and who is one of the nestors and pillars of the Texas Folk-Lore Society, is his brother.

J. FRANK DOBIE Austin, Texas April, 1936

SOME CURRENT FOLK-SONGS OF THE NEGRO AND THEIR ECONOMIC INTERPRETATION.

BY W. H. THOMAS, COLLEGE STATION, TEXAS.

_Mr. President, Members of the Folk-Lore Society, Ladies and Gentlemen:_

I should first like to say a word as to why I have been given the honor of addressing this meeting. Mr. Lomax is solely to blame for that. A short while after this society was organized, Mr. Lomax approached me one day while I was holding an examination and asked me to join the society and to make a study of the negro songs. He did so, no doubt, out of a knowledge of the fact that as I had lived all by life in a part of the State where the negroes are thick, and as I was then devoting my summers to active farming where negroes were employed, I would, therefore, have an excellent opportunity for studying the negro and his songs, as the geologist would say, _in situ_.

You will notice that I have taken as my title, "Some Current Folk-Songs of the Negro and Their Economic Interpretation." Now it is somewhat misleading at this day and time to speak of the negro as a "folk." That word seems to me to be applicable only to a people living in an industry in which economic function has not been specialized. So it would be more accurate to speak of "negro class lore." The class that I am treating of is the semi-rural proletariat. So far as my observation goes, the property-holding negro never sings. You see, property lends respectability, and respectability is too great a burden for any literature to bear, even our own. Although we generally think of beliefs, customs, and practices, when we hear the word "folk-lore" used, I believe all treatises on the subject recognize songs, sayings, ballads, and arts of all kinds as proper divisions of the subject. So a collection and study of the following songs is certainly not out of place on a program got up by this society.