Henry C. Davis printed a similar collection in JAF in 1914, and E. C. Perrow included black “Songs and Rhymes from the South” at the same time in JAF. Most published sources focused on older spirituals, such as John W. Work and his brother Frederick J. Work in their booklet Folk Songs of American Negro in 1907. They wrote: “Still away down in the Negro’s heart there has been a smouldering coal of love for his own peculiar songs which have been gradually fanned into a burning flame by two forces, education and knowledge that musicians of other people are studying it seriously.”
John Work, James Weldon Johnson, Nathaniel Dett, and other African-American composers collected spirituals and arranged them into a modern classical format, mostly to be used in church services. Trained choirs became more common, particularly in black Pentacostal churches. At the same time, commercial phonograph records began appearing as early as the Kentucky Jubilee Singers recording in 1894. The Fisk Jubilee Singers were brought to the Victor Talking Machine Company studio in New Jersey in 1909 by John Work. They first performed “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” and even Stephen Foster’s “Old Black Joe.” The Jubilees issued records for the next two decades. The Tuskegee Institute Singers were much less prolific, recording for Victor only in 1914 and 1915. Meanwhile, from 1910 to 1918 a Colored Music Festival in Atlanta featured spirituals, known as “Plantation Melodies,” that attracted both whites and blacks.
The blues was considered the secular counter to spirituals, the developing gospel style, and other church-related music. Defining the “blues” is virtually impossible, so that Elijah Wald, in 2004, in his very informative Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, believes “that if a black person played it before 1950, and it is not classifiable as jazz, classical or gospel, then it must be blues.” He also remarks that before the 1960s the blues was “Whatever the mass of black record buyers called ‘blues’ in any period.” Asthe blues developed, however, there was also a significant connection between black and white performers, so that racial distinctions have not been particularly evident in songs and performances. A blues style seemed to emerge sometime in the late nineteenth century, principally in the Mississippi Delta region, according to most accounts.
The blues was considered the secular counter to spirituals, the developing gospel style, and other church-related music. Defining the “blues” is virtually impossible, so that Elijah Wald, in 2004, in his very informative Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, believes “that if a black person played it before 1950, and it is not classifiable as jazz, classical or gospel, then it must be blues.” He also remarks that before the 1960s the blues was “Whatever the mass of black record buyers called ‘blues’ in any period.” Asthe blues developed, however, there was also a significant connection between black and white performers, so that racial distinctions have not been particularly evident in songs and performances. A blues style seemed to emerge sometime in the late nineteenth century, principally in the Mississippi Delta region, according to most accounts.
W. C. Handy, a professional band leader, published “The Memphis Blues (Mr. Crump)” in 1912, the same year that “Dallas Blues” and “Baby Seals Blues” appeared in sheet music. “Memphis Blues” was recorded in 1914 by the Victor Military Band, sounding more like a ragtime march than a blues tune; ragtime songs were then very popular. The next year Morton Harvey, a white performer, recorded “Memphis Blues,” and for the next few years other white singers recorded folk-style blues, including Nora Bayes. The first black “blues” singer, Mamie Smith, did not enter a studio until 1920. Moreover, Wald argues, her hit record, “Crazy Blues,” sounded more like a Tin Pan Alley torch song than a rural blues tune. “This is not to say that it was less genuine blues than the folkier songs,” he notes, “but only to reemphasize the fact that such categories are infinitely mutable, arbitrary divisions of a continuum.” Musical classifications—blues, country, jazz, bluegrass, gospel, spirituals, folk, classical, etc.—are not absolute, but always relative and flexible.
Hormoz Farhat Ethnomusicologist and Composer
