| Share page | Visit Us On FB |
|
NEGRO FOLK RHYMES |
||
|
about which the "old time" Negro banjo picker and fiddler clustered his best instrumental music thoughts. It is too bad that this music passed away unrecorded save by the hearts of men. Paul Laurence Dunbar depicts its telling effects upon the hearer in his poem "The Party":
"Cripple Joe, de ole rheumatic, danced dat flo' frum
side to middle. Throwed away his crutch an' hopped it, what's
rheumatics 'gainst a riddle? Eldah Thompson got so tickled dat he lak to los' his
grace, Had to take bofe feet an' hold 'em, so's to keep 'em
in deir place. An' de Christuns an' de sinnahs got so mixed up on
dat flo', Dat I don't see how dey's pahted ef de trump had
chonced to blow."
Perhaps a new school of orchestral music might be built on the Negro idea that some of the performers sing a sentence or so here and there, both to assist the hearers to a clearer musical understanding and to heighten the general artistic finish. The old Negro performers generally sang lines of the Folk Rhymes at the opening but occasionally in the
238 |
||