Red Rose, Black, Words and Music By Brian McCaskill

Words and Music by Brian McCaskil

Hi! Vincent Wice here, and I'm gonna give you a little information about myself. I was born June 5th, 1980, in New York City, but I moved to New Brunswick when I was 3. My father was a traveling salesman, and he died when I was 7. My mother re-married when I was 11. I started playing guitar when I was around 13, mostly country music. My uncle's a huge country music fan and I learned a lot from him. My favorite artist are Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, Townes Van Zandt, Johnny Cash, stuff like that. I also like some other stuff, too. I really can't think of much too say, but Brian thought it would be a good idea to introduce myself. Anyway, that's me and I hope you enjoy the things I say.

"Take it easy, but take it" - Woody Guthrie

Brian McCaskill
10/21/04

Brian McCaskill 10/21/04 ”The Great Migration of American Music” Along with the many barometers on which we measure history, music provides an insight into the past. It tells us how a group of people felt, how they lived, and, most importantly, it can tell us how they interacted with another segment of the population. American music, and especially the music of the slaves in the Antebellum period and after the Reconstruction period in the South, can tell us how the people lived. When we trace this music through time and throughout the country, we can also observe how this music blended with the European music and the white population. This mixing of cultures helped to provide us a better understanding of how these two different traditions met, and to what degree. In beginning the discussion of black music in America, the songs of slavery must be the first example. The slaves sang spirituals in the religious sense, but also as a form of entertainment; “They [spiritual songs] were not sung solely or even primarily in churches of praise houses but were used as rowing songs, field songs, work songs, and social songs” (Levine 30). It’s not hard to realize why these songs were used as entertainment, and not solely for religious purposes; slaves worked all day and needed some sort of activity to take their minds off the hard labor and the abuse they were constantly subjected to, mentally and physically. The songs often had themes of one day being released from the hard life of a slave, and going to some better place. A quintessential example of this is; “This world is not my home / This world is not my home / This world’s a howling wilderness / This world is not my home.” (Levine 32). Because of what these songs tell us about the mood and environment of these slaves, they are useful not only in a musical sense but also in a historical sense. They are primary sources with a beat and a rhythm. Besides the songs loaded with religious references, slaves, and freed blacks after the Civil War, often sang work songs in the fields. Along with the distinct vocal styling and rhythm of the spirituals, these work songs, or calls, were just as distinct. As one observer described them, “The call was peculiar, and I always wondered how they came by such a strange form of vocal gymnastics, since I never heard a white person do anything like it” (Levine 218). These calls are the secular music that reigned throughout the South and in other parts of the country. One description of this style depicts a joyous song, as many of the calls and spirituals were; “Ike was singing the words of a jig in a monotonous tone of voice, beating time meanwhile with his hands alternately against each other and against his body. To this music about a dozen or so negro boys and girls were dancing on the hard beaten ground” (Oakley 20). It seems that this mixture of song and dance would go on to form two other musical forms: the songs of the minstrel shows, and the blues. The minstrel shows would travel up north where they were used to make fun of blacks and make a case for slavery and heated racism. The Jim Crow Laws of the early 20th century came directly from a minstrel song, titled “Jump Jim Crow”, that contained the lines: First on de heel tap, den on the toe, Ebery time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow, Wheel about and turn about an do jis so, An ebery time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow. (Oakley 22). The songs of the minstrel shows were just an exaggeration of the songs that blacks really sang. The rhythm was reminiscint of the calls and the work songs, and even the first line sounds like a mix between a call and a lyric. This music, as well as the calls, also relied heavily on the African beats that were so important to the southern music. The major difference, however, was that in the south the music was sang to provide entertainment and a release from a hard life, while in the north it was a way to support the cruel treatment of blacks. While white men in black face paint performed the minstrel shows, at least up until the late 19th century, the blues was performed strictly by blacks for much longer. This is because, in many ways, the blues was not an entirely new music, rather an extension of existing styles; “The rise of the blues did not call for the invention of wholly new musical forms. The same musical repertory of traditions out of which black spirituals, work songs, and hollers were forged was sufficient to structure the blues as well” (Levine 221). Since the blues was such an integral part of African-American music, the mixing with the minstrel show music at the time was inevitable. This mixture helped create ragtime music. The King of Ragtime, Scott Joplin, was no exception to the idea of the blues. His childhood was not too far after slavery, and he knew of a hard life: “The son of freedmen in northeastern Texas, Joplin grew up amid toilers and sharecroppers, never too far removed from their years of bondage” (Curtis 1). What we know of the environment where Joplin grew up, it is certain that he was aware of the musical styles of the calls and the spirituals, the same vein of music that blues and the minstrel songs would grow out of. Part of the reason ragtime music was created was because more people had access to instruments such as the piano, which meant that young musicians, like Joplin, could become exceptional players. These European instruments was one of the first blending of these two cultures, and as The Great Migration of the early 20th century took place, when many of the blacks living in the rural parts of the country moved to bigger cities, the blend expanded as well, while keeping it’s traditional roots: “The folk process may have been altered by the mass migrations to the cities and by the advent of mass media and commercialization, but it remained a central ingredient in Afro-American music” (Levine 232). One of the most important forms of this new “mass media” was the new technology that allowed for songs to be recorded, and transported wherever people wanted to hear them: “Negroes living far apart could now share not only styles but experiences, attitudes, folk wisdom, expressions, in a way that was simply not possible before the advent of the phonograph” (Levine 231). Along with music being delivered to blacks, whites also got to hear this music, and it became so influential that the goal of most of the music industry in the early parts of the 20th century was simply to copy the sound of the these so called “race records”. Songwriters such as Irving Berlin, and earlier, Stephen Foster, tried to emulate the sounds they heard from records and from live performances, but make it possible for whites to sing it; “The key challenge for the modern American songwriter was to make a song that white folks could sing, not in blackface but in whiteface” (Dawidoff 294). The music from the South, working calls and spirituals, mixed with the technology of the phonograph and the luxury of the piano, created the new wave of American music. Gone were the separated cultures of blacks singing African-based songs, and whites singing European-based folk ballads, and a new, blended sound took place as the popular music of the time. Studying the sounds of the culture has let us find connections between peoples, and has shown us how different groups of the population related to each other and influenced each other.