Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War by Dena J. EpsteinReview by: Geneva H. SouthallFontes Artis Musicae, Vol. 25, No. 3 (1978 Juli-September), pp. 273-275Published by: International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres(IAML)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23505266 .

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Comptes-Rendus/Besprechungen/Reviews 2 73

as the nickname Didone abbandonata of sonata

g-10; the resemblance of the beginning of g-5, The Devil's Trill Sonata, to the opening of D-4

(despite the change in mode as well as key); the two sets of numbering for the 15 sonatas of Stockholm's Kungliga Musikaliska akademien, MSS. C. I-R; the connection between G-13 and

g-8, two sonatas (?) which appear together in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz

manuscript 21636/1 as a work in 13 movements, and in the Vienna Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde

manuscript IX 33956/28 as two separate works

although notated together with the same succes sion of movements; printing errors like the omis sion of the number 1888 from the shelf mark of the Paduan autograph score of sonata E-l (infor mation that is printed before the musical incipits of movements rather than after as are all other

descriptions in the catalogo), and finally, the

disappearance of E-7c, an allegro movement entitled "capricio" [sic] (MS 21636/1 in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek) cited in the dissertation

(p. 265) but replaced by a different movement in the catalogo (p. 47).

The German system of identifying keys (e. g., B for B-flat, Es for E-flat and h for b minor) used

throughout this Italian catalogue certainly looks odd. But it is simple and clear, which prompts one last reflection: was the suppression of details here and there the result of efforts to reduce

publishing costs and enhance the neat appearance of every page, or was it the consequence of indifference to details that may look like minutiae to one researcher but prove invaluable to another? The well-equipped library should seriously con sider obtaining Brainard's unpublished dissertation and the Duckies/Elmer catalogue of the Berkeley collection before buying the new catalogo. Or is

it time to begin planning a new catalogue of all the instrumental and vocal music by this great master? Does not Tartini's widespread popularity warrant a large, comprehensive investigation on a

scholarly level that Padua's Accademia Tartiniana has not yet attempted in any of its publications?

Sven Hansell

Seventeenth-Century Instrumental Dance Music in Uppsala University Library Instr. mus. hs. 409. Transcribed and Edited by Jaroslav J. S.

Mracek. (Stockholm: Reimers, 1976 [ 1977]). In

fol., 45-276 p. facsim. 8 (Monumenta musicae

svecicae, 8).

Cette tablature allemande de clavier datée

1651-1662 contient 213 pièces, pouvant être

groupées en 35 suites. Elle reflète l'intérêt mani

festé par l'illustre reine Christine de Suède pour

la musique instrumentale française. En 1646 elle avait envoyé à Paris un émissaire qui avait ramené à Stockholm six violinistes. Ceux-ci contribuèrent à implanter en Suède le répertoire des fameux

Vingt-quatre violons du roi. Jusqu'alors on con naissait surtout celui-ci par un manuscrit de Cassel,

publié en 1906 par J. Ecorcheville. Le manuscrit

d'Upsala est légèrement antérieur et donne donc la possibilité de fructueuses comparaisons.

J. Mracek, qui est l'auteur d'une thèse (Ph. D., Indiana University, 1965) sur ce document, en donne ici une édition intégrale, précédée d'une introduction et de notes critiques. Son travail, très soigné, enrichit largement le répertoire des suites de danses antérieur à Lully. Outre les

pièces des instrumentistes français le manuscrit en contient des trois membres de la famille Düben:

Andreas, Gustaf et Peter. Le musicien plus abondamment représenté est Pierre Verdier, arrivé de Paris à la Cour suédoise en 1647 et mort

peu après 1706. L'éditeur est malheureusement mal informé

sur la biographie de plusieurs auteurs de ces danses. Il se contente trop des vieux travaux d'Ecorcheville et n'utilise pas les recherches plus récentes, tirées du fichier Laborde (Y. de Brossard) et du Minutier central des notaires (Jürgens). Il aurait été bon en particulier de dégager les personnalités de

Jacques de Montmorency, sieur de Belleville, conducteur des ballets du roi, mort entre 1637 et

1641; Lazaro Salami, dit Lazarin, fils d'un gentil homme de Crémone, ordinaire de la musique du cabinet du roi; Nicolas Picart, né en 1590, élève

d'Henry Picot, joueur d'instruments à Paris dès

1608; Lahaey, qui n'est pas Ph. de La Hire mais Jean Crestot, dit La Haye, baladin de la grande Ecurie du roi depuis 1631 et violon de sa chambre, mort après 1650. Quant à Lavoy, il est clair qu'il faut chercher ailleurs que chez La Voye-Mignot, qui n'appartient pas du tout au même milieu, de même qu'une assimilation entre Nau et le biblio

graphe Naudé apparaît tout à fait fantaisiste. Enfin il faudrait enrichir la connaissance des Mazuel des travaux d'Elizabeth Miller et M.

Jürgens. Il va sans dire que ces remarques ne

compromettent en rien la valeur de l'édition

elle-même, qui doit figurer dans toute bonne

bibliothèque.

François Lesure

Dena J . Epstein: Sinful Tunes and Spirit uals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War. (Urbana,

Illinois; University of Illinois Press, 1977). 433 pp. Clothbound $ 17.95.

Since slave songs represent the oral historical

documents of an enslaved people, they should be

viewed as more than simple musical expressions.

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2 74 Comptes-Rendus/Besprechungen/Reviews

In many ways they are the voices - sometimes Musical Quarterly 59, 1973). Graphic descrip strident, sometimes muted and weary - of a tions and illustrated sketches reveal the existence

people for whom the burdens of suffering too of many similar African-type drums, rhythmic often became overwhelming. An examination of sticks, musical bows, xylophones and aereophones slave songs provides evidence of how slaves were among slaves in the Caribbean and North Amen able to fashion a lifestyle and value-system which can colonies. combined Africanisms and New World elements; In the second section secular and sacred slave such a syncretic process made possible their music are traced from 1800 to 1867. While much maintenance of a spiritual and cultural autonomy of the material presented here had appeared in amidst sub-human conditions. While many slave the two-part survey Slave Music in the United

songs express in words, nuances, and melody the States before 1860, (MLA Notes 20, 1963), and slaves' frustrations, despairs, and poignant hopes, in Folk Banjo: A Documentary History, (Ethno many are truly songs of protest hidden in genuine musicology 19, 1975), the author now reveals a

expressions of the slaves' deepest thoughts and greater synthesis and understanding of the racial yearnings, therefore a valuable key to our under- intermix and convenient two-way borrowing of standing of the dynamics of slavery and racial the 19th-century camp meetings, the role of the interaction. independent Black church movement, and the

Dena Epstein's Soulful Tunes and Spirituals, importance of slave dances, instruments and songs the twelfth volume in the Music in American Life jn minstrelsy and early American theatre history. Series by the University of Illinois Press, adds Eyewitness accounts of slave music from such to our knowledge of American music and Black literary personalities as Sydney Lanier and Edgar experience. Her meticulous search since 1950 Allen Poe, citations by William Cullen Bryant as for contemporary descriptions of slave music in well as discussion concerning slaves performing travelers' accounts, slave narratives, missionary on European instruments and the use made by reports, letters, memoirs, polemics both for and slave traders of these musicians are aspects against slavery, court and plantation records, seldom discussed by slave historians. By devoting and even novels and poetry, is a testimony to a special discussion to the music of antebellum her bibliographic skills and flexibility in cross- New Orleans with its remarkable social stratifi disciplinary research. In an article titled Docu- cation, quadroon balls, West Indian traditions, menting the History of Black Folk Music in the and dances in Congo Square, the variance among United States: A Librarian's Odyssey, (Fontes geographical slave cultures reflective of this 23, 1976, p. 151-157), the author describes country's diverse African-European culture mix her determined effort to locate previously are pointed up. The examination of work songs unexplored materials dealing with the enslaved offers insights into the slaves' everyday experi and enslavers in order to provide a documented, ences, especially their contributions as enslaved historically accurate account of Blacks to the forced laborers in both the plantation and indus musical culture of this country. Though the book's trially-urban-related economy of this country, subtitle is Black Folk Music to the Civil War, she songs that through disguised imagery and indirect does discuss the music of slaves and "Contrabands" statement are the secular supplements to their

during the Civil War via the Port Royal Experiment religious songs on a more homely, realistic plane, and devotes the final two chapters to the songs In my opinion the book's major research and collectors of the historic 1867 publication contributions are found in the third section. Slave Songs of the United States. These chapters show a detective-type skill in

The book is divided into three chronological investigating the long-neglected aspect of black sections of several chapters each. In an introduc- folk music during the Civil War and the motiva tory Prologue the theory of African continuity tions of the three editors of the first slave collec and change is skilfully supported by re-creating tion in their concerted efforts to introduce these the inhuman conditions of the Middle Passage songs to a non-southern public. Mrs. Epstein not where enslaved Africans were forced to dance. only discusses the breakup of the closed plantation The first section wisely makes use of vivid society, the subsequent Port Royal and Freedmen descriptions of African dances, instruments, Bureau experiments, and the freedmen's mournful and music by British and French chroniclers, musical expressions as evidence of their post along with fragmentary accounts from the emancipation concerns, but also includes racist thirteen Mainland Colonies as evidence of survi- statements made by several of the northern ving and developing Neo-Africanisms in colonial liberals and active abolitionists who served in America (an update of the article on African those bureaus. The author's research into the Music in British and French America, in the previously-unexamined manuscript diaries of

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Comptes-Rendus /Besprechungen/Reviews 2 75

William Francis Allen (senior editor of the

collection), her location of and assistence to relatives of Lucy McKim Garrison in sorting out their deceased relatives' letters and other memora bilia related to the collection, her investigation of the Garrison papers in the Smith College and Harvard University libraries (see her Lucy McKim

Garrison, American Musician in the New York Public Library Bulletin, October, 1963), and her

personal interviews with Caroline Farrar Ware

(granddaughter of the third editor, Charles Pickward Ware), make this unquestionably the definitive and long-overdue historic study of the

1867 slave song collection and its three compilers. Besides the musical and biographical insights to be gained from these diaries and letters, they should be viewed as an additional primary source

by Civil War and Reconstruction historians. Dis cussion of notational questions, language diffi

culties, problems and reviews following the

publication, and pictures of the editors and the

reprint of manuscript versions of the slave songs by Charles Ware (omitted from the publication) and William Allen are invaluable.

The published excerpts from William Allen's

manuscript diary (the first of three appendices) offer readers other references to slave music not

quoted in the body of the book. A chronologi cally-arranged Table of Sources about the banjo from 1621-1850 (in the second appendix) graph ically demonstrates that this African-type instru ment had many name variants and was widely distributed among New World populations. And while she notes the impossibility for listeners to

capture and write down the distinctive musical features of slave music, Mrs. Epstein has placed three notated arrangements of Go Down Moses in the third appendix, feeling that they have historic value as 19th-century transcriptions from a

bygone era. As a means of strengthening the study the

documentation analyses could have been ex

panded by collaboration with such highly re

spected and easily accessible African ethno

musicologist-composers as J. Kwabena Nketia, Francis Bebey, Fela Sowande and Akan Ebba.

Questions such as the African linguistic contin uum could have similarly benefited from collab

oration with Dr. Richard Long and other Afro

American scholars engaged in this type of research

at the Center of African and Afro-American

Studies, Atlanta University. Also in this vein, more quotations from the slaves themselves

would have given the needed balance to what is

primarily a compilation about slave music deriving from those white outsiders who understandably

injected their own interpretation and moralities

into their eyewitness accounts. A greater utiliza tion of slave autobiographical and semi-autobio

graphical materials would have left no questions in her mind about the role of spirituals in Under

ground Railroad activities (e.g. that the song Follow the Drinkin' Gourd served as a "map"; or that Harriet Tubman [a leading black abolitionist called the "Moses" of her people) had after her

escape from slavery used these songs as a means of communication in each of her nineteen trips back south to aid in the freedom of over 300

slaves). In her treatment of the independent Black

church movement the author should have incor

porated a discussion of the two African Methodist

Episcopal (AME) hymnals published in 1801 by Richard Allen, founder of the church. This collec tion of hymns "for the exclusive use of his con

gregation" serves as a folk-selected anthology by Black religious leaders themselves. The 4th edition of 1818 is particularly significant as it was the first official hymnal of the church after it became

independent from the white denomination. AME

Bishop Dancel A. Payne's Recollections of Sev

enty Years (1888) can also reveal much about the

religious and secular musical practices of that church group inasmuch as runaway slave mem bers provided a further vehicle for transmission of Africanism among the non-slave Black com munities and the controversies surrounding such elements.

Even though 1 have noted a few historical exclusions the book must, along with John Lovell's monumental encyclopaedic Black Song: The Forge and the Flame (New York: Macmillan, 1971), be considered a "necessary" reference tool for historians, folklorists, anthropologists, musicologists and Afro-Americanists. Her exten sive bibliography and detailed footnotes reveal that the research data associated with the study constitute a music librarian-scholar's efforts to look comprehensively at a fascinating and complex subject, thus making her study indispensable as a

major source concerning the acculturative aspect in American music by way of the Black experience.

Geneva H. Southall

Donna K. Anderson: Charles T. Grif fes: An Annotated Bibliography-Discography. (Detroit: Published for the College Music Society

by Information Coordinators, 1977). In-8, 255 p. (Bibliographies in American Music No. 3)

This book is only the second to be devoted

wholly to Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884

1920). The first, Edward Maisel's Charles T.

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