How Long, How Long?
Black Protest/White Discovery and Denial
From the 1920s into the 1950s, Lawrence Gellert documented Black vernacular music in the U.S. South in written transcription and audio. With the advent of digitization and online electronic transfer, the possibilities for a deeper systematic inquiry into the Gellert sound archive have vastly increased. In 2015, I conducted a comprehensive review of all 505 field recordings housed at the Archives of Traditional Music, Indiana University Bloomington (ATM). I have deposited my research index at the ATM for other researchers.1 A select few of these field recordings were compiled for commercial release on LP and CD in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. For a useful itemization, see Stefan Wirz’s online “Illustrated Discography of Lawrence Gellert.”
“How Long, Brethren?” was one of the songs that Gellert encountered in his fieldwork. It was a “city blues,” he recalled, “right out of Charleston.”2 Original unaccompanied sound fragments are represented among Gellert’s field recordings from the 1930s.
A full transcript with musical arrangement is included in Gellert’s 1936 songbook, Negro Songs of Protest. As he printed it, the item reads:
How long, brethren, how long,
Must my people weep and mourn?
How long, how long, brethren, how long?
So long my people been asleep
White folks plowin’ n——r’s soul down deep.
How long, how long, brethren, how long?
Too long, brethren, too long
We just barely miserin’ along
Too long, too long, brethren, too long.
White folks ain’t Jesus, he just a man,
Grabbin’ biscuit out of poor n——r’s hand.
Too long, too long, brethren, too long.
So long, brethren, so long
N——r keep a-singin’ the same old song.
So long, so long, brethren, so long.
N——r he just patch black dirt,
The raisin’ part of the white man’s earth,
So long, so long, brethren, so long.3
For those familiar with the blues, the song may strike a chord. It bears a marked resemblance in sound and structure to the popular standard “How Long, How Long Blues,” a commercial “race record” hit in 1928 for the influential piano and guitar duo of Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell.4 In the commercial recording, Carr sings about romantic longing; in the Gellert transcription, the unnamed informant sings about the long struggle for Black freedom. Both items can be valued as authentic expressions from out of African American vernacular culture. Still, the difference in lyric content is significant, and so are the stakes of recognition.
To that point, it is useful to note that there was already a long history behind “How Long” before even Carr and Blackwell or Gellert. In 1867, compilers William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison published “My Father, How Long?” in Slave Songs of the United States, the first major collection of Black folk music in the United States. They included a revealing annotation that the “negroes had been put in jail at Georgetown, South Carolina, at the outbreak of the Rebellion” for singing the title. Lines like “We’ll soon be free,” they explained, were “too dangerous an assertion,” and “De Lord will call us home” was “evidently thought to be a symbolic verse” which alluded to the “Yankees.”5 Clearly, Gellert’s informant did not wholly originate the theme in the documentary item, and neither did Carr and Blackwell in their blues recording.6
Notes
1 My inventory of cross-matches between the Gellert collection in its parallel audio and print dimensions, the Gellert collection and parallels in the publications of folklore peers, and the Gellert collection and overlapping commercial blues from the 1920s and 1930s can be accessed through the Archives of Traditional Music. Additionally, I have prepared a document on the geography of Gellert’s fieldwork that cross-references between his publications and interviews.
2 Lawrence Gellert, interview by Richard A. Reuss, March 28, 1968, Archives of Traditional Music, Indiana University, Bloomington (hereafter ATM). Totaling nearly nine hours, Reuss’s oral interviews with Gellert between 1966 and 1969 constitute the only primary source evidence of such extent on the collector. “United States, 1966, 1968, 1969,” interviews of Lawrence Gellert by Richard A. Reuss, Israel Goodman Young, and Margot Mayo (on six sound tape reels, analog, 3¾ ips, 2 track, mono).
3 Gellert, Negro Songs of Protest (New York: American Music League, 1936), 16–17.
4 Leroy Carr, Sloppy Drunk, Catfish KATCD 108, 1998, CD.
5 William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, Slave Songs of the United States (1867; New York: Peter Smith, 1951), 93.
6 Though these lyric transcriptions in dialect may be off-putting for modern readers, it was common practice at the time, for not just white but Black authors as well in the field of folklore. Zora Neale Hurston, for instance, published Mules and Men in 1935, which conveyed the language and rhythm of African American locals in her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, in southern Black dialect. Additionally, as the long-delayed publication of Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” makes clear, Hurston was committed to dialect transcription as a “way to produce a written text that maintains the orality of the spoken word” (xxii). Gellert used the same logic. Barracoon was completed in 1931, but remained unpublished until 2018. See Hurston, Barracoon (New York: Amistad, 2018).