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A Verboten Tradition of Protest: Tradition of Protest

A Verboten Tradition of Protest

Tradition of Protest

A Verboten Tradition of Protest

Lawrence Gellert began his music collecting in the mid-1920s. Through his local activities in his adopted home in the South (Tryon, North Carolina), he was given a rare hearing into a provocative store of Black lyrical resistance. African American luminary Sterling Brown called this collective expression a “verboten” tradition with respect to the dominant culture. As Brown elaborated, “Where there is some protection or guaranteed secrecy” a host of “verboten songs come to light” from out of the vernacular cultures of Black America. These were “songs brewed in bitterness,” Brown explained, “not the double-talk of the slave seculars, but the naked truth of desperate men telling what is on their brooding minds.” Never meant for outside listening, they constituted an alternate stream, parallel and sometimes overlapping, of Black musical tradition that had, with due cause, gone largely without recognition in the dominant culture. In Brown’s estimation, it was the rare outsider who achieved the necessary level of trust to get at such material.1

One of the first songs Gellert said he heard in Tryon from out of this “underground” reservoir of music—indeed, one of the tunes that was “everywhere,” as he remembered it, and in fact “got [his] teeth into this”2—evoked the bitter relations of southern chain gangs:

Work all de Summer

Work all de Fall

Gonna make dis Chris’mas

In mah overhall

Got any cawn bread

Cawn bread save me some

Got any cawn bread

Buddy won’ you save me some

Don’ min’ de weather

So de win’ don’ blow

Don’ min’ dese chains

So de ball don’ grow

Way far f’om home

Wit hammer in mah han’

Ahm so tire’ hammerin’

Ah cain’ stan’

Ah feels mah Hell arisin’

Six feet a day

Lord ef it keep arisin’

Gwine wash dis damn lan’ ‘way3

As it is presented here, from Gellert’s earliest published transcription in the left periodical New Masses in 1932, “Work All the Summer” builds to a stanza of ominous warning. Such expression may have appeared quite terrific to the white collector at the beginning of his endeavors. But it was hardly unique. In his recorded interviews, Gellert claims to have first heard the song from a local Black informant in Tryon. This first published transcription featured above, however, was reportedly collected several years later, from a county jail in South Carolina according to the annotation text that accompanies the lyric in his New Masses article. Moreover, there are other permutations of “Work All the Summer” in the Gellert archive. He published the song, in a slightly longer version, in 1936 in Negro Songs of Protest. It is also included in audio, in various forms, among both his seven-inch recordings from the 1920s and ten-inch recordings from the 1930s.4

The audio recordings are noteworthy. In melody, phrasing, and lyric structure, they suggest a marked correspondence between “Work All the Summer” and the commercial blues standard, “Sitting On Top of the World,” first made famous by The Mississippi Sheiks in 1930.5 The commercial history of this well-known title is long and varied. It begins in the Black southern string band tradition of the Delta-based Sheiks and goes on to include country and bluegrass luminaries Bob Wills and Bill Monroe; bluesman Chester “Howlin’ Wolf” Burnett; and rock performers Bob Dylan, Cream, and The Grateful Dead. What is important to note is that verses and lyric fragments associated with the tune were well incorporated into rural southern vernacular tradition, Black and white, by the time Gellert was first afforded a hearing in the 1920s. If the lines of protest he encountered among African American singers were unlikely to appear on commercial record, they were nonetheless prevalent, he asserted, in local circles on the ground.

Notes

1 Brown makes specific reference to Gellert in his discussion of verboten songs. Sterling A. Brown, “Negro Folk Expression: Spirituals, Seculars, Ballads and Work Songs,” Phylon XIV (1953): 58–59.

2 Lawrence Gellert, interview by Richard A. Reuss, Archives of Traditional Music, Indiana University, Bloomington (hereafter ATM).

3 Lawrence Gellert, “Negro Songs of Protest,” New Masses (May 1932): 22.

4 Lawrence Gellert, Negro Songs of Protest (New York: American Music League, 1936), 18–19. Gellert field recordings 7–2194, Side A1 and 10–17815, Side B1, ATM.

5 The Mississippi Sheiks, “Sitting on Top of the World,” 78 rpm, Okeh 8784, 1930.

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