Susan, I confess that I've spent almost no time with the verbiage. I started out playing with the dots to see if my MIDIs would be useful for your purpose. After that I just kept working on the MIDIs. I'll go back and see if I find help in Allen's descriptions. I find Allen hard to read because his view of the people who sang the songs is so stilted and condescending. He constantly refers to them as barbaric and, I'm sure, regarded them as sub-human. He seems awestruck that such people could make music that his highly developed European ear would find attractive. Given the time and circumstances, his attitude isn't surprising but that makes it no less offensive. As I work on the tunes I think of the people who made them, not Allen, et al.

Jon, As you recognized, the second triplet in bar 4 of song #10 actually contains the correct total time value for three eighth notes in the space of two only the third eighth note (quaver?) is further broken down into a sixteenth rest and a sixteenth note (semiquaver?). I don't imagine Allen, et al. thought this was correct notation. I just think they were trying to use the notation they had available to represent rhythms they'd never heard before. African people have greatly enriched the rhythmic and melodic possibilities of the music we all love today. But in Allen's time, I suspect these rhythmic variations were completely unknown to white people. In the verbiage, Allen, et al. give the following:

The best that we can do, however, with paper and types, or even with voices, will convey but a faint shadow of the original. The voices of the colored people have a peculiar quality that nothing can imitate; and the intonations and delicate variations of even one singer cannot be reproduced on paper. And I despair of conveying any notion of the effect of a number singing together, especially in a complicated shout, like "I can't stay behind, my Lord" (No. 8), or "Turn, sinner, turn O!" (No. 48). There is no singing in parts, as we understand it, and yet no two appear to be singing the same thing--the leading singer starts the words of each verse, often improvising, and the others, who "base" him, as it is called, strike in with the refrain, or even join in the solo, when the words are familiar. When the "base" begins, the leader often stops, leaving the rest of his words to be guessed at, or it may be they are taken up by one of the other singers. And the "basers" themselves seem to follow their own whims, beginning when they please and leaving off when they please, striking an octave above or below (in case they have pitched the tune too low or too high), or hitting some other note that chords, so as to produce the effect of a marvellous complication and variety, and yet with the most perfect time, and rarely with any discord. And what makes it all the harder to unravel a thread of melody out of this strange network is that, like birds, they seem not infrequently to strike sounds that cannot be precisely represented by the gamut, and abound in "slides from one note to another, and turns and cadences not in articulated notes." "It is difficult," writes Miss McKim, "to express the entire character of these negro ballads by mere musical notes and signs. The odd turns made in the throat, and the curious rhythmic effect produced by single voices chiming in at different irregular intervals, seem almost as impossible to place on the score as the singing of birds or the tones of an Æolian Harp." There are also apparent irregularities in the time, which it is no less difficult to express accurately, and of which Nos. 10, 130,131, and (eminently) 128, are examples.

I'm guessing that scholars today would have a much easier time transcribing what Allen heard because we are accustomed to the rhythmic variation that so confounded Allen.

Or else I'm full of crap and this post is just rubbish. <g>

      - Mark