The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #17760 Message #1426928
Posted By: wysiwyg
04-Mar-05 - 06:28 PM
Thread Name: Origins/Meaning: Follow the Drinking Gourd
Subject: RE: Origins: Follow the Drinking Gourd meanings
Perhaps it is partly the impossibility of nailing down the "true" origin of any of the songs, balanced against the deceptive recency of their currency, that makes the whole genre so fascinating.
I'm studying Shaker music these days, for Lent, and it's very interesting that they documented SO MUCH of what was freely and abundantly created in song. Yet even tho the notes were dutifully transcribed and preserved, there is quite a bit of scholarship suggesting that whatever tempo, mode, and time signature they were scribed in-- that ain't at all how singers SANG 'em. Reasons range from folk process-type things to the changing stylistic preferences of the higher-ups, who from time to time attempted to standardize some of the musical conventions of the group, with little success at the grass-roots level where the creative process was at work.
I've learned not to worry so much about all that, and just SING them-- both the slave spirituals and related songs, and the Shaker spirituals. And now that I am into the Shaker corpus, it's wonderful to discover how alike these two particular forms of "spiritual" turn out to be, in the hearing and in the singing.
~Susan