Q and I have combed through the Lomax LOC material pretty extensively; I've personally listened to every one of their apparently-religious sound files at LOC many times. I don't recall ever coming across a song in their corpus to which I reacted, "Oh, THERE's the Drinking Gourd connection." ANd I look for connections, or maybe I should say I'm sensitive to and intruitive about them-- I've spotted many a connection across time and culture that link specific spirituals and other material.

So-- given all that, if anyone wants to look in that corpus, I can save you some time and say to look at what seems strictly secular among their material,, cuz I bneen there, done that in the reliegious vein.

At the same time, I'm aware of what I believe was written about extensively and evocatively in the Allen Slave Songs prefatory material, about how quickly and prolifically songs were created in that time, how some of them spread and some did not, and how many never found their way to preservation except in individuals' memories which they may have passed down through their own succeeding generations. Songs (spirituals) that are TOTALLY new to me keep cropping up that can only be explained by that mode of travel along the route of the folk proceess.

I think, in a way, Drinking Gourd can be a metaphor FOR the folk process-- an image of cultural diffusion, if you will. (I mean that we can take it that way, not that it was meant to be taken that way.)

Fascinated,

~Susan