The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #54404   Message #845088
Posted By: Richie
10-Dec-02 - 11:22 PM
Thread Name: Steamboat coonjine songs
Subject: RE: Steamboat coonjine songs
Guest Q,

The "Diamond Joe" songs were said to have originated with the Diamond Jo Steamboat Line. "Boatin' Up Sandy" and "Davy, Davy" are other old river songs.

Here are some of my notes I've got several fairly large piles of notes, haven't sorted though them but maybe you can develop the info.

Roustabout Holler
DESCRIPTION: "Oh, Po' roustabout don't have no home, Makes his livin' on his shoulder bone." The singer, loading sacks of cottonseed on the steamer Natchez, has no home and a sore shoulder, but does have a "little gal in big New Orleans."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1939
KEYWORDS: work river
FOUND IN: US(So)
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Botkin-MRFolklr, p. 571, "Roustabout Holler" (1 text, 1 tune)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Levee Camp Holler"
cf. "Steel Laying Holler"
File: BMRF571

Levee Camp Holler
DESCRIPTION: "We git up in de mornin' so dog-gone soon, Cain'[t] see nothin' but de stars and moon. Um...." An enumeration of typical travails in a hard day behind a team of mules.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1934
KEYWORDS: poverty work hardtimes
FOUND IN: US(So)
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Botkin-MRFolklr, p. 569, "Levee Camp Holler" (1 text (composite, from Lomax), 1 tune)
Lomax-ABFS, pp. 49-52, "Levee Camp 'Holler'" (1 text, obviously composite, 1 tune)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Roustabout Holler"
cf. "Steel Laying Holler"
Levee Camp Holler
1.        American Ballads and Folk Songs, MacMillan, Bk (1934), p. 49
2.        Moore, John L. (Johnny Lee). Sounds of the South, Atlantic 7-82496-2, CD( (1993), cut#2.08

The following material is excerpted from a larger body of material in progress called Muleskinners, by Adele Thomsen

The first documented and descriptive observation of the black work holler was done in June of 1901 in Coahoma County, Miss., not by a folklorist but by archeologist, Charles Peabody. Arriving to excavate Indian burial mounds, his first stop was Clarksdale, Miss. where he gathered supplies and recruited a gang of black workers, then set off for the first dig. Proceeding to the work area, Peabody was astonished when his workmen burst into rhythmic song, and continued until they reached the campsite. Directing his crew to dig deep trenches, he observed they continued singing while timing their song to the rhythm of the digging.
Soon Peabody was startled to hear himself referred to in their songs as improvisation became obvious as a dominant characteristic: "Mighty long half-day Captain" or "I'm so tired I'm almost dead." (Palmer, p. 23) But Peabody experienced more than improvisation as a difference between the music he was hearing and music he was accustomed. LeRoi Jones explains why.
       "While the whole European tradition strives for regularity—of pitch, of time, of timbre and of vibrato—the African tradition strives precisely for the negation of these elements. In language, the African tradition aims at circumlocution rather than at exact definition. The direct statement is considered crude and unimaginative; the veiling of all contents in ever-changing paraphrases is considered the criterion of intelligence and personality. In music, the same tendency... is noticeable: no note is attacked straight; the voice or instrument always approaches it from above or below, plays around the implied pitch and departs from it without ever having committed itself to a single meaning. The timbre is... constantly changing vibrato, tremolo and overtone effects. The timing and accentuation... are not stated, but implied or suggested." (Jones p. 31).
The levee-camp holler appears to be distinct to the Delta. Lomax's many recording trips to the region revealed an extensive genre of songs, called hollers. "For example, every black prisoner in the penitentiary, we discovered, had a holler that was, in effect, his personal musical signature."

"All these hollers share a set of distinctive features. They are solos, slow in tempo, free in rhythm (as opposed to the gang work songs) composed of long gliding, ornamented and melismatic phrases, given a melancholy character by minor intervals... blued or bent tones, sounding like sobs or moans or keening or pain-filled cries..." Seldom sung except on the job, even black music scholars have little knowledge of this type of vocalizing through which black labor expressed the tragic horror of their condition. (Lomax p. 233)

Steel Laying Holler These songs termed as hollers, were members of the same family as the levee-camp songs. Hollers "were pitched high out of a wide-open throat" in order to be heard at a distance. Convicts raising a holler could assert their individuality and defend themselves against certain prison anonymity. "Field hollers," "old corn songs" and "levee-camp hollers," interchanagably termed, demonstrate characteristics uniquely different from other black music. These Delta hollers usually tend to be solos sung in minor keys with recitative-like free-form rhythms distinguished by long-held notes, lengthy embellished phrases emphasising vocal color. Other black folk music is usually characterised by group singing using short phrases, and tends to conform to a steady beat. (Lomax p.273)
      A visitor arriving in the Delta in 1909 described the singing (holler) of a black woman plowing a cotton field. He heard the "lamentation of a creature in great distress and isolation," and her music "made {him} feel as if {he}I were traveling through an African region and had just been to visit a colony of prisoners in confinement." Several musicologists agree that certain elements of African communal music appear in the blues and that former slaves combined both old African heritages and new American experiences as a cultural response to emancipation which was, in reality, disappointing.
Plantations, levee camps and logging camps of the Deep South provided the conditions that were ripe for the birth of the blues. Blacks seeking a better life through employment in these labor-hungry industries soon felt like prisoners in a continuous cycle of hard labor, deplorable living and working conditions which offered little reward for their efforts.
      The blues emerged most directly from the holler where hard manual labor was the impetus for its birth. Delta bluesman; Bukka White affirmed this when he insisted, "That's where the blues start from, back across them fields.... It started right behind one of them mules or one of them log houses, one of them log camps or the levee camp. That's where the blues sprung from. I know what I'm talking about."
      Speaking of the hollers, bluesman Son House recalled, "They'd sing about their girl friend or about almost anything—mule—anything. They'd make a song of it just to be hollering."
David Evans stated that near the end of the nineteenth century the "free almost formless vocal expressions" of the field hollers "were set to instrumental accompaniment and given a musical structure, an expanded range of subject matter and a new social context" in the dynamic creative process that became the beginning of the blues. (Cobb p. 278-279)

DESCRIPTION: Foreman's instructions for laying a railroad iron, with variations to fit the particular situation. E.g. "Awright, awright, Ev'rybody get ready. Come on down here. Come on, boys. Bow down. Awright, up high, Awright, throw 'way...."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1934
KEYWORDS: work railroading nonballad
FOUND IN: US
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Lomax-ABFS, pp. 10-12, "Steel Laying Holler" (1 text, 1 tune)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Roustabout Holler"
cf. "Levee Camp Holler"
File: LxA010

-Richie