Yes, in the oldtime fiddle tunes you hear a lot of floaters/zippers, and the style as well as many of the verses themselves seem to have traveled forward from camp mneeting times in the South-- black and white camp meetings would be held side by side, and material floated back and forth. IMO it grew from there into the minstrel shows, as well as into what evolved as the blues.

I've just been working through the Lomax and other American Memory sound files stored on this big old puder, and in addition to the traditionally-sung spirituals Lomax collected, there's another body of songs from a singing festival called "Now What a Time" over on the Am Mem site. On my CD I mixed them, alpha'ed by title, and did not separate the Lomax from the fesival material. So it's easy to hear, from one song to the next, that there's only a small difference in performance style and material, and further from there is only a small difference between that festival's sound and the sound of the early gospel quartets and country blues.

It's all mixed in together, each culture's heritage flowing in and through the others, for in the end it is all one culture-- ours, we humans'. The good, the bad, the glorious and the ugly, it's all OURS.

~Susan

~Susan