Edited by Azizi Powell
This is Part II of a two part pancocojams series about the 1978 Album "Afro-American Folk Music from Tate and Panola Counties, Mississippi".
Part II of this pancocojams series presents excerpts from the sixty-four page booklet edited by David Evans also included in this pancocojams post. I accessed that booklet from a pdf whose link is given below.
The Addendum to this post provides a list of the titles for the music that is found on this record.
Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2021/09/article-excerpt-about-2000-reissue-of.html for Part I of this pancocojams series. Part I presents excerpts of a 2001 article written by Fred McCormick about Rounder record 2000 reissue of a 1978 Library of Congress album Afro-American Folk Music from Tate and Panola Counties, Mississippi. That booklet was edited by David Evans who recorded the music. David Evans was the person who recorded the music in that album.
I've presented the excerpt about this 1978 booklet first because it provides some explanations about the musicians and singers who are featured in that record as well as providing information and opinions about that music itself.
The content of this post is presented for historical, socio-cultural, and folkloric purposes.
All copyrights remain with their owners.
Thanks to Fred McCormick and David Evans and all those who are mentioned in this excerpt.
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PDF EXCERPT
[This excerpt is given "as is" including spelling or typing errors.]
https://www.loc.gov/folklife/LP/AfroAmFolkMusicMissL67_opt.pdf "Afro-American Folk Music from Tate and Panola Counties, Mississippi"
From the Archive of Folk Song
Edited by David Evans [1978]
"Preface
[page] 1
TATE AND PANOLA COUNTIES are in the northwestern part of the state of Mississippi, due south of Memphis, Tennessee. Coldwater, the northernmost town in Tate County, is thirty miles from downtown Memphis, and from there it is another thirty-five miles to the southern edge of Panola County. Running north and south, U.S. Highway 51 bisects the two counties and was formerly the main artery of travel. Along it are the main towns, Coldwater and Senatobia in Tate, and Como, Sardis, Batesville, Courtland, and Pope in Panola. Senatobia is the Tate county seat, and Sardis and Batesville are the joint seats of Panola County. Only the county seats and Coldwater have populations above one thousand, and Batesville, the largest, has less than four thousand. Running parallel to Highway 51 is Interstate Highway 55, which cuts down the driving time to Memphis.
The main towns are also connected along a north-south route by the Illinois Central railroad. Running from east to west are five state highways. A number of very small tOWIIS lie on both sides of the main northsouth communications axis.
The Choctaw Ridge runs north to south in the western part of the two counties. To the west of the ridge stretch flat, rich bottomlands all the way to the Mississippi River. This lowland area is known as the Delta, a region famed for its huge cotton plantations. Most of the land in the two counties, however, and most of the people are in what is known as the Hill Country to the east of the Delta. Here the land is poorer and the farms smaller. Readers of American literature know this area as "Faulkner Country" after the late novelist William Faulkner from Lafayette County, adjacent to Panola on the east., The performers on this record are from the Hill Country, which has a quite different musical tradition and style from the Delta.
About forty-five thousand people live in the two counties, approximately three-quarters of them in the country. The population is almost equally divided between black and white citizens, although in earlier times the black percentage was larger. The decline of sharecropping since World War II has driven blacks off the land in large numbers, some to the towns and many more to Memphis and cities farther north. With the mechanization of agriculture and the improvement of roads, many white landowners have moved into the towns and left only one or a few black families on their farms. Most of the other whites live on the paved country roads or in the tiny country crossroads towns. Along the dirt and gravel country roads lives much of the area's black population. Some are hired hands or sharecroppers on white-owned land, but a good many own or rent their farms. Other black families live in the new housing developments or in small lots in the towns. Thus in recent years the neighborhoods have become somewhat segregated racially. The rural Gravel Spring community, for instance, where most of these performances were recorded, is over 95 percent black, even thou gh much of the land is owned by towndwelling whites The economy of the area is heavily agricultural, especially for the black population.
In former times the main crop was cotton,
and much of the land was worked by black sharecroppers. This pattern
has changed considerably since cotton prices went down and agriculture
became mechanized. Now much of the land is planted with corn and soybeans,
although cotton is still an important crop. Some large landowners
have turned to cattle grazing. The few black workers left on the large
farms are living there because of the indulgence of the owners, because the
house rent is cheap, or because they are retained to do such odd jobs as
mending fences, feeding cattle, or driving a tractor.
A considerable number
of other black families rent their farm land, usually plots of about ten
acres, on which they barely manage a subsistence living, often supplemented
by government welfare and commodities and sometimes through employment of one of the family members in a low-paying job in town or as
domestic help. Many of these renters are former sharecroppers, having
attained their current status after years or even a lifetime of hard work,
with little or no formal education and with large families to support. If they
still have any energy and will left, and many of them do, they can, with a
lot of luck, rise to the higher status of landowner. Before mechanization
very few blacks had much capital with which to buy land. Now that
economic conditions have improved somewhat for the blacks, they still
find it hard to buy land in the country, because very little is for sale.
The mechanization of ;griculture and the introduction of new crops and cattle
raising have made it worthwhile for owners to retain all their land
or sell it only at a very high price. Despite these obstacles, some black
farmers manage to buy a few acres. In economic terms their lives are not
much better than those of the renters, but they have a great deal more
respect from others and, most important, more self-respect. Besides the
renters and small landowners there are a few hundred black families that have
intermediatesized landholdings of about a hundred acres and a good number with
even larger farms. Many of these families have inherited their
land from grandparents and great-grandparents who obtained large parcels during
the nineteenth century.
Over the years many of these holdings ha ve been subdivided among the children of large farm hmilies, so that today one can drive down a road and find that all or most of the people in the houses along the way are related. The independent farmers with fairly substantial landholdings tend to be the leaders in the religious, economic, soc ial, and, more recently, political life of the communities. All the black farmers derive most of their subsistence from their land. As a cash crop cotton has declined considerably in popularity in recent yea rs, being replaced by soybeans. The larger landholders can make a fairly good cash income from truck farming, but the renters, small landholders, and remaining sharecroppers can expect to clear only a few hundred dollars a year from such activities as selling pigs or molasses to the people in town.
[…]
[Page] 3
….Although many blues and gospel singers from Mississippi have made commercial records for the black buying public from the 1920s on, no commercial records featured music from Tate and Panola Counties until the 1960s, when a gospel record by a group from Sardis was issued locally.
The lack of representation on early records is quite unusual considering the proximity to the Delta, which has always been the heartland of blues country and the home of many singers who made records. Some blues singers were recorded from De Soto County, to the north of Tate, but they never interacted with blues singers or other musicians to the south. Instead, their music was more in the Delta tradition. Tate and Panola Counties have maintained a separate blues tradition which, if it was ever encountered by a talent scout, was never considered of sufficient commercial potential to warrant recording.
Although the WPA Federal Writers' Project collected some texts from both black and white residents of the two counties in the 1930s, the first recordings of this area's music were not made until 1942. Alan Lomax, recording black folk music for the Library of Congress's Archive of Folk Song in the Delta county of Coahoma, heard about Sid Hemphill's band, which had been playing there recently, and traced the group to the town of Sledge, which is on the edge of the Delta near the Panola County line. Hemphill and his fellow musicians were all from Panola County, however.
In one long session with the band, Lomax made a remarkable collection of fiddle tunes with string band accompaniment, ballads, one spiritual, and pieces played on quills and the fife and drums.
…In spite of the changes in economy and residence in recent years, most of the active social life for blacks, and thus much of the music, continues to take place in the country. The town dwellers all have relatives there, as do many city dwellers from Memphis and farther north, and visiting is frequent. But more important, most of the churches, the picnic grounds, and the jukes where social activities take pl ace are in the country. The towns are fairly quiet at night, and if black people want ente rtainment and music, they drive out to the country where there is no dan ger of bothering white people with noise and bringing on retaliation. Thus, although life in the area has changed greatly in recent years, the music continues to have a strongly rural flavor.
The music of the area has a long history of investigation and recording by folklorists. Between 1905 and 1908 folklorist Howard W. Odum collected many folk songs from the black tradition of Lafayette County, adjacent to Panola County on the east. The music of all these counties is part of a homogeneous tradition today, and .residents state that it was in the past, too. Thus, Odum's songs were probably similar to what was being sung in Tate and Panola Counties and other parts of the nearby Hill Country. Unfortunately Odum did not print music with his texts or identify his informants. H e stated, however, that most of the secular songs had instrumental accompaniment, usually :1 guitar, fiddle, or banjo, or some combination of them. Interestingly, very few of the songs he collected are sung in the area today, an indication of the rapidity with which a bl ack repertoire can change even though stylistic characteristics may persist. In addition to many spirituals, Odum collec ted a grea t man y blues-his was, in fact, the first major documentation of this ge nre-along with ballads, work songs, and social songs in a lighthearted vein. He makes no mention of purely instrumental band performances, which have long been a feature of the area's music from cane (see note to A4 for full description) - had been known previously only from a few commercial recordings, and the fife and drum tradition had never been recorded before. When one also considers the rarity of recordings of black string bands, it becomes apparent that this 1942 session is one of the most important of all time in the documentation of black folk music. The performances are also of a very high quality and of great intrinsic interest. Unfortunately they remained unpublished until now (A2, A4, A6) and little known to scholars.
Hemphill was interviewed by James W. Silver in 1954, and in 1959 Alan Lomax returned to the area to make a remarkable series of field recordings, which were issued on a number of phonograph records. He revisited Sid Hemphill and another surviving member of his band. Recordings of a guitar and fiddle combination, the nucleus of a string band, as well as another outstanding fife and drum band, some singers of children's songs, and several excellent singers of spirituals were made at this time.
He recorded Sid Hemphill's daughter singing blues, but perhaps his outstanding discovery was the extraordinary blues singer and guitarist Fred McDowell. Several of the other artists he recorded made occasional concert appearances as a result of Lomax's sponsorship, but McDowell became world famous and recorded over fifteen record albums before his death in 1972. He was without a doubt a master of the "bottleneck" guitar style (d. B3) and one of the greatest folk blues singers ever recorded.
In 1967 writer and reporter George Mitchell and his wife, Cathy, revisited the area and made another important series of recordings, which
[page] 4
testified to the continuing richness of the area's musical traditions. The Mitchells revisited some of Lomax's informants but found many new ones as well. They made the first record ings of fife and drum music at a picnic and in a book doc umented this important aspect of the area's musical culture. Also in the book were song lyrics, a description of a church service, and interviews with four musicians from the area. In 1969, 1970, 1971, and 1973 I made recordings in the area, the last two times with my wife, Chery l. Starting with old informa nts of Lomax and Mitchell, I managed to branch out and find many other fine musicians who had not yet been recorded. Just as Odum discovered the blues and Lomax found the quills and fife and drum music, there were some musical surprises awaitIng me. Perhaps the outstanding types of music, which had seldom been recorded in black tradition, were the homemade percussion (A3 and A5), banjo pieces (B I), and the one -string diddley bow (see note to B2 for description of this instrument) . Most heartening of all was the fact that folk music was still being made by children and teenagers (A I, A3, B6, and B7). For me this was a sign that there would be folk music in this area for many years to come.
One of the most important fea tures of this region's music is its strong instrumental emphasis. The majority of songs are performed here with some kind of accompaniment, even if it consists simply of hand clapping, foot tapping, body slapping, or beating on chairs and cans. Complex vocals with elaborate texts are largely a thing of the past (A6). Today the vocals frequently occupy only a small part of the tota l performance (A I) or, if longer, are highly repetitious (A3, A5, BI, B2, B4, B5 , B6, and B8). Sometimes a singer will let his instrument finish a vocal line (B l) , or there may be long instrumental breaks or choruses between sung lines and stanzas (A6, B I, B2, B3, and B4). Many pieces, of course, lack a vocal part altogether (A2 and A4) or only include one at the whim of the performer (AI) .
All the musical instruments in the area are known elsewhere in Afro·· American folk music tradition, but rarely does one encounter such a variety in one place. Some loca lly popular instruments are additionally distinctive for having been se ldom recorded in other parts of the country.
Among percussion instruments, one such example is the solo drum (A I, A2, A4, and A6). The combination of a bass drum with one or two snare drums and a fife is quite common in this area and neigh bori ng regions of the Hill Country but has been recorded elsewhere only in Georgia. In recent years drum se ts have been used locally to accompany blues played on guitars and harmonicas, a development which has taken place throughout the American blues tradition. Another type of drum used in the area is the tambourine. The bass drum player in Sid Hemphill's string band would sometimes beat a tambourine against his knee while striking the drum with a stick held in the other hand. The tambourine has also been used to accompany singing in the Sanctified Church. Other simpler types of percussion include tubs, cans, crates, chairs, benches, and woodblocks (A3 and A5), and the striking of the human body itself (B6 and B7). The "jazz horn" (kazoo) and comb with wax paper have been encountered here as vocal modifiers and are well known outside the area.
True wind instruments are rare in black folk music, w ith the exception of the harmonica. Although not rep resented on this album, the harmonica is widely used in the area to accompany blues played on the guitar and as a solo instrument for blues, old fiddle tunes, and other novelty pieces.
The fact that other wind instruments are played makes the music here quite unusual and distinctive. The most common of these is the fife (A I and A2), which is made by bu rning holes in a stalk of cane cut from a creek bottom. It is usually played in a fife and drum band, although sometimes it is played as a solo instrument for the amusement of the performer himself or a small group of friends. It is not customary for more than one fife to be played simultaneously. The panpipes, or "quills," were also common at one time in the area but may have died out recently. Their current status is hard to determine, however, because they are usually pla yed as home music or by children and are seldom thought by the people in the area to be worthy of mention when they talk about music and music making. They can be fairly complex instruments, though, and Sid Hemphill's band used them with drums on a few specialty pieces (A4). Trombones and saxophones have also been reported in the area's folk music, but they have never been recorded. A cow horn is used by farmers and hunters as a signaling device, but the player makes no attempt to control its pitch.
A great variety of stringed instruments have been played in this area. The string band was once common (A6) but is now no longer heard. It included such instruments as the fiddle, guitar, banjo, string bass, and mandolin, although the last two instruments have not been recorded locally. The fiddle has now been replaced by the harmonica, and the banjo lingers only among a few elderly performers (B 1). It used to be played either in a band or as a solo instrument. The guitar here, as elsewhere, became the popular instrument for the blues (B3 and B4), although it is also frequently heard in accompaniment to religious music. In the latter function it never appears in the regular preaching service, except in the Sanctified Church, but only in quartet or solo performances. In the last few decades the electric guitar has ga ined in popularity for both blues and religious music. Sometimes the electric bass is added. One characteristic of the area's guitar playing, the frequent use of the slide or "bottleneck" style (see note to B3) , has been adapted to the guitar from the one-stringed diddley bow (B2), perhaps the most unusual instrument in the region and one rarely recorded in the Afro-American tradition. The piano was once played by a few blues singers in the area but was never as popular for this kind of music as the guitar and harmonica. Pianos are found in most churches, however, and are the only instrument played in Sunday morning services. A few gospel quartets are accompanied by a piano, but most favor a guitar.
Although a number of the songs in this area's black folk music tradition are of white origin (A2, B7, and possibly A3, A4, A5, B5, and B8), the overwhelming stylistic influence on the music is Afro-American or African. In fact, black music may exhibit more African traits here than anywhere else in the country. The selections on this record show several of these traits. Perhaps most prominent is the emphasis on percussion, especially evident in the fife and drum music of the picnics and its counterpart in home music (AI, A2, A3, A4, and A5). The summer picnics are the most important and best attended musica l eve nts in the area, emphasizing all the more the primary status of percussion. But this trait is also a feature of most religious songs (B6) and almost all children's songs (B7). It is present in the music of stringed instruments, which are not usually thought of as percussive (B 1, B2, and B4), and was incorporated into Sid Hemphill's string band in the form of a bass drum (A6). There is even a dim trace in the area of one of the important functions of African percussion, the "talking drum" (A 5) .
African rhythmic and vocal stylistic features are also common here. One is polyrhythm, or the use of more than one rhythm within the same metric structure (A 1, A3, and B6). Another common rhythmic trait is syncopation-the shifting of an accent from the beat where it would normally be expected to fall. A melodic trait is the use of "blue notes," or neutral tones pitched between the semi tones of the Western scale. They occur most commonly around the third and seventh degrees of the scale but can be found elsewhere as well. Another prominent African trait in this area is antiphonal organization, sometimes known as "call and response." It is especially common in the gospel quartet style (B6) but can also be heard in the phrases of the blues guitar as it "answers" the vocal (B2, B3, and B4).
Finally, some of the musical instruments themselves are of African origin. Best known is the banjo (Bl), which was common in black music during slavery and up to the early years of the twentieth century but is gradually being abandoned to white folk music today. Its African origin is beyond dispute, even though it has undergone modifications in American manufacture. Another instrument of African origin' which has undergone modification in construction in this country is the one-stringed diddley bow (B2). It is derived from an African form of the musical bow, an instrument which has survived in the black music of several New World countries. The style of playing the diddley bow has been carried over to a popular guitar style in the area (B3). The panpipes are known in both Europe and Africa, as well as other parts of the world, but their playing style in this area, which alternates blown and "whooped" notes, is strictly African.
The African traits account for much of the vigor of the area's folk music. They pervade almost all the music and are the dominant features of many performances. The traits must not be viewed as mere survivals, however, for in fact they often occur in songs of white origin. The instruments of African origin have all been changed in appearance and adapted to American conditions, and no song, melody, or instrument here could be called purely African. On the other hand, the African traits are becoming more prominent today as the black communities of the area become more independent. This can be noted in the modern style of quartet singing (B6) with its antiphonal organization and percussive hand clapping and foot tapping and in the polyrhythmic fife and drum playing of younger musicians (A 1). Since these are the two most popular types of folk music in the area today, it appears that African traits will play an important part in music there for many years to come.
This record presents examples of the various genres and
styles of Afro-American folk music from Tate and Panola Counties,
insofar as is possible on a single longplaying record. It is hoped that
focusing on a limited geographical area can clarify the interrelationships
between musical genres and the historical developments and changes of
musical styles. The notes to the selections provide information on the
performers, the context of performance, and the role of each kind of piece in the
musical life of the community or its meaning for the individual performer;
some of the notes also discuss the history of the genre or style and
musical or textual aspects of the performance. I have limited the comparative
references in most cases to published examples of the pieces from the same
immediate geographical area. For those songs which are more widespread
in American folk music traditions, I have printed only enough references
to indicate their traditional status. Likewise, for pieces with
commercial origins I have been concerned only to point out their first appearance
as a recording or in print. This record is not intended to be a song
collection, nor were the songs and tunes selected because they were typical of
the themes and types of black folk song as a whole. Instead, I have tried
to present examples of related musical styles from one small area. This
portrait of the area's music may help to reveal processes which have affected the
music of other areas and of the Afro-American and American folk music
traditions as a whole."
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ADDENDUM- The titles for the music that is found on this record (given without performers and other notes)
Al Soft Black Jersey Cow
A2 After the Ball Is Over
A3 Old Dick Jones Is Dead and Gone
A4 The Devil's Dream
A5 Granny, Will Your Dog Bite
A6 The Carrier Line
B1 New Railroad
B2 Shake 'Em on Down
B3 Shake 'Em on Down
B4 Black Woman
BS This Little Light of Mine
B6 He's Calling Me
B7 Little Sally Walker
B8 Go to Sleepy, Baby
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This concludes Part II of this two part pancocojams series on the preface to the booklet of the 1978 album"Afro-American Folk Music from Tate and Panola Counties, Mississippi".
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