Edited by Azizi Powell
This pancocojams post presents information about Henry Edward Krehbiel and provides an excerpt from an online reprint of his 1914 book Afro-American Folk Songs: A Study In Racial And National Music.
Information about Black Creoles of Lousiana is also included in this post.
The content of this post is presented for historical, folkloric, and cultural purposes.
All copyrights remain with their owners.
Thanks to Henry Edward Khehbiel and all the African American composers and African American singers of the songs that he collected. Thanks to the editor/s of the online versions of this song and thanks to all those who are quoted in this post.
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INFORMATION ABOUT HENRY EDWARD KREHBIEL
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Edward_Krehbiel
"Henry Edward Krehbiel (March 10, 1854 – March 20, 1923) was
an American music critic and musicologist who was music editor for The New York
Tribune for more than forty years.
[…]
Krehbiel was a champion of the music of Antonín Dvořák whom
he hoped would help establish an authentically American school of music when
Dvořák was appointed head of the National Conservatory of Music of America in
New York City in 1892. Already an admirer of folk music, Krehbiel was inspired
by Dvořák's work as a folk song collector and composer, and spent many years
researching and collecting folk songs from Americans and immigrants. He
collected the folk songs of Magyars, Scandinavians, Russians, Native Americans,
and African Americans. This work resulted in numerous publications, including
the first book published on African-American spirituals Afro-American
folksongs: a study in racial and national music (1914).”…
[…]
Biography
Krehbiel was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1854, the son of
a German clergyman of the Methodist Episcopal Church. A first generation
American, he was educated by his father, and grew up in a bilingual household
speaking, reading, and writing in both German and English. He later mastered
the French, Italian, Russian, and Latin languages.
[…]
Krehbiel wrote many books about various aspects of music, including Afro-American
folksongs: a study in racial and national music (1914); one of the earliest
examinations of African American music. His interest in the music was
African-Americans dates back to his attendance of World's Columbian Exposition
where he was enthralled with performances of music by black musicians at the
Midway Plaisance.[8] He annotated concert programs (including many of
Paderewski's recitals)."...
-snip-
Henry Edward Krehbiel was a White American.
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PANCOCOJAMS EDITOR'S NOTE
Henry Edward Krehbiel's 1914 book Afro-American Folksongs: a study in racial and national music includes the now outdated referent "Negro" spelled with a lower case "n".
Here's some information about Black Creoles
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Creole_people
..."The term créole was originally used by French settlers to
distinguish persons born in Louisiana from those born in the mother country or
elsewhere. As in many other colonial societies around the world, creole was a
term used to mean those who were "native-born", especially native-born
Europeans such as the French and Spanish. It also came to be applied to
African-descended slaves and Native Americans who were born in
Louisiana.[3][4][5] The word is not a racial label, and people of fully
European descent, fully African descent, or of any mixture therein (including
Native American admixture) may identify as Creoles.
Starting with the native-born children of the French, as
well as native-born African slaves, 'Creole' came to be used to describe
Louisiana-born people to differentiate them from European immigrants and
imported slaves. People of any race can and have identified as Creoles, and it
is a misconception that créolité—the quality of being Creole—implies mixed
racial origins. In the early 19th century, amid the Haitian Revolution,
thousands of refugees (both whites and free people of color from Saint-Domingue
(affranchis or gens de couleur libres) arrived in New Orleans, often bringing
enslaved Africans with them. So many refugees arrived that the city's
population doubled. As more refugees were allowed in Louisiana, Haitian émigrés
who had first gone to Cuba also arrived. These groups had strong influences on
the city and its culture. Half of the white émigrė population of Haiti settled
in Louisiana, especially in the greater New Orleans area."...
****
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creoles_of_color
"The Creoles of color are a historic ethnic group of Creole
people that developed in the former French and Spanish colonies of Louisiana
(especially in the city of New Orleans), Mississippi, Alabama, and Northwestern
Florida in what is now the United States. French colonists in Louisiana first
used the term "Creole" to refer to whites born in the colony, rather
than in France. It was also used for enslaved people born in the colony.
But as a group of mixed-race people developed from placage
and the rape of Africans and Native Americans from the French and Spanish the term
Creoles of color was applied to them. In some cases, white fathers would free
their concubines and children, forming a class of Gens de couleur libres (free
people of color). The French and Spanish gave them more rights than enslaved
people. Most of these Creoles of Color have since assimilated into Black
Culture through a shared history of slavery in the United States, while some
have chose to remain a separate yet inclusive subsection of the African
American ethnic group.[1]"...
****
EXCERPT FROM THE SONGS OF THE BLACK CREOLE" CHAPTER OF "AFRO-AMERICAN FOLKSONGS: A STUDY IN RACIAL AND NATIONAL MUSIC"
From http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/afro-american/afro-american-folksongs%20-%200235.htm
[page 134]
..."the popular notion in the United States that a Creole is a
Louisiana negro is erroneous. Friedenthal discusses the origin of the word and
its application in the introduction to his book "Musik, Tanz und Dichtung
bei den Kreolen Amerikas." The Spanish word criollo, from which the
French Creole is derived, is a derivation from the verb criar, to
create, bring up, breed. From this root other words are derived; not only
substantives like cria (brood), crianza (education, bringing up), criatura,
criador, etc., but also criada (servant), which in other languages
has a very different etymology (Diener, serviteur, domestique, servo,
etc.). The term criado is a relic of the old patriarchal system, under
which the servants of the household were brought up by the family. Children of
the servants became servants of the children of the master. So on the plantations
of the Southern States slaves were set apart from childhood to be the playmates
and attendants of the children of the family. Criollo also signifies
things bred at home but born in foreign lands, and thus it came about that the
Spaniard called his children born in foreign lands criollos; and as these
foreign lands were chiefly the American colonies, the term came to be applied
first to the white inhabitants of the French and Spanish colonies in America
and only secondarily to the offspring of mixed marriages, regardless of their
comparative whiteness or blackness.
When Lafcadio Hearn was looking up Creole music for me in
New Orleans in the early 8o's of the last century, he wrote in one of his
letters: "The Creole songs which I have heard sung in the city are Frenchy
in construction, but possess a few African characteristics of method. The
darker the singer the more marked the oddities of into nation. Unfortunately,
most of those I have heard were quadroons or mulattoes." In another letter
he wrote: "There could neither have been Creole patois nor Creole melodies
but for the French and Spanish blooded slaves of Louisiana and the Antilles.
The melancholy, quavering beauty and weirdness of the negro chant are lightened
by the French influence, or subdued and deepened by the Spanish." Hearn
was musically illiterate, but his powers
[page 135]
From http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/afro-american/afro-american-folksongs%20-%200235.htm
of observation were keen and his intuitions quick and
penetrating. He felt what I have described as the imposition of French and
Spanish melody on African rhythm.
This union of elements is found blended with the French
patois in the songs created by the creole negroes in Louisiana and the West
Indies. Hearn came across an echo of the most famous of all Creole love-songs
in St. Pierre and in his fantastic manner gave it a habitation and a name. Describing
the plague of smallpox in a chapter of "Two Years in the French West
Indies," he tells of hearing a song coming up through the night, sung by a
voice which had "that peculiar metallic timbre that reveals the young
negress."
Always it is one "melancholy chant":
Pauv' ti Lele,
Pauv' ti Lele!
Li gagnin doule,
doule, doule,
Le gagnin doule
Tout patout!
I want to know who little Lele was, and why she had pains
"all over" for however artless and childish these Creole songs seem,
they are invariably originated by some real incident. And at last somebody
tells me that "poor little Lele had the reputation of being the most
unlucky girl in St. Pierre; whatever she tried to do resulted only in
misfortune;when it was morning she wished it were evening, that she might sleep
and forget; but when the night came she could not sleep for thinking of the
trouble she had had during the day, so that she wished it were morning.
..."
Perhaps "Pov' piti Lolotte" (a portion of whose
melody served Gottschalk, a New Orleans creole of pure blood, for one of his
pianoforte pieces), came from the West Indies originally, but it is known
throughout Creoleland now. It fell under the notice of Alphonse Daudet,
who,Tiersot says, put it in the mouth of one of his characters in a novel. Out
of several versions which I have collected I have put the song together, words
and melody, in the form in which Mr. Burleigh has arranged it. (See page 136.)
It is worth noting that the coda of the melody was found only in the transcript
made from the singing of the slaves on the Good Hope plantation, in St. Charles
Parish, La., and that this coda presents a striking use of the rhythmical snap
which I have discussed in connection with the "spirituals," but which
is not found in any one of them with so much emotional effect as here.
****
[Pancocojams Editor's Note: Pages 136, and 137 includes music notations.]
From http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/afro-american/afro-american-folksongs%20-%200238.htm
[page 138]
Century Magazine" on Creole songs Mr. Cable wrote:
One of the best of these Creole love-songs ... is the tender
lament of one who sees the girl of his heart's choice the victim of chagnn in
beholding a female rival wearing those vestments of extra quality that could
only be the favors which both women had courted from the hand of some proud
master whence alone such favors should come. "Calalou," says the
song, "has an embroidered petticoat, and Lolotte, or Zizi," as it is
often sung, "has a heartache." Calalou, here, I take to be a derisive
nickname. Originally it is lie term for a West Indian dish, a noted ragout. It
must be intended to apply here to the quadroon women who swarmed into New
Orleans in 1809 as refugees from Cuba, Guadaloupe and other islands where the
war against Napoleon exposed them to Spanish and British aggression. It was
with this great influx of persons, neither savage nor enlightened, neither
white nor black, neither slave nor truly free, that the famous quadroon caste
arose and flourished. If Calalou, in the verse, was one of these quadroon fair
ones, the song is its own explanation.
In its way the song "Caroline" (see page 139) lets
light into the tragedy as well as the romance of the domestic life of the young
creole slaves. Marriage, the summit of a poor girl's ambition, is its subject that
state of blissful respectability denied to the multitude either by law or
social conditions, I have taken words and melody from "Slave Songs,"
but M. Tiersot, who wrote the song down from the singing of a negress in New
Orleans, gives the name of the heroine as Azelie and divides the poem into two
stanzas separated by a refrain:
Papa dit non, maman dit non,
C'est li m'oule, c'est li ma pren. (Bis)
Un, deux, trois, Azelie.
Pas pare com 9a, ma cher! {Bis)
Sam'di l'amour, Dimanch' marie, Lundi matin piti dans
bras; N'a pas couvert', n'a pas de draps, N'a pas a rien, piti dans bras!
(Papa says no, mama says no.
It is he whom I want and who will have me. One, two, three;
don't talk that way, my dear I Saturday, love; Sunday, married
Monday morning, a little one in arms. There is no coverlet,
no sheets, nothing little one in arms!)
Tiersot gives the melody of the stanzas in 5-8 time, of the
refrain in 2-4, and describes the movements of the dancers (the song is a
Counjai) as a somewhat languorous turning with a slight swaying of the body. I
have translated "cabanne" cabin, but in Martinique "caban"
signifies a bed, and in view of M. Tiersot's variant text this may also have
been the meaning of the term in Louisiana.”…
****
From http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/afro-american/afro-american-folksongs%20-%200239.htm
[page 139]
[Notes]: “Words and melody from “Slave Songs Of The United States”. The arrangement, by
John Van Brockhaven, to a variant of the poem, was printed by Mr. Cable in his
essay on “The Dance In Place Congo” and is here reprinted by permission of Mr.
Cable and t, the Century Co, the words as sung on the Good Hope Plantation, St.
Charles Parish, La, being restored. The meaning of the words is “One, two,
three, that’s the way my dear. Papa says no, mama says yes. Tis him I want and
he that will have me. There will be money to buy a cabin”.
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ADDENDUM #1: PARTIAL TRANSLATION OF THE FRAGMENT OF THE SONG PAUV' TI LELE
"Pauv' ti Lele,
Pauv' ti Lele!
Li gagnin doule, doule, doule,
Le gagnin doule
Tout patout!"
-snip-
Google translate from French to English
"Poor Lele,
Poor Lele!
Li Gainin Doule, Doule, Doule,
The Doule Winner
Everything patout!"
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ADDENDUM #2: QUOTE FROM WIKIPEDIA PAGE ON THE SONG "SKIP TO MY LOU"
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skip_to_My_Lou
"Skip to My (The) Lou" is a popular American
partner-stealing dance from the 1840s.
[...]
S. Frederick Starr suggests that the song may be derived
from the Creole folksong "Lolotte Pov'piti Lolotte", to which it has
a strong resemblance.[3]"...
-snip-
I believe "Pauv' ti Lele" and "Pov'piti Lolotte" are titles for the same song.
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