Social Instinct type. Read once again the following rhyme
recorded in our collection under the caption of "Antebellum Courtship
Inquiry"--

(He)--"Is you a flyin' lark, or a settin' dove?"
(She)--"I'se a flyin' lark, my Honey Love."
(He)--"Is you a bird o' one fedder, or a bird o' two?"
(She)--"I'se a bird o' one fedder, w'en it comes to you."
(He)--"Den Mam:
"I has desire an' quick temptation
To jine my fence to y[=o]' plantation."

This is primitive courtship; direct, quick, conclusive. It is the crude
call of one heart, and the crude response of another heart. The two
answering and blending into one, in the primitive days, made a rhymed
couplet--one. It is "call" and "sponse," born to vibrate in
complementary unison with two hearts that beat as one. "Did all Negroes
carry on courtship in this manner in olden days?" No, not by any means.
Only the more primitive by custom, and otherwise used such forms of
courtship. The more intelligent of those who came out of slavery had
made the white man's customs their own, and laughed at such crudities,
quite as much as we of the present day. The writer thinks his ability
to recall from childhood days a clear remembrance of many of these
crude things is due to the fact that he belonged to a Negro family that
laughed much, early and late, at such things. But the simple forms of
"call" and "sponse" were used much in courtship by the more primitive.
This points out something of the general origin of "call" and "sponse"
in Social Instinct Rhymes, but does not account for their origin in
other types of Rhymes. I now turn attention to those.

About eighteen years ago I was making a Sociological investigation for
Tuskegee Institute, which carried me into a remote rural district in the
Black Belt of Alabama. In the afternoon, when the Negro laborers were
going home from the fields and occasionally during the day, these
laborers on one plantation would utter loud musical "calls" and the
"calls" would be answered by musical responses from the laborers on
other plantations. These calls and responses had no peculiar
significance. They were only for whatever pleasure these Negroes found
in the cries and apparently might be placed in a parallel column
alongside of the call of a song bird in the woods being answered by
another. Dr. William H. Sheppard, many years a missionary in Congo,
Africa, upon inquiry, tells me that similar calls and responses obtain
there,