acquainted. If the reader will get
nearly any copy of Jubilee Songs he will find that the larger number
group themselves about Jesus Christ and the others cluster about Moses,
Daniel, Judgment Day, etc., subjects partially known and handled by the
preachers in their sermons. There is just one exception. There is no
Jubilee Song on "Servants, obey your Masters." We shall leave for the
"feeble" imagination of the reader the reason why. The Negroes
practically left out of their Jubilee Songs, Jeremiah, Job, Abraham,
Isaac, Solomon, Samuel, Ezra, Mark, Luke, John, James, The Psalms, The
Proverbs, etc., simply because these subjects did not fall among those
taught them as preaching subjects.

Now let us consider for a while the Negro's religion in Africa. Turning
to Bettanny's "The World's Religions" we learn the following facts about
aboriginal African worship.

The Bushmen worshiped a Caddis worm and an antelope (a species of deer).
The Damaras believed that they and all living creatures descended from a
kind of tree and they worshiped that tree. The Mulungu worshiped
alligators and lion-shaped idols. The Fantis considered snakes and many
other animals messengers of spirits. The Dahomans worshiped snakes, a
silk tree, a poison tree and a kind of ocean god whom they called Hu.

Now turning our attention to Negro Folk Rhymes we find them clustering
around the animals of aboriginal African Folk worship. The Negro stories
recorded by Mr. Harris center around these animals also. In the Folk
Rhyme "Walk Tom Wilson" our hero steps on an alligator. In "The Ark" the
lion almost breaks out of his enclosure of palings. In one rhyme the
snake is described as descended from the Devil and then the Devil
figures prominently in many Rhymes. Then we have "Green Oak Tree
Rocky-o" answering to the tree worship.

I have placed in our collection of Rhymes a small foreign section
including African Rhymes. I have recorded precious few but those few are
enough to show two things. (1) That the Negro of savage Africa has the
rhyme-making habit and probably has always had it, and thus the American
Negro brought this habit with him to America. (2) That a small handful
from darkest Africa contains stanzas on the owl, the frog, and the
turkey buzzard just like the American rhymes.

Knowing that the Negro made rhymes in Africa, and knowing that he
centered his Jubilee Song words around his American Christian religion,
is it not reasonable to suppos