perhaps, gather from a study of the plantation hymns.
These folksongs represent, at any rate, the naive and spontaneous
utterance of hopes and aspirations for which the Negro slave had no
other adequate means of expression. The first and most interesting
account we have of these Negro spirituals is that of Col. Thomas
Wentworth Higginson, in his _Army Life in a Black Regiment_.[10] He
collected them from the lips of his own black soldiers as they sang
them about the campfire at night. He was almost the first to recognize
that these rude plantation hymns represented a real literature, the
only literature the American Negro has produced, until very recent
times.

Col. Higginson has compared the Negro spirituals to the Scotch
ballads and to the folk songs of other races. It is, however, not so
much their similarities as their differences which are interesting and
significant. Negro folk songs are ruder and more primitive. The
verses, often but not always rhymed, are, as in the case of the
example given below, composed almost entirely of single phrases,
followed by a refrain, which is repeated again with slight
modifications, ending, not infrequently, in an exclamation.

An' I couldn't hear nobody pray,
O Lord!

Couldn't hear nobody pray.
O--way down yonder
By myself,
I couldn't hear nobody pray.

In the valley,
Couldn't hear nobody pray,
On my knees,
Couldn't hear nobody pray,
With my burden,
Couldn't hear nobody pray,
An' my Saviour,
Couldn't hear nobody pray.

O Lord!
I couldn't hear nobody pray,
O Lord!
Couldn't hear nobody pray.
O--way down yonder
By myself,
I couldn't hear nobody pray.

Chilly waters,
Couldn't hear nobody pray,
In the Jordan,
Couldn't hear nobody pray,
Crossing over,
Couldn't hear nobody pray,
Into Canaan,
Couldn't hear nobody pray.

In Negro folk songs the music and expression are everything. The
words, often striking and suggestive, to be sure, represent broken
fragments of ideas, thrown up from the depths of the Negroes'
consciousness and swept along upon a torrent of wild, weird and often
beautiful melody. One reason the verses of the Negro folk songs are so
broken and fragmentary is that the Negroes were not yet in secure
possession of the English language. Another explanation is the
conditions un