der which they were produced. The very structure of these
verses indicate their origin in the communal excitement of a religious
assembly. A happy phrase, a striking bit of imagery, flung out by some
individual was taken up and repeated by the whole congregation.
Naturally the most expressive phrases, the lines that most adequately
voiced the deep unconscious desires of the whole people, were
remembered longest and repeated most frequently. New lines and
variations were introduced from time to time. There was, therefore, a
process of natural selection by which the best, the most
representative verses, those which most adequately expressed the
profounder and more permanent moods and sentiments of the Negro were
preserved and became part of the permanent tradition of the race.

Negro melodies still spring up on the plantations of the South as they
did in the days of slavery. The Negro is, like the Italian, an
improviser, but the songs he produces today have not, so far as my
knowledge goes, the quality of those he sang in slavery. The schools
have introduced reading, and this, with the reflection which writing
enforces, is destroying the folk songs of the Negro, as it has those
of other races.

Not only are the Negro folk songs more primitive--in the sense I have
indicated--than the folk songs of other peoples with which we are
familiar but the themes are different. The themes of the Scotch
ballads are love and battles, the adventures and tragedies of a wild,
free life. The Negro songs, those that he has remembered best, are
religious and other worldly. "It is a singular fact," says Krehbiel,
"that very few secular songs--those which are referred to as 'reel
tunes,' 'fiddle songs,' 'corn songs' and 'devil songs,' for which
slaves generally expressed a deep abhorrence, though many of them no
doubt were used to stimulate them while in the fields--have been
preserved while 'shout songs' and other 'speritchils' have been kept
alive by the hundred."[11]

If it is the plantation melodies that, by a process of natural
selection, have been preserved in the traditions of the Negro people,
it is probably because in these songs they found a free and natural
expression of their unfulfilled desires. In the imagery of these
songs, in the visions which they conjure up, in the themes which they
again and again renew, we may discern the reflection of dawning racial
consciousness, a common racial ideal.

The content of the Negro folk