Songs of Protest

With an old-fashioned phonograph strapped on his back, a sawed-off megaphone and a bundle of blank aluminum records, a lean, scraggly-haired New Yorker has been touring the South for the past nine years, collecting Negro songs that few white men have ever heard. Like his older brother Artist Hugo Gellert, Collector Lawrence Gellert is an ardent Left Winger. He scorns the idea that most Negroes when left to themselves will either sing spirituals or dance to the blues. The songs that fascinated Lawrence Gellert were those symbolic of Negro class consciousness, unrest and despair. From more than 300 that he has collected he published 24 last week as Negro Songs of Protest.*

For the cover of his brother's first songbook Artist Gellert drew a barrel-chested, barefooted black convict wearing a ball& chain and resting on his pickax while he wiped the sweat from his face. Of the songs, some are mournful, some grim, some comic. But each one has its grievance. In I Went to Atlanta it is:

White folks eat de apple, Nigger wait fo' co' [core] In Sistren an' Brethren, the rebellious singer commands: Stop foolin' wid pray, When black face is lifted, Lord turnin' 'way.

Collector Gellert says he heard Preacher's Belly in a small Alabama church one Sunday morning before the service began:

Religion is somethin' fo' de soul But preacher's belly done git it all. . . .

Lawd make preacher big an' fat, Sleek an' shiny lak a beaver hat. . . .

He eat yo' dinner an' take yo' lamb Gwine give you pay in de promise' Ian'. . . .

De Lawd make you po' an' lean De sorries' sight ah eber seen. . . .

It was purely by chance that Lawrence Gellert became seriously interested in Negro songs and problems. He had been a newspaper reporter, a secretary in Manhattan to the late Undertaker Frank E. Campbell, then a chorus boy in a Marilyn Miller production and a bush in The Miracle, a role which left him time to help with the publicity, sell programs in the lobby. The Miracle was in San Francisco when Gellert fell ill, left the company, went to Asheville, N. C. to convalesce. One of his first sights there was the corpse of a Negro two days dead dangling from a barn rafter in full view of passersby.

On an income provided by his father, a Hungarian who for years conducted a prosperous Manhattan importing & exporting business, Gellert began his social and musical investigations. For long trips he used a ramshackle old Jewett in which he kept a cot. More often he hiked through the backlands, stopping at sundown at some shack where he would ask the Negro owner if he could spend the night. Thus he won the confidence of Negroes, attended their baptisms, weddings, funerals, heard them sing songs they ordinarily would rather the white folk did not hear.

-- American Music League ($1).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.