SOURCE: "Notes on Negro Music," in The Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. XVI, No. LXII, 1903, pp. 255-94.

In the following excerpt, the author analyzes the music sung by the African-American men hired to help at an archeological excavation in Mississippi.

During May and June of 1901 and 1902 I was engaged in excavating for the Peabody Museum of Harvard University a mound in Coahoma County, northern Mississippi. At these times we had some opportunity of observing the Negroes and their ways at close range, as we lived in tent or cabin very much as do the rest of the small farmers and laborers, white and black, of the district. Busy archaeologically, we had not very much time left for folk-lore, in itself of not easy excavation, but willy-nilly our ears were beset with an abundance of ethnological material in song,—words and music. In spite of faulty memory and musical...