Natalie Curtis Burlin: A Life in Native and African American Music

6. Folk Songs of a "Very Musical Race": Curtis and African Amerian Music

6 Curtis and African American Music in the 1918 introduction to the second book of Negro Folk Songs Natalie Curtis explained her rationale for collecting African American spirituals and other songs. She had begun this work several years earlier at the request of “a group of earnest colored men” who asked her to “do for the music of their race what I had tried to do for that of the Indian: to present it with entire genuineness and in a form of publication that could readily be grasped by all people.” Curtis undertook this challenge with “the same uncompromising ideal” that had guided her earlier folk music research. She endeavored to “put in written form, without addition or change of any kind, the true folk-song, spirit, and sound, just as it springs from the hearts and the lips of the folk-singers.”1 These aspirations led Curtis to collect, preserve, and popularize African American and African folk songs. As with Native Americans she viewed blacks as members of “primitive” cultures who could inspire “overcivilized” Americans and help create a national musical identity. African American folk music urgently needed preservation , Curtis believed, because as blacks “progressed” they would no 214 longer be capable of producing such music and would forget their treasured past. Curtis understood the prejudice and oppression blacks faced as a consequence of white misunderstanding of their cultures. She therefore believed that her studies of black musical traditions—using music as a universal language—would increase interracial understanding and lead to improved race relations. This chapter analyzes Curtis’s research into African American and African folk music and her efforts to use black song to establish an interracial dialogue and ease racial tensions. Negro Folk Songs and especially Songs and Tales from the Dark Continent more clearly reveal Curtis’s views on race and her attempts to straddle the evolutionary perspective of her Victorian youth with the burgeoning cultural pluralism of the modern era. This chapter also examines the influence of patronage on her work and how the agenda of Hampton Institute, one of her most significant supporters, shaped her approach to black folk song. Her efforts to preserve and popularize African American music through her research and reform efforts demonstrate that Curtis saw her work as both uplift of a “primitive” group and an attempt to use this group’s primitivism as a means to articulate a personal and national identity. Curtis first became interested in African American music through her contacts with Hampton. As early as 1904 she jotted down spirituals and other songs in the field notebooks she used for collecting Native American music. For instance, in the spring of 1904 she transcribed several songs at the Hampton, Tuskegee, and Calhoun schools.2 Many of these songs were just fragments or sketches of melodies, but they piqued her interest in the music of “primitive” peoples, as did songs from African groups at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Curtis’s musical curiosity partly explains her attraction to African American music, but Hampton’s influence, particularly its efforts to collect, study, and use black folk songs, clearly had its effect. Black educational institutions began popularizing Negro spiritu- 215 als among Northern audiences in the early 1870s. Fisk University’s Jubilee Singers first performed these songs on fund-raising tours. School leaders were initially wary of using spirituals because white blackface minstrels often sang them to ridicule African Americans. Educators, and some students, feared that this stigma would tarnish the reputation of the schools and counteract their programs for black progress. The songs the students sang did not exactly resemble renditions by slaves but were “denatured into a form more compatible with Euro-American musical tastes.” Spirituals became wildly popular among white audiences, and soon other schools, like Hampton, sent out their own student groups to garner support and raise funds for new buildings and other needs.3 Hampton argued that the preservation of black folk songs served several important functions. Studying this music would help teachers better understand their students. A Hampton representative speaking at a typical school performance explained, “It seems well to us to look backward a little and try to find out from what conditions the people have come, and what they have of their own value which they should cherish and preserve for their descendents, together with all this new learning.” African Americans needed to respect themselves if they hoped...