Holy Gibberish

 

     The business of an artist centers on the construction of meaningful patterns of words, sounds, forms, or movement, yet the creator is often acutely aware that the object produced falls short of the initial vision.  The same gap is unlikely to be experienced by authors of texts meant to convey less subtle information such as warehouse data or scientific research.   For such purposes language seems wholly adequate, while, on the other end of the spectrum, ordinary verbal usages fail the mind that ventures to plumb beyond the horizon.  Words encounter their acid test in Ultimate Reality.  What name can the ineffable bear?

     Various spiritual techniques have sought to transcend the limits of words, some, such as Hatha Yoga, largely non-verbal, others like the koan practice of Rinzai Zen, using language to subvert itself.  Often people seeking illumination have used nonsense syllables, vocables with no conventional meaning, to indicate or to evoke insight beyond the bonds of ordinary speech. 

     The mystical significance of gibberish is usually distinguishable from its artistic use in such manifestations as Dadaist sound poetry, the zaum of the Russian Futurists, or the work of those who produce asemic writing (an abstract form using no familiar characters).  Though many writers entertain spiritual as well as aesthetic pretensions their work is usually classed among their fellow avant-gardists rather than among the practices labelled religious. 

     Likewise excluded here are purely musical uses of nonsense vocables such as the scat singing of jazz vocalists, Celtic “lilting,” Jewish Nigun, Sami joik or luohti, the chanting of tabla bols in Indian music, and the familiar use of nonsense in children’s rhymes, folksong, doo wop, and hip hop.  [1] 

    I find no clearly demarcated borderline, though, between religious and magical gibberish, as both involve supernatural claims.  In each case the individual expects to use a series of unintelligible vocables to derive some benefit from the unseen powers.  What seems to the believer a sublime spiritual activity might strike subscribers to other belief systems as utter superstition, while the skeptical observer would convict all the believers alike of credulity. 

     All such practices have a good deal in common.  Both priest and magician employ what might be called the principle of Mumbo Jumbo [2], the notion that mysteries are likely to be associated with unintelligible speech.  This is evident in the world-wide belief in the efficacy of magico-religious formulae such as spells.  The best known such expression in the Western tradition is probably abracadabra which dates from Roman times when it was used in medical treatments [3] though today it is more common in cartoons and stage shows. Hocus pocus and alakazam, though formed of sounds reminiscent of Latin and Arabic respectively, are both latecomers, lacking the pedigree of having once been used for conjuring. 

     In religion proper, the use of mysterious words to seal a contract with the supernatural is probably as old as language.  Many Roman Catholics felt that the mass lost a good deal of its impact if not its efficacy when vernacular was substituted for Latin, while Jewish and Hindu congregants may well yet hear ceremonies in words they do not understand.  A middle-class American sitting in temple or in a mandir may share more than is immediately apparent with the purchaser of a useful spell from the local magic-worker in the Nigerian bush.  Like the elaborate directions such a shaman might insist must be precisely fulfilled, or like the dials and blinking lights on a quack medical device, the very inscrutability of the sounds seems to their users a guarantee of their value.  Such magic phrases in antiquity sometimes included the deeper mystery of “charaktêres,” signs with no associated sound or significance.

     One group of magical formulae in ancient times was called “Ephesian words,” said by Pausanias to be written on the cult image at the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus.  These phrases were employed for a variety of purposes.  Among the attested uses are to guarantee athletic victory, to bless a marriage, and to avert demons. The fire meant to burn Croesus was drenched after the king, it was said, pronounced an Ephesian spell.  [4]  Other similar charms were called voces magicae by the Romans.   Another label was “barbarous names,” due to untranslated magic formulae being imported from other languages, Egyptian, Persian and Hebrew.  Such terms were widely used by the Neo-Platonists.  Iamblichus explains that such unintelligible foreign terms are preferable in controlling certain divine powers. [5]  These texts and their names were revived by Renaissance practitioners of magic such as the author of the Ars Goetia, compiled in  the mid seventeenth century which was in turn used by later occultists such as Aleister Crowley who notes that such phrases should remain untranslated to retain their purity and power as they “are very sonorous” when pronounced in “a certain magical voice.” [6]

     The Hindu use of mantras such as “Om” depends upon the sound’s lacking any denotation.  [7]  It is thus even more empty of meaning (and thus to some potentially full) than the Zen “Mu” which retains traces of signification, though only of negation.    

     Holy gibberish is generated ever anew in some Native American cultures (Dakota, Blackfoot, and Native American Church peyote songs, among others), but perhaps its most spectacular contemporary expression is among Pentecostalists who practice speaking in tongues.  Though speaking in tongues has sporadically appeared among other sects in the past including fifteenth century Moravians, seventeenth century Camisard Huguenots and Quakers, and nineteenth century Mormons, those most identified with the practice today are fundamentalist Christians such as those in the Assemblies of God, the Church of God, Foursquare churches, Apostolic churches, and Vineyard churches.

     The scriptural warrant for this activity is the day of Pentecost when “there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.  And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” In this incident it is clear that the Christians are thought to be miraculously able to proselytize in all languages.  In some Biblical references speaking in tongues seems to be simply a spiritual gift that descends on some believers requiring no interpretation, while in others it refers to the ability to communicate in any earthly tongue, or to prophesy, or to possess esoteric knowledge of a divine language used by god or by angels. [8]

     A number of individuals have in fact composed secret languages.  Though others have invented languages meant for purely practical ends such as Esperanto and Interlingua, some have constructed languages that they supposed would enable communication with god.   Feeling, surely, that neither German nor Latin was quite up to the task of supporting her meditations, Hildegarde of Bingen devised a phonetic alphabet to embody her “lingua ignota,” used, as far as is known, by herself alone.  Anticipating her death, her friend Womarus asked elegiacally, "where, then, the voice of the unheard melody? And the voice of the unheard language?" [9] 

     Apart from Hildegarde, perhaps the most significant language constructor in the European religious tradition was John Dee, the Elizabethan scholar, scientist, and occultist widely thought to be Shakespeare’s model for the character of Prospero, who developed what he called “Angelic” language but which was later labeled “Enochian.”  Dee also called his language “Adamic” because, according to his angels, it was spoken until the confusion of tongues after Babel.  Beginning in 1583 Dee with the aid of a medium recorded first a new alphabet and then a series of seven-by-seven tables as well as poems (for some of which he provided translations) in this angelic speech. His work is celebrated today by the Theosophical Society and other esotericists, though a recent student of his system maintains that much of what he produced was meaningless, mere random syllables. [10] 

     Other constructed languages with spiritual aims include Balaibalan, devised by Sufis in the Ottoman Empire, Damin used by a group of Australian aborigines of the Lardil and Yangkaal groups, and the Medefaidrin invented by an Ibibio congregation in Nigeria during the nineteen-thirties who came into conflict with the government when they sought to use the language for their children’s school.

          Each of these uses of holy gibberish begins from the assumption that ordinary language is inadequate, that the words used in daily discourse cannot bear the weight, the infinite significance of the divine.  Yet unintelligible utterances can do no more than gesture in the direction of the numinous godhead.  Intimating something beyond and confessing that what one has seen one cannot tell.   Strained to the breaking point, words fracture and fail, yet in this broken state, they preserve the passionate desire of the individual to establish contact with the macrocosm.  If, in the via negativa, god is that which we do not know, perhaps his most eloquent liturgy must be likewise incomprehensible.

 

  

1.  Among modern musical ensembles that have used constructed languages of their own invention are Magma in France and Sigur Rós in Iceland. 

2.  The term, which came to mean incomprehensible language, as I here use it, originally signified a divine being, his sculptural representation, or his impersonation by a person in masquerade.  Mungo Parks introduced the term to English in Travels in the Interior of Africa (1795).

3.   In the Liber Medicinalis of Serenus Sammonicus where it is presented in a “reduction pattern” with one less letter per line, forming a triangle suitable for inscribing in amulets.  The phrase is clearly based on the opening letters of the alphabet.

4.  See Chester C. McCown, “The Ephesia Grammata in Popular Belief,” TAPA 54 (1923).

5.  See Iamblichus Theurgia, or the Egyptian Mysteries I, 7.  The concept of barbarous names appears as well in the Chaldean Oracles.

6.  Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, Ch. IX.

7.  The syllable also occurs in Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh texts. 

Visions of Vorticism: Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound

 

Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel: Spring 1915 (1961-62) by William Roberts.

     Like other self-conscious schools of twentieth century modernism, Vorticism was imprecisely defined by its inventors, inevitably then producing work of considerable variety.   Though the concept of the vortex had been first used by Ezra Pound to refer to some contemporary art and poetry, suggesting the site of the greatest concentration of energy, the idea of a Vorticist movement emerged publicly with Wyndham Lewis’s Blast in 1915 and the show at the Doré Galleries in London the same year. [1]  With an eye on being the most avant-garde of the avant-gardes, Lewis had sought to distinguish himself from recognized schools, maintaining the superiority of his own version of the geometric designs of Cubism, encouraging abstraction energized by a certain modern dynamic sometimes labeled “hard-edged,” resembling Futurism with an interest in industry and violence.   Lewis’s own art and that of others who exhibited as Vorticists – the original show included Lewis, Jessica Dismorr, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, William Roberts, Helen Saunders, Frederick Etchells, and Edward Wadsworth [2] -- combined Cubist fragmentation of reality with imagery derived from the machine and the urban environment.  The idea of Vorticism itself adds little to understanding of the works from that show or of Pound’s poetry of the time.  Lifting the banner of a militant movement, however, l did provide an arena for avant-garde posturing by both Lewis and Pound, entertaining in itself, but shedding limited light on their art.   

      The investigation into the question of to what extent, if any, these artists constituted a coherent group would seem to depend primarily on their adherence to the principles of Vorticism.  As it happens, the same year of the Vorticist exhibition, Lewis published a manifesto in his journal Blast. [3]  The reader might be baffled to find virtually no reference to visual art in this document.  Its attention-getting typography reinforces the notion of volume implied by the publication’s title, but the shouting does not seem to add up to much of a program.  The emphasis is rather on playing the bohemian viva voce, satirizing the priggish and the sentimental, the conventional and the bourgeois, while claiming for England (and in that way for himself) the leadership of modern art.  Lewis here constructs a persona by taking center stage to enact the role of the modern artist.

     There are artistic references, all polemical, in the series of declarations opening the inaugural and penultimate issue of Blast titled “Long Live the Vortex!”  Bearing the banner of the avant-garde holds for Lewis a critical significance.  Due to the value he places in novelty, he declares that “education (art education and general education) tends to destroy the creative instinct,” though his own theory remains obscure, apart from a commitment “to destroy politeness, standardization, and academic, that is civilized, vision” and to express “vivid and violent ideas.”  He arbitrarily claims that “great artists in England are always revolutionary, just as in France any really fine artist have [sic] a strong traditional vein.”  Precisely what this might mean is unexpressed, except that Vorticist art must engage “the Reality of the Present,” shaped by the artist acting as an individual.

     With a self-conscious deprecation of realism, he maintains that Vorticism means to appeal to “every class and description of people, TO THE INDIVIDUAL” in spite of the fact that he is well aware that the overwhelming majority of the populace will never hear the word.  He emphasizes this vague universality, concluding with the summary statement: “Blast presents an art of individuals,” a proposition acceptable to most Romantic and post-Romantic critics.  In an equally ill-defined clue to the identity of Vorticism, he anticipates Surrealism, saying “WE NEED THE UNCONSCIOUSNESS OF HUMANITY – their stupidity, animalism, and dreams.” [4] 

     Whatever this may mean, he fears that his movement might be confused with Futurism which he repeatedly condemns as “sensational and sentimental,” no advance at all, but merely “the latest form of Impressionism.”  His own predilections for fascism made him no more sympathetic to Mussolini’s cheerleader.  He ridicules the Italian’s interest in industrial and mechanical imagery, saying “Marinetteism” [sic] amounts to nothing but “Automobilism.”  His rivals, though somewhat similar to Lewis to outsiders, are not to him even second-rate; they are contemptible

     Lewis compensates for the fact that Vorticism may seem to some a splinter of a faction by jauntily speculating on the pillars of society becoming Vorticists: Lloyd George, shortly to become prime minister, Lady Mond, Baroness Melchett, and perhaps even the king.  The effect of the suggestion, of course, is to emphasize its unlikeliness and thus to highlight Lewis’s counter-cultural credentials.

     “Long Live the Vortex!” is followed by a lengthy manifesto, or series of manifestoes.  The first eighteen pages are a compilation of blessings and curses of things English and French, an amusing and typographically spectacular definition, I suppose, of Lewis’s specific individuality.  Much of this content is satirical or otherwise humorous, though certain significant patterns emerge.  English wet weather and politeness are both rather predictably condemned, but so are England’s “socialist-playwright” and “tonks.”  Considering France he curses “gallic gush,” the Arc de Triomphe, and France’s status as a “Mecca for Americans” and for many an “amative German professor.”  The years 1837 to 1900, the period of “bourgeois Victorian vistas” are denounced as a whole, though he blesses Britain’s “seafarers” expressing particular fondness for their “restless machines.”  Having blasted “humour” in one section, he returns to bless it a few pages later.  In England the “art-pimp” is blasted though with no description by which he might be identified, while in France a similarly mysterious “bad music” is condemned.  The reader is clearly dealing with a self-identified enfant terrible, more eager to provoke than to present a new view of artistic practice.  The address of Blast is, after all, the Rebel Art Centre, implying that the most important element in Lewis’s Vorticist program is rebellion.

     A seven-part document titled “Manifesto” follows.  Part I sheds little new light on artistic practice, but rather aims to evoke and destroy dualities in the same pronouncements.  This principle is restated in several forms.  The first item says “Beyond Action and Reaction we would establish ourselves.”  Next, starting from “opposite statements of a chosen world,” the Vorticist wishes to set up a “violent structure” between the extremes.  Thus “we discharge ourselves on both sides.”  Etc.  What this might mean in terms of practice or connoisseurship remains obscure.

     Perhaps in illustration of this dialectic, Lewis proceeds, after establishing England’s reputation as “anti-artistic,” to assert that this is the very reason “why England produces such good artists.”   Hints of appropriate subject matter emerge as “the Art-instinct is permanently primitive,” finding “stimulus” in a chaos of imperfection, discord, etc.,” a “savage” wholly unlike any “Futurist individual of Mr. Marinetti’s limited imagination.”  The modern artist will derive material from “this enormous, jangling, journalistic fairy desert of modern life” as artists of the past had been inspired by nature.   In spite of the world’s being “a fairy desert,” Lewis laments the passing of fairies and offers a somewhat premature elegy for the Spanish bullfight.  Fruitful imaginative resources, “springs of creation,” remain, however, characterized by “mysticism,” “gladiatorial instincts,” and “blood and asceticism.” 

     Shakespeare embodies a certain British “mysticism, madness, and delicacy” uniting comedy and tragedy.  Lewis indulges in his peculiar version of chauvinism by claiming that the “Modern World” as a whole is due to “Anglo-Saxon genius,” making the English the natural practitioners of the imagery of “machinery, trains, steamships” “buildings, bridges, and works.”  They are “the inventors” of modern “bareness and hardness,” and the enemies of “Romanticism,” while the similar modernism of the Futurists is to him spurious, “romantic and sentimental,” nothing but “gush.”  The tone of the journal is clear from the next feature, poetry from Ezra Pound, beginning with his “Salutation the Third” which opens, “Let us deride the smugness of ‘the Times’:/ GUFFAW!”

     Apart from his considerable brio in presenting an individualistic catalogue of preferences somewhat resembling the lists of the hip and the non-hip Norman Mailer compiled for the Village Voice and his generalized bad boy persona the reader may yet wonder just what a Vorticist work of art looks like.  The show at the Doré Gallery perforce answered that question and, in Lewis’s “Note for Catalogue” [7] of the exhibition, he let the cat peek just a bit out of the bag.  He opens with an adroit faux naïf use of passive voice, referring to “painters, to whom the name Vorticist has been given” (as though he and Pound had not concocted the movement).  He has not dropped his rivalry with Marinetti, referring to the “fuss and hysterics of the Futurists,” but he is now at pains to distinguish himself from another rival as well, Picasso in whose work he finds “passivity” (Lewis used all capitals) in contrast to Vorticist “activity.”  To him Picasso is a “dressmaker” who simply “matches little bits of stuff he finds lying about. He puts no life into the pieces of cloth or paper he sticks side by side, but rather contemplates their beauty.”

      The heart of Lewis’s remarks in this introduction to the exhibition, however, stresses abstraction rather than dynamism.

The impression received on a hot afternoon on the quays of some port, made up of the smell of tar and fish, the heat of the sun, the history of the place, cannot be conveyed by any imitation of a corner of it. The influences weld themselves into an hallucination or dream (which all the highest art has always been) with a mathematic of its own.   

He criticizes naturalistic or academic painting the goal of which is what was later called photorealism, concluding that abstraction is the only adequate method of conveying his vision.  His whimsy has not altogether departed.  He suggests that if advertisements were abstract “the effect architecturally would be much better, and the Public taste could thus be educated in a popular way to appreciate the essentials of design better than picture-galleries have ever done.”  As a final caprice, he implies that Vorticism is a contribution to the British war effort in contending against German Kultur.  In terms of actual Vorticist characteristics, gallery-goers are offered only in fact abstraction as a kind of higher symbolism and the idea of energy.

     While Blast had been primarily a counter-cultural entertainment, an irreverent eruption making considerable noise while shedding little light, the exhibit allowed Lewis to define the “movement” with bit more specificity.  Today descriptions of Vorticist art generally limit themselves to prescribing “hard-edged abstraction” allied on the one hand with Cubist forms and on the other with Futurist themes. 

     The movement’s other parent, however, was Ezra Pound whose primary concern was literary.  Pound argues in his essay “Vortex” [8] for a sort of abstraction in literature as well as visual art, quoting with approval Pater’s line that “all arts approach the conditions of music.” He elaborates.

It is no more ridiculous that a person should receive or convey an emotion by means of an arrangement of shapes, or planes, or colours, than that they should receive or convey such emotion by an arrangement of musical notes.

 For him consciousness is “the primary pigment,” and the artist is reproducing a state of mind, not an observed external scene.  Just as poetry tends toward the pleasures of music, music answers and, to him, “music, sheer melody, seems as if it were just bursting into speech.”  Everything is symbolic.  “The vorticist relies not upon similarity or analogy, not upon likeness or mimicry.”  Realism is a “secondary application”

     In Pound’s Vorticist poetry prettiness, too, is not the focus. 

Since the beginning of bad writing, writers have used images as ornaments. The point of Imagisme is that it does not use images as ornaments. The image is itself the speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language.

In accordance with Pound’s admiration for craft, the primary aim for him is formal, a value highlighted by his claim (which he immediately moderates) that “Lewis is Bach.” 

Music was vorticist in the Bach-Mozart period, before it went off into romance and sentiment and description. A new vorticist music would come from a new computation of the mathematics of harmony, not from a mimetic representation of dead cats in a fog-horn, alias noise-tuners.

     Far from dropping Imagisme for Vorticism, he built on its foundation.  Far from being left behind, the image generates the vortex.  For him “THE IMAGE IS NOT an idea,” and presumably not mere decoration either. He characterizes it using formal terms, beginning with the word vortex itself.  To Pound the vortex is “a radiant node or cluster.”  His images are meant neither to be symbols requiring decoding nor decorative elements, but rather vortices, formal patterns “from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.”  Even the sort of images he admired in East Asian poetry become, through this lens, vorticist nodes of activity in spite of their apparent stillness.   Rhythms alone are, like music, capable of communicating anything.  “I believe that every emotion and every phase of emotion has some toneless phrase, some rhythm-phrase to express it.”

     Physicists in the early twentieth century found, upon close examination of material reality, that its apparent solidity conceals teeming activity and extraordinary potential energy on the subatomic level.  At the time of Vorticism scientists were beginning to dig deeper yet, uncovering first the mysteries of relativity and then those of quantum mechanics.   By analogy the Vorticist claimed to be likewise looking into the very essence of things. 

     Pound, then, argues for the formal values of abstraction while maintaining a practice of imagism, asserting what to him  are essentially artistic values against thematics.  He republishes his principles of Imagism which have now become principles of Vorticism as well. [9] He aspires to pass beyond the mild beauty of the picturesque, beyond the appeal of the concrete specific, to reach a glimpse of the tumultuous, sometimes awe-inspiring energy of the vortex.   He repeats at the same time Lewis’s conviction that Vorticism must be altogether au courant, in the very forefront of innovation.  “Vortex is the present, the moment of the creation of the future.”

     To visualize Vorticism as the central modern art movement he situates it among others, Marinetti, Picasso, and Kandinsky in particular.  He declares defiantly that Marinetti “did not set on the egg that hatched me,” he disparages Marinetti’s Futurism as merely “a sort of accelerated  impressionism.”  For him all non-Vorticist work, “every work that is not poised in this whirlpool” [i.e., the vortex) “is a corpse”.

     On the other hand he admires the artists most associated with abstraction and Cubism, Kandinsky and Picasso, and is willing to accept descent in their lineage.  “Picasso, Kandinski, father and mother, classicism and romanticism of the of the [Vorticist] movement.”  In associating Picasso with a sort of “classicism,” he may have been recognizing the tendency toward poised serenity in composition of many of Picasso’s Cubist work during the World War I period even before what art historians often label his ”classical” phase. 

     To Kandinsky he attributed the principle that content is quite irrelevant.  “An artist should have just as much pleasure in an arrangement of planes or in a pattern of figures, as in painting portraits of fine ladies, or in portraying the Mother of God as the symbolists bid us.”  This insistence on abstraction is shared by Lewis and Pound and is perhaps the chief discernable principle of Vorticism. 

     The documents here analyzed preserve the idea of the movement, though Lewis’s visual works might well be subsumed under other labels.  Vorticism is ever elusive since it “never presented a coherent point of view.” [11]  A critical article wonders “on what basis we can call any work of art ‘Vorticist,’” adding  “It is difficult to imagine any sentence as an example of the Vorticist style, or any visual style in painting.”  A description of Vorticist work might be equally applied to paintings by Kandinsky or Picasso or, indeed, to “most of the paintings created between 1907 and 1915 by the avant-garde.”   Vorticist poetry seems to be in an even worse case.  Even when looking at Pound’s own work, the Vorticist character “remains elusive.” [10]  another investigator says that, in general, Vorticism “failed miserably,” and “left no permanent traces on  Western styles of art.”   “If few understood it then,” the writer concludes, “it is even more obscure now.” [12]

     Vorticism, though occasioned perhaps more by Lewis’s break with Roger Fry’s Omega group and Pound’s rambunctious free-lance troublemaking than by theoretical considerations, enjoyed a brief efflorescence.  At its crest, though, the movement had little to distinguish it from the longer-lived trends of Imagism and Cubism.  Vorticism’s founders, much as they looked down upon Marinetti, shared with him a noxious politics that has discouraged discipleship.  Yet for a time Vorticism seized the spotlight of the art world, though this most often meant attracting scorn.  The Daily Mail commented that “Almost any child between the ages of eight months and three years can be a first rate Vorticist if it is given some lightly coloured paints, bottle of blacking and mama’s new white tablecloth.” [13]  Such philistinism is by no means entailed by a critique of Vorticism.  Lewis’s pictures and Pound’s poems retain a lasting value and Blast will remain a marvel, a pyrotechnic display that energizes and amuses still after more than a hundred years, a reminder of a time when the Bohemian avant-garde still possessed the power to shock and, with that sometimes, to stimulate thinking.    

 

 

1.  This was followed by a New York show at the Penguin Club the same year1915.  The group then lost coherence, though elements recoalesced as Group X (which exhibited in 1920).  Since then, major shows focusing on Vorticism as a historic phenomenon, first at the Tate in 1956, and since at the Estorick Collection in 2004, and again at the Tate in 2011. 

2.  Others of the circle included Lawrence Atkinson, Cuthbert Hamilton, and Sir Jacob Epstein.

3.  Though the manifesto bears eleven signatures, it is thought to have been written by Lewis.

4.  Capitals in the original.  Following this statement, however, Lewis’s capitalization seems impressionistic and improvisatory, guided by design more than content.  To avoid an unpleasantly busy page, I shall silently return other cited phrases to conventional capitalization. 

5.  Reprinted in Advertisements for Myself, p. 364-6 where the reader learns that “Schrodinger’s model of the atom,” “differential calculus,” and Catholic things are hip, while  “Bohr’s model of the atom,” “analytic geometry,” and what is Protestant are square. 

6.  Whether another critic might deem “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon” passive may seem dubious, though many of the artists’ Cubist works are serenely composed and he was shortly to enter what art historians call his neo-classical period.

7.  Available online at https://exhibitions.univie.ac.at/exhibition/724.

8.  “Vorticism,”  The Fortnightly Review, September 1914.  Available at https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/vorticism/.

9.  “A Few Don’ts by an Imagist,” Poetry Magazine,z March 1913. 

10.  William C. Lipke and Bernard W. Rozran, “Ezra Pound and Vorticism: A Polite Blast,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature Vol. 7, No. 2 (Summer, 1966).

11.  Arthur J. Sabatini, “Vorticism Revitalized,” Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Summer 2015).

12.  Herbert N. Schneidau, “Vorticism and the Career of Ezra Pound.”  Modern Philology, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Feb., 1968).

13.  Quoted in  Andrew Thacker “Blasting Beyond Britain,” Fortnightly Review, August 24, 2011.

The Contradictions of Minstrelsy: Jim Crow, Zip Coon, and Gumbo Chaff

 

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; those in parentheses refer either to stanzas in “Jim Crow” or to lines in “Zip Coon,” and “Gumbo Chaff.”  The poems are appended. 

 

      The minstrel show was a leading form of American popular entertainment for decades.  What had been enjoyed as simple entertainment lost its savor when the form was eventually recognized as aggressively and perniciously racist.  Already in its heyday Frederick Douglass denounced minstrelsy with righteous anger, castigating the performers as “the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow-citizens.” [1] 

     Douglass’ unqualified condemnation, while justifiable in a polemic, is reductive.   His disgusted rejection of minstrel entertainment contrasts dramatically with the attitude of W. E. B. Du Bois whose defense of the contributions of Black artists included “American music built on Negro themes . . . such as ‘Old Black Joe’” as well as praising James Weldon Johnson and composer Will Marion Cook whose works were, doubtless for commercial considerations, sometimes clearly derivative of minstrelsy. [2]  The penetration of minstrelsy to the most sophisticated Black artists is evident in Cook and Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s operetta Clorindy: the Origin of the Cakewalk (1898) which was heavily influenced by the genre’s conventions and included songs like "Who Dat Say Chicken In Dis Crowd" and “Hottest Coon in Dixie.”

     In their time minstrel shows were nationwide popular culture in a young nation, and were valued by many as a sort of unique national culture.  For some sympathetic to Black culture, far from being degrading, minstrel entertainments allowed music arising from African-American culture to become popular and “cross over” to a wider audience.  Since “negroes” were “the true originators of this music,” its performance might allow the race to “aspire to an equality with the musical and poetical delineators of all nationalities.” [3]  A popular music magazine in 1856 lamented the lack of musicality of many white Americans, noting that “we are still dependent on foreigners [Italians and Germans] for our music,” since “the only musical population of this country are the negroes of the south.”  “Compared with our taciturn race, the African nature is full of poetry and song. The Negro is a natural musician.”  The apparent praise arises, however, from a Romantic and racist premise: “the African nature is full of poetry. Inferior to the white race in reason and intellect, they have more imagination.” [4]

     A similar ambivalence is reflected in a comprehensive and detailed survey of Black performance in America published in 1889 which noted that that minstrelsy was “the only branch of the dramatic art, if properly, it can claim to be an art at all, which has had its origin in this country, while the melody it has inspired is certainly our only approach to a national music.”  The qualifying phrase questions whether Black art can be art at all, while at the same time it concedes the quality and distinctly American character of performances developed from African-American materials. [5]

     The historical context confirms the ambiguity of what today seems an outrightly offensive art.  Minstrelsy began in New York City and its leading performers were virtually all Northerners and no defenders of slavery.  Performers like Thomas “Daddy” Rice claimed to be imitating valued Black models.  As an actor Rice sometimes played Uncle Tom in blackface in the extremely popular enactments of the novel which served as propaganda for the anti-slavery cause.  Dan Emmett, the founder of the first troupe of minstrel performers, was from frontier Ohio.  He, too, was an opponent of slavery and reportedly regretted having written his biggest hit “Dixie” when the South made it an anthem (Lincoln was very fond of the song as well).  [6]  Though his dialect songs no longer find listeners, Henry Work Clay in “Kingdom Coming” expressed rebellion against master and overseer and celebrated liberation (“ De whip is lost, de han'cuff broken”) in his work while in his life he maintained an Underground Railway stop.      

     Recent studies have argued for the complexity of the theatrical phenomenon.  A recent popular account claims that minstrel shows expressed a progressive point of view and attracted a multi-racial audience specifically because they “embodied the strivings and frustrations of laborers of all races and circumstances who were wise to their oppressive masters.”  In this writer’s view the blackface character is a “compellingly transgressive cross-racial persona, with its slyly veiled but unmistakable challenge to power.”  [7]  A scholarly treatment elides race while suggesting that minstrelsy was progressive.  The shows “represented, in a comic way, the natural and democratic values usually fostered by the Indian, the Yankee, or the frontiersman against artificiality and elitism.” [8]  Calling the minstrel form “shot through with ambivalence,” another academic study raises the possibility that blackface manifested a genuine “African-American people’s culture,” [9] while yet another notes that in general early “minstrels deplored the cruelty of slavery.” [10]

     Ambivalence emerges inevitably from the blackface tradition.  While the comic figures of the minstrel stage were portrayed as buffoons (a fate common to many comic characters), their antics accompanied the movement of music based in part on Black models to the center of popular taste, a dominance now globalized with the influence of blues, jazz, and rhythm and blues.  In this way the rise of minstrelsy might, like the prominence of Gnaoua musicians in Morocco, be viewed as a result of West African musical genius.  The fact remains that the minstrel stage constructed and perpetuated negative racial stereotypes which, while likely reassuring to the white audience, were socially destructive.  Despite this general effect, the songs and skits could sometimes express authentic aspirations of African-Americans while satirizing the master class.  Some minstrel comedy is embodied in projections of desire which apply to all people. 

     The polyvalence of what might seem on the surface a simple and unambiguous set of conventions is in fact inherent in its essence.  A masquerade in which a white person aped a Black (reminiscent of African masquerades and forgotten European ones) was capable of further turns.  Soon Black performers were imitating white ones imitating Black ones.  Once the African-American with the stage name of Juba (William Henry Lane) became sufficiently celebrated (in part through Dickens’ description of him in American Notes) to attract imitators, a viewer witnessing their derivative shows could see a white man pretending to be a Black imitating a white person in the role of a Black one.   The vertigo of such a situation is unsettling and clearly problematic.

     The original texts of the classic minstrel characters provide a body of evidence more direct and revealing than theoretical speculation or circumstantial historical investigation.  Among the most celebrated of the early minstrel characters were Jim Crow, originated by Thomas “Daddy” Rice, Zip Coon, performed by George Washington Dixon, and Gumbo Chaff, performed by both Rice and Dixon.  An examination of the songs attributed to each of these contributes to an understanding of the racial attitudes of the performers and their audiences.   

     The Jim Crow spectacle doubtless centered on the dancing which was surely expert but also exotic, and likely a bit grotesque.  Rice’s model was a disabled man whose performance entertained people in the same way as kings had once been amused at dwarfs.  The improbable makeup must have had a comic impact like Groucho Marx’s mustache when it was painted on, or Chaplin’s villains’ towering eyebrows.  These significant elements are lost.  The character of Jim Crow underwent considerable reuse and adaptation on the minstrel stage and beyond, but the present analysis, like those that follow, is based on the text of the original poem alone.

     Jim Crow appears in Rice’s song fundamentally as a hero, a man of prodigious abilities and appetites, a fighter and a lover.  With physical strength sufficient to “split a horse block” (13) he is “full of fight” (5).  The song concludes with an aggressive challenge to racists.

 

An I caution all white dandies,

Not to come in my way,

For if dey insult me,

dey'll in de gutter lay.     (44)

 

     Like Gilgamesh, Achilles, and Lancelot, Jim Crow is a lover as well.  He cannot stay away from the river due to the many “galls” there.  He admires women in Hoboken, too, where he sees them “drinking lemonade.” (26)  He is enthusiastic about marriage and looks down on divorce, imagining himself proudly strolling down Broadway with his wife on his arm. (40-42)  This final image is in a way definitive: what Jim Crow wants is respect.

     The song, however, is comic, enlivened by carnival spirit including the sort of fanciful boasts characteristic of the tall tales associated with the frontier.  Just as Davy Crockett was said to claim to be able to “whip my weight in wildcats” [11], Jim Crow boasts, “I wip my weight in wildcats.” (7)  Crockett claims to be “half alligator,” while Jim Crow says he could “eat an Alligator.” (7)  With similar verbal display Jim Crow’s fighting prowess leaves one opponent nothing but “a little grease spot” (6) while another turns gray with fright. (14)

     When Jim Crow comes to comment directly on politics, the views expressed are direct and uncompromising.  The singer contemplates emancipation, declaring that the slaves’ “wish for freedom” is “shining in deir eyes” and boldly stating an abolitionist position.

 

I'm for freedom,

An for Union altogether,

Aldough I'm a black man,

De white is call'd my broder.

                                          (39)

 Rice’s Jim Crow even goes into the political details of the time, noting the challenge to the federal government in South Carolina’s Nullification Act of 1832 and anticipating the Civil War.

 

De great Nullification,

And fuss in de South,

Is now before Congress,

To be tried by word ob mouth.

(34)

 

Dey hab had no blows yet,

And I hope dey nebber will,

For its berry cruel in bredren

One anoders blood to spill.

(35)

 

     In spite of the obvious insulting racial stereotypes implied by the makeup, the dialect, and the doubtlessly weird dance movements, Jim Crow as a character seems more a comically exaggerated frontier hero like Davy Crockett or Mike Fink than weak and simply ridiculous like the movies’ Lincoln Perry (Stepin Fetchit) or Willie Best.  

     Zip Coon is likewise a comic figure, boastful in spite of his uneducated language; though he claims to be a “larned skoler,” (1) though the reader suspects his deepest learning concerns the pursuit of the “possum up a gum tree” or the “coony on a stump.” (5) His love with Suky, though rustic, is mutual.  The frivolous tone of the song with its effervescent nonsense syllables is inescapable, but Zip Coon, like Jim Crow, has a partisan political position.  Like Andrew Jackson and many of the country’s working class, he opposes the United States Bank, but his next line is a startling one: “de bery nex President, will be Zip Coon.” (32)  He then tops this declaration by naming Davy Crockett, who was found to have a good deal in common with Jim Crow, as vice-president. (47)  Zip Coon, far from accepting the status quo, clearly advocates grass roots rebellion.  He is appetitive and boastful, but these are the characteristics of heroes as well as fools.

     “Gumbo Chaff,” another character Rice popularized with a song and dance, while he begins in slavery, ends in bourgeois propriety, introducing his wife to neighbors.  A riverboat man skilled at cat-fishing, he is nonetheless mistreated by his master whose death then appears a matter of retributive justice. [12]  He has little doubt of the slaveowner’s posthumous fate.

 

An' I do believe sure enough he's gone to de debil,

For when he live you know he light upon me so,

But now he's gone to tote de firewood way down below. (22-4)

 

     The deceased master’s wife seems to have troubles of her own including an acquisitive new lover whose exploitation of her wealth is the occasion for another sympathetic reference to Davy Crockett. (28)  Perhaps she also exercises less control over the slaves, for Gumbo Chaff runs off to New Orleans where he astonishes the locals with his “genius” at handling cotton bales: “dey swore it was de debil or old Gumbo Chaff.” (42)  In this free environment he flourishes, dancing and learning French, until he stows away for a return upriver to a satisfied retirement where he recounts his career for the amusement of “white folks,” a task he accomplishes by the very act of speaking of it. (63)

     Far from finding contentment in slavery, Jim Crow, Zip Coon, and Gumbo Chaff all express the desire to escape their oppression.  In the first and last instances they achieve a respectable married life and in the second (in imagination, at any rate) the presidency of the United States.  The comic attributes of all three are in part the appetitive proclivities often prominent in comedy magnified by the exaggerations of “tall tale” lore.  Yet Douglass had good reason to complain that minstrel performers “pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow-citizens,” “corrupt” because they direct laughter at African-Americans as they coopt their skin color and thus reinforce the racism that has poisoned this republic since its founding.  Minstrelsy as a Creolized art, a mixture of European and African elements, was perhaps bound from its conception to a profound ambivalence.  

      The white working-class audience that patronized early minstrel shows, like the white working class in other eras, was able to scapegoat and mock African-American workers, while periodically recognizing their common humanity.  This vacillation was inevitably represented in popular entertainments during and after the practice of the country’s “peculiar institution.”  While some members of a white audience  might seek to elevate their own exploited position prior to the rise of labor unions by scorning identifiable groups of their fellow workers, women or immigrants if not non-white peoples, this reaction was neither necessary nor consistent.  White workers sometimes also extended a general human sympathy with slaves and Blacks, often in the popular sentimental mode of the day, and sometimes made common political cause with them on the basis of class.  The same ambivalence, unfortunately, is no less apparent in twenty-first century America.  Condemning the racism that clearly plays a role in minstrel entertainments need not involve blindness to the progressive tendencies of such performances and of the artists who composed them. 

 

  

 

1.  “The Hutchinson Family.—Hunkerism,” The North Star, October 27, 1848.  Douglass recommended instead the Hutchinson Family, a group of white singers who actively supported opposition to slavery as well as other progressive causes such as woman suffrage, opposition to the Mexican War, and Prohibition. 

 

2.  W. E. Burghardt DuBois, “The Negro in Literature and Art,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Sep., 1913, Vol. 49, The Negro's Progress in Fifty Years (Sep., 1913).  Cook had studied in Heinrich Jacobson in Germany and in America with Dvořák.  He directed an operatic version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1898.

 

3.  “The Black Opera,” first published in the New York Herald Tribune, June 30, 1855,  reprinted in Dwight’s Journal of Music, July 3, 1858.

 

4.  “Songs of the Blacks,” Dwight’s Journal of Music, 15 November 1856.

 

5.  Hutton, “The Negro on the Stage,” Harper’s June 1889.

 

6.  Hans Nathan, Dan Emmett and the rise of early Negro minstrelsy, p. 275.  Emmet wrote the fife-and-drum manual for the Union Army.

 

7.  Sarah Richardson, “The History of the Real Jim Crow,” American History,  April, 2018. 

 

8.  Cory Rosenberg, “Ole’ Zip Coon is a Mighty Learned Scholar: Blackface Minstrelsy as Reflection and Foundation of American Popular Culture,” Gettysburg College Journal of the Civil War Era, Volume 3 Article 6, 2013.

 

9.  Eric Lott, "’The Seeming Counterfeit’: Racial Politics and Early Blackface Minstrelsy,” American Quarterly Vol. 43, No. 2 (Jun., 1991).

 

10. Anthony J. Berret, S. J., “Huckleberry Finn and the Minstrel Show,” American Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2 (fall 1986). 

 

11.  John S. C. Abbott, David Crockett: His Life and Adventures, pt. 4.

 

12.  Indifference or relief at a master’s death appears in numerous other minstrel songs as well, the most familiar being “Jimmy Crack Corn,” a song popularized by Dan Emmett's Virginia Minstrels.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rice sheet music publication 1832

Jump Jim Crow
 

1
Come listen all you galls and boys
I's just from Tuckyhoe,
I'm goin to sing a little song,
My name is Jim Crow

Chorus

Weel about and turn about and do jis so,
Eb'ry time I weel about and jump Jim Crow.
 

2
Oh, I'm a roarer on de Fiddle,
And down in old Virginny,
They say I play de skyentific
Like Massa Pagannini.
 

3
I git 'pon a flat boat
I cotch de Uncle Sam
Den I went to see de place
Where dey kill'd Packenham.

4
I went down to de riber,
I did'nt mean to stay,
But dere I see so many galls,
I couldn't get away.

 

5
And den I go to Orleans
An feel so full of fight
Dey put me in de Calaboose,
An keep me dare all night.
 

6
When I got out I hit a man,
His name I now forget,
but dere was nothing left
'Sept a little grease spot
 

7
I wip my weight in wildcats
I eat an Alligator,
And tear up more ground
Dan kifer 50 load of tater
 

8
I sit upon a Hornet's nest,
I dance upon my head,
I tie a Wiper' round my neck
And den I go to bed.
 

9
Dere's Possum up de gumtree
An Raccoon in de hollow,
Wake Snakes for June bugs
Stole my half a dollar
 

10
A ring tail'd monkey
An a rib nose Babboon,
Went out de odder day
To spend de arternoon.
 

11
Oh de way dey bake de hoecake
In old Virginny neber tire
Dey put de hoe upon de foot
An hole it to de fire.
 

12
Oh by trade I am a carpenter,
But be it understood,
De way I get my liben is,
By sawing de tick oh wood.
 

13
I'm a full blooded niggar,
Oh de real ole stock,
An wid my head and shoulder
I can split a horse block.
 

14
I struck a Jersey niggar,
In de street de oder day,
An I hope I neber stir
If he didn't turn gray.
 

15
I'm berry much afraid of late
Dis jumping will be no good.
For while de Crow are dancing,
De Wites will saw de wood.
 

16
But if dey get honest,
By sawing wood like slaves
Der'es an end to de business,
Ob our friend Massa Hays.
 

17
I met a Philadelphia niggar
Dress'd up quite nice & clean
But de way he 'bused de Yorkers
I thought was berru mean.
 

18
So I knocked down dis Sambo
And shut up his light,
For I'm jist about as sassy,
As if I was half white.
 

19
But he soon jumped up again,
An 'gan for me to feel,
Says I go away you niggar,
Or I'll skin you like an eel.
 

20
I'm so glad dat I'm a niggar,
And don't you wish you was too
For den you'd gain popularity
By jumping Jim Crow.
 

21
Now my brodder niggars,
I do not think it right,
Dat you should laugh at dem
Who happen to be white.
 

22
Kase it dar misfortune,
And dey'd spend ebery dollar,
If dey only could be
Gentlemen ob colour.
 

23
It almost break my heart,
To see dem envy me,
And from my soul I wish dem,
Full as black as we.
 

24
What stuf it is in dem,
To make de Debbil black
I'll prove dat he is white
In de twinkling of a crack.
 

25
For you see loved brodders,
As true as he had a tail,
It is his very weakness
What makes him turn pale.
 

26
I went to Hoboken,
To hab a promenade,
An dar I see de pretty gals,
Drinking de Lemonade.
 

27
Dat sour and dat sweet,
Is berry good by gum',
But de best of lemonade is,
Made by adding rum.
 

28
At de Swan cottage,
Is de place I tink,
Whar dey make dis 'licious
An 'toxicating drink.
 

29
Some go to Weehawk,
An some to Brooklyn hight
But dey better stay at home,
If dey want to see de sight.
 

30
To go to de museum,
I'm sure it is dare duty,
If for noting else,
Jist to see de sleeping beauty.
 

31
An dare is daddy Lambert,
An a skeleton on he hunkie,
An likeness of Broadway dandy
In a glass case of monkies.
 

32
De Broadway bells,
When dey carry full sail,
Around dem wear a funny ting,
Just like a fox tail.
 

33
When you hear de name of it,
I sure it make you roar,
Why I ax'd 'em what it was,
And dey said it was a boar.
 

34
De great Nullification,
And fuss in de South,
Is now before Congress,
To be tried by word ob mouth.
 

35
Dey hab had no blows yet,
And I hope dey nebber will,
For its berry cruel in bredren
One anoders blood to spill.
 

36
Wid Jackson at de head,
Dey soon de ting may settle
For ole Hickory is a man,
Dat's tarnal full ob mettle.
 

37
Should dey get to fighting,
Perhaps de blacks will rise,
For deir wish for freedom,
Is shining in deir eyes.
 

38
An if de blacks should get free,
I guess dey'll fee some bigger,
An I shall concider it,
A bold stroke for de niggar.
 

39
I'm for freedom,
An for Union altogether,
Aldough I'm a black man,
De white is call'd my broder.
 

40
I'm for a union to a gal,
An dis is a stubborn fact,
But if I marry an dont like it,
I'll nullify de act.
 

41
I'm tired of being a single man
An I'm tarmined to get a wife
For what I think de happiest
Is de swee married life.
 

42
Its berry common 'mong de white
To marry and get divorced
But dat I'll nebber do
Unless I'm really forced
 

43
I think I see myself in Broadway
Wid my wife upon my arm,
And to follow up de fashion,
Dere sure can be no harm.
 

44
An I caution all white dandies,
Not to come in my way,
For if dey insult me,
dey'll in de gutter lay.

 

 

 

Old Zip Coon (1834)
 

O ole Zip Coon he is a larned skoler,
O ole Zip Coon he is a larned skoler,
O ole Zip Coon he is a larned skoler,
Sings posum up a gum tree an coony in a holler,
possum up a gum tree, coony on a stump,
possum up a gum tree, coony on a stump,
possum up a gum tree, coony on a stump,
Den over dubble trubble, Zip Coon will jump.
 

O zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.           10
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
 

O it's old Suky blue skin, she is in lub wid me,
I went the udder arter noon to take a dish ob tea;
What do you tink now, Suky hab for supper,
Why chicken foot an possum heel, widout any butter.
 

O zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.               20

Did you eber see the wild goose, sailing on de ocean,
O de wild goose motion is a bery pretty notion;
Ebry time de wild goose, beckons to de swaller,
You hear him google google google google goller.
 

O zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
 

I tell you what will happin den, now bery soon,
De Nited States Bank will be blone to de moon;   30
Dare General Jackson, will him lampoon,
An de bery nex President, will be Zip Coon.
 

O zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
 

And wen Zip Coon our President shall be,
He make all de little Coons sing possum up a tree;
O how de little Coons, will dance an sing,
Wen he tie dare tails togedder, cross de lim dey swing. 40
 

O zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
 

Now mind wat you arter, you tarnel kritter Crocket,
You shant go head widout ole Zip, he is de boy to block it;
Zip shall be President, Crocket shall be vice,
An den dey two togedder, will hab de tings nice.
 

O zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.              50
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
 

I hab many tings to tork about, but don't know which come first,
So here de toast to old Zip Coon, before he gin to rust;
May he hab de pretty girls, like de King ob ole,
To sing dis song so many times, 'fore he turn to mole.
 

O zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.                  60
 

 

 

Gumbo Chaff  (1850)
 

On de Ohio bluff in de state of Indiana,
Dere's where I live, chock up to de Habbana,
Eb'ry mornin early Massa gib me likker,
I take my net and paddle and I put out de quicker,
I jump into my kiff and I down the river driff,
And I cotch as many cat fish as ever nigger liff
 

Now dis morning on a driff log tink I see an Alligator,
I scull my skiff around and chuck him sweet potatoe,
I cratch him on de head and try for to vex it,
But I couldn't fool de varmint now how I could fix it;        10
So I picks a brick an' I fotch'd him sich a lick,
But twant nothin' but a pine knot 'pom a big stick.
 

Now old Mass build a barn to put de fodder in,
Dis ting an dat ting an' one ting anodder;
Thirty ninth Decembur time come a rise ob water,
An' it carry Massas barn much farder dan it ought to;
Then old Massa swear, he cuss an' tare his hair,
Becase de water tuck de Barn off he cou'dnt tell where.
 

Now old Massa die on de lebenteenth of April,
I put him in de troff what cotch de sugar maple,                   20
I digs a deep hole right out upon de level,
An' I do believe sure enough he's gone to de debil,
For when he live you know he light upon me so,
But now he's gone to tote de firewood way down below.
 

Den Missis she did marry Big Bill de weaver,
Soon she found out he was a gay deceiver,
He grab all de money and he put it in his pocket,
And de way he did put out was a sin to Davy Crocket;
So old Missis cry and 'gin to wipe her eye,
For she marry Bill de weaver she cou'dnt tell why.                 30
 

Now one day de sun gone down an' de days work over,
Old Gumbo Chaff he tink he'd live in Clover;
He jump into a boat wid his old Tamborine,
While shoonerhead Sambo play'd de Violin;
De way we sail'd to New Orleans never be forgotten,
Dey put me on de Levy dock to roll a bale of Cotton.
 

When I cotch hold de bale oh! den you ought to seen us!
First time dis child 'gan to show his genus;
I got hold de corner an' I give him such a hug,
An' I light upon him like a duck 'pon a june bug;                      40
Oh! you ought to been dare to see de Niggers laff,
For dey swore it was de debil or old Gumbo Chaff.
 

I lern'd to talk de French oh! a la mode de dancey,
Kick him shoe, tare him wool, parle vo de Francey,
None jaw Madamselle, Stevadors and Riggers,
Apple jack and sassafras and little Indian Niggers;
De natives laff'd an swore dat I was corn'd,
For dey neber heard sich French since dey was born'd.
 

I leab New Orleans early one day morning,
I jump'd aboard de boat jist as de day was dawning,                  50
I hide behind de wood where de Niggers allways toss'um,
And lay low like de Coon when him tries to fool de Possum;
I lay dare still doe 'twas rather diffikill,
An dey did'nt find me out 'till I got to Louisville.
 

Dare Jim beats de drum an old Joe's de fifer,
An I is dat child what can read an cifer;
Twice one is five den carry six to seven,
Twice six is twenty nine an eighteen's eleven,
So 'twixt you and me its very plain to see,
Dat I learnt to play de Banjo by de double rule of three.             60
 

Now I rive on our farm on de Ohio Bluff,
An' I tink of fun an' frolick old Gumbo's had enough;
Oh! de white folks at home I very much amuse,
When I sing dis song an tell 'em all de news;
So we'd music all night an dey set up sich a laff
When I introduced de Niggers to Mrs Gumbo Chaff.