Black music - anthologies

Allen, William Francis, Charles Pickard Ware and Lucy McKim Garrison. 
Slave Songs of the United States. NY: Peter Smith, 1929. (orig., 1867)
    This is the classic, first and most significant collection - mostly of 
sacred music. Many popular African-American religious songs are found
here including "Michael Row the Boat Ashore" and so on. Realizing the 
bias of the collection and the obvious limitations of the collectors, the
lack of idiommatic inflections and rhythms is understandable. A general
study of the pitch vocabularies indicates that around two-thirds of the
pieces are in the major mode but only half of those include a complete
heptatonic set; the others are hexatonic (no leading-tone). Only around an
eighth of the songs are in the minor and none of those contain leading-
tones.  About the same number are pure pentatonic, mostly in plagal form. 
The rest are in one of three modes: mixolydian, dorian, or aeolian. Only a
small number include a mixed, inflected vocabulary; either flat-3 to 
natural-3 or flat-7 to natural-7.

Parrish, Lydia. Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. New York: Creative 
Age Press, Inc., 1942.
     Twenty-five years of tune-catching produced this wonderful collection
of lyrics and notated songs with thoughtful commentary. Modern ethnoids
will find many weaknesses in this collection and its methodology, but the
point of its existence remains most significant. Unlike earlier collections
such as Allen's Slave Songs, this contains many secular pieces. The musical
notation attempts to capture both the rhythmic subtleties and the blue-note
pitch inflections indigenous to the style - with mixed results.  The work
also contains a significant bibliography.

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