"Poor Rosy" and the #BlackHistoryMonthChallenge
Day 12: Diving Through History in Search of the Blues
Like a lot of White people of my generation, my first encounter with the Blues was a song written and performed by a White man.
My parents loved the White musicians of their generation who blended folk, rock and pop influences--Bob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, Cat Stevens etc. But alongside the heavier hitters there was lighter folk and country-inspired music in their collection, and when I was around seven I latched onto a cassette tape of Sweet Baby James, an album by James Taylor.
Sweet Baby James was released the year that I was born. It had several good songs on it, including “Fire and Rain” and “Country Road”, both of which were bona fide hits and have remained cover band staples to the present day. The eponymous self-soothing lullaby became the singer’s nickname in the music press for many years—a song so sweet that it stuck in my memory for 45 years, and was the first thing that came to my lips when I needed to sing to my grandbaby—like his mother, he’s not an easy child to get to sleep.
This being said, the song that really got my attention on that album was “Steamroller Blues”. It’s an obscure track that was never a hit; James Taylor wrote it as a parody of the pretentious white Blues musicians of his day, and recorded it mainly as a joke at their expense. But hey, let’s face it—I was seven! It was the first Blues song I’d ever had the chance to memorize. I listened to it over and over--even a sarcastic copy of a copy still had a teensy bit of Blues magic clinging to it. It was enough to catch my ear.
I knew there was something special about “Steamroller Blues”. I wasn’t trained in music, and I couldn’t have named all the formal elements that distinguish Blues from other musical forms. But I could hear the difference, and those elements would appear over and over again in the music I’ve loved most throughout my life.
Blues is defined by several features. It starts with the “blue notes” in the scale, an extra minor or flat which adds expression to a standard progression. Then you have the lyrics, which tend to follow a hypnotic call-and-response pattern, and which often share common verse structures. One of the most recognizable is also the oldest, a classic AAB pattern: two repetitions of a line, then a break or a twist.
Give me one reason to stay here, and I’ll turn right back around
Give me one reason to stay here, and I’ll turn back back around
Said I don’t want to leave you lonely—you got to make me change my mind.
Tracy Chapman, “Give Me One Reason”, 1995
There are also distinctive stylistic elements to a Blues performance—a shivering tremolo on a long-held note, expressive flourishes like throaty roars, howls, yips or moans when words alone are not enough to get a point across. Blues songs are often deeply personal, very vulnerable expressions of heart-felt emotion—and they can feature brutal honestly and frankness about forbidden subjects.
Like a lot of modern music, Blues is a product of the African-American South. The call-and-response lyrics, the whoops and shouts, and the blue notes of the Blues scale came to us from Africa. According to Wikipedia, that tremolo on the long notes was acquired from Arabic and Jewish singers, whose voices shiver and dance up and down the Phrygian Dominant scale as they call out to God. But the themes, topics and passions of Blues music come from the New World, not the Old World—they are purely African-American in origin. It’s not just Blackness, but a very specifically Southern African-American Blackness that moves through those songs.
The first known use of the phrase “the Blues” to connect both its emotional connotation (of being sad, depressed, troubled or distressed) with the music of African Americans was in 1862. The semantic connection was made by Charlotte Forten, a free Black Abolitionist from Pennsylvania.
Forten was the first Black teacher at the famous Penn School, which was itself the first school for freed slaves in the American South. The school was set up on St. Helena Island, a Union-held territory during much of the Civil War; the Sea Islands of South Carolina were taken in 1861 in the Battle of Port Royal, which placed all of the Port Royal Sound under Union control. Once the Islands were Union territory, slaves seeking freedom began to arrive in large numbers, and by 1862 there were 80 pupils who needed an education taking classes with Ms. Forten in a little brick church.
It’s worth noting a few facts here, since this IS Black History Month. First, those 80 pupils and the surrounding community of thousands of emancipated people who arrived during the Civil War were the ancestors of the contemporary Gullah culture of the Sea Islands and the Southeastern coast of the USA. The Gullah are a unique African-American heritage population, still thriving today. Thanks to their relative geographic isolation, they retained a great many African features to their language and culture which were more widespread among Black Americans prior to the Civil War.
It’s also worth noting that the Penn School of 1862 is now known as the Penn Center, and it is one of the most important African-American institutions in North America. Over its 162 years of continuous service, the Penn Center has gone through many phases of evolution. Perhaps its most famous contribution to American history in the 20th century was during the Civil Rights Movement, when it hosted interracial conferences and served as a retreat space for Martin Luther King, Jr. and other Civil Rights leaders.
But to return to Forten herself—she was an educated woman who had come a long way from home to pursue her mission. She taught both slaves and freedman in that small church building, and kept a detailed diary of her years on St. Helena, some of which she later chose to publish as two articles in the Atlantic.
For purposes of this essay, what matters most is that she wrote one day that she had come home from work “with the blues”—she was in a lonely, sad, self-pitying mood. Her spirits did rally quickly, but it struck her at the time that there were many popular songs among the slaves and freedmen that seemed to capture a similar sense of melancholy. While she didn’t describe any technical aspects of that music, she did mention a particular song, “Poor Rosy”. Specifically, her journal said that the song “can't be sung without a full heart and a troubled spirit"—which is pretty commonly said about the Blues, even today.
James Miller McKim, a White Abolitionist from Philadelphia, came to visit St. Helena the same year. He was a Presbyterian minister and philanthropist, instrumental in organizing the Port Royal Relief Committee, a charity created to provide support for the 10,000 freed slaves in the Port Royal Area. He later published a collection of personal notes, brief interviews, and musical information that he had collected in the August edition of Dwight’s Music Journal, 1862. Along with the lyrics and sheet music of several standard African-American spirituals, McKim included a long passage about “Poor Rosy”, the same haunting song that had so caught Forten’s attention:
“There was one which on shore we heard more than any other, and which was irresistibly touching. It was a sort of ballad, known as “ Poor Rosy, Poor Gal.” It is almost impossible to give an idea of the effect of this or any of their songs by a mere recital or description.
They are all exceedingly simple, both in sentiment and in music. Each stanza contains but a single thought, set in perhaps two or three bars of music; and yet as they sing it, in alternate recitatives and choruses, with varying inflections and dramatic effect, this simple and otherwise monotonous melody will, to a musical ear and a heart susceptible of impression, have all the charm of variety.
Take, for instance, a few stanzas from the dirge of ‘Poor Rosy.” Fancy the first line sung in the major key, and the two following changed by an easy transition, and with varying inflections, into the minor, and you will have some idea of the effect.
Poor Rosy, poor gal!
Poor—Rosy—poor—gal !
P-o-0-r R-o-s-y, p-0-o-r gal!
Heaven shall be my home.
Hard trial on my way!
Hard—trial—on—my—way !
H-a-r-d t-r-i-a-l o-n m-y w-a-y!
Heaven shall be my home.
Wonder what de people want of me,
Wonder—what—de—people —want—of—me,
W-o-n-d-e-r w-h-a-t d-e p-e-o-p-l-e w-a-n-t 0-f m-e,
Heaven shall be my home.
When I talk T talk with God!
When—I—talk—I—talk—with—God !
W-h-e-n I t-a-l-k I t-a-l.k w-i-t-h G-o-d!
Heaven shall be my home.”
W.E.B. Dubois used the phrase “Sorrow Songs” to describe such music. An entire chapter of his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk is dedicated to the Sorrow Songs, and he makes it clear that he had read both Forten and McKim. He offered his own thoughts on “Poor Rosy” and quotes the familiar opening of the song.
Poor Ro–sy, poor gal;
Poor Ro–sy, poor gal;
Ro–sy break my poor heart,
Heav'n shall–a–be my home.
Between these three accounts, we have enough evidence to identify not only the verse structure and call-and-response pattern of the Blues in “Poor Rosy”, but also the presence of the characteristic flats and minors. We also have enough information to connect the song reliably to later versions that were recorded in the 20th century.
I’ve listened to several of these later recordings, and for the most part they treat “Poor Rosy” as a spiritual and give it a Gospel feel. But Gale P. Jackson, who wrote about “Poor Rosy” and other early African-American songs for the Journal of Black Studies in 2015, has pointed out that “Poor Rosy” was an extremely flexible tune in the 1800’s. It was performed differently when sung by people of different genders and professions, or on different occasions: it could be a dirge, a reel, a ring shout, a love song or dance tune, a spiritual or a work song.
At this point, I personally believe that “Poor Rosy” and other songs like it were the Protean common ancestors of all modern American music, particularly the Blues. A rare version of “Poor Rosy” as a work song, recorded at a prison in 1947, definitely supports the notion that the song could be performed as proto-Blues:
The flexibility of “Poor Rosy” does beg a question: why did the music of the formerly enslaved population of the Southern USA end up splitting into so many different forms? I have a guess—it was a natural result of Emancipation. The moment they were free to live their lives, Black people began spreading out and diversifying, not only geographically but culturally. Once they were no longer imprisoned on plantations, they immediately began building their own clubs for dancing, gambling, and drinking—“juke joints” or “barrelhouses” where lively secular music was played. Once a dance club for Black people existed, developing a split between Blues and Gospel is fairly intuitive. The spirituals would naturally live in the church on Sunday morning, while the Blues lit up the roadhouse on Saturday night.
Still. When I go back to The Souls of Black Folk, it’s not hard to see why W.E.B. Dubois started every chapter with a verse from one of those old songs. And even more than a century later, I think his description of Sorrow Songs remains one of the best descriptions of the Blues and its allure, to the people who love it:
“They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days—Sorrow Songs—for they were weary at heart. And so before each thought that I have written in this book I have set a phrase, a haunting echo of these weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men. Ever since I was a child these songs have stirred me strangely. They came out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me and of mine.”
Resources:
Wikipedia: Charlotte Forten Grimké
NPS.gov Charlotte Forten Grimké
South Carolina: Penn Center
Penn Center: Historical Timeline
Wikipedia: St. Helena Island, South Carolina
The Atlantic.com: All Stories By CHARLOTTE FORTEN GRIMKÉ
W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk Chapter 14: Of the Sorrow Songs
Wikipedia: The Souls of Black Folk
Archive. org: Dwight's Journal of Music: a Paper of Art and Literature 1862-08-09: Vol 21 Iss 19
"Rosy, Possum, Morning Star: African American Women's Work and Play Songs": An Excerpt From Put Your Hands on Your Hips and Act Like a Woman: Song, Dance, Black History, and Poetics in Performance”, by Gale P. Jackson - The Journal of Black Studies, 2015 Vol. 46(8) 773-796