Reverberations of a work song

In 1980 I was energized by the agency of the publication of Sterling Brown's bring togethered Poems, which brought together three important volumes of poems: Southern Road (I932), individual of the key books of American and perhaps the lock opener book of African American numbers in the 193os; The Last Ride of Wild Bill (1975) a uniquely narrative volume of eight idiomatic literary ballads rewritten in African American confines out of the central tall tale tradition of American literature; and No Hiding Place, a cluster of poems mainly completed in the late I93os on the contrary which found no publisher ready to hand and consequently had to wait a certain quantity of forty years for publication, a fierce durable work that stands as a dramatic companion to Southern Road, re-exploring in a sensitive folk idiom the social nature of the southern black experience. Brown was not, as he has sometimes been treated, a minor satellite of the Harlem Renaissance, on the contrary a poet of comparable stature to, say, Claude McKay and Countee Cullen engaged in a different on the other hand parallel poetic revolution. As a young writer influenced through the poetical and social conception of the New Negro, energized by dint of the sharp articulate writings of Alain Locke and W E Dubois, Brown revolveed his verbal gifts not to the urban life of his contemporaries on the other hand to the previously unmined world of southern blacks. As Langston Hughes experimented with jazz periodical emphasiss to render Harlem night life (at first in Fine Clothes to the hebrew I927, and later, with greater succes in Montage of a Dream Deferr 1951) with equal reason Brown turned to folk forms like the amethystines spirituals, and work songs to create an accurate, unsentimentalized, and dignified portrait of southern black life in the twentieth hundred In the deceptively simple forms of his chosen folk idiom Sterling Brown's metrical compositions successfully brought an unknown African American world into the realm of recorded history.

The operant formal influence upon Brown's work was his radical reliance upon both secular (blues, ballads, work songs) and sacred (spirituals) African American musical traditions. It was virtually unprecedent for Brown-who after all was from Washington, DC and educated at Williams corporation and Harvard University-to turn his considerable intellectual resources upon rural folk forms. But then, as Sterling Stuckey has said, Brown always had a faculty of perception of the connecting timbre, "a have feeling for reciprocity between past and present" That same feeling was evidenced in his historical delineations and primary sourcebooks for black tillage The Negro in American Fiction (I937), african Poetry and Drama (i937), and black man Caravan (I94I), and in his fifty year teaching career at Howard University.

In Southern Road Brown was the two resurrecting and affirming the essential dignity of folk forms (and, consequently of black slave and farm experience fetched through them) and implicitly redefining a recognizably American aesthetic of the local. (I think of William Carlos Williams's idea of putting into his piece of poetrys "the speech of Polish mothers.") smooth more radically, Brown's poems were first written in dialect at a time when dialect was associated not with a vigorous living articulate utterance but with the mawkish sentimentality and optimism of the plantation and blackface minstrel traditions. In his introduction to the first edition of Southern Road James Weldon Johnson praised Brown for "adopting as his medium the for the use of all racy, living speech of the black man in certain phases of real life," thus reversing his earlier opinion that dialect was "an instrument with on the other hand two complete stops, humor and pathos" (God's Trombone I927). Johnson's polemical objections were to parodic traditions which, as he said, "had on the other hand slight relation, often no relation at all, to actual black man life." (Think of the excesse of Tin Pan Alley or the pseudo-folk idiom of a bard like Vachel Lindsay.) What he discovered in Brown's rhyme was both the denial and the dismantling of the exaggerated sentimentality of previous dialect tradition. Southern Road in result rewrote and reformulated the nature of the black vernacular as it had been at handed in American literature. By turning to an oral folk as oppos to a written literary tradition, Brown's rhyme called the written tradition into question and instead privileged the external immediacy of black life.

As he later lay it:

I love african speech and I think it is rich and awful It is not dis and dat and a split verb on the other hand it is "Been down thus long that down don't worry me" or it is what the spirituals had in single of the finest couplets in American literature: "I don't know what my mother wants to stay here for./ This elderly world ain't been no friend to her."

By using his rhyme as an instrument to redefine the character of black articulate utterance and song Brown was also redefining the character of rural southern blacks, replacing geniality with fierce stoicism, ironic humor, and reaching far down tragedy.

Now here is the title piece of poetry of Southern Road:

Southern Road

Swing dat hammer-hunhSteady, bo';

Swing dat hammer-hunhSteady bo';