Jim Crow - misc. notes

Jim Crow Jubilee - 1847 - sheet music cover in Library of Congress website

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2001701399/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2001701399/

Johns Hopkins - sheet music

https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/18021 Jim Crow Jubilee. A Collection of Negro Melodies.


Title: Jim Crow Jubilee. A Collection of Negro Melodies.
Author: Augustus Clapp (arranger); Stephen Collins Foster (composer)
Description: piano and voice

Uncle Ned

---------------

Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow
Author(s): Karl Hagstrom Miller
Published: 2010
Pages: 384

------------


Advanced Book Search

Jim Crow, American: selected songs and plays By T. D. Rice, W. T. Lhamon
http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=12782

Possum up a Gum Tree

POSSUM UP A GUM TREE. AKA - "Opossum Up a Gum Tree." American. Cecilia Conway (1995) finds references to the song "Opposum up a Gum Tree." An English performer, Charles Mathews, witnessed the tune being rendered by the noted tragedian and performer Ira Aldridge (1807-1867) at the African Grove Theater in New York. The theater was a venue for black performers, and at the conclusion of Hamlet (rendered in dialect) the audience had called for their favorite song; Aldridge obliged. Mathews (who later incorporated the material into a comic act for the British stage) made several transcriptions of the song, the tune of which appears to be similar to the "Turkey Buzzard" family of tunes. Ceclia Conway, in African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia (1995), states that "the song is apparently a variant of the dance tune 'Cooney in de Holler,' which was popular in Philadelphia and the Five Points dance halls and dives of New York during the time of 'Juba' Lane and Charles Dickens." Hans Nathan (Dan Emmett and Negro Minstrelsy, Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1962), citing T. Allston Brown (The Origins of Minstrelsy), writes that the song was known to white boatmen and African-Americans in South Carolina. The song was published in London by J. Willis & Co. c. 1824:

***

Possum up a Gum-Tree,

Up he go, up he go

Racoon in the hollow

Down below, down below.

Him pull him by hims long tail,

Pully hawl, pully hawl,

Then how him whoop and hallow

Scream and bawl, scream and bawl.

Possum up a Gum Tree

Racoon in the hollow

Him pull him by hims long tail

Then how him whoop and hallow.

***

X:1

T:Possum Up a Gum Tree

M:C

L:1/8

R:Air

S:Willis & Co., London (c. 1824)

Z:AK/Fiddler’s Companion

K:A

EAA>B c2 {B}A2 | df B2 df B2 | EAA>B c2 {B}A2 | AcE2 AcEE |

EAAB c2 {B}A2 | dfB2 dfBE | EAA>B c2{B}A2 | AcE2 Ac e2 |

e>f e>c B2A2 | f>g fd c2 Be | efec {c}B2AA | AFGE EA3 ||

http://www.ibiblio.org/fiddlers/PORT_POY.htm