Lil's Dreamland Syncopators. Always the featured soloist, his aggressive confident style was being copied everywhere. They tried, at least."
Tom's book, "From Cakewalks to Concert Halls", won the Ralph Gleason music book awards for the second best music book published in 1992. This award is sponsored by BMI, Rolling Stone and New York University. "Cakewalks" is a music teacher's dream come true for a book covering the history of Blues and Jazz. In the opening pages, Mr. Morgan explains that on the eve of the Emancipation Proclamation, black popular music was primarily a folk music with well-established sacred and secular oral traditions. Some 50 years later, it would be heard on the Broadway stage and Tin Pan Alley. He delves into various spirituals and talks about their cultural framework and the process of songwriting among slaves.
An excerpt from some of his incredible finds is as follows:
- The big bee flies high
the little bee makes the honey.
The black folks make the cotton,
and the white folks gets the money.
He offers a wealth of information on the practice of "double voicing" and call-response songs, how the songs changed after the end of slavery and how the Black popular song continued to flourish in the postbellum era. The spirituals began to be recognized as cultural treasures.
One of the worksongs that is transcribed in the book, From Cakewalks to Concert Halls, is a song that I was familiar with due to the fact that it is in one of the classroom textbooks that my classes have sung from in the past. It's a song about "Long John". Long John was long gone, meaning of course, that he had fled from his slavery. However, I had never realized until I read through Mr. Morgan's book that the lost John was a variant of John De Conqueror, a trickster folk hero, famous for outwitting his white owners during slavery.
