The editor of Dwight’s Journal of Music published a letter from Miss Lucy McKim, of Philadelphia, accompanying a specimen of the songs in vogue among the negroes about Port Royal. Miss McKim accompanied her father thither on a recent visit, and wrote as follows:

It is difficult to express the entire character of these negro ballads by mere musical notes and signs. The odd turns made in the throat, and the curious rhythmic effect produced by single voices chiming in at different irregular intervals, seem almost as impossible to place on score as the singing of birds or the tones of an Aeolian harp. the airs, however, can be reached. They are too decided not to be easily understood, and their striking originality would catch the ear of any musician. Besides this, they are valuable as an expression of the character and life of the race which is playing such a conspicuous part in our history. The wild, sad strains tell, as the sufferers themselves never could, of crushed hopes, keen sorrow, and a dull, daily misery which covered them as hopelessly as the fog from the rice-swamps. On the other hand, the words breathe a trusting faith and happy land,” to which their eyes seem constantly turned.

A complaint might be made against these songs on the score of monotony. It is true there is a great deal of repetition of the music, but that is to accommodate the leader, who, if he be a good one, is always an improvisator. For instance, on one occasion, the name of each of our party who was present was dexterously introduced.

As the same songs are sung at every sort of work, of course the tempo is not always alike. On the water, the oars dip “Poor Rosy” to an even andante; a stout boy and girl at the hominy-mill will make the same “Poor Rosy” fly, to keep up with the whirling stone; and in the evening, after the day’s work is done, “Heab’n shall a be my home” peals up slowly and mournfully from the distant quarters. One woman–a respectable house-servant, who had lost all but one of her twenty-two children–said to me:

“Pshaw! don’t har to dese yar chil’en, missis. Dey jest rattles it off; dey don’t know how for sing it. I likes ’Poor Rosy’ better dan all de songs, but it can’t be sung widout a full heart and a troubled sperrit!”

all the songs make good barcarolles. Whittier “builded better than he knew,” when he wrote his “song of the Negro Boatman.” It seemed wonderfully applicable as we were being rowed across Hilton Head Harbor among United States gunboats–the Wabash and the Vermont towering on either side. I thought the crew must strike up:

“And massa tink it day ob doom,
And we ob jubilee.”

Perhaps the grandest singing we heard was at the Baptist Church, on St. Helena Island, when a congregation of three hundred men and women joined in a hymn:

“Roll, Jordan, roll, Jordan!
Roll, Jordan, roll!”

It swelled forth like a triumphal anthem. That same hymn was sung by thousands of negroes on the Fourth of July last, when they marched in procession under the Stars and Stripes, cheering them for the first time as the “flag of our country.” A friend, writing from there, says that the chorus was indescribably grand–”that the whole woods and world seemed joining in that rolling sound.”

There is much more in this new and curious music of which it is a temptation to write, but I must remember that it can speak for itself better than any one for it.

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