Note 70 — Chapter XI · THE FOLK ELEMENT IN AMERICAN MUSIC

James Augustus Grant in 'A Walk Across Africa' says that his people when cleaning rice were always followed by singers who accompanied the workers with clapping of hands and stamping of feet. 'Whenever companies of negroes were working together in the cotton fields and tobacco factories, on the levees and steamboats or sugar plantations and chiefly in the fervor of religious gatherings, these melodies sprang into life.' (Booker T. Washington, in preface to Coleridge-Taylor's 'Twenty-four Negro Melodies.')