1 Of nearly all the songs, however, the music is distinctly sorrowful.
2 He would not like to be listless and idle, he thought, for he felt with the music the movement of power within him.
3 In winter's twilight, when the red sun glows, I can see the dark figures pass between the halls to the music of the night-bell.
4 Words and music have lost each other and new and cant phrases of a dimly understood theology have displaced the older sentiment.
5 The first is African music, the second Afro-American, while the third is a blending of Negro music with the music heard in the foster land.
6 A deep longing swelled in all his heart to rise with that clear music out of the dirt and dust of that low life that held him prisoned and befouled.
7 The songs are indeed the siftings of centuries; the music is far more ancient than the words, and in it we can trace here and there signs of development.
8 Caricature has sought again to spoil the quaint beauty of the music, and has filled the air with many debased melodies which vulgar ears scarce know from the real.
9 The ten master songs I have mentioned tell in word and music of trouble and exile, of strife and hiding; they grope toward some unseen power and sigh for rest in the End.
10 Then as the sheen of the starlight stole over him, he thought of the gilded ceiling of that vast concert hall, heard stealing toward him the faint sweet music of the swan.
11 They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.
12 Once in a while we catch a strange word of an unknown tongue, as the "Mighty Myo," which figures as a river of death; more often slight words or mere doggerel are joined to music of singular sweetness.
13 Purely secular songs are few in number, partly because many of them were turned into hymns by a change of words, partly because the frolics were seldom heard by the stranger, and the music less often caught.
14 The child sang it to his children and they to their children's children, and so two hundred years it has travelled down to us and we sing it to our children, knowing as little as our fathers what its words may mean, but knowing well the meaning of its music.
15 The mass of "gospel" hymns which has swept through American churches and well-nigh ruined our sense of song consists largely of debased imitations of Negro melodies made by ears that caught the jingle but not the music, the body but not the soul, of the Jubilee songs.