When I first heard the Anthology of American Folk Music, I was stunned by its implication that the folk music of The South has always been deeply de-segregated. It makes no mention of race at all, and it’s often hard to tell whether a performer is black or white. At least in the North, this was much of its impact when it was first released in 1952.
But after 7 years of thinking and reading, The Anthology has begun to change my notions of what Southern (and Northern) segregation were really about.
I grew up outside Chicago, historically one of the most segregated cities in America. You had to get in a car and really drive to see any African Americans. Drinking fountains labeled “Colored” and “White” would have been absurd in my hometown — not due to our great enlightenment, but just because our drinking fountains would have to wait years before ever seeing a black face.
I now see that there was rarely any place in The South so segregated in quite this way. Historically, the African American experience there has been largely rural (hard to picture for me), so rural whites and blacks breathed the same air, however uneasily. It wasn’t unusual for white children to be raised, to a degree, by black servants.
Many linguists even believe that the various “Southern accents” derive some of their characteristics from West African languages. If this is true, Northerners have no Southern accent because they have so few African influences.
Chicago was segregated geographically, physically, bodily. The South was more segregated by custom and law. It’s no wonder that the musical intimacy of blacks and whites in The South came as a shock to me. It didn’t square with my experience as a Northerner, studying old photographs of those drinking fountains labeled “White” and “Colored”.