TY - JOUR
AU - Winkler, Peter
AB - What consequences would it have for the practice of musicology if reason and sensibility were allowed to come back together? What if we were to work out of a consciousness that is not divided, that is vulnerable to those things in the world and in music that can move the scholar to feeling and action, without fear of the incapacitation of reason?1 In the language of the Lao the expression that corresponds to the verb “to know” is khow jai, literally, “to enter the heart.” Knowing is an involvement of the knower with the known; to know is to be engulfed in and surrounded by the known (precisely what objectivity is meant to avoid). Knowing is a continuing relationship, not the product of a process of gaining control over the object. In preparing for the knowing one gives oneself over to what one understands, and that presupposes an affinity for it…. The very expression khow jai resonates with our expression for knowing something from memory—to know “by heart,” which is a survival from medieval Latin.2                         —Leo Treitler On the last day of February 1927, in an empty office repurposed as a recording studio in the McCall Building in Memphis, Tennessee, two blind Black street performers recorded a gospel song called “Honey in the Rock.”3 Mamie Forehand sang and kept time with a bell; her husband, A. C. Forehand, played bottleneck guitar. The recording was supervised by a white man, Ralph Peer, one of the pioneers of the booming “race record” industry. Along with three other songs the Forehands recorded, “Honey in the Rock” was one of thousands of recordings by Black artists marketed by white-owned record companies to rural and urban working-class Black listeners in the 1920s and 1930s.4 Initially, “Honey” was not much of a commercial success, and the Forehands were never again asked to make a recording. But the song lived on; several decades later the recording caught the attention of white collectors, connoisseurs, and curators of Black folk music. It was reissued first in the late 1940s, and since 1966 it has reappeared on more than twenty-five LP and CD compilations of Black folk music. I first encountered “Honey in the Rock” in the late 1960s, in its first appearance on a compilation LP. The song held me spellbound; I played it over and over, and years later I was still playing it to my university classes in popular and folk music.5 My initial inspiration for this essay was Leo Treitler’s exhortation to write from a combination of reason and passion. I wanted to study a piece of music I had long loved simply because I loved it, and I immediately thought of “Honey in the Rock.” I wanted to enter into a relationship with this song, to be “engulfed and surrounded” by it, as Leo put it. My intention was to approach this song with no preexisting scholarly agenda, but in a spirit of humility, just asking the song what it had to teach me. I was well embarked on this project when Black Lives Matter brought me up short. The brutal police murders of George Floyd and countless other Black Americans woke me, along with many other white people, to a painfully heightened awareness of our country’s long history of systemic racism. That awareness has penetrated the walls of the academy; musical scholars are taking a hard look at the unacknowledged “white racial frame” that conditions what music we look at and how we look at it.6 Race was always going to be part of my account—it had to be; in fundamental ways the story of popular music in America is a story of race—but now the matter took on a new urgency. I needed to ask how my own privileged position as a white musician, trained in a Eurocentric tradition, affected how I came to know this music. I realized that asking the music what it had to teach me meant that I also had to look at who I was in relation to it. “Honey in the Rock” is a song that speaks to me, but what I hear is dependent on who I am. Thus, a central theme of this essay became an acknowledgment of the difference between my ways of learning and knowing music, as a composer socialized in the “white frame” of the Western European tradition, and the ways in which the people who made this music, Mamie and A. C. Forehand, learned and thought about what they are doing. Although I learned this song by listening carefully and repeatedly, my way of learning was conditioned by the pervasive visualist orientation of my musical culture.7 In large part, I learned “by eye,” transcribing the recorded music into written musical notation, and studying it using diagrams, symbols, and musical terminology originally developed for the study of music in the literate European tradition. I used these technologies to build up a mental image, a visual representation of my understanding of what is going on in this song. Mamie and A. C. Forehand’s musical culture was rooted in oral tradition. They were members of a Black musical community, and learned this song “by ear,” through interaction with other musicians. There is nothing tentative or haphazard in their recorded performance; clearly they knew what they were doing, but I can only hazard guesses about how that “knowing” worked, what their mental representation of the song might have been like. One thing is certain: visual cues and images did not play a role in their knowing; they were blind. They had no access to the social power and agency our culture affords to those who can see, read, and write. In this essay, then, I will try to portray “Honey in the Rock” as I have come to know and understand it, which is necessarily through the “white frame” of my training and culture. But I will keep in mind the very different ways in which the Forehands themselves knew this song, and attempt to imagine the ways of musical thinking that gave rise to it. This attempt, necessarily, must be an act of what Leo Treitler calls “historical imagination.” Listening, Sound, Groove Although I provide transcriptions, I urge you to listen to the actual recording of the song itself before reading further. It’s readily available on many online music streaming services—a search for “Blind Mamie Forehand Honey in the Rock” should yield quick results. The object of study here is a recording, the surviving sonic traces of a performance that took place nearly a century ago. So, let me begin by describing how this recording strikes my listening ear, prior to any attempt to analyze what I hear. I can discern three sounds: a guitar, a bell, and a woman’s voice.8 Most striking to my ear is that bell. Mamie’s9 bell is unique to this record and the other three songs the Forehands recorded; I have heard nothing like it on any other “race” record.10 It sounds on every quarter-beat, a soft, clear ringing that suffuses the entire recording. Mamie’s bell functions rhythmically as a time-keeper, but it has meanings beyond that. In many cultures, bells serve to summon attention, and they often have a function in religious ceremonies. When the Forehands played on street corners, the bell could have helped attract the notice of passers-by—think of Christmastime Salvation Army bell ringers. Or perhaps, in this song about Christian faith, we are hearing Mamie summoning the holy spirit. Mamie sounds the bell steadily, with virtually no variation in volume or tempo, providing a clear rhythmic horizon, defining the temporal field of the music.11 Her bell opens up spaces that are filled in a variety of ways by A. C. Forehand’s guitar. His playing has two layers: a melody played on the higher-pitched strings using “bottleneck” technique, and an accompaniment on the lower-pitched, fretted strings.12 Musicians often refer to the “feel” of their playing, referring to a complex combination of elements including rhythmic placement, relationship to the beat, dynamic shaping, ornamentation and inflection of pitch. To my ears, A.C.’s “feel,” his sense of time, is masterly. His style is spare, but every attack comes at just the right moment, locking into Mamie’s steady bell strokes. Together, bell and guitar create a compelling rhythmic momentum: an irresistible “groove,” a light but dancing beat, in which silences and omissions are as important as notes.13 Measuring Blue Notes In the first verse, Mamie does not sing; the melody is carried by the bottleneck guitar. Or rather, the bottleneck sings the melody, its pitches constantly in motion, gliding and bending, evoking the sound and expression of a human voice. And when Mamie begins to sing, her notes also glide and bend as the two voices intertwine. Such expressive inflection of pitch—here primarily inflections of the third degree of the scale—is a core attribute of African American melody, often described as “blue notes” or “blue tonality.” The heart and soul of these melodies lies in what happens “inside” the notes, the unique bending and shaping of individual notes. This phenomenon is difficult to describe with the tools of a European music theory which conceptualizes melody in terms of relationships between fixed pitches. And so we need to pause and consider “blue notes.” Over many years, they have been the object of study and at times contentious discussion.14 Much of that discussion has focused on the positing of “blues scales” based on the measurement of the microtonal intonation of particular scale steps—in particular the “neutral third” halfway between a minor and a major third. In other words, the blues scale has been conceived in terms of deviations from a European norm of equal temperament. In discussions of blues melody, slides between notes are often mentioned, but rarely described in any detail. I feel this emphasis is misguided; when I listen to A.C.’s bottleneck melody and to Mamie’s singing, I do not hear a series of fixed pitches connected by means of linear slides, I hear dynamic shapes, curving trajectories within a given tonal space.15 In an effort to study what goes on “inside” a blue note, I made use of “time-stretching” software that enabled me to isolate individual moments and slow them down without altering their pitch.16 This enabled me to study the subtle shaping of each note, but finding a way to represent this shaping visually was a problem. I attempt, in example 1, a graphical representation of the shape and trajectory of A.C.’s opening gesture.17 Below the graph is my transcription of the gesture into Western notation, using a variety of symbols in an effort to capture the subtleties of his shaping of pitch. Example 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Guitar opening phrase, diagram and notation. Example 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Guitar opening phrase, diagram and notation. The gesture consists of four “blue notes” grouped by two’s; the first two constitute an upbeat, the second two a downbeat and afterbeat: A shape beginning on F♯ and rising rapidly at first, then leveling off at the neutral third point, halfway between G and G♯, where it hovers for an instant. After the initial bell stroke, a rapid downward plunge from a pitch slightly lower than G, touching briefly on F♯, then landing on the open E string. On the downbeat the neutral third G is retaken, this time falling rapidly to E. E is confirmed by an answering upward slide from the D below, ending with a slight vibrato. As example 1 makes clear, each of these notes has its own unique shape; no two are alike. Although my description of these shapes has referred to specific pitches, they should be understood as reference points within a shape rather than goals of motion, with the exception of the stable “E” tonic (an open string on the guitar). The “blue third” region within which A.C.’s melody moves extends between the second degree of the E-major scale (F♯3 ca. 370 Hz) and the neutral third between G3 and G♯3 (ca. 400 Hz). Interestingly, a spectral analysis of Mamie’s bell shows it ringing exactly in the same region, but two octaves higher. Figure 1 shows the bell’s pitch spectrum; its fundamental is a pair of pitches approximately a quarter-tone apart, located between F♯6 and G6. The bell’s resonance with the melody’s blue notes is one of the sonic marvels of this recording; it is as though the bell and the guitar were calling to each other. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Bell spectrum at V1.1,3, as measured by Transcribe! software. The three most prominent frequencies are 1508 Hz (F♯6 +33 cents), 1549 (G6–21 cents) and 3953 Hz (B7). Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Bell spectrum at V1.1,3, as measured by Transcribe! software. The three most prominent frequencies are 1508 Hz (F♯6 +33 cents), 1549 (G6–21 cents) and 3953 Hz (B7). My urge to employ digital technology to isolate and measure blue notes is a typically European-American ambition. It is a reductionist approach: fragmenting phenomena into constituent elements, classifying, measuring, and hypothesizing rules to explain the phenomena. Microanalysis of the shaping of notes within the blue region could well be a fruitful avenue of investigation, but I lack the space to pursue it further here.18 And I am not sure how useful such a tool would ultimately be in helping me comprehend the musical impulses that led to the creation and shaping of these melodies. At this point it is important to mention that, when speaking of their approach to melody, most Black musicians do not seem to think in terms of blue notes. Gerhard Kubik notes that “blues musicians do not talk about ‘blue notes’ or any other intervals supposed to be special, unless they have adopted the jargon from music critics or musicologists.”19 Black guitarists may speak of “worrying” or “bending” a note,20 or, as B.B. King puts it, “I think in terms of not just playing a note but making sure that every note I play means something.”21 In other words, the focus is not on how they make the sound but on what their playing communicates. The concept of a “blue note” is, as Kubik observes, “a Western construct, reflecting a Western cognitive problem in the encounter with African American music.”22 Learning the Song Let me return to the distinction between learning “by eye” and learning “by ear.” Mamie and A. C. Forehand learned “Honey in the Rock” through oral transmission. They listened to others sing a version of the song, emulated what they heard, and in so doing made a version of the song that was uniquely their own. This was a process of learning through dialogue and social interchange. This way of coming to know the song is not open to me: the community and the musical traditions that gave rise to “Honey in the Rock” are long gone—or rather, have evolved into very different things. And so my only access to the song was through a recorded artifact, which I transcribed into written musical notation. My “dialogue” was between me and the recording, a piece of “fixed media,” enabled through technologies of musical notation and digital sound manipulation. Such a project is inherently problematic. I have written elsewhere about the shortcomings of using European musical notation as a tool for transcription.23 To summarize briefly: Notation is a visual form of representation: it uses space to represent time. Thus it exists outside of the temporal stream of music as we experience it. Western musical notation separates the musical continuum into a number of discretely notated parameters. Western notation represents two of these parameters—pitch and rhythm—with some precision as discrete points located within the grids of scale and meter. All other parameters, such as dynamics, timbre, mode of articulation, fluctuations of tempo, and ornamentation, are represented with less precision, by means of an array of arbitrarily assigned symbols or specialized terms, typically Italian words: forte, staccato, accelerando, etc. This notational fragmentation gives rise to a fragmented, reductionist view of the music itself. As Hans Weisethaunet, in his provocatively titled article “Is There Such a Thing as a Blue Note?” puts it: “The simplified conceptualization of what ‘blue notes’ are about partly stems from the intense musicological insistence on separation of elements of musical ‘structure’ derived from Western music theory: the insistence on the separation of ‘harmony’ from ‘sound’ (timbre), ‘melody’ and ‘rhythm,’ as the starting point of all analysis.”24 Still, for many purposes the convenience of notation outweighs its shortcomings. And I have found that the act of transcription is a great focusing device: it forces me to be aware of every event in the music.25 Example 2 is my detailed transcription, an attempt to represent everything I hear in the recording. To indicate some of the nuances of the performance, I have made use of an array of symbols; figure 2 supplies a table d’agréments. Example 2. Open in new tabDownload slide “Honey in the Rock,” full transcription. Example 2. Open in new tabDownload slide “Honey in the Rock,” full transcription. Example 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Continued Example 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Continued Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Transcription symbols used in example 2. Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Transcription symbols used in example 2. My notation ended up appearing rather formidable, and indeed the amount of detail shown obscures the larger outlines of the song. So I decided to make a second transcription, example 3, a simplified, practical “sheet music” version, something that musicians might use as the basis for a performance. This transcription collapses all the verses and choruses into single strains with repeat marks. Mamie and A.C. vary the verses and choruses in subtle ways, but they follow the same basic melodic and harmonic outlines throughout the song, which makes this condensation and simplification possible.26 Example 3. Open in new tabDownload slide “Honey in the Rock,” practical version. Example 3. Open in new tabDownload slide “Honey in the Rock,” practical version. The “eye/ear” distinction I have been making is actually an oversimplification. No musical culture, even European art music, is solely dependent on notation; listening and imitating are always part of the process.27 As I worked on this transcription, I was also trying to learn the music by ear. The act of transcription, especially my “practical” version, helped me learn the tune more quickly, but I also learned by playing along with the recording, echoing and imitating what I heard A.C. playing and Mamie singing, trying to fit my piano into their groove. Listening closely and playing along with them helped me unlearn some of my own habitual musical moves and licks. They were teaching me new ways of playing. The Formal Archetype “Honey in the Rock” is structured around a familiar sixteen-bar form common to many songs. Figure 3 outlines the form. It is a hierarchical structure, based on the mapping of a simple binary grouping on successively higher structural levels. Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Sixteen-measure formal archetype. Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Sixteen-measure formal archetype. This song type is common to a wide range of both secular and sacred songs, from the United States and many other Western cultures. The circled chords in figure 3 point out two characteristics that distinguish this particular archetype from other similar sixteen-bar forms: the clear half-cadences in measures 4 and 12, and the beginning of the second half—either a continuation of a verse or the beginning of a chorus—on the subdominant. Forms of this type were particularly characteristic of songs in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, as part of what Christopher Smith calls the “creole synthesis” of musical cultures that American Blacks and whites have been sharing since the early days of slavery.28 Example 4 presents two representative samples of the form: the blackface minstrel show tune, “The Little Old Cabin in the Lane” (1871) by Will Shakespeare Hays, and my transcription of a 1930 Black gospel recording by Elder Curry and his congregation, “Memphis Flu” (a song newly relevant to the times we are now living through).29 These examples—their words as well as their music—suggest the complex cultural interaction that embodies, in Smith’s words, “a fluid, contested dynamic of appropriation, derogation, emulation, exploitation, greed, theft, and inspiration.”30 Example 4. Open in new tabDownload slide “Little Old Log Cabin” and “Memphis Flu.” Example 4. Open in new tabDownload slide “Little Old Log Cabin” and “Memphis Flu.” The Guitar Verse In “Honey in the Rock,” A.C. and Mamie Forehand shaped this form to their own purposes. A.C.’s guitar begins the song with an eight-measure instrumental verse. In his opening melodic gesture (the gesture I diagrammed in ex. 1 above), the melodic sense is a shift of weight, by stages, from the blue third region to the tonic. The melody continues in similar fashion, in units that are eight eighth-note pulses long, straddling the downbeat of each measure and beginning with an anacrusis of three eighth-pulses.31 We can view his melody as a whole as a series of transformations of the initial melodic motion. Example 5 displays these transformations by vertically lining up the downbeats of every measure. (I use Schenkerian scale-degree notation to show the fundamental motion within each unit; the brackets on the left-hand side show the grouping structure.) Example 5. Open in new tabDownload slide “Honey in the Rock” verse, analysis of guitar melody. Downbeats are lined up vertically; fundamental melodic motion is indicated by scale-degrees, and brackets on left show grouping structure. Example 5. Open in new tabDownload slide “Honey in the Rock” verse, analysis of guitar melody. Downbeats are lined up vertically; fundamental melodic motion is indicated by scale-degrees, and brackets on left show grouping structure. The treble bottleneck melody is interrupted at measure 4, when A.C. unexpectedly abandons the melody in favor of a bass line chromatically descending to an arrival on B2 (scale-degree 5). Example 5 shows this as a transference of melodic activity to the bass register, but it could also be understood as a deliberate absence, an empty melodic space that will later be filled by Mamie’s voice. At measure 5, A.C. begins the second phrase with a high B(⁠ 5^ ⁠), the highest pitch the melody has reached so far, then continues with a melody that parallels measures 1 and 2. At measure 6, a more dramatic disruption occurs. A.C. begins with an unexpected elision, shortening the space between the end of the antecedent and the beginning of the consequent groups by two beats so that the consequent phrase begins immediately after the end of the antecedent. This final phrase is one continuous statement, in which the melody climbs to a new high point—C♯ (⁠ 6^ ⁠), before concluding with a strong 3^–2^–1^ melodic cadence. The elision suspends a sense of regular metrical grouping; it is unclear where the downbeat to measure 7 is located or how the melody should be parsed. Example 6 suggests one alternative hearing of the passage—as two 34 measures. This hearing is reinforced by the melodic shape, which suggests a grouping of the eighth-note pulses into progressively shorter units: 8–5–4–3–2–(downbeat). Example 6. Open in new tabDownload slide “Honey” verse, mm. 5–8, alternative metrical grouping. Example 6. Open in new tabDownload slide “Honey” verse, mm. 5–8, alternative metrical grouping. Regardless of how it is parsed, this elision is a startling moment. It disrupts the regularity of the phrasing, drawing us forward before we’re quite ready for it, disorienting our sense of time, before dropping us decisively into the cadence in measure 8. The elision reoccurs in analogous places in all the verses and choruses; each time it comes as a surprise, and each time its effect is subtly different, as we shall see. A.C.’s Way with Harmony A.C.’s guitar style keeps both melodic and accompaniment activity going, but he shifts focus from one to the other: when the melody pauses, he drops down to fill in chords and bass; when the melody is sounding, the harmony is sketched in lightly or not at all. His accompanying bass and harmony parts are a very different kind of pitch language from the bottleneck melody: their pitches are fixed, either open strings or notes stopped at frets. The contrast between these two kinds of music is seen most clearly in measure 5 of the choruses: in his accompaniment A.C. employs a G♮–G♯ appoggiatura figure similar to what a blues piano player would use to approximate a blue note; meanwhile his bottleneck melody is bending a blue third. The guitar is tuned to an E-major chord, as shown in figure 4. This “open” tuning, which is often coupled with bottleneck guitar style, facilitates a harmonic style very different from Western “textbook” harmony, such as that seen in the popular evangelical hymn books that contributed to the Gospel tradition. Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide “Open E” guitar tuning. Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide “Open E” guitar tuning. To study A. C. Forehand’s way with tonal harmony, I will focus on his accompaniment to this first verse in detail. The accompaniment in measure 1 consists entirely of open strings, at first string 4 (E3), then adding string 3 (G♯3). In measure 2 he supplies the first hint of harmonic movement; between beats 2 and 3 an A-major chord (IV) embellishes the E-major tonic. This neighbor IV–I figure will recur throughout the song, always in the same metrical position, leading into beat three of the bar. I have already noted the dramatic abandonment of the bottleneck melody for an accompaniment figure in mm. 3–4. Harmonically, this strongly directed chromatic bass line drives to an arrival on the dominant, a B7 chord, with the addition of F♯ and A to the chords. The arrival on the dominant at measure 4 is marked by three beats of “oom-pah” accompaniment, the first appearance of regular alternation of bass and chord, a moment of relative rhythmic and metrical stability. But the B7 chord is not sustained all the way through measure 4; when the melody begins its anacrusis to the following phrase the harmony returns to E major. This is a characteristic move throughout the song: when either IV or V appear at the beginning of a measure, they are never sustained through to the end of the measure; within the last three eighth-note beats of the bar the tonic E major is always reasserted. Given the assertive half-cadence in measure 4, ears trained in the conventions of European tonal harmony might expect a definitive V–I cadence in mm. 7–8. Such ears will be disappointed; A.C. gives no hint of a dominant function here. Underneath the concluding phrase, A.C. lightly touches some open strings, doing nothing to disturb the metrical ambiguity of this passage. No strong bass note is heard until the confirming low E2 on the downbeat of measure 8. Though the melody provides a strong sense of cadence, the harmony provides no hint of a cadential V–I progression (in later verses and choruses, A.C. adds a touch of IV in measure 7, but he never goes near V). This way of making a cadence is not uncommon in blues and gospel recordings from the period. Scholars often frame it as a lacking; the chords that “ought” to be there are missing. As David Evans puts it: Often a blues accompaniment does not consist of full chords … but only the suggestion of chords. The subdominant harmony in the fifth and sixth bars of a twelve-bar blues might be suggested by the inclusion of the fourth or sixth degree in a chord that is otherwise based on the tonic, and similarly for the dominant harmony. 32 If we try to set aside our Western European preconceptions about how harmony is supposed to work, what can we say about how the harmony is working in this verse? A.C.’s way with harmony is primarily to adhere to the tonic, using his open E tuning, but varying its stability by means of momentary fluctuations such as neighbor motions. This is true even at the moment of the final cadence in the verse, where a functional dominant is clearly absent. The exception is the emphatic motion to a half-cadence in measures 3 and 4. This is the moment at which the song, conforming to the eight-measure archetype it is following, accedes to the conventions of European harmony. It could be seen as a moment when African and European musical cultures confront each other. Such a hymn-like move would not occur in the rural blues (a tradition that probably developed later than the Black gospel tradition to which this song belongs). David Evans notes that blues vocal lines almost never end on the second degree of the scale,33 and Gerhard Kubik affirms that “the dominant chord is often avoided or circumvented in the blues.”34 I study A.C.’s way with tonal harmony with delight. His approach is, of course, conditioned by the configuration and tuning of his guitar, and many guitarists employ similar moves. But A.C.’s individual approach—his sense of what to leave out and when, and in particular his way of making cadences—feel especially elegant to me. Mamie’s Verses Before considering the choruses in “Honey in the Rock” let us turn to the verses as sung by Mamie. Example 7 partitions her melody in the same manner as example 5. Example 7. Open in new tabDownload slide “Honey” verse, analysis of vocal melodies. Example 7. Open in new tabDownload slide “Honey” verse, analysis of vocal melodies. Mamie sings in the same register as A.C.’s bottleneck melody, and her melody, like his, depends on the expressive inflection of the blue third region. But even though the two melodic voices are in dialogue, their languages are not identical; they speak in slightly different dialects. Mamie’s range is narrower; she falls no lower than a third below the tonic, and never rises more than a fourth above: a total range of little more than a minor sixth. Her melody hovers, as does A.C.’s melody, in the area around a slightly sharp 2^ (F♯) and the neutral third (between G♮ and G♯), though she seems to favor the lower portion of this pitch range more than he does. Her pitch inflection is not as precise as A.C.’s; she slides into each line from below and ends each line with a downward fall (sometimes the pitch of her final syllables is impossible to determine). Her rhythmic sense is different as well; A.C.’s phrases are marked by strong arrivals on the downbeat, whereas Mamie tends to push forward and anticipate the downbeat by a sixteenth-note pulse. Mamie’s voice and A.C.’s bottleneck melody begin the verses together, in a kind of heterophony: the two melodies follow the same contour and rhythm, but their intonation differs. (It would be inappropriate to consider this discrepancy in intonation as dissonance; rather, the two voices are dealing with the same melody, each in their own way.) The lyrics for the two verses begin differently: Gamblers gamblin’ / every day Oh while I walk / this narrow way Mother mother / can’t you see Oh what the Lord / has did for me But both verses end with the same two lines: There is no evil / ever betide35 While I’m walking by my savior’s side The first three lines have four stresses with a caesura in the middle, while the final line has five stresses. This culminating line occurs at measure 6, the moment of the two-beat elision, and partially resolves the puzzle of metrical groupings here. The strongest stresses in the line are on “walk-ing” and “sav-ior’s,” so we can rule out the possible 34 grouping suggested in example 6 above. But what is important here is the dramatic impact of the metrical irregularity. The verse had been proceeding in regular units of two stresses, separated by pauses of three eighth-note pulses. This pause disappears in measure 6, and Mamie “walks” straight into the culminating final line, moving in an unbroken stream of eighth notes until she suddenly comes to a halt on the syncopated second syllable of “sav-ior’s side.” Our rhythmic disorientation is resolved by the appearance of the savior. This is also the moment when A.C.’s guitar and Mamie’s voice pursue different melodic paths and branch into true counterpoint (see ex. 8). A.C. returns to his culminating guitar melody, climbing up to the climactic high 6^ while Mamie hovers around 2^ ⁠, dipping down to a low 6^ as A.C. reaches his high point, before they unite in a 2^–1^ cadence. As words and music come together, a declaration of trust and faith seems to crystallize in this moment, one of the dramatic high points of the song. Example 8. Open in new tabDownload slide “Honey,” counterpoint in mm. 7–8 of verses. Example 8. Open in new tabDownload slide “Honey,” counterpoint in mm. 7–8 of verses. The Many “Honey in the Rocks” Before I discuss the chorus, it will be useful to look at how some other musicians performed “Honey in the Rock.” The Forehands were the first to record a song by that name, but many other “Honey in the Rocks” followed. In my search for other instances of the song, I discovered a number of distinct song-families.36 One of them, an evangelical hymn called “Honey in the Rock,” was published in 1895 by Frederick Arthur Graves. This is often considered to be the source of the song the Forehands sing, but the two songs have little in common.37 The closest match I have found to the lyrics Mamie sings is a text transcribed by the Alabama folklorist Ruby Pickens Tartt sometime in the 1930s:38 Mother, mother, come and see What the Lord have done for me I am so humble Never get tired I am walkin’ by my Savior's side. Chorus Honey in the rock, honey in the rock Oh it taste like honey in the rock Go taste and see dear Lord ’tis good Oh it taste like honey in the rock. Unfortunately, the Tartt collection does not include melodies. But three field recordings John Lomax made for the Library of Congress between 1935 and 1940 contain the chorus in the form we see above, and closely match what the Forehands sing.39 Example 9 presents these versions of the chorus, comparing them with the Forehands’ version as well as a version recorded in 1937 by the Carter Family (which conflates the Graves hymn with this form of the chorus). Though all of these versions of the chorus postdate the Forehands’ recording, they exhibit a musical and lyrical similarity and a regularity that suggests a song that had been circulating in oral tradition for some time prior to the Forehands’ recording. A look at this “common-form” version sheds light on the unique qualities of the Forehands’ version. Example 9. Open in new tabDownload slide “Honey” choruses: Mamie Forehand, three transcriptions from the Lomax Library of Congress recordings, and the Carter Family. (Transcriptions by the author.) Example 9. Open in new tabDownload slide “Honey” choruses: Mamie Forehand, three transcriptions from the Lomax Library of Congress recordings, and the Carter Family. (Transcriptions by the author.) The Forehands’ Way with the Chorus The common-form versions of the chorus begin with call-and-response repetition of the lyric “Honey in the rock”—a survival from camp-meeting hymns and a common feature of popular gospel hymnody. But A.C. and Mamie begin their chorus together, before separating to create a more subtle form of musical dialogue. At first A.C. and Mamie follow the common-form version of the melody, setting the words “Honey in the rock” with a questioning stepwise rise up to A4 (the highest note Mamie ever sings). But the two soon part ways, A.C. following the common-form model and returning to G♯ in the answering figure, while Mamie answers her question more definitively by inverting her stepwise figure as she repeats the words, returning us to the stability of the tonic. Mamie begins the next line, “Oh well it tastes so like honey . .,” but then breaks off; A.C. finishes her thought, making the anticipated half-cadence on 2^ with a ragtime-like turning figure.40 Now, at the midpoint of the chorus, Mamie continues her pattern of pausing three eighth-note beats between lines of text. But her omission of the last words of the previous phrase has put her out of phase with A.C.’s guitar. Her line “taste and see” sounds at first like an echoing answer to A.C.’s phrase-ending, but comparing her version with the common-form version suggests that she is actually beginning the next line early; she has dropped two beats from measure 4, making an elision. Meanwhile, A.C. is still following the regular 44 meter, so he begins his next phrase two beats after Mamie. Their dialogue is an unusual kind of call-and-response in which it is unclear which is the call and which the response. Then in measure 6 A.C. drops two beats, making the same elision he had made in the verses, and the two voices are reunited. Example 10 illustrates this elegant large-scale metrical dissonance, showing Mamie beginning measures 5 and 6 two beats earlier than A.C. Example 10. Open in new tabDownload slide “Honey” chorus, mm. 3–8, metrical dissonance. Example 10. Open in new tabDownload slide “Honey” chorus, mm. 3–8, metrical dissonance. A.C.’s accompaniment in the chorus begins with the same kind of figures he employed in the verses, but halfway through measure 2, at the words “Oh well it tastes so like honey,” he enters new territory. Here, as in measure 3 of the verses, he abandons his bottleneck melody in favor of action in the lower strings. Using the fourth and fifth strings, he plays an emphatic chromatic rising figure in parallel fourths, then, in the next bar, reverses the figure. This figure is closely related to the falling stepwise chromatic bass line we saw in mm. 3–4 of the verse, but it begins a full measure earlier, consists of a rise as well as a fall, and ends two beats before the cadential moment at measure 4. Although this passage clearly signals a move to the dominant, it would be difficult to fit this moment into any common harmonic schema. Example 11 offers an explanation of the tonal action here by way of a voice-leading analysis. Example 11. Open in new tabDownload slide “Honey in the Rock” chorus, guitar mm. 2–4, analysis. Example 11. Open in new tabDownload slide “Honey in the Rock” chorus, guitar mm. 2–4, analysis. In the final measure of the first two choruses, A.C. adds a cadence-confirming formula often favored by blues guitarists: a chromatic descent from 7^ to 5^ ⁠, under a repeated open E string. This little cliché, a reference to the circle-of-fifths figure heard in barbershop harmony, acquires richer associations in this song, since it is a variation, an octave higher, of the bass figure heard in measure 4 of the verses, and thus also recalls the unusual parallel-fourths figure heard in measures 2 and 3 of the choruses (see ex. 10). These are the only chromatic movements in the song; they occur at different structural points, but they echo and reflect one another. The formal subtleties I have been describing are the sort of things a theorist raised in the Western European tradition delights in discovering. The two-beat elision, though it occurs at the same structural point in the verses and choruses, has very different effects and different meanings at different points: metrical disorientation in the guitar verse, textual consummation in the sung verses, and an intricate metrical dissonance in the choruses. The guitar’s chromatic figure is a motive whose appearances cut across the formal structure of the song. And while indulging in a Eurocentric analytic mindset, I could also point out some fleeting but significant moments of melodic inversion. I already noted the inversional relationship between Mamie’s first two “Honey in the rocks.” And further, in measure 6 of the chorus when Mamie sings “Oh well it tastes … ” she is answering and inverting the melodic figure A.C. just played (shown in Example 10). This melodic convergence signals the approaching reunification of the two voices. If I were to suggest that these subtleties are of the sort one might discover in, say, a Schubert lied, I could be accused of judging this music by inappropriate standards. It is not uncommon for commentators to compare moments in jazz or blues to European classical music (how often has Stravinsky been invoked when discussing the rhythmic subtlety of a jazz performance?). Such a strategy is often employed in an effort to win a sense of legitimacy and artistic status for the music.41 But it can easily veer off into being patronizing or condescending. Having set out in such detail my own, very European-influenced understanding of the song, I must return to the question of Mamie and A.C.’s own ways of knowing it. There is no doubt that they were very aware of the two-beat elision; they play it consistently throughout the recording. When I was learning the song, I found this elision one of the most difficult moments to master; it was a long time before that little temporal hiccup became second nature to me. Dropping and adding beats was common practice in both Black and white southern styles.42 Such elisions typically happen at points of structural articulation—between phrases, or between verses and choruses. The Forehands’ elision is subtler, though; it happens within the phrase. And in their choruses, Mamie and A.C. drop beats at different points. When they were learning the song, did they discuss this? Would they have conceptualized what they were doing in terms of leaving beats out? Or did they just listen closely to each other, and come to an unspoken mutual understanding of “how it goes?” My awareness of the formal complexity I have discovered in “Honey in the Rock” has become part of my experience of the song. It is an aspect that appeals to my European-trained sensibilities. But I am more deeply moved by aspects that lie in other realms. I have already spoken of the irresistible sense of groove, and the expressive inflection of the blue third region. I have yet to consider what is, to me, the emotional core of the song: the touching quality of Mamie’s voice and her way with the song’s words. Mamie’s Way with the Words The image of the first line of the chorus—“Honey in the rock, honey in the rock”—can be traced to two Old Testament sources: Deuteronomy 32:13, “And he made him (Jacob) to suck honey out of the rock,” and Psalm 81:16, “He should have fed them also with the finest of the wheat: and with honey out of the rock should I have satisfied thee.”43 The words that follow—“taste and see”—introduce sensory experience into the imagery of the song: we taste the honey and, through its sweetness, see the goodness of the Lord. Again, there are biblical sources for these images: Psalm 34:8, “O taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man that trusteth in him,” and Psalm 110:103, “How sweet are thy words unto my taste! Yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth.” The words of the chorus are structured around the circulation of these three core images: “honey,” “rock,” and “taste.” Mamie’s reshaping of the chorus artfully withholds the appearance of all three images together until the final line. Figure 5 illustrates the distribution of these images. Figure 5. Open in new tabDownload slide “Honey in the Rock” chorus text, distribution of imagery. Lines are arranged vertically and numbered on the left-hand side; significant images are in bold and lined up vertically. Figure 5. Open in new tabDownload slide “Honey in the Rock” chorus text, distribution of imagery. Lines are arranged vertically and numbered on the left-hand side; significant images are in bold and lined up vertically. Mamie only sings two verses in this recording, but the Ruby Pickens Tartt manuscript suggests how additional verses might have been constructed:44 Brother, brother, come and see / What the Lord has done for me (etc.) Sister, sister, come and see, etc. Gambler, gambler, can’t you see, etc. Sinners, sinners, can’t you see, etc. As Olivia and Jack Solomon remark in their notes to the Tartt manuscript, the verses constitute a “catalog of relatives and sinners, all of whom are exhorted to salvation.” Mamie condenses the catalogue, first addressing the sinful world—“Gamblers gamblin’ every day”—then appealing to her mother. She also works in a New Testament image of the straight and narrow path.45 What really matters, of course, is how Mamie sings these words. In attempting to write about Mamie’s singing I’m aware of the dangers of a white male writing about a Black woman’s voice. Looking over attempts (by other white males) to characterize Mamie Forehand’s voice, I see that they cluster around familiar themes: the nurturing mother (“tender,” “heartfelt”), the otherworldly angel (“ethereal,” “celestial,” “delicate,” “innocent”), or the vulnerable victim (“weak, weary,” “plaintive,” “nervously trembles”).46 Such adjectives recall the kind of male projections often encountered in writing about artists such as Billie Holiday or actresses like Marilyn Monroe. Is it possible to describe Mamie’s voice without resorting to such stereotypes? Mamie recorded one other song on February 28, 1927, “Wouldn’t Mind Dying If Dying Was All.” This was a version of a popular and much-recorded song, “Bye and Bye I’m Going to See the King,” and it sheds light on Mamie’s vocal technique.47 Here her voice is very different: she sings in a lower register (her vocal range extends from E3 to E4) and uses a chest voice.48 Singing in different voices is not unusual among Black singers: another gospel singer, Blind Willie Johnson, was famous for singing in two different voices, a baritone and a “false bass” technique similar to throat-singing. Johnson varied his vocal sound to fit the topic of the song, and I imagine this is what Mamie was doing on the only two songs she ever recorded. “Wouldn’t Mind Dying” is a grim song about facing death, and Mamie’s voice is low, forceful, and determined: I wouldn’t mind dying but I had to go by myself I wouldn’t mind dying if dying was all. “Honey in the Rock” is about living in a state of grace, so Mamie employs her head voice, lighter, sweeter, closer to heaven. Her vocal range here is from C♯4 to A4; the high A sounds like the upper limit of her range, which creates an occasional quaver in her voice. In her first vocal entry, this quaver adds to the tentative, questioning quality of her first “Honey in the Rock.” The quaver could be heard as signaling vulnerability, but Mamie’s way with words encompasses a wider range of emotions. In her very next phrase there is an immediate shift of affect as she inverts the melody, answering the question with a decisive affirmation. To mention just two other moments I feel are particularly moving: at the beginning of the second chorus she breaks off singing for a moment, to utter a fervent prayer: “Lift me.” And when she begins her final verse by appealing to her mother, her voice takes on a new urgency, then moves into a mood of calm strength, a quiet determination to suffer no evil, a joyful confidence in walking by her savior’s side. Conclusions: Knowing by Heart There is much that could be told about the story of this recording, how it came to be made and what happened to it subsequently, but I do not have the room here.49 Suffice it to say that racism and white privilege play a large role in the story. The “race record” business functioned like an extractive industry. To white entrepreneurs such as Ralph Peer, Black artists like the Forehands were sources of marketable product; once the product was extracted the sources were discarded.50 To the generation of white collectors, connoisseurs, and curators who later rediscovered “Honey in the Rock,” reviving old Black folk music was seen as a rejection of commercial mass culture and as a tool for opposing racism, although the well-intentioned efforts of these enthusiasts ran the danger of veering into paternalism and romanticization.51 But what of Mamie and A. C. Forehand themselves? Who were they? We have only a few scraps of biographical information about them; to fill in the picture requires an act of historical imagination.52 What did this song mean to them? Recording the song meant a few hours in a recording studio, a cash payment (undoubtedly welcome) for each of the songs they recorded, a brief, if lucrative, moment in their everyday lives.53 What could the lives of these two blind street singers have been like? In The Songs of Blind Folk, Terry Rowden points out the “almost epidemic levels of blindness among African Americans” in the early twentieth century, “caused by poverty, accidents, and a range of treatable but untreated illnesses and medical conditions.”54 He adds: From approximately 1920 to 1945, the word “blind” functioned as a professional surname for a startling number of African American musicians. In fact, one of the most significant aspects of the existence of blind performers in such large numbers in Southern Black communities during this time is the extent to which their presence seems to have simply been taken for granted by their contemporaries.55 Rowden’s research suggests that blind musicians played a stable and accepted role in the life of Black communities in southern cities. Mamie and A. C. Forehand were working musicians, performing in churches and busking on street corners—hard work, as any working musician knows. Although their lives were undoubtedly difficult, it appears that they were members of a community that they could rely upon for support. In return for that support, they contributed music to the life of the community. Mamie died in her early forties, but A.C. remarried and lived into his eighties, suggesting the strength of that community support. Ultimately, I feel I have come to know something about who the Forehands were through their music and my ability to empathize with them as a fellow musician. Such empathy is possible because, despite our very different backgrounds and histories, we share a common musical tradition: the “Creole synthesis” of African and European musical elements that has characterized American vernacular music for centuries. By no means is this tradition shared fairly; power is not distributed equitably, and as a white man I am a member of a class that needs to pay reparations. For a start, I can do the Forehands the honor of paying close attention to the music they have made. As I have figuratively sat at their feet, learning this song from them, my respect for their musicianship has grown. I admire the subtlety, elegance, and grace with which they shaped their material. A.C.’s guitar playing in particular has taught me new ways of navigating the waters of harmony and harmonic rhythm.56 Historical imagination requires a leap of faith. I can only hope that what I have found in this song bears some relationship to what Mamie and A.C. intended to convey. Mamie sings “There is no evil … while I’m walking by my savior’s side.” In the brutally racist world they inhabited, the Forehands faced evils that are beyond my capacity to imagine. But “Honey in the Rock” affirms the quiet confidence with which they faced the evil in their lives. Mamie and A.C. learned “Honey in the Rock” by ear, but they made it their own; they knew it “by heart.” When you know music by heart, it becomes part of you; when performing it you don’t need to think about what happens next, it just happens. Through my own way of learning (partly by ear, mostly by eye), I feel I also have come to know this song by heart. It has become part of me, and I have become part of it. To use Leo Treitler’s words, I have been “engulfed in and surrounded by” the song. In our present time of violence, danger, and suffering, I can cling to “Honey in the Rock” as a reassurance of the possibility of faith. And as I listen to Mamie and A.C., I am encouraged to trust that we have truly met one another in the heart of their song. Supplementary Material Supplementary material is available at http://mq.oxfordjournals.org/. Peter Winkler (b. 1943) is Professor Emeritus of music at Stony Brook University, where he taught theory, composition, and popular music history from 1971 to 2014. His principal composition teacher was Earl Kim, with whom he studied at Princeton and Harvard Universities. The history and theory of popular music are a focus of his research and teaching; he was a founding member of the U.S. branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM). His compositions include both concert works and music for the theater; many of his works explore connections between popular and classical idioms. Email: peter.winkler@stonybrook.edu I would like to thank Guido Van Rijn for his help in locating information about the Forehands; Todd Harvey at the Library of Congress American Folklife Center for access to recordings in their archives; Taylor Ackley for insights into the mechanics of slide guitar and the shaping of blue notes; and Dorothea Cook, Erika Honisch, and especially August Sheehy for comments and suggestions that helped me figure out what this essay was really about. And my deepest gratitude to Leo Treitler, who encouraged and mentored my early attempts at scholarly writing, and who first showed me that musicology could be fun. Footnotes 1 Leo Treitler, Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1989), 6. 2 Ibid., 10 3 “Honey in the Rock” was first issued on Victor records 20574 (matrix BVE 37961). Discographical information from the online Discography of American Historical Recordings, University of California Santa Barbara Library, https://adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/matrix/detail/800012218/BVE-37961-Honey_in_the_rock (accessed October 27, 2021). 4 The term “race record” was coined by Ralph Peer, to refer to recordings marketed to Black audiences. Between 1921 and 1943, some 15,000 titles were released on race record labels; of these some 1,750 were gospel recordings. The majority of the recordings were made in a brief five-year period, between 1925 and the onset of the Great Depression. An exhaustive discography of these recordings is Blues and Gospel Records, 1890–1943, compiled by Robert M. W. Dixon, John Godrich, and Howard Rye (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). See Paul Oliver, “Race record,” Grove Music Online 2001, https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.22778 (accessed January 25, 2021) and Matthew Killmeier, “Race Music,” St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, https://www.encyclopedia.com/media/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/race-music (accessed January 12, 2021). 5 The repertory of Black gospel song as represented on race records in the early twentieth century existed primarily in oral tradition. The songs, many of them copyrighted as original compositions, drew on a variety of sources, including camp meeting songs, hymns from the shape-note tradition, nineteenth-century popular evangelical hymnody, and Black and white secular songs and dances. See Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Interestingly enough, this repertory included few if any of the “Negro spirituals” performed in concert by the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the late nineteenth century, Paul Robeson in the twentieth century, or found in printed collections such as James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson’s American Negro Spirituals (Viking Press, 1925–26). A valuable anthology of gospel recordings (Black and white) from the pre-World War II period is Goodbye, Babylon, ed. Lance Ledbetter, Dust to Digital records (2003). (This CD is out of print, but the contents are available as digital downloads at the following link: https://dusttodigital.bandcamp.com/album/goodbye-babylon-2 (accessed October 27, 2021). 6 See Philip Ewell, “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame,” Music Theory Online 26, no. 2 (September 2020), https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.20.26.2/mto.20.26.2.ewell.html; and Matthew Morrison, “Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 72, no. 3 (2019): 781–823, https://online.ucpress.edu/jams/article/72/3/781/107058/Race-Blacksound-and-the-Re-Making-of-Musicological (accessed October 27, 2021). 7 See Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1988) in particular chapter 5, “Print, Space and Closure,” 117–38. 8 I also hear surface noise. It is an old 78 rpm record, made nearly a century ago; I hear the song through a softly crackling patina of white noise as through the curtain of time. This is a sound I listen through, rather than listen to, but its effect on my listening experience should not be completely discounted. Psychologically, it places the song as “long ago and far away,” far distant from me as a listening subject. As the sound artist Philip Samartzis puts it, “Surface noise has become an integral component of the listening experience, psycho-acoustically shaping the way we listen, restraining transparent articulation with a film of fuzzy realism, and molding a convention that implies authenticity, warmth, and nostalgia.” Samartzis, “Surface Noise,” presentation at the inaugural Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Aus., 2005, https://ro.ecu.edu.au/csound/10/ (accessed October 27, 2021). 9 I take the liberty of referring to Mamie and A. C. Forehand by their first names in what follows, in part in order to be concise, but also in order to put a human face on the music I describe. A.C.’s name was recorded differently in different sources; he was known variously as Asa, Acey, Asey, Acie, Acey, Asay, and U.C. in 1920 census records as reported by “Blind Zippo” on https://weeniecampbell.com/yabbse/index.php?topic=11031.0 (accessed 27 October 2021). I will call A.C. by the name that is listed on the labels of the recordings he made. 10 It is not clear what this bell actually is. The Victor records ledger identifies it as “finger cymbals,” but to many listeners, myself included, it sounds more like a single bell being struck by a beater. 11 Mamie’s bell keeps a steady beat, averaging around sixty-nine beats per minute, accelerating very slightly over the course of the song (65 bpm at the beginning, 70 bpm by the end). 12 In “bottleneck” or “slide” technique, one of the guitarist’s fingers is fitted with a cylindrical tube (often the cut-off neck of a bottle); the tube can stop the strings at any point along their length, enabling continuous variation of pitch rather than the fixed pitches dictated by frets. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_guitar (accessed October 27, 2021). 13 See Charles Keil and Steven Feld, Music Grooves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), for an exposition and exploration of the idea of “groove.” 14 Recent writing on the subject of blue notes and blues scales includes Jeff Todd Titon, Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 154–56; David Evans, Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 23–25; William Tallmadge, “Blue Notes and Blue Tonality,” Black Perspective in Music 12, no. 2 (1984): 155–65; Hans Weisethaunet, “Is There Such a Thing as the ‘Blue Note’?,” Popular Music 20, no. 1 (2001): 99–116; Alona Sagee, “Bessie Smith: ‘Down Hearted Blues’ and ‘Gulf Coast Blues’ Revisited,” Popular Music 26, no. 1 (2007): 117–27; Gerhard Kubik, “Bourdon, Blue Notes, and Pentatonism in the Blues: An Africanist Perspective,” in Ramblin' on My Mind: New Perspectives on the Blues, ed. David Evans (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 117–27; Cort B. Cutting, “Microtonal Analysis of ‘Blue Notes’ and the Blues Scale,” Empirical Musicology Review 13, nos. 1–2 (2018): 84–99; Martin Pflederer, “Commentary on Microtonal Analysis of ‘Blue Notes’ and the Blues Scale by Court B. Cutting,” Empirical Musicology Review 13, nos. 1–2 (2018): 103–6. 15 African American melody is what Bret Battey calls a “pitch continuum tradition” that “place(s) far greater emphasis on the expressive shaping of the continuum between scale steps” than our Western European classical tradition. In scholarly discussions of such music, “The detailed and highly subtle pitch curves, ornaments, and inflections of the tradition usually remain at most vaguely described. They are absorbed through oral transmission, and musical notation proves unequal in the task of representing them.” See Bret Battey, “Bézier Spline Modeling of Pitch-Continuous Melodic Expression and Ornamentation,” Computer Music Journal 28, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 25–39. 16 The software I used to slow playback, measure pitch, and analyze pitch spectra and facilitate transcription is an elegant application called Transcribe!, developed by the British guitarist Andy Robinson. See https://seventhstring.com/xscribe/overview.html (accessed October 27, 2021). 17 I generated the curve of this graph by jury-rigging a kind of melograph, using Transcribe! to take readings of the pitch (a rolling average reading of the frequency over a range of 4–7 ms) at intervals of 2 ms, then I recorded the data in an Excel file which I used to generate the graph. 18 Brett Batty’s article, cited above, develops an analytical approach that mathematically models the unique shaping of expressive melodic bends and slides. His techniques would certainly be applicable to the study of American Black melody. 19 Kubik, “Bourdon, Blue Notes, and Pentatonism,” 15. 20 Ibid., 20. 21 B.B. King, Blues Guitar: A Method by B.B. King, comp. and ed. Jerry Snyder (New York: Hansen, 1973), 15; quoted in Weisethaunet, “Is There Such a Thing as the ‘Blue Note’?,” 101. 22 Kubik, “Bourdon, Blue Notes, and Pentatonism,” 15. 23 Peter Winkler, “Writing Ghost Notes: The Poetics and Politics of Transcription,” in Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, ed. David Schwartz and Anahid Kassabian (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia Press, 1997), 169–203. 24 Weisethaunet, “Is There Such a Thing as the ‘Blue Note’?,” 102. 25 For more on this point, see Winkler, “Writing Ghost Notes.” 26 In the “practical” version I have avoided the whole issue of the blue note inflection by adding a small triangular symbol to the “G” line in the key signature. This is the symbol Jeff Todd Titon uses to represent what he calls a “note complex.” See Titon, Early Downhome Blues, 155–61. For our purposes I’ll refer to it as the blue third region. A note written on this altered “G” line can be any pitch within that region. 27 See Winkler, “Writing Ghost Notes”, 173, for further on this point. 28 See Christopher J. Smith, The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 29 “Little Old Log Cabin” is from the 1871 sheet music. “Memphis Flu” was transcribed by the author from OKeh 8857, recorded in Jackson, Mississippi, December 1930, reissued in the Goodbye, Babylon anthology. A more recent instance of this form is the Beatles’ 1962 song “I Saw Her Standing There.” 30 Smith, The Creolization of American Culture, xiv. 31 Since the eighth-note pulse groups straddle the downbeat of each bar, I will identify location of groups by writing “at bar X,” which will refer to the three-eighth-beat anacrusis to bar X as well as the beats following the downbeat. 32 Evans, Big Road Blues, 26. 33 Ibid., 25 34 Kubik, “Bourdon, Blue Notes, and Pentatonism,” 25. 35 No two transcribers agree on the last four syllables of this line. Guesses include “ever been tried” (Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints, 211), “ever in sight” (Guido van Rijn, personal communication), “ever been tide (can’t e’er betide),” “every night” (Spottswood, Goodbye Babylon notes), “never get tired” (other recordings of the song). My own guess is that these lines might have migrated from a different hymn, “Fully Saved Today” by William J. Henry (1900): “I am in the narrow way / And no evil can betide / For I’m walking by my Savior’s side.” 36 One such song-family comes from the South Carolina sea islands. It is in a minor key, with a secondary refrain “feed every child of God.” The song appears on 1939 field recordings for the Library of Congress (numbers AFS 3148b and 3149a); in the 1950s it was popularized by the folksinger and civil rights activist Guy Carawan, and it is still in circulation today. Other than the title line, it has nothing in common with the song the Forehands recorded. 37 This hymn was quite popular, and is still heard in evangelical churches today. The text, a rather blunt, unsubtle exhortation to the believer, ends with the lines “Leave your sins for the blood to cover / There is Honey in the Rock for you.” This unsettling mingling of fluids—blood and honey—is not found in the Forehands’ song, and apart from the title and a passing reference to “taste” there are no other elements in common between either the lyrics or the melodies of the two songs. See the online supplementary material for a comparison of the original hymn melody with versions recorded by the Black minister D. C. Rice in 1930 and the white Carter Family in 1937. 38 Ruby Pickens Tartt, Honey in the Rock: The Ruby Pickens Tartt Collection of Religious Folk Songs from Sumter County, Alabama, ed. Olivia and Jack Solomon (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1992), 111. The Solomons’ notes to this text claim that Vera Hall recorded a version of this song for John Lomax. If only it were so! Vera Hall was one of the finest singers the Lomax family recorded in their song-collecting tours. But I have found no such recording in the Library of Congress Lomax catalogues. 39 The titles and their Library of Congress access numbers are: AFS 227 “Honey in the Rock”—Group of Negro Convicts, recorded by John Lomax, Speigner, Alabama, 10/1934; AFS 1028, “Honey in the Rock”—D. W. White and Pearson’s Funeral Home Choir, recorded by John Lomax, Columbia, South Carolina, 7 September 1937; AFS 4077 “Honey in de Rock”—People’s Burial Aid Society Choir recorded by John and Ruby Lomax, Columbia, South Carolina, November 1940. The Carter Family version was recorded in New York, Decca matrix 62296, 17 June 1937, https://adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/matrix/detail/2000290409/62296-Honey_in_the_rock (accessed October 27, 2021). 40 The habit of transferring the end of a line from voice to guitar is common with gospel and blues performers, especially in performances by bottleneck guitarists such as Blind Willie Johnson and Bukka White. But usually the same person is both singing and playing; here the melody is transferred from one musician to another. 41 For further discussion, see Winkler, “Writing Ghost Notes,” esp. 196–97. 42 For example, the Alabama convicts I quote in Figure 13 drop two beats between the verses and choruses. (This does not appear in my transcription, because I omitted their verses). 43 Honeybees can build their nests in the crevices of rocks; this may be the original source of the Old Testament image, suggesting sweetness flowing from a barren stone. 44 Tartt, Honey in the Rock, 111. 45 “Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it,” Matthew 7:14. See note 33 for another possible source for these lines. 46 These adjectives were gathered from descriptions of “Honey in the Rock” from the following sources: Ken Romanowski and Dick Spottswood, liner notes to Goodbye, Babylon, Dust to Digital (2003); user reviews on Rateyourmusic.com, https://rateyourmusic.com/release/single/blind_mamie_forehand/honey_in_the_rock___wouldnt_mind_dying_if_dying_was_all/ (accessed November 1, 2021), and a discussion thread on the “Weeniecampbell” website titled “Is Mamie Forehand the singer on both Honey in the Rock and Don’t Mind Dying?,” https://weeniecampbell.com/yabbse/index.php?topic=11031.msg100316#msg100316 (accessed October 27, 2021). 47 Among the many versions of this song are recordings by Arizona Dranes (“Bye and Bye,” 1926), the Norfolk Jubilee Quartet (1927), the Golden Leaf Quartet (1928), Rev. I. B. Ware (1928), Blind Willie Johnson (“Bye and Bye,” 1929), Washington Phillips (1929, titled “A Mother’s Last Word to Her Daughter”), the Carter Family (1932), Smith Casey (1929), and the Dixie Hummingbirds (1939). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bye_and_Bye_We%27re_Going_to_See_the_King (accessed October 27, 2021). 48 See the “Weeniecampbell” website, https://weeniecampbell.com/, for a discussion about whether both songs were sung by the same artist. 49 A continuation of the legacy of this song was “Sweet Honey in the Rock,” the women’s a capella vocal group founded by Bernice Johnson Reagon, who made use of Black vocal traditions in the service of new songs marked by a fierce social conscience. Horace Boyer’s introductory essay to a collection of their songs makes reference to Blind Mamie Forehand, but the “Honey in the Rock” the group sings is an original composition by Reagon. See Boyer, “About Sweet Honey in the Rock,” https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/sweet-honey-in-the-rock-about-sweet-honey-in-the-rock/716/ (accessed October 27, 2021). 50 The similarity of the “race” and “hillbilly” music industries to mining is pointed out by Richard A. Peterson in Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Peterson distinguishes between “strip mining”—recording a few copyrightable songs before moving on to other artists, and “deep-shaft mining”—cultivating artists who were capable of generating original material that sounded like traditional music. Ralph Peer’s 1927 Memphis sessions—the first such recording sessions in that city—included the first recordings by the Memphis Jug Band, who went on to make popular recordings for several decades. But Peer was to hit his most lucrative “deep shaft” a few months later in Bristol, Tennessee, when he first recorded the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, a moment considered to be the birth of the modern country music industry. 51 See, for example, Matthew Ismail’s interview with the pioneering blues collector Sam Charters, in Blues Discovery: Reaching Across the Divide (self-published, 2014), in which Charters states: “For me, the writing about Black music was my way of fighting racism. That’s why my work is not academic, that is why it is absolutely nothing but popularization … my work is unashamedly romantic” (187). I include a list of significant reissues of “Honey in the Rock” in recorded anthologies in the supplemental online material. 52 Biographical information about the Forehands was gleaned from Guido van Rijn’s painstaking research in census and other public records, published in the liner notes to Denomination Blues: Storefront and Street Corner Gospel, Document Records DOCD 5054 (2003); and Bob Eagle’s interview with A. C. Forehand’s widow printed in Living Blues 9 (Summer 1972): 3. A. C. Forehand was born in either 1890 or 1893; Mamie was born in 1895. They were married and had a child; they lived in Birmingham, Alabama, before moving to Memphis. Mamie died in the mid-1930s; A.C. remarried (another blind musician, Frances Forest) and died in 1972. 53 Ralph Peer’s treatment of the artists he recorded was somewhat less exploitative than the practice of other producers working in the field. He probably paid the Forehands $50 apiece for the four songs he released, and also shared half of the publishing royalties (if any) with them. Peer’s career is documented in Barry Mazur, Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2015). 54 Terry Rowden, The Songs of Blind Folk: African American Musicians and the Cultures of Blindness (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 3. 55 Ibid., 35. 56 “Meditation on ‘Honey in the Rock,’” a composition for piano, bell, and fixed media I wrote in honor of the Forehands, can be accessed on YouTube: https://youtu.be/N1ocJcunCB4 (accessed November 1, 2021). © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - “Honey in the Rock”: Ways of Knowing and the Historical Imagination
JF - The Musical Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/musqtl/gdab019
DA - 2021-12-22
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/honey-in-the-rock-ways-of-knowing-and-the-historical-imagination-GeXVNtZppv
SP - 271
EP - 304
VL - 104
IS - 3-4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -