"Smeixe Sotpiens."—By Lieutenant Niles. Seribners, Price, 10 shu. 6d.
Songs of soldiers, chiefly negro ones, collected towards the end of the war and after the Armistice in France by a U.S. airman, Lieutenant Niles, are given in "Singing Solders Interested in music, Lieutenant Niles noted down, wherever he went up and down the American front, the ditties he heard. Those of the negroes were by far'the best. The writer "My resolution at first was intended to include any songs sung by the soldier of the United States Army, but the imagination of the white boys did not, as a role, express itself in song. They went to Broadway for their music, contenting themselves with the ready-made rhymes and tunes of the professional song-writers." He adds:—
After a little while I discovered that time, music-score paper, and original songs were rare, In fact, Twas even beginning to lose in: terest in my musical diary, when We encountered some negro troops. 'True, they sang some music-ball es—after all, those coloured regiments were' recruited from every corer of the United States—there were Harlem negroes, Taxas negroes, negroes from South Side, Chicago, negroes from North Caro-Hina—negroes, as they so aptly said, "frum all over."
Usually among. the black troops there were a few semi-professional musicians who did the music-hall tuft as we sce it done nowadays in cabarets and supper clubs. And then there were the others, the nature born singers, usually from rural" districts, who, prompted by hunger, wounds, homesickness, and the reaction to so many genera-ions of suppression, sang the legend of the black man to tunes and harmonies they made up as they—went along—tunes and harmonies ofttimes too subtle for my clumsy fingers and my improvided score pay Something Origins}
At lust I discovered something original—a kind of folk music, brought up to date and adapted to the war situations—at the same ime savouring of the haunting melodic value found in the negro sic T had known as a boy in Here are representative verses from some of the thirty or so songs given and discussed in the don't think Tue And de change of Sharron up my shovel, 'And shine ap ave Team' scratch 'North Caroli 'Tennessee; digging' Diggin" in, Pronces "Sanday Times"
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.