Field Hollers as well as work songs were African American styles of music from before the American Civil War, this style of music is closely related to spirituals in the sense that it expressed religious feelings and included subtle hints about ways of escaping slavery, among other things. Slaves in New Orleans had a field area called Congo Square in which they were allowed time on Sundays to dance and sing more freely than they could on the plantations.
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A field holler, also called a holler, is an extemporized form of black American song, sung by southern labourers to accompany their work. It differs from the collective work song in that it was sung solo, though early observers noted that a holler, or ‘cry’, might be echoed by other workers or passed from one to another. Though commonly associated with cotton cultivation, the field holler was also sung by levee workers, mule-skinners and field hands in rice and sugar plantations.
Field hollers are also known as corn-field hollers, water calls, and whoops. They were sung solos and normally expressed by the southern labourers (most often slaves). These songs expressed many different topics, many times cries for water and food, cries about what was happening in their daily lives, to let other people know that they were out in the fields working on that particular day, and many other circumstances that one would feel like singing about. Some were even about the slaves religious devotions. Field hollers were even used as an outlet for southern laubourers to sing about their troubles and hardships in their everyday lives.
As described by Frederick Law Olmstead in 1853 it was a ‘long, loud, musical shout, rising and falling and breaking into falsetto’, a description that would also have fitted examples recorded a century later. Some hollers are wordless, like the Field Call by Annie Grace Horn Dodson (1950, Negro Folk Music of Alabama, Folkways); others combine improvised lines concerning the singer’s thoughts, with elaborated syllables and melismas, such as the long example recorded at the Parchman Farm penitentiary in Mississippi in 1947, by ‘Bama’, of a Levee Camp Holler (1947, Negro Prison Songs, Tradition). An unidentified singer of a Camp Holler was urged on with shouts and comments by his friends, suggesting that the holler could also have a social role (1941, Negro Blues and Hollers, Library of Congress). Some street cries might be considered an urban form of holler, though they serve a different function; an example is the call of ‘The Blackberry Woman’, Dora Bliggen, in New Orleans (1954, Been Here and Gone, Folkways).
It is believed that the holler is the precursor of the blues, though it may in turn have been influenced by blues recordings. No recorded examples of hollers exist from before the mid-1930s, but some blues recordings, such as Mistreatin’ Mama (1927, Black Patti) by the harmonica player Jaybird Coleman, show strong links with the field holler tradition. A white tradition of ‘hollerin’’ may be of similar age, but has not been adequately researched. Since 1969 an annual ‘hollerin’’ contest has been held in Sampson County, North Carolina.