A few nights ago I went to pay a visit to an old "mammy" from Charleston. All her family sat round the room when they found I was from the South. The eldest daughter said: "Bress de Lord! I'm glad to see you! The Norf am no place for people what's been used to eberyting. Nuffin but wuk, wuk, wuk; all's jes money. No fun, nor lub, nor Jesus Christ nowhar! Why, dey'll jes meet you and pass de time ob day, and dey'll let you go away widout eber stoppin' to ax yer ef you's prepared to die, and how's your soul. Why, I neber seed no stranger in Charleston 'thout axin' 'em how's der soul comin' on? De niggers heah ain't got no Holy Spirit and dey is singing no 'count songs--dese white songs from books." At this juncture I quietly began to sing, "I don't want to be buried in de Storm." Suddenly they all began to sing and pat with me, and quickly adapted their different versions to mine. They lost no time in getting happy. They all jumped up and down in a perfect ecstasy of delight, and shouted, "I feel like de Holy Spirit is right on my hade!" Another one exclaimed: "People! dem songs makes de har rise up. Mine a-risin' now." We all had a good time, and I felt greatly complimented when the head of the house explained enthusiastically: "You does shore sing 'em good; and for a white lady you is got a good deal ob de Holy Spirit in you, honey"; and before I left the house they had tried to convince me that God has surely blessed this music by taking a hand in forming it himself. We find many of the genuine negro melodies in Jubilee and Hampton Song Books, but for the uninitiated student of the future there is little or no instruction given, and the white singer in attempting to learn them will make poor work at their mastery; for how is he, poor fellow, to know that it is bad form not to break every law of musical phrasing and notation? What is there to show him that he must make his voice exceedingly nasal and undulating; that around every prominent note he must place a variety of small notes, called "trimmings," and he must sing tones not found in our scale; that he must on no account leave one note until he has the next one well under control? He might be tempted, in the _ignorance_ of his twentieth-century education, to take breath whenever he came to the end of a line or verse! But this he should never do. By some mysterious power, to be learned only from the negro, he should carry over his breath from line to line and from verse to verse, even at the risk of bursting a blood-vessel. He must often drop from a high note to a very low one; he must be very careful to divide many of his monosyllabic words in two syllables, placing a forcible accent on the last one, so that "dead" will be "da--_ade_," "back" becomes "ba--_ack_," "chain" becomes "cha--_ain_." [Music: