The negro found satisfaction in singing not only at church but perhaps even more while he performed his daily tasks. Those who heard the old slaves sing will never forget the scenes that accompanied the songs. After the lighter songs and brisk melodies of the day were over the negroes turned toward eventide to more weird and plaintive notes. The impressions of such singing have been expressed: "Then the melancholy that tinges every negro's soul would begin to assert itself in dreamy, sad and plaintive airs, and in words that described the most sorrowful pictures of slave life--the parting of loved ones, the separation of mother and child or husband and wife, or the death of those whom the heart cherishes. As he drove his lumbering ox-cart homeward, sitting listlessly upon the heavy tongue behind the patient brutes, the creaking wheels and rough-hewn yokes exhibiting perhaps his own rude handiwork, the negro slave rarely failed to sing his song of longing. What if his words were rude and its music ill-constructed? Great poets like Schiller have essayed the same theme, and mighty musicians like Beethoven have striven to give it musical form. What their splendid genius failed adequately to express, the humble slave could scarce accomplish; yet they but wrought in the same direction as the poor negro, whose eyes unwittingly swam in tears, and whose heart, he scarce knew why, dissolved in tenderness as he sang in plaintive minor key one or another of his songs." The above quotations have been given promiscuously, and while others might be added, these suffice to give the general attitude toward the songs of the negroes in the ante-bellum days and since. One other will be added, giving the expression of a present-day negro leader toward the songs of the slave, as the best interpretation that has come from within the race. In his introduction to _Twenty-four Negro Melodies_ by Coleridge-Taylor in _The Musicians Library_, Booker Washington says: "The negro folk-song has for the negro race the same value that the folk-song of any other people has for that people. It reminds the race of the 'rock whence it was hewn,' it fosters race pride, and in the days of slavery it furnished an outlet for the anguish of smitten hearts. The plantation song in America, although an outgrowth of oppression and bondage, contains surprisingly few references to slavery. No race has ever sung so sweetly or with such perfect charity, while looking forward to the 'year of Jubilee.' The songs abound in scriptural allusions, and in many instances are unique interpretations of standard hymns. The plantation songs known as the 'Spirituals' are the spontaneous outbursts of intense religious fervor, and had their origin chiefly in the campmeetings, the revivals and in other religious exercises. They breathe a child-like faith in a personal father, and glow with the hope that the children of bondage will ultimately pass out of the wilderness of slavery into the land of freedom.