The Vernacular Tradition: A History in the U.S.

This week we will be reading about and discussing the "Vernacular Tradition" in the U.S. The 'vernacular' refers to all forms of creative expression that include songs, games, 'dozens,' storytelling, sermons, blues and jazz traditions, and other modes of primarily oral artistic creation. Our text points out that the vernacular tradition arose in part as a mode of self- and group- preservation: a type codification in which members of the group could communicate secretly, beyond the prying ears of an oppressor (Gates 3). What occurred among African slaves in the New World was a complex and dynamic system of communicating experience. This system, is called 'signifying' by author Henry Louis Gates, and can be found in the strains of 'sorrow songs,' 'field hollers,' folktales, and other modes of oral expression, in which African American experience is encoded and passed on.

The record of early expressions in the vernacular tradition has been aligned with what scholars refer to as 'the folk', and its expressive output as 'folklore.' For some, these terms may be considered pejorative: that is, to call a cultural artifact 'folk' might suggest an 'over-sentimentalization' of black experience, and undermine a more serious consideration of early African American art forms. Gates remarks that the terms 'vernacular' and 'folk,' for some critics suggest a "category of things that are male, attached only to lower-class groups, and otherwise simplistically expressive of a vast and complexly layered and dispersed group of people" (3). However, I wish to point out that 'folk' expression reveals the core resilience and creativity of the early African American, who found ways to preserve a collective experience under the harshest and most malevolent of systems.

The slave trade sought to eradicate the social, cultural, and religious histories and practices of its victims. After having endured the horrors of human trafficking on the African continent, and the brutality of the Middle Passage, African bondsmen suffered the psychological and emotional trauma that attended violent dislocation to strange and hostile New World. Family ties were ruptured; language was eradicated; and religious practices of African tribes were stamped out under penalty of further brutality. Forced conversions to Christianity were followed by periods in which slave owners forbade slaves from practicing religion for fear of conspiracy. What becomes apparent in the lines of the folk songs and tales is the mode of 'signifying' Gates speaks of. While one meaning might be apparent on the surface, these lines served as code for sublimated meaning that ranged from expressions of woe and misery, to cautionary messages, to conveying messages about survival in a hostile and inhumane institution.

The Vernacular Tradition can be best understood, in words of Gates: "...the vernacular is not a body of quaint, folksy items. It is not an exclusive male province. Nor is it associated with a particular level of society or with a particular historical era. It is neither long ago, far away, nor fading. Instead, the vernacular encompasses vigorous, dynamic processes of expression, past and present" (3-4). Further, as we examine the examples of the vernacular tradition, we will discover the ways in which a rich and indomitable spirit and shared heritage has been perpetuated and distilled by a people who had routinely been taught to believe that they 'had no history.'