Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 June 1886 — YIS, SAH; WESCOMIN’, SURE’S YERBORN. [ARTICLE]

YIS, SAH; WESCOMIN’, SURE’S YERBORN.

To Rensselaer, on Friday, June 18th, From Way Down in Dixie’s Land! -A Real Simon Pure Band of Old Time Cctton Field Darkies*~A Genuine Southern Slave Singing Troupe op Camp-meeting Melodists. “Oh, shall we < o wen day cum Wid der blowin’ ob Ge trumpits an’ de baDgin’ er der drum*? How many poo’ sinuers ’ll be kotch’d out late, An’ fine no latch ter der Golden Gate.” A novel and not uninstructive feature of the John Robinson Mammoth Street Parade is the presence of a veritable slave-singing band of Southern negroes. The sable sons and daughters of the Sunny South are fresh from the cotton plantations of the Carolinas, the cane fields of Louisiana and the rice swamps of Georgia, and constitute an entirely new, humorous and at the sam time instructive feature of the vast, varied and peerless public pageant made by John Robinson and his Ten Gigantic Big New European Mammoth Shows Combined. All these negroes were old plantation southern slaves, black as crows. They appear in the grand parade clad in the same grotesque and varied garb they wear when in their sunny homes, and seated on cotton bales, piled in an old plantation mule team of precisely the same pattern as is used in the south. This band of freedmen sill sing, as procession moves, with all the soulful and weird effect oijformer surronndings, the genuine music of the campmeetings, merry-makings and slave cabins of the south, The public, instead of seeing white men with burnt cork faces, such as are presented in the intolerable misrepresentations upon the minstrel stage, will behold in this great street parade, in this band of freedmen, a troupe of genuine oldtime plantation darkies, and hear from the lips of these sable singers such quaint and original airs as

“Mary and Martna’s jist gone ’long To ring dem charmin’ bellsCryin’ free graie, 'end dyin’ love— To ring dose charmin’ bells. and Baptists, jist come Tong To ring dem charmin’ bells.” And also fire melodies of slavery days upon the old Southern plantations: “De ole bee make de honey- comb: Do young beo maße de honey; De niggers make de cotton an’ korn, En de white folks gits a.l de muuny.” These and similar songs will be sung with that fervor and gusto which makes an accurate delineation of genuine southern negro life a source of unalloyed pleasure to their white-faced brethren. The sable harmonists will positively appe r daily in the grand street cortege of John Robinson when the Mastodon Show visits Rensselaer, June 18.