Charles Peabody

Charles Peabody

Dr Charles Peabody
File:Peabody, Charles.jpg
Born	1867
Died	1939
Residence	Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. USA
Occupation	museum work archaeologist
Society Membership membership ordinary fellow left 1923 last listed elected_AI 1907.11.05

Notes

House Notes

1907.10.22 proposed by A.C. Haddon, seconded by T.A. Joyce

Notes From Elsewhere

Less known is the 1901 story of Harvard archaeologist Charles Peabody who conducted a seven-week excavation season at the plantations in Clarksdale and in Oliver, and who described the singing of the African-Americans he hired.
The observation that his transcription of these songs in his ‘Notes on Negro music’ (1903) was published before his archaeological findings (1904) illustrates the profound effect that his worker’s chants must have had on him.
This could be an earlier example of proto- or early blues.

“Willy-nilly our ears were beset with an abundance of ethnological material in song,” wrote a Peabody Museum archaeologist about his northern Mississippi digs in 1901 and 1902. The sound of the Delta blues surrounding the excavation affected Dr. Charles Peabody so profoundly that he wrote about the music in a 1903 issue of the Journal of American Folklore before publishing his archaeological findings. It was the first historical documentation of the Delta blues.
Peabody—a great-nephew of the Peabody Museum’s founder, George Peabody—was an accomplished archaeologist studying Native American earth mounds when he encountered the Delta blues sung by the men on his excavation and people nearby.
“The Methodist hymns sung on Sundays were repeated in unhappy strains, often lead by one as choragus, with a refrain in ‘tutti,’ hymns of the most doleful import,” he wrote. “Rapid changes were made from these to ‘ragtime’ melodies of which ‘Molly Brown’ and ‘Goo-goo Eye’ were great favorites….These syncopated melodies, sung or whistled, generally in strict tempo, kept up hour after hour a not in-effective rhythm, which we decidedly should have missed had it been absent.”
Ever the scholar, Peabody noted that his recollections “may be suggestions for future study in classification” of the music that came to known as the Delta blues.
Want to learn more? Two authors devote a chapter to Peabody’s discovery in their books: Robert Palmer, Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta (Penguin 1981) and Ted Gioia, Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music (W.W. Norton 2008).