The Chant of the Tobacco Auctioneer

Abstract

auctioneer of the southern United States may be explained historically as the joint product of two oral traditions: the English auctioneering tradition deriving from seventeenth century England and the musical tradition of black slaves deriving from West African musical traditions.' Historical reconstruction is a problematic activity. However, it is frequently done in linguistics and rests on the premise that, if two distinct languages share a common feature and if that feature is not a function of universal linguistic characteristics, then we assume that it derives from a common source of the two different traditions. Our hypothesis is more complex since we wish to show that in one variety of a language, that of tobacco auctioneers, there are elements of two distinct traditions. We will do this by showing that tobacco auctions share their discourse structure, syntax, and some of their lexis with auction systems in both England and New Zealand. These elements will be taken as deriving from the common source of all three auction systems, the English tradition. We will show that there are good historical reasons to support this contention. We will then show that the prosodic character of tobacco auctions differs in crucial ways from that of both English and New Zealand auctions in that it is entirely musical. We will show that this musical chant shares a number of crucial characteristics with black sermon intonation and Negro spirituals. We will therefore hypothesize that the prosodic character of tobacco auctions derives from a nineteenth century black oral tradition. We will show that here, too, the historical facts will support such a hypothesis. Lastly we will provide functional explanation as to why tobacco auctioning adopted a foreign prosodic tradition.

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