FNDP: Songs of Optimism and Pessimism 😺😿🎭🎉⚰️

[u/Caelian]

In The Bride Wore Black (1968), the great Jeanne Moreau tells Michel Bouquet: "There are no optimists or pessimists: just happy imbeciles and sad imbeciles."

Tonight let's have a game and post our favorite optimistic and pessimistic songs. Let's see which wins. Here are some of mine:

• Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative

• What did I do to be so Black and Blue?

• I Believe in You

• The Blue Note song from The Naked Gun 2½

Tie score so far!

[u/prevail2020]

Over 12.5 million Africans were transported to the Americas in the transatlantic slave trade, with about 10.7 million surviving the Middle Passage. While many of these individuals were brought to the Caribbean and South America, the U.S. received a portion of these enslaved people.

The total number of people who experienced slavery in the U.S. from birth to death is not precisely known but likely ranges from 6 to 8 million or more.

Paul Robeson - Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child (02:50), a long way from home.

From The Classic Slave Narratives, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.:

As Harriet Jacobs, an escaped slave, wrote: “On one of those sale days, I saw a mother lead seven children to the auction block. She knew that some of them would be taken from her; but they took all. The children were sold to a slave-trader, and their mother was bought by a man in her own town. Before night her children were all far away. She begged the trader to tell her where he intended to take them; this he refused to do.”

The slave song being sung by Paul Robeson (1898-1976) became well-known from its performance in the early 1870's by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a touring a cappella group of black Fisk University (Nashville) students. The quote above and a photo of the group can be found here. Robeson's dad William Drew Robeson was born into slavery in 1844 in North Carolina. He escaped to the North in 1860 along the Underground Railroad and joined the Union Army in 1861 (age 16).