Better Git Yer Learnin’

Songs of our Native Daughters (Smithsonian Folkways, 2019)


Rhiannon Giddens, vocals and minstrel banjo;
Jamie Dick, percussion;
Dirk Powell, fiddle;
Jason Sypher, bass

La melodia di “Better Git Yer Learnin’ è attribuita al banjoista ottocentesco Thomas F. Briggs, ma al testo originario, pieno di luridi stereotipi razzisti, le nostre hanno sostituto liriche considerando il punto di vista di uno schiavo emancipato.  
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The tune for this song is attributed to the banjo performer Thomas F. Briggs, found in a banjo method book published in 1855 entitled Briggs’ Banjo Instructor. It provides an early glimpse into that first truly American cultural sensation, the minstrel show. These tunes were published with no words, which gave me the opportunity to engage with them as pieces of music with no baggage. After learning quite a few, I braced myself to read the original lyrics, and was faced with a mountain of offensive sentiments and the degraded characters of the “minstrel nigger” and “plantation darky.” I thought about what an actual emancipated ex-enslaved person might have to say in a song like this, and “Better Git Yer Learnin’” was born. Each verse refers to well-known difficulties in the African American world of the mid-1800s, and all around education. Education was what the enslaved person wanted above all else, yet even trying to learn to read was often a punishable offense.
After the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in 1863 (many in Texas and other territories didn’t find out until the June of two years later—a date celebrated by the holiday Juneteenth), young teachers (white and black) who graduated from schools like Oberlin went to teach at newly formed schools for black children all over the South, but the conditions were so bad many of them took sick and died, or gave up.
Where all-black schools were established, sometimes white supremacists would blow them up. Opportunities for education were hard to come by but, to a newly freed per- son, worth fighting for. — RG
Dal libretto dell'album

(*) short for “pickaninny,” a common term for a young black child