Talk:An African Song or Chant from Barbados

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Bunnypranav talk 08:02, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

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An African Song or Chant from Barbados

• ... that An African Song or Chant from Barbados (manuscript pictured) was nominated to the UNESCO Memory of the World register by someone who saw it in an online exhibition?

• Source: "It was nominated for the register by musicologist Roger Gibbs who saw an image of the document in an online exhibition on Gloucestershire Archives' website." (Ref 4 in the current version)

• • Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Sitaleshwar_Temple
  • Comment: Cropped image used because the full image is so detailed. This was initially created as a Google-assisted translation from the German article, but has been greatly expanded with original text. The Melody and Lyrics section plus Notes are largely unchanged from the translation: the rest is mostly original.

Created by MartinPoulter (talk). Number of QPQs required: 1. Nominator has 34 past nominations.

MartinPoulter (talk) 17:52, 9 January 2025 (UTC).

General: Article is new enough and long enough
New enough: Long enough:

Policy: Article is sourced, neutral, and free of copyright problems
Adequate sourcing: Neutral: Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing:

Hook: Hook has been verified by provided inline citation
Cited: Interesting:

Image: Image is freely licensed, used in the article, and clear at 100px.
Freely licensed: Used in article: Clear at 100px:

QPQ: Done.

Overall: Article is new enough, long enough, well-sourced, neutral and plagiarism free. Hook is cited and interesting. Pic is free to use, is an excerpt of the image in the article and is clear. QPQ is done. A nice addition! Lajmmoore (talk) 14:35, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

"Call and response" etc.

The article states, "A lead singer alternates with the rest of the work gang in a call and response pattern, a feature shared by work songs in the United States into the early 20th century. In this song, the call lasts 13 bars and the response is of similar length. Later work songs, by contrast, have short calls."

I understand this comes from a source—the person who nominated the item for UNESCO. But I fear they are wrong about this, and the evidence is there in the manuscript itself.

The manuscript says that one person leads the song "and the others join in Chorus at the end of every verse." That's not call and response. First, call and response (and surely African style of call and response, which they are claiming this is a species of) means the soloist sings something and then others sing something, whereas here it seems the chorus in joining the soloist. More importantly, 13 bars (actually implied 16 bars— the fermatas are doing the work of extra bars in conventionally notated music) is far too long to set up a call and response texture. If someone simply sings a long verse of a song and then people sing along on a long chorus, that's just "a verse and a chorus." The writer of the source article contradicts themselves by saying that this is an unusual form of call and response, whereas it would appear unusual, yes, because it simply is not call and response at all. I would guess that they are stuck on this idea that African songs are characteristically call and response (or, at least, that's about all they know to say about African song if pressed to say something that sounds knowledgeable) and they are projecting that notion onto the interpretation.

As a result, the Wiki article's paraphrase of the source statement leans into the misinterpretation. It adds, as if to further rehearse the appearance of knowledge about African song, the fun fact that call and response is "a feature shared by work songs in the United States into the early 20th century," with a citation for that truism. The citation, which merely hopes to support the statement that call and response is a feature in US work songs, gives the appearance of authority to the first clause's claim that the song in question is call in response. And it needlessly suggests we notice a supposed "shared feature" between this song and Barbados and songs in the US. I guess this is like Original Research.

The Wiki goes on to make the interpretation that "later work songs" (where? by whom?) are different, as if there was some evolution from long to short "calls" and foreclosing the possibility that both longer and shorter forms were contemporaneous.

Acknowledging the good faith behind this passage in the article, nevertheless I think it is not objective enough for Wiki and the cited source is not of high enough quality with regards to this point to publish the statements. I think the public is liable to discover this article, which compounds the issues in the cited source, and without the time/ability to analyze the manuscript, take the statements at face value and repeat them. So, I move to strike these sentences and will make that edit (subject to reversion). Thanks. DrBaldhead (talk) 14:04, 13 August 2025 (UTC)