Kisander

DESCRIPTION: Call-response. Calls: "(Come on, come on/Mama, mama), Come tell me your (sir/funny/last/bad) name." "Me tell when you walk when you talk." Response: "O Kisander, Kisander"
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1981 (JamaicaFaithWorkPlay)
KEYWORDS: nonballad worksong
FOUND IN: West Indies(Jamaica)
REFERENCES (1 citation):
ADDITIONAL: John Storm Roberts, _Black Music of Two Worlds_ (New York: Original Music, 1972), p. 125, ("Show me your true name, Kisander") (1 fragment)
RECORDINGS:
unknown, "Kisander" (on JamaicaFaithWorkPlay)
NOTES [392 words]: John Storm Roberts, Black Music of Two Worlds p. 125: "This [digging work song] was obviously at one time a play-party song and may in the first instance have come from an Anancy story. [Anansi is the eponymous spider trickster of West Indian and Ashanti (West African) 'Anansi stories.'] The chorus 'Kisander' is the name of a cat who appears in some old stories. The song itself sounds as though it began as a word game in which participants had to find new adjectives for the phrases."
Where I hear "sir name" Roberts hears "secret name." Secret names are appropriate where Anancy stories are told. For example, in the Annancy story "Devil's Honey Dram," "An' there was no one know the [Devil's mother's] name except Mr. Annancy.... An' the woman name is Matilda." Annancy uses her name to cast a spell and put her to sleep (Walter Jekyll, Jamaican Song and Story (New York: Dover Publications, 1966 (Reprint of David Nutt, 1907)) #22 pp. 68-70). Hidden names are common enough throughout religion, folk-tales and ballads.
Another of Roberts's points is that this song reminds him of a play-party song. Gomme has a number of games where players with a secret name are to be revealed. See, for example, Alice Bertha Gomme, The Traditional Games of England, Scotland and Ireland (London: David Nutt, 1894 ("Digitized by Microsoft")), vol. 1: "How Many Miles to Babylon" ("Gates of Babylon," pp. 236-237), "Merry-ma-tansa" (pp. 369-376), and "Namers and Guessers" (p. 409).
In his liner notes Roberts writes, "Kisander contains one rarity: the slow introduction used by this group with many of their worksongs. They called it a 'bobbin.'" In Black Music of Two Worlds p. 124, Roberts writes "The communal nature was strongly underlined in the case of some digging songs I collected.... They were preceded by a very slow, richly harmonized passage, which the diggers called a 'bobbin' and which they sang all standing together before work began, almost like an invocational hymn." I can make out a few words of the "bobbin" sung before "Kisander" begins: "Ay-yah, ay-yah, ah-yah, We remember that day, Ay, When we go down ... We remember that day We go far away ...." As for the term "bobbin," Roberts notes that when Jekyll uses the term in Jamaican Song and Story he refers to the response part of call-and-response Jamaican worksongs. - BS
Last updated in version 6.7
File: RcKisand

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