TE'3 HERE SHE IS! There's your America ! said the ship's officer to Georges Duhamel as the radio caught the strains of plaintive harmonies, almost funereal . . . the religious hymns sung by Negro choirs. And the officer added that when one heard spirituals or jazz, one could be sure that the United States was not far away. Today, a quarter of a century later, that statement would be open to question. Gradually but unmistakably the Negro spiritual finding a place in the hearts of the French people. No longer are the Negro's religious folk songs fatmiliar only to a select group of French concert-goers; they have seeped through to a large segment of the French public. During the last decade at least three collections of spirituals have been published in France, and French adaptations of some of the more popular spirituals have been edited separately. I can remember purchasing a copy of Were There? last year from an unpretentious music publisher on the rue de l'Odeon in Paris. French curiosity about the American Negro's folk music was first aroused by the travel accounts of visitors to the United States. As early as 1857 a French musician, Oscar Comettant, who was not especially friendly to the slave, reported in his Trois Ans aux Etats-Unis that Negro music is not however without poetry and charm. Based on rhythms of captivating originality, the melodies that compose it are the happy expression of an inspiration (that is) savage but agreeable and full of gentle melancholy. A few lines later he added that this music proof of the Negro's poetic sensitivity. Though M. Comettant did not identify them, we may assume that some of the melodies were spirituals. Subsequent commentators were more specific. In 1895 Paul Bourget described a spiritual that he had heard on a Georgia plantation. He quoted his hostess who had cited the spirituals as evidence of the Negro's Christianity: You should hear them sing their hymns in which they speak of Paul and Moses as old acquaintances, and sometimes these hymns are so poetic! Nine years later, after hearing the 1,400 members of Tuskogee's student body sing spirituals, another French traveler, M. Jules Huret, was so impressed that he enthused: Negroes are admirably endowed for music, and I am sure that, if ever America produces musicians, they will be black.