Black English: 'Cause the battle am in my hand

[Flaminius]

Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho is passed down from the 19th century in a few variations. Some of the versions written in Black English has this line; 'Cause the battle am in my hand.

I wonder what this am is intended to. Is this use of the cobular be also found in present day Black English?

 

[Flaminius]

Shameless bump.

 

[Loob]

Your patience is admirable, Flaminius!

As far as I know, generalised am isn't used in today's African-American Vernacular English: see African-American Vernacular English - Wikipedia. But I'm far from being an expert.

As to whether it was used in the past, you might be interested in this paper by John McWhorter: Freedom Am Won: A Linguistic Mystery.

Overgeneralized am sounds so gratingly unnatural to a modern ear that even experts on Black English have long assumed that this usage was created by white minstrels.​

[...]​

But a great deal of evidence suggests that black Americans actually did use am in this way. The minstrels vastly exaggerated it, even as they savagely distorted black speech overall. [...] Historical am usage also demonstrates something counterintuitive, given the racial conflict so deeply embedded in this nation’s history: a great many of the roots of Black English reach back to the speech of rural white folk in the British Isles.​

​

 

[kentix]

I have not heard any usage similar to that where I live in the U.S. South.

 

[Flaminius]

Thanks so much, Loob! The thread title was the only example I had of generalised am back then. I think I thought the am implied "I won it and I still have it," but it seems to be more unmotivated after reading passages like:

People from southwestern England, for example, as late as the 1950s said things such as “Because you’m a lot older than I.” And people in the West Midlands have been documented as saying, “We drink water when we am thirsty.”

English doesn't stop amazing me...