"Old Folks at Home"

[Paul Johnston]

I'm curious about one line in this "Whitey's version" of early AAVE:
the line "All de world AM sad and dreary".  It seems to me, as an
admittedly non-native speaker, given the rest of the context, that
this AM is equivalent to invariable BE (All the world is ALWAYS sad
and dreary).  Is there any real-life attestation of "invariable AM"
of this kind  in Early AAVE, that we can count on as being reasonably
genuine? (and I know Southwestern British English-style "invariable
AM" might have been brought to these shores--there's examples in the
Somerset material in SED-- but there's no notion of habituality
there, so I'm not talking about that.)  Or was it Stephen Foster's
imagination?

Paul Johnston

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