Topic: Early Versions - Performers
Two kinds of cotton were produced in the United States before the Civil War. Long staple grew in the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia. Short staple was better adapted to drier upland areas of the lower South.
Both were members of the Malvaceae that emerged in the Eocene in South America and Australia. [1] Mallow pollens appeared in Africa during the Oligocene. [2] About 12.5 million years ago, the cotton genus, [3] Gossypium, emerged in Africa, and one lineage floated across the Pacific to western Mexico by 10 million years ago. [4] The Miocene climate was cold in those centuries and sea levels had dropped. Seeds of one modern cotton species were still viable after three years in sea water according to a team led by Jonathan Wendel. [5]
Seeds from Africa took another ocean voyage one to two million years ago [6] during the Ice Age when sea levels again were low. This time, the lineage that had developed long seed hairs [7] in Africa or Asia landed in the New World where it mated with local plants to produce progeny with double the number of chromosomes. [8]
Today four species share the long threads, all derived from a single genetic change: Indian cotton (arboreum), which was domesticated by 2300 bc in the Indus valley; Levant (herbaceum); Mexican (hirsutum), which was being cultivated in the Tehuacan valley around 3000 bc, and Caribbean (barbadense), [9] which was being used for fishing nets on the Peruvian coast about 3500 bc. [10] The last moved from there to the Caribbean [11] where it was being farmed for export to Hispañola by the Arawak when Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492. [12]
Cotton seeds were covered by hairs that probably developed to deter predators. When they dried after the seed pod opened, they maintained their round shape. The seed parent of the American tetraploids developed additional long hairs that dried into flat, twisting ribbons that attached to one another. That made them spinnable, [13] although the James Hargreaves jenny of 1764 didn’t produce a strong enough thread for existing looms. Richard Arkwright’s water frame of 1771 was the one that created stronger yarns. [14]
Colonists began experimenting with cotton as a commercial crop to support England’s mills before the American Revolution. Its introduction into South Carolina and Georgia went through three phases: establishing the crop could grow, proving it could make a profit, and adapting to the demands of the new market.
Beaufort, South Carolina, historians noted several people had been given credit for being the first to plant the long-staple Caribbean cotton. Andrew Turnball and his overseer, John Earle, grew some kind of cotton, possibly Arabian since they migrated from the Mediterranean to the newly British possession of East Florida in 1763. Andrew’s son Nicholas then grew what became Sea Island cotton near the Savannah river in Georgia in 1787. [15]
Francis Levant moved from Italy to East Florida, then to Georgia where he shipped 10,000 pounds of cotton from Savannah to London in 1791. [16] Two years later James King was exporting cotton from Georgia that had been ginned by a roller mill. His father-in-law, Kinsey Burden had experimented with cotton upriver from Savannah in 1777. [17]
Sea Island cotton was introduced elsewhere by outsiders who were aware of economic developments in England, or who had no emotional commitment to rice. William Elliott introduced it to Hilton Head Island in 1790. [18] His great-grandfather had settled in Albemarle county, North Carolina, then moved to Charleston [19] where he married into the Barnwell family. [20] His grandfather made the move to Beaufort, [21] where the Barnwells became "to sea island cotton what the Heywards were to rice." [22]
Ezekiel Donnell suggested 1791 was the first year English mills began to rely on sea island cotton. Three-fourths of the supply came from South Carolina, and the rest from Georgia. In earlier years "Great Britain obtained her supplies of cotton from the West Indies, South America, and the countries around the eastern parts of the Mediterranean." [23]
The next year prices more than doubled when wars with Napoléon began to impact shipping across the Atlantic. [24] Others started planting cotton rather than rice. Ebenezer Coffin introduced long-staple cotton on Saint Helena island. [25] His immigrant ancestor, Tristram, moved to Haverhill, Massachusetts, in 1642 [26] just as the English Civil War was beginning. The family became merchants who remained loyal during the American Revolution. [27] After the war, Ebenezer married a woman who may have had kinship ties with people in Charleston. [28] He began clearing land for Coffin Point in 1800, and had a working plantation in 1803. [29]
Instead of a cotton gin, they used a roller mill invented by Joseph Eve. The Philadelphia-born Loyalist began buying land in the Bahamas in 1788, and moved there in 1795. He improved the local roller mill to remove black-seeds from long-staple cotton by converting it to wind, cattle, or water power. David Moody said his customers included Pierce Butler and John Couper on Saint Simons island off the coast of Georgia. He sold his island plantation and moved to Charleston to manufacture gins in 1800. When his factory burned in 1805, he moved inland to the fall line at Augusta, Georgia. [30]
End Notes
1. Jonathan F. Wendel, Curt L. Brubaker, and Tosak Seelanan. "The Origin and Evolution of Gossypium. 1–18 in Physiology of Cotton. Edited by James McD. Stewart, Derrick M. Oosterhuis, James J. Heitholt, and Jackson R. Mauney. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2010. 2.
2. Wendel. 2.
3. Wendel. 3.
4. Wendel. 10.
5. Wendel. 11.
6. Wendel. 12.
7. Wendel. 13.
8. Wendel. 12.
9. Wendel. 13.
10. Wendel. 16.
11. Wendel. 17.
12. William F. Keegan and Corinne L. Hofman. The Caribbean before Columbus. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. No page numbers in on-line edition. Arawak were discussed with MC-6 site on Middle Caicos island.
13. Wendel. 13.
14. "Sir Richard Arkwright." Encyclopaedia Britannica. 20 July 1998; last updated 19 December 2018. He was mentioned in the post 19 May 2019.
"Sir Richard Arkwright (1732 - 1792)." British Broadcasting Company website.
Wikipedia. "Richard Arkwright."
15. Lawrence Sanders Rowland, Alexander Moore, and George C. Rogers. The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina: 1514–1861. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. 277–278. E. J. Donnell reported Alexander Bissell was the first to export sea island cotton from Saint Simons Island in 1788. [31]
16. Donnell said Frank Leavet originally lived in Jamaica where he lived "in a distressed situation." Patrick Walsh recommended he move to Georgia and sent him "a large quantity of various seeds of Jamaica." He planted the ones he recognized, and emptied the bag containing Pernambuco cotton seeds on a dung heap when he needed the bag itself. It was thus he learned it would grow in 1789. [32]
17. Rowland. 278.
18. Rowland, 280, and E. J. Donnell. Chronological and Statistical History of Cotton. New York: James Sutton and Company, 1872. 10.
19. Phoebe R. Leverling. "Thomas Elliott." Genealogy website. On Elliott’s great-grandfather.
20. John Barnwell migrated to South Carolina in 1701 where he served as a military leader against the the Tuscarora and the Spanish in Florida. [33]
21. "Mary Elliott (Gibbes)." Gini website. 1 December 2016. On Elliott’s great-grandmother.
22. Rowland. 280.
23. Donnell. 51.
24. Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta reported the price paid per pound in 1740 as 9 pence. It jumped to 23 pence in 1792–1793, fell to 14 pence in 1802–1803, rose to 20 pence in the War of 1812, then returned to 9 pence per pound in 1822–1824. [34]
25. Rowland. 281.
26. W. S. Appleton. Gatherings toward a Genealogy of the Coffin Family. Boston: David Clapp and Son, 1896. 3.
Wikipedia. "Haverhill, Massachusetts."
27. James H. Stark. The Loyalists of Massachusetts. Boston: W. B. Clarke Company, 1910. 234.
28. Ebenzer’s cousin, John Coffin, served with Cornwallis in Charleston. [35] John married Ann Mathews from Saint Johns Island. [36] Ebenezer subsequently married Mary Mathews in Boston. [37] She may have been a cousin to Ann. [38]
29. Rowland. 281.
30. David L. Moody. "Dr. Joseph Eve." Ancestry website. His primary source was Lydia Austin Parrish. "Records of Some Southern Loyalists." Manuscript in Harvard Library’s Houghton Library.
31. Donnell. 44.
32. Donnell. 48.
33. Wikipedia. "John Barnwell (Colonist)."
34. Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta. "Cotton Textiles and the Great Divergence: Lancashire, India and Shifting Competitive Advantage, 1600-1850." Global Economic History Network conference, Utrecht, 23–25 June 2005. 38.
35. Stark. 236.
36. Stark. 237.
37. Appleton. 45.
38. Sally Pamelia Dobson. "Benjamin Matthews." Geni website. Last updated 20 January 2017. On father of Mary Coffin, son of Benjamin.
"Benjamin Mathewes." Geni website. Last updated 14 November 2014. On father of Benjamin, son of Anthony.
"Anthony Mathewes." Ancestry website. On father of Benjamin and grandfather of Ann.
Sunday, May 26, 2019
Sunday, May 19, 2019
Cotton Markets
Topic: Early Versions - Performers
Economic engines are industries that stimulate self-perpetuating demand and the growth of other industries. Sugar plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean required slaves, who needed to be fed during transit from Africa. Thus, rice became a necessity. That in turn led to a demand for slaves in South Carolina.
Similarly, the rise of large cities like London presupposed the development of food surpluses, building materials, and clothing for inhabitants who couldn’t provide themselves with necessities by their own labor. Textiles have been a driver of economic growth since the Middle Ages when Flemish weavers in Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres needed yarn, and English landowners raised sheep to produce wool for export. [1]
Bubonic plague decimated populations of Europe. It entered England in 1348 and killed 40 to 60% of the population. [2] The disease spread to Lancashire in September of the next year, where it spared the wealthy, the old and ailing, but took the "youthful and healthy." [3]
Edward III invited survivors from Hainult in Flanders to migrate, [4] probably after the French-speaking county became the domain of Bavaria after his wife’s sister’s husband died and her property was inherited by his sons. [5] They were settled throughout the country, including in Manchester [6] and Preston in Lancashire.
Preston was located on the River Ribble where it opened into an estuary of the Irish sea. It then was developing into a port. [7] Manchester was situated near water falls on the Mercey river that could be harnessed for water power. [8] It already was a center for woolen manufacture. [9] The influx of Flemish weavers solidified its status, while Preston became a center of the textile trade by the 1550s. [10]
The industry remained local and relatively primitive. When Spain attacked Antwerp in 1585, during the Counter-Reformation, Elizabeth I let Protestant refugees settle in England. Some went to Manchester. Their settlement was hedged by "restrictions and burdens on foreigners setting up business as masters in England, in the trades then carried on in this country, whilst foreigners commencing a new art would be exempt from those restrictions." Edward Baines believed this meant they introduced cotton spinning and weaving. [11]
Cotton was not then competitive. That began when the East India Company began importing printed cotton fabrics from India into England in 1631. [12] Soon after, Armenian merchants arrived in France in 1640 with the secrets of calico printing. [13] Baines noted cotton manufacturing was mentioned in Manchester for the first time the next year, but in a way that suggested the industry was well established. The raw materials came from Cyprus and Smyrna through London. [14]
Industrial activity, no doubt, was depressed during the religious wars that commenced in England in 1640. Manchester supported Parliament and the Puritans [15] while Preston sided with Charles I and the Roman Catholics. [16]
When Charles II was restored to the English throne in 1660, the East India Company gave him calicos to stimulate demand among the upper classes. [17] Unlike woollens, whose yarns were dyed and woven into plaid patterns like tartans, calicos had designs printed on them in bright colors. Some local printing began in 1676. [18]
The trading company was so successful, woollen interests, including the aristocrats who raised sheep, began complaining to Parliament. France had banned the import, manufacture, or use of calico in 1686. [19] They wanted the same protection. England banned finished cloth in 1700, but it still allowed the import of undyed cotton. [20]
The acts did not have the desired effect, because Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and Huguenot weavers began fleeing the country. Giorgio Riello noted Holland and Switzerland were the primary beneficiaries. [21] Baines found evidence one had settled in London by 1690. [22]
Following riots directed toward Huguenot weavers in London in 1719, [23] Parliament enacted more restrictions on calico in 1721. It exempted raw cotton, muslin worn by the wealthy, and blue calico worn by the poor. [24] The result was smuggling by the East India Company and others. [25]
Riello thought the reason calicos became a threat to the European textile industry was the dyes that created the brilliant patterns were unknown, and were produced by unfamiliar techniques. [26] The English finally found an inexpensive way to process indigo to create blue in 1734. [27] The Swiss mastered madder to produce red in 1768. [28] Francis Drake pioneered using copper plates to transfer designs in Dublin in 1754. [29]
France repealed its calico laws in 1759 to the benefit of Swiss craftsmen. [30] England waited until 1774. [31] By that time, Robert Peel had established a calico printing works in Preston, [32] and James Hargreaves had patented the spinning jenny that made cotton thread more quickly. [33]
The cost of cotton production was finally low enough to be competitive with India, [34] and the British laws were repealed in 1774. [35] The textile industry in Lancashire began to drive the economy. By 1785, 80,000 people were working in its mills. [36]
Lancashire imported its food and lumber from Ireland. [37] Its labor didn’t just come from the countryside, but from Scotland. During the period of protection, Scots land owners had started evicting their tenants in 1762 to convert their land to sheep pasture. [38] This increased the number of workers in Preston, which had remained both Roman Catholic and Jacobite. [39]
The parents of Thomas Hilton’s wife, [40] Jane Lachlison, moved there from Scotland [41] in the early 1800s. [42] One of her sisters, Lydia, married Thomas Arkwright. [43] His ties to the Richard Arkwright who introduced the centralized mill into cotton thread production in 1771 [44] were remote at best. The family had been in the area for generations. Richard’s father had at least 13 children by several wives, and his great-grandfather may have had three sons, each of whom had sons. [45]
The Hiltons and Lachlison began moving to the United States in the 1830s. Before them, Samuel Slater had migrated to New England in 1789. He’d been apprenticed to one of Arkwright’s partners, and understood both the machinery and the manufacturing process. Moses Brown hired him to build a mill in 1793 in Rhode Island. [46] That was the same year Eli Whitney patented his cotton gin. [47]
The gears of the industrial engines meshed. The textile mills demanded more raw materials. The Southern plantations that responded by growing cotton used slave labor. That, in turn, increased the demand for rice.
End Notes
1. Encyclopædia Britannica. "Ghent." Last updated 12 January 2015.
2. Wikipedia. "Black Death in England."
3. R. Sharpe France. "A History of Plague in Lancashire." Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire Transactions 90:1–175:1938. 21.
4. Edward Baines. History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain. London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, 1835. 90.
5. This is supposition. Writers only say the middle 1300s. Edward married Philippe de Hainaut in 1328. [48] Her father died in 1337, [49] and her brother died in 1345. Her older sister Margaret inherited the title, which meant it went to her husband Louis IV of Bavaria. He died in 1347, and she resigned in favor of her son. When he double-crossed her, she reasserted her rights to Hainault. In the ensuing battles, Edward supported her in 1351 and changed sides in 1354. [50] One would guess he issued his invitation sometime in the 1350s.
6. Baines. 90.
7. Wikipedia. "Preston, Lancashire."
8. Wikipedia. "Manchester."
9. Baines. 90.
10. Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Preston." May 04, 1999; Last Updated: Dec 20, 2018.
11. Baines. 84
12. E. J. Donnell. Chronological and Statistical History of Cotton. New York: James Sutton and Company, 1872. 7.
13. Maddy. "Calico and Its Origins." Historic Alleys website. 6 February 2010.
14. Baines. 100–101. His source was Lewes Roberts. The Treasure of Traffic. London: E. P. for Nicholas Bourne, 1641.
15. Wikipedia, Manchester.
16. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Preston.
17. Beverly Lemire. Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain 1660-
1800. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. 15. Cited by Peter Fisher. "The Calico Acts: Why Britain Turned its Back on Cotton." History thesis. University of Puget Sound, 2012. 3.
18. Baines. 258. Giorgio Riello mentioned 1677 in a table on page 32. "The Rise of Calico Printing in Europe and the Influence of Asia in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries." London School of Economics website.
19. "Printed Textiles from the 18th Century." Musée de l’Impression sur Etoffes, Mulhouse, website.
20. Wikipedia. "Calico Acts" and "Textile Manufacture during the Industrial Revolution."
21. Riello.
22. Baines. 259.
23. Fisher. 12.
24. Fisher. 16.
25. Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta. "Cotton Textiles and the Great Divergence: Lancashire, India and Shifting Competitive Advantage, 1600-1850." Global Economic History Network conference, Utrecht, 23–25 June 2005. 7. Their source was P. J. Thomas. Mercantilism and the East India Trade, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1926.
26. Riello.
27. Riello. 35. This demand lead to the indigo production in South Carolina, mentioned in the post for 13 January 2019.
28. Riello. 39.
29. Riello. 42.
30. Riello. 20.
31. Wikipedia, Calico Acts.
32. Baines. 262–263.
33. Wikipedia. "Spinning Jenny."
34. Broadberry.
35. Wikipedia, Calico Acts.
36. Donnell. 37.
37. Baines. 87.
38. Wikipedia. "Highland Clearances."
39. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Preston.
40. Hilton was mentioned in the post for 3 February 2019. Nothing was clearly known about Hilton. The Ancestry website entry for "Thomas Hilton" reported he as "born in England, Scotland on 17 Nov 1797, parents unknown."
41. "Jane Lachlison." Ancestry website. It said she was "born in Scotland on 6 Jun 1802."
42. Her brother was born in England in 1814 according to Grave History. "James Lachlison." Find a Grave website. 26 October 2014.
43. jrpv. "Lydia Lacklison Arkwright." Find a Grave website. 12 April 2012.
44. Wikipedia. "Sir Richard Arkwright (1732 - 1792)."
45. Tricia Booth. "People: Richard Arkwright’s Family." Her Belper Derbyshire Historical and Geological Records website.
46. Wikipedia. "Samuel Slater."
47. Wikipedia. "Eli Whitney."
48. Wikipedia. "Philippa of Hainault."
49. Wikipedia. "William I, Count of Hainaut."
50. Wikipedia. "Margaret II, Countess of Hainaut."
Economic engines are industries that stimulate self-perpetuating demand and the growth of other industries. Sugar plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean required slaves, who needed to be fed during transit from Africa. Thus, rice became a necessity. That in turn led to a demand for slaves in South Carolina.
Similarly, the rise of large cities like London presupposed the development of food surpluses, building materials, and clothing for inhabitants who couldn’t provide themselves with necessities by their own labor. Textiles have been a driver of economic growth since the Middle Ages when Flemish weavers in Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres needed yarn, and English landowners raised sheep to produce wool for export. [1]
Bubonic plague decimated populations of Europe. It entered England in 1348 and killed 40 to 60% of the population. [2] The disease spread to Lancashire in September of the next year, where it spared the wealthy, the old and ailing, but took the "youthful and healthy." [3]
Edward III invited survivors from Hainult in Flanders to migrate, [4] probably after the French-speaking county became the domain of Bavaria after his wife’s sister’s husband died and her property was inherited by his sons. [5] They were settled throughout the country, including in Manchester [6] and Preston in Lancashire.
Preston was located on the River Ribble where it opened into an estuary of the Irish sea. It then was developing into a port. [7] Manchester was situated near water falls on the Mercey river that could be harnessed for water power. [8] It already was a center for woolen manufacture. [9] The influx of Flemish weavers solidified its status, while Preston became a center of the textile trade by the 1550s. [10]
The industry remained local and relatively primitive. When Spain attacked Antwerp in 1585, during the Counter-Reformation, Elizabeth I let Protestant refugees settle in England. Some went to Manchester. Their settlement was hedged by "restrictions and burdens on foreigners setting up business as masters in England, in the trades then carried on in this country, whilst foreigners commencing a new art would be exempt from those restrictions." Edward Baines believed this meant they introduced cotton spinning and weaving. [11]
Cotton was not then competitive. That began when the East India Company began importing printed cotton fabrics from India into England in 1631. [12] Soon after, Armenian merchants arrived in France in 1640 with the secrets of calico printing. [13] Baines noted cotton manufacturing was mentioned in Manchester for the first time the next year, but in a way that suggested the industry was well established. The raw materials came from Cyprus and Smyrna through London. [14]
Industrial activity, no doubt, was depressed during the religious wars that commenced in England in 1640. Manchester supported Parliament and the Puritans [15] while Preston sided with Charles I and the Roman Catholics. [16]
When Charles II was restored to the English throne in 1660, the East India Company gave him calicos to stimulate demand among the upper classes. [17] Unlike woollens, whose yarns were dyed and woven into plaid patterns like tartans, calicos had designs printed on them in bright colors. Some local printing began in 1676. [18]
The trading company was so successful, woollen interests, including the aristocrats who raised sheep, began complaining to Parliament. France had banned the import, manufacture, or use of calico in 1686. [19] They wanted the same protection. England banned finished cloth in 1700, but it still allowed the import of undyed cotton. [20]
The acts did not have the desired effect, because Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and Huguenot weavers began fleeing the country. Giorgio Riello noted Holland and Switzerland were the primary beneficiaries. [21] Baines found evidence one had settled in London by 1690. [22]
Following riots directed toward Huguenot weavers in London in 1719, [23] Parliament enacted more restrictions on calico in 1721. It exempted raw cotton, muslin worn by the wealthy, and blue calico worn by the poor. [24] The result was smuggling by the East India Company and others. [25]
Riello thought the reason calicos became a threat to the European textile industry was the dyes that created the brilliant patterns were unknown, and were produced by unfamiliar techniques. [26] The English finally found an inexpensive way to process indigo to create blue in 1734. [27] The Swiss mastered madder to produce red in 1768. [28] Francis Drake pioneered using copper plates to transfer designs in Dublin in 1754. [29]
France repealed its calico laws in 1759 to the benefit of Swiss craftsmen. [30] England waited until 1774. [31] By that time, Robert Peel had established a calico printing works in Preston, [32] and James Hargreaves had patented the spinning jenny that made cotton thread more quickly. [33]
The cost of cotton production was finally low enough to be competitive with India, [34] and the British laws were repealed in 1774. [35] The textile industry in Lancashire began to drive the economy. By 1785, 80,000 people were working in its mills. [36]
Lancashire imported its food and lumber from Ireland. [37] Its labor didn’t just come from the countryside, but from Scotland. During the period of protection, Scots land owners had started evicting their tenants in 1762 to convert their land to sheep pasture. [38] This increased the number of workers in Preston, which had remained both Roman Catholic and Jacobite. [39]
The parents of Thomas Hilton’s wife, [40] Jane Lachlison, moved there from Scotland [41] in the early 1800s. [42] One of her sisters, Lydia, married Thomas Arkwright. [43] His ties to the Richard Arkwright who introduced the centralized mill into cotton thread production in 1771 [44] were remote at best. The family had been in the area for generations. Richard’s father had at least 13 children by several wives, and his great-grandfather may have had three sons, each of whom had sons. [45]
The Hiltons and Lachlison began moving to the United States in the 1830s. Before them, Samuel Slater had migrated to New England in 1789. He’d been apprenticed to one of Arkwright’s partners, and understood both the machinery and the manufacturing process. Moses Brown hired him to build a mill in 1793 in Rhode Island. [46] That was the same year Eli Whitney patented his cotton gin. [47]
The gears of the industrial engines meshed. The textile mills demanded more raw materials. The Southern plantations that responded by growing cotton used slave labor. That, in turn, increased the demand for rice.
End Notes
1. Encyclopædia Britannica. "Ghent." Last updated 12 January 2015.
2. Wikipedia. "Black Death in England."
3. R. Sharpe France. "A History of Plague in Lancashire." Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire Transactions 90:1–175:1938. 21.
4. Edward Baines. History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain. London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, 1835. 90.
5. This is supposition. Writers only say the middle 1300s. Edward married Philippe de Hainaut in 1328. [48] Her father died in 1337, [49] and her brother died in 1345. Her older sister Margaret inherited the title, which meant it went to her husband Louis IV of Bavaria. He died in 1347, and she resigned in favor of her son. When he double-crossed her, she reasserted her rights to Hainault. In the ensuing battles, Edward supported her in 1351 and changed sides in 1354. [50] One would guess he issued his invitation sometime in the 1350s.
6. Baines. 90.
7. Wikipedia. "Preston, Lancashire."
8. Wikipedia. "Manchester."
9. Baines. 90.
10. Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Preston." May 04, 1999; Last Updated: Dec 20, 2018.
11. Baines. 84
12. E. J. Donnell. Chronological and Statistical History of Cotton. New York: James Sutton and Company, 1872. 7.
13. Maddy. "Calico and Its Origins." Historic Alleys website. 6 February 2010.
14. Baines. 100–101. His source was Lewes Roberts. The Treasure of Traffic. London: E. P. for Nicholas Bourne, 1641.
15. Wikipedia, Manchester.
16. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Preston.
17. Beverly Lemire. Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain 1660-
1800. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. 15. Cited by Peter Fisher. "The Calico Acts: Why Britain Turned its Back on Cotton." History thesis. University of Puget Sound, 2012. 3.
18. Baines. 258. Giorgio Riello mentioned 1677 in a table on page 32. "The Rise of Calico Printing in Europe and the Influence of Asia in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries." London School of Economics website.
19. "Printed Textiles from the 18th Century." Musée de l’Impression sur Etoffes, Mulhouse, website.
20. Wikipedia. "Calico Acts" and "Textile Manufacture during the Industrial Revolution."
21. Riello.
22. Baines. 259.
23. Fisher. 12.
24. Fisher. 16.
25. Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta. "Cotton Textiles and the Great Divergence: Lancashire, India and Shifting Competitive Advantage, 1600-1850." Global Economic History Network conference, Utrecht, 23–25 June 2005. 7. Their source was P. J. Thomas. Mercantilism and the East India Trade, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1926.
26. Riello.
27. Riello. 35. This demand lead to the indigo production in South Carolina, mentioned in the post for 13 January 2019.
28. Riello. 39.
29. Riello. 42.
30. Riello. 20.
31. Wikipedia, Calico Acts.
32. Baines. 262–263.
33. Wikipedia. "Spinning Jenny."
34. Broadberry.
35. Wikipedia, Calico Acts.
36. Donnell. 37.
37. Baines. 87.
38. Wikipedia. "Highland Clearances."
39. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Preston.
40. Hilton was mentioned in the post for 3 February 2019. Nothing was clearly known about Hilton. The Ancestry website entry for "Thomas Hilton" reported he as "born in England, Scotland on 17 Nov 1797, parents unknown."
41. "Jane Lachlison." Ancestry website. It said she was "born in Scotland on 6 Jun 1802."
42. Her brother was born in England in 1814 according to Grave History. "James Lachlison." Find a Grave website. 26 October 2014.
43. jrpv. "Lydia Lacklison Arkwright." Find a Grave website. 12 April 2012.
44. Wikipedia. "Sir Richard Arkwright (1732 - 1792)."
45. Tricia Booth. "People: Richard Arkwright’s Family." Her Belper Derbyshire Historical and Geological Records website.
46. Wikipedia. "Samuel Slater."
47. Wikipedia. "Eli Whitney."
48. Wikipedia. "Philippa of Hainault."
49. Wikipedia. "William I, Count of Hainaut."
50. Wikipedia. "Margaret II, Countess of Hainaut."
Sunday, May 12, 2019
Folk Revival - Southern United States
Topic: Folk Music Revival
During the Depression, the perception of American vernacular music became more literal. Carl Sandburg, discussed in the post for 5 May 2019, used criteria defined in 1922 by Louise Pound. [1]
In American Ballads and Songs, Pound focused on the transmission process: folk songs were learned from other people, rather than from print or other mass media. Text and tunes, thus, were modified as they moved from place to place and survived for more than a few years. [2]
In his 1927 American Songbag, Sandburg wrote: "the melodies and verses presented here are from diverse regions, from varied human characters and communities, and each is sung differently in different places." [3]
John and Alan Lomax inserted the word "folk" into the title of their American Ballads and Folk Songs in 1934. [4] The folk not only were rural, but they were farmers who had not adopted modern machinery like the wheat farmers mentioned by Sandburg. [5]
Like Sandburg, the Lomaxes recognized regional cultures. However, regions should be isolated to be considered folk. Thus people living in a South that had not recovered from the economic consequences of the Civil War were more folk, than those in the Midwest. However, both men did include sections of historic Southern and Pioneer songs. [6]
Occupational folk groups also could sing folk songs, and the status of the folk as employee was critical. Farmers who owned land were not folk, but share croppers, tenant farmers, and farm laborers were. Sandburg included songs from six occupational groups, while the Lomaxes defined nine. Instead of Sandburg’s "Hobo Songs," most of which came from the controversial Industrial Workers of the World, the Lomaxes include a group of miner’s songs. They added two Negro labor groups: chain gangs and levee camp workers. [7]
It was not enough that singers come from the working class like Sandburg, whose father worked in the blacksmith shop of Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy railroad. [8] They had to remain laborers. If they became educated or rose into the middle class, they lost their status as folk.
Paul Stamler classified Sandburg’s sources by social status and found 23% were middle class, a number that was "suggestively high [. . .] for a book chronicling the music of the American lower orders. [9]
Stamler did recognize mobility existed in U. S. society and that a judge or lawyer could have had working-class parents. However, he said a "newspaper reporter," like Sandburg, probably had a "working-class background," but "a college student probably did not." [10] Thus, Sandburg who only got an eighth-grade education, lost his imprimatur when he attended Lombard College as a veteran of the Spanish-American war. [11]
What Stamler did not recognize was that singers, no matter their cultural background, may be natural collectors who hear and remember songs others would not. Lomax himself started paying attention when he was a boy hearing "the cowboys sing to the cattle "bedded down" near our home." [12] One person Sandburg and Lomax borrowed from was Edward Piper, [13] who began writing down songs when he was eight-years-old. [14] The fact Lomax and Piper became professors [15] may have given their collections the gloss of professionalism, but it was their childhood interests that made their collections important.
The Lomaxes were more precise in their definition of American. It was not enough that a song be sung in the United States. It also had to be created here. This not only precluded Sandburg’s Irish songs, but the Child ballads collected by Cecil Sharp in the Southern Appalachian mountains. They wrote:
"We have excluded, also, the beautiful English ballads that it has been America’s artistic good fortune to inherit. The bald fact is that the characters that animate these ballads lived, died, and had most of their folk-structure before they came to this country." [16]
When so many sociological criteria were applied to the American population only a few Spanish speakers in Texas [17] and African Americans qualified. They noted:
"In giving ample space to the songs of the Negro, who has, in our judgement, created the most distinctive of folk songs—the most interesting, the most appealing, and the greatest in quantity—we may have put into too narrow limits of others types, such as the songs of the Great Lakes, the soldier, and the sailor, and the numerous quasi-ballads of Pennsylvania and the Middle West." [18]
Sandburg aimed to produce a singable collection, and was roundly condemned by folklorists [19] for following his publisher’s demand that his songs be harmonized with piano accompaniments. [20] While he didn’t much care for the request, it was congruent with his belief that most of the songs he reproduced were part of the contemporary tradition of group singing. [21]
Seven years later radio and phonograph records had become so prevalent the Lomaxes believed they could only collect uncontaminated material from African-American men who were in jail. They wrote:
"In the prison farm camps, however, the conditions were practically ideal. Here the Negro prisoners were segregated, often guarded by Negro trusties, with no social or other contacts with the whites, except for occasional official relations. The convicts heard only the idiom of their own race. Many—often of greatest influence—were ‘lifers’ who had been confined in the penitentiary, as few as long as fifty years. They still sang the songs they had brought into confinement, and these songs had been entirely in the keeping of the black man." [22]
This focus was not as heartless as it sounds. The father and son believed "the spread of machine civilization is rapidly making it hard to find folk singers," [23] and that they were performing a rescue mission. To this end, they compiled verses associated with songs and presented them in composite versions, often with tunes from other sources. [24]
Work songs tend to be open-ended, with traveling and improvised verses added to extend the singing to fit the task. The pages of verses documented that process, even if the Lomaxes did not show how individual artists put them together. In contrast, Sandburg intimated other versions existed but only presented one example. [25]
The sociological definition of the "folk" as the people who are isolated from modern life and who preserve traditions from the past defined the scope of the folk music revival in the 1960s. The first Newport Folk Festival in 1959 included Kentucky’s John Jacob Niles [26] and African-American country bluesmen Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, along with folk revival artists like Pete Seeger and the Kingston Trio. [27]
The festival also included Earl Scruggs and Mike Seeger’s New Lost City Ramblers, [28] who sang white Southern music that had appeared on records. Festival organizers waited until the next year to feature John Lee Hooker, a African-American blues musician who played an electric guitar. [29]
End Notes
1. Carl Sandburg. The American Songbag. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1927. 56.
2. Louise Pound. American Ballads and Songs. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1922.
3. Sandburg, Songbag. vii.
4. John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax. American Ballads and Folk Songs. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1934.
5. Harvest crews in the wheat belt were mentioned in post for 5 May 2019.
6. The Lomaxes called their section of pioneer music "Songs of the Overlanders."
7. The Lomaxes separated one Sandburg category, "Great Lakes and Erie Canal," into two with one song in the "Great Lakes" category.
8. Carl Sandburg. Always the Young Strangers. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1953; reprinted in 1991 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 22.
9. Paul J. Stamler. "Commodification and Revival." 207–221 in The Ballad Collectors of North America. Edited by Scott B. Spencer. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2012. 217. Sandburg did not claim to collect only from the working classes. He dedicated his book to "to those unknown singers—who made songs—out of love, fun, grief—and to those many other singers—who kept those songs as living things of the heart and mind—out of love, fun, grief." [30]
10. Stamler. 217.
11. Wikipedia. "Carl Sandburg."
12. Lomax. xi.
13. Sandburg, Songbag, included Piper’s "Ain’t Gonna Rain," "Dakota Land," "Hello Girls," "I Wish I Was Single Again," "Kinkaders," "The Lane County Bachelor," and "Somebody." The Lomaxes included Piper’s "Old Bachelor."
14. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 53.
15. Piper became a professor of English at the University of Iowa [31]
16. Lomax. xxxvi. Instead of ballads, they included a number of Southern white fiddle tunes. Sandburg included "Lord Lovel" (Child 75), "Barbara Allen" (Child 84), "Maid Freed from the Gallows" (Child 95) and a variant "Hangman."
17. Lomax focused on the social conditions of "the peons of Mexico and their descendants in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California." [32] Four of five were published by The Texas Folk-Lore Society. Sandburg also borrowed four of seven texts from the Texas society, and two from Mexican Folkways. He mentioned hearing most of them sung. Both included "El Abandomando" and quoted Frank Dobie’s comments that "vaqueros sang little else but love songs." [33]
18. Lomax. xxxiv.
19. Stamler. 217. He wrote that if the songs had not been harmonized, "the academic community might have been less dismissive."
20. Stamler. 214. His source was Penelope Niven. Carl Sandburg. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1991.
21. The songbook succeeded among those who sang. For instance, Judith Tick noted "the composer Elie Siegmeister took it to Paris with him in 1927, and he and his wife Hannah ‘were always singing these songs. That was home. That was where we belonged’." [34]
22. Lomax. xxx. Sharp was indignant about the ways modern life was infiltrating the Appalachian mountains. "These missionaries and their schools!" he complained. "I’d like to build a wall around these mountains and let these mountain people alone. The only distinctive culture in America is here. These people live. They sustain themselves on the meanest food. They are not interested in eating but they have time to sing ballads." [35]
23. Lomax. xxvi.
24. Lomax. xxix-xxx. "No one person probably has ever sung entirely a number of the songs, as herein printed; but all the words given have been sung by some people."
25. For instance, Sandburg said he heard George S. Chappell sing "The Erie Canal" and mentioned two alternative opening verses, with music harmonized by Alfred G. Wathall. [36] The Lomaxes presented ten pages of verses with no music.
26. Niles was mentioned in the post for 5 May 2019.
27. Wikipedia. "Newport Folk Festival."
28. Mike Seeger was Pete’s half-brother.
29. Wikipedia, Newport.
30. Sandburg, Songbag. v.
31. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 53.
32. Lomax xxxvi
33. J. Frank Dobie. "Verses of the Texas Vaqueros." In Happy Hunting Ground. Edited by Dobie. Austin: The Texas Folk-Lore Society, 1925.
34. Judith Tick. Ruth Crawford Seeger. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 57. The source of the quotation was not available in the online version.
35. J. Russell Smith. North America. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925. 220. Quoted by Sandburg, Songbag. 306.
36. Sandburg, Songbag. 171.
During the Depression, the perception of American vernacular music became more literal. Carl Sandburg, discussed in the post for 5 May 2019, used criteria defined in 1922 by Louise Pound. [1]
In American Ballads and Songs, Pound focused on the transmission process: folk songs were learned from other people, rather than from print or other mass media. Text and tunes, thus, were modified as they moved from place to place and survived for more than a few years. [2]
In his 1927 American Songbag, Sandburg wrote: "the melodies and verses presented here are from diverse regions, from varied human characters and communities, and each is sung differently in different places." [3]
John and Alan Lomax inserted the word "folk" into the title of their American Ballads and Folk Songs in 1934. [4] The folk not only were rural, but they were farmers who had not adopted modern machinery like the wheat farmers mentioned by Sandburg. [5]
Like Sandburg, the Lomaxes recognized regional cultures. However, regions should be isolated to be considered folk. Thus people living in a South that had not recovered from the economic consequences of the Civil War were more folk, than those in the Midwest. However, both men did include sections of historic Southern and Pioneer songs. [6]
Occupational folk groups also could sing folk songs, and the status of the folk as employee was critical. Farmers who owned land were not folk, but share croppers, tenant farmers, and farm laborers were. Sandburg included songs from six occupational groups, while the Lomaxes defined nine. Instead of Sandburg’s "Hobo Songs," most of which came from the controversial Industrial Workers of the World, the Lomaxes include a group of miner’s songs. They added two Negro labor groups: chain gangs and levee camp workers. [7]
It was not enough that singers come from the working class like Sandburg, whose father worked in the blacksmith shop of Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy railroad. [8] They had to remain laborers. If they became educated or rose into the middle class, they lost their status as folk.
Paul Stamler classified Sandburg’s sources by social status and found 23% were middle class, a number that was "suggestively high [. . .] for a book chronicling the music of the American lower orders. [9]
Stamler did recognize mobility existed in U. S. society and that a judge or lawyer could have had working-class parents. However, he said a "newspaper reporter," like Sandburg, probably had a "working-class background," but "a college student probably did not." [10] Thus, Sandburg who only got an eighth-grade education, lost his imprimatur when he attended Lombard College as a veteran of the Spanish-American war. [11]
What Stamler did not recognize was that singers, no matter their cultural background, may be natural collectors who hear and remember songs others would not. Lomax himself started paying attention when he was a boy hearing "the cowboys sing to the cattle "bedded down" near our home." [12] One person Sandburg and Lomax borrowed from was Edward Piper, [13] who began writing down songs when he was eight-years-old. [14] The fact Lomax and Piper became professors [15] may have given their collections the gloss of professionalism, but it was their childhood interests that made their collections important.
The Lomaxes were more precise in their definition of American. It was not enough that a song be sung in the United States. It also had to be created here. This not only precluded Sandburg’s Irish songs, but the Child ballads collected by Cecil Sharp in the Southern Appalachian mountains. They wrote:
"We have excluded, also, the beautiful English ballads that it has been America’s artistic good fortune to inherit. The bald fact is that the characters that animate these ballads lived, died, and had most of their folk-structure before they came to this country." [16]
When so many sociological criteria were applied to the American population only a few Spanish speakers in Texas [17] and African Americans qualified. They noted:
"In giving ample space to the songs of the Negro, who has, in our judgement, created the most distinctive of folk songs—the most interesting, the most appealing, and the greatest in quantity—we may have put into too narrow limits of others types, such as the songs of the Great Lakes, the soldier, and the sailor, and the numerous quasi-ballads of Pennsylvania and the Middle West." [18]
Sandburg aimed to produce a singable collection, and was roundly condemned by folklorists [19] for following his publisher’s demand that his songs be harmonized with piano accompaniments. [20] While he didn’t much care for the request, it was congruent with his belief that most of the songs he reproduced were part of the contemporary tradition of group singing. [21]
Seven years later radio and phonograph records had become so prevalent the Lomaxes believed they could only collect uncontaminated material from African-American men who were in jail. They wrote:
"In the prison farm camps, however, the conditions were practically ideal. Here the Negro prisoners were segregated, often guarded by Negro trusties, with no social or other contacts with the whites, except for occasional official relations. The convicts heard only the idiom of their own race. Many—often of greatest influence—were ‘lifers’ who had been confined in the penitentiary, as few as long as fifty years. They still sang the songs they had brought into confinement, and these songs had been entirely in the keeping of the black man." [22]
This focus was not as heartless as it sounds. The father and son believed "the spread of machine civilization is rapidly making it hard to find folk singers," [23] and that they were performing a rescue mission. To this end, they compiled verses associated with songs and presented them in composite versions, often with tunes from other sources. [24]
Work songs tend to be open-ended, with traveling and improvised verses added to extend the singing to fit the task. The pages of verses documented that process, even if the Lomaxes did not show how individual artists put them together. In contrast, Sandburg intimated other versions existed but only presented one example. [25]
The sociological definition of the "folk" as the people who are isolated from modern life and who preserve traditions from the past defined the scope of the folk music revival in the 1960s. The first Newport Folk Festival in 1959 included Kentucky’s John Jacob Niles [26] and African-American country bluesmen Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, along with folk revival artists like Pete Seeger and the Kingston Trio. [27]
The festival also included Earl Scruggs and Mike Seeger’s New Lost City Ramblers, [28] who sang white Southern music that had appeared on records. Festival organizers waited until the next year to feature John Lee Hooker, a African-American blues musician who played an electric guitar. [29]
End Notes
1. Carl Sandburg. The American Songbag. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1927. 56.
2. Louise Pound. American Ballads and Songs. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1922.
3. Sandburg, Songbag. vii.
4. John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax. American Ballads and Folk Songs. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1934.
5. Harvest crews in the wheat belt were mentioned in post for 5 May 2019.
6. The Lomaxes called their section of pioneer music "Songs of the Overlanders."
7. The Lomaxes separated one Sandburg category, "Great Lakes and Erie Canal," into two with one song in the "Great Lakes" category.
8. Carl Sandburg. Always the Young Strangers. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1953; reprinted in 1991 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 22.
9. Paul J. Stamler. "Commodification and Revival." 207–221 in The Ballad Collectors of North America. Edited by Scott B. Spencer. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2012. 217. Sandburg did not claim to collect only from the working classes. He dedicated his book to "to those unknown singers—who made songs—out of love, fun, grief—and to those many other singers—who kept those songs as living things of the heart and mind—out of love, fun, grief." [30]
10. Stamler. 217.
11. Wikipedia. "Carl Sandburg."
12. Lomax. xi.
13. Sandburg, Songbag, included Piper’s "Ain’t Gonna Rain," "Dakota Land," "Hello Girls," "I Wish I Was Single Again," "Kinkaders," "The Lane County Bachelor," and "Somebody." The Lomaxes included Piper’s "Old Bachelor."
14. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 53.
15. Piper became a professor of English at the University of Iowa [31]
16. Lomax. xxxvi. Instead of ballads, they included a number of Southern white fiddle tunes. Sandburg included "Lord Lovel" (Child 75), "Barbara Allen" (Child 84), "Maid Freed from the Gallows" (Child 95) and a variant "Hangman."
17. Lomax focused on the social conditions of "the peons of Mexico and their descendants in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California." [32] Four of five were published by The Texas Folk-Lore Society. Sandburg also borrowed four of seven texts from the Texas society, and two from Mexican Folkways. He mentioned hearing most of them sung. Both included "El Abandomando" and quoted Frank Dobie’s comments that "vaqueros sang little else but love songs." [33]
18. Lomax. xxxiv.
19. Stamler. 217. He wrote that if the songs had not been harmonized, "the academic community might have been less dismissive."
20. Stamler. 214. His source was Penelope Niven. Carl Sandburg. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1991.
21. The songbook succeeded among those who sang. For instance, Judith Tick noted "the composer Elie Siegmeister took it to Paris with him in 1927, and he and his wife Hannah ‘were always singing these songs. That was home. That was where we belonged’." [34]
22. Lomax. xxx. Sharp was indignant about the ways modern life was infiltrating the Appalachian mountains. "These missionaries and their schools!" he complained. "I’d like to build a wall around these mountains and let these mountain people alone. The only distinctive culture in America is here. These people live. They sustain themselves on the meanest food. They are not interested in eating but they have time to sing ballads." [35]
23. Lomax. xxvi.
24. Lomax. xxix-xxx. "No one person probably has ever sung entirely a number of the songs, as herein printed; but all the words given have been sung by some people."
25. For instance, Sandburg said he heard George S. Chappell sing "The Erie Canal" and mentioned two alternative opening verses, with music harmonized by Alfred G. Wathall. [36] The Lomaxes presented ten pages of verses with no music.
26. Niles was mentioned in the post for 5 May 2019.
27. Wikipedia. "Newport Folk Festival."
28. Mike Seeger was Pete’s half-brother.
29. Wikipedia, Newport.
30. Sandburg, Songbag. v.
31. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 53.
32. Lomax xxxvi
33. J. Frank Dobie. "Verses of the Texas Vaqueros." In Happy Hunting Ground. Edited by Dobie. Austin: The Texas Folk-Lore Society, 1925.
34. Judith Tick. Ruth Crawford Seeger. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 57. The source of the quotation was not available in the online version.
35. J. Russell Smith. North America. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925. 220. Quoted by Sandburg, Songbag. 306.
36. Sandburg, Songbag. 171.
Sunday, May 5, 2019
Folk Revival - Carl Sandburg
Topic: Folk Music Revival
Carl Sandburg shared Peter Dykema’s vision of a common repertoire when he published The American Songbag in 1927. [1] And, like him, Sandburg was from the Midwest and from immigrant stock. He was born in Galesburg, Illinois, to Swedish migrants. [2] Dykema’s Dutch grandparents had settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan. [3]
Sandburg differed from Dykema in his willingness to present what people actually sang, not what educators thought they ought to know. He organized his collection thematically, with sections devoted to different geographic regions and occupations.
His headnotes gave background information on when and where songs were sung. For 182 of the 294 songs, [4] Sandburg indicated where the person who gave him his version had learned it. 84 were from the South, 68 were from the Midwest, 18 from the west coast, 8 from the Northeast, and 4 from the Southwest. 13 of the Southern songs were explicitly identified as African American. [5]
The poet did not ignore ethnicity, but he was not inclusive. He had a section devoted to Irish songs, some of which he learned from a woman raised in McKinley, Iowa. [6] In addition, he noted five songs adopted Irish tunes. The Scots songs were buried in the ones from the South. Only one song had a German tune, "O, Tannenbaum." [7] "In de Vinter Time" was recognized as a mazurka that "came with Polish and Czeko-Slovak emigration to the Corn Belt." [8]
No doubt, ethnic material was submerged in the occupational songs. Few of the jobs he mentioned were permanent. Loggers in northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota were farmers in the summer. Hobos weren’t the only ones who worked for crews that followed the steam-powered machines that harvested wheat in Kansas in late summer. Young men like Sandburg also took such temporary jobs in late summer. [9]
Sandburg learned early that ethnicity was not valued. As a child, he changed his surname from "berg" to "burg" and anglicized Carl August to Charlie. [10] After he published his "Hog butcher for the world" poetry collection, [11] he supplemented his income as a newspaper reporter by "meeting audiences to whom I talked about poetry and art, read my verses, and closed a program with a half- or quarter-hour of songs, giving verbal footnotes with each song." [12]
He often learned songs at these programs from audience members. [13] He also must have noted which songs were accepted and which were not, and modified his public repertoire accordingly.
The one area where Sandburg intended to make his audiences a bit uncomfortable was songs from the union movement. In 1907 he began working for Eugene Debs’ Socialist party in Wisconsin. [14] His section of "Hobo Songs" included several from the International Workers of the World. He said he learned one when he was covering the strike by copper miners on Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula in 1913. [15]
When I was going to a Camp Fire Girls’ summer camp in lower Michigan in the 1950s, Dykema’s repertoire was more important than Sandburg’s. Younger girls sang two song published by Sandburg: "She’ll be Comin’ ’round the Mountain" and "Down in Valley" during the day. [16]
On the occasional evening when older campers and counselors felt like singing more after supper, they fell back on songs people knew without having sung them before in camp. Three were Stephen Foster songs, including the two mentioned by Dykema; [17] five were popular songs from the early twentieth century, [18] and, less often, "Home on the Range." [19]
The important difference between the two men was Sandburg worked as a soloist and collected from individuals, while Dykema was from a Dutch Calvinist family where he grew up singing in church. [20] The only comment Sandburg made on group singing in the Songbag was:
"barbershop harmonizers of midwest towns used to make up their own melodies and then mix in the words. In Galesburg, boys from the Q. railroad shops, from Colton’s foundry and the Burlington brickyards would meet in front of Brown’s hotel or the Union hotel, practice with their voices as they strolled off Main Street, and then make the rounds of the ice cream ‘sociables’ held by various churches on a summer evening." [21]
Sandburg’s most important contribution to the 1960s commercial folk music revival was the persona he adapted from Walt Whitman as the solitary bard who toured the country and returned to tell the less adventurous. [22] He accompanied himself with a six-string guitar years before it was popular in country music. [23]
Many copied Sandburg, perhaps without realizing it. Among those from Illinois who followed him was Burl Ives, who called his 1940 New York City radio program The Wayfaring Stranger. [24] Billy Grammer’s most popular country recording was "Gotta Travel On." [25]
End Notes
1. Carl Sandburg. The American Songbag. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1927.
2. Carl Sandburg. Always the Young Strangers. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1953; reprinted in 1991 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Chapter 1.
3. James A. Keene. "Peter Dykema." 100–119 in Giants of Music Education. Centennial, Colorado: Glenbridge Publishing, 2010. 102. Dykema was discussed in the post for 28 April 2019. Dutch settlement in the United States is shown by the green counties in the map at the bottom of the rightmost column.
4. Sandburg counted 280 songs, [26] but several had variants. Paul Stamler included fragments in his total of 298.5. [27]
5. Most of Sandburg’s African-American songs were heard by whites; a few came from collections that were not clearly identified. Instead of building an image of Black music, the lyrics added to his picture of songs passing from singer to singer or, to be technical, from active to passive tradition bearers. For instance, Florence Heizer heard a woman sing "Great Gawd, I’m Feelin’ Bad" while ironing, [28] while Charles Hoening heard four harvest hands sing "Bird in a Cage" when he was working on a threshing crew. [29]
6. "Mother McKinley, formerly of McKinley, Iowa, and later of Chicago." [30] I could find no reference to that town in Iowa. The name Mother McKinley usually referred to the mother of President McKinley who lived in Chicago for a while. [31] However, Nancy Campbell Allison McKinley was from Ohio and died in 1897, [32] when Sandburg was still a youth in Galesburg. "Mother McKinley" may have become a nickname given to others, or a pseudonym for someone who did not want to be identified.
7. Sandburg, Songbag. "The Kinkaiders." 278. From the Edwin Ford Piper collection.
8. Sandburg, Songbag. 334. From the "students and faculty members of Cornell College" in Mount Vernon, Iowa.
9. Sandburg spent the summer of 1897 rambling from place to place as a hobo; he worked as a dishwasher in some towns, did odd jobs in others, and worked with threshing crews in Kansas. [33]
10. Sandburg, Strangers. 39.
11. Opening line of the poem "Chicago." Chicago Poems. New York: H. Holt and Company, 1916.
12. Sandburg, Songbag. ix. One group who invited him was the Poetry Society of South Carolina. [34] This was the same group who produced the collection of spirituals mentioned in the post for 10 March 2019. The one person he specifically mentioned was Julia Peterkin, [35] who also visited Ruby Pickens Tartt. [36]
13. Sandburg, Songbag. ix. "After a recital and reception" at the University of Oregon’s Crossroads Club "one evening three years ago, we held a song and story session lasting till five o’clock in the morning." [37]
14. Paul J. Stamler. "Commodification and Revival." 207–221 in The Ballad Collectors of North America. Edited by Scott B. Spencer. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2012. 212.
15. Sandburg, Songbag. 186. "The Dying Hogger." He wrote "once on a newspaper assignment during the copper mine strike in the Calumet region, I spent an hour with a ‘wobbly’ who had been a switchman, cowboy, jailbird."
16. "Down in the Valley" was from Music Makers, a CRS songbook sold by the Camp Fire Girls. Its version came from Alta May Calkins. Her husband worked for the Ohio Farm Bureau. [38] Sandburg collected his version from Frances Ries of Batavia, Ohio. [39] He may have heard it when he was researching his biography of Abraham Lincoln, [40] since Batavia was the closest town to Ulysses S. Grant’s birthplace. [41]
17. Dykema’s collection was discussed in the post for 28 April 2019. The other Stephen Foster song was "Old Black Joe."
18. "There’s a Long, Long Trail" [42] followed by "Let the Rest of the World Go By," [43] "Shine on Harvest Moon" [44] followed by "The Bells Are Ringing for Me and My Gal," [45] and "Down by the Old Mill Stream." [46]
19. Wikipedia. "Home on the Range." John A. Lomax included "Home on the Range" in his 1910 Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, mentioned in the post for 27 January 2019. It was recorded in 1927 by Vernon Dalhart, [47] and popularized by Bing Crosby in 1933. [48]
20. Keene. 102.
21. Sandburg, Songbag. 464. In my hometown in Michigan in the 1950s, they were called ice cream socials. Q was the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy railroad. In his autobiography he mentioned singing in a quartet in a church program and later, with three others, who met outside a cigar store. [49]
22. Sandburg ended his preface to Songbag [50] with lines from Whitman’s "Song of the Open Road" from the second edition of Leaves of Grass. Brooklyn: 1856. [51]
23. Sandburg started his lecture tours in 1919. [52] Jimmie Rodgers made the guitar the primary instrument in country music with his first recordings in 1929.
24. Wikipedia. "Burl Ives." He was from Jasper County in central Illinois. "Wayfaring Stranger" was introduced by John Jacob Niles, who was born in Louisville in 1892. He began collecting when Burroughs Adding Machine Company sent him to eastern Kentucky during World War I to sell and service equipment in local stores. He moved to New York in 1925. [53]
25. Wikipedia. "Billy Grammar." He was from Franklin County in southern Illinois. "Gotta Travel On" was written by David Lazar, Larry Ehrlich, Paul Clayton and Tom Six. It was popular in 1959.
26. Sandburg, Songbag. vii.
27. Stamler. 217.
28. Sandburg, Songbag. 238.
29. Sandburg, Songbag. 213.
30. Sandburg, Songbag. 35.
31. Philip McFarland. Mark Twain and the Colonel. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012. 22.
32. Marc Power. "Nancy Campbell McKinley (Allison)." Geni website. 23 May 2018.
33. Sandburg, Strangers. Chapter 19.
34. Sandburg, Songbag. ix. Barbara Bellows said he "played his guitar" during his performance. [54]
35. Sandburg, Songbag. 447. He also mentioned Peterkin in his autobiography. [55]
36. Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens. Toting the Lead Row. University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981. 12. Tartt was mentioned in the post for 23 January 2019.
37. Sandburg, Songbag. 20.
38. Camp Songs. 58.
39. Sandburg, Songbag. 148.
40. The first volume of Sandburg’s biography, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, was published by Harcourt in New York in 1926.
41. Camp Songs. 54.
42. Alonzo Elliott and Stoddard King. "There’s a Long, Long Trail a-Winding." New York: M. Witmark and Songs, 1914.
43. Ernest Roland Ball and Joseph Keirn Brennan. "Let the Rest of the World Go By." New York: M. Witmark and Songs, 1919.
44. Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth. "Shine on Harvest Moon." New York: Jerome H. Remick and Company, 1908.
45. George William Meyer, Edward Ray Goetz, and Edgar Leslie. "For Me and My Gal." New York: Waterson, Berlin and Snyder Company, 1917.
46. Tell Taylor. "Down by the Old Mill Stream." Chicago: Forster Music, 1910.
47. Vernon Dalhart. "Home on the Range." Brunswick 137. 1927.
48. Bing Crosby. "Home on the Range." Brunswick 6663. Recorded 27 September 1933, Los Angeles. Released 1933.
49. Sandburg, Strangers. 71, 158.
50. Sandburg, Songbag. viii.
51. Wikipedia. "Song of the Open Road (Poem)."
52. William Ruhlmann. "Sandburg (Sandberg), Carl (August)." Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians. Edited by Nicolas Slonimsky and Laura Diane Kuhn. New York: Schirmer Books, 2001.
53. Camp Songs. 51.
54. Barbara L. Bellows A Talent for Living: Josephine Pinckney and the Charleston Literary Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. 42.
55. Sandburg, Strangers. 447.
Carl Sandburg shared Peter Dykema’s vision of a common repertoire when he published The American Songbag in 1927. [1] And, like him, Sandburg was from the Midwest and from immigrant stock. He was born in Galesburg, Illinois, to Swedish migrants. [2] Dykema’s Dutch grandparents had settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan. [3]
Sandburg differed from Dykema in his willingness to present what people actually sang, not what educators thought they ought to know. He organized his collection thematically, with sections devoted to different geographic regions and occupations.
His headnotes gave background information on when and where songs were sung. For 182 of the 294 songs, [4] Sandburg indicated where the person who gave him his version had learned it. 84 were from the South, 68 were from the Midwest, 18 from the west coast, 8 from the Northeast, and 4 from the Southwest. 13 of the Southern songs were explicitly identified as African American. [5]
The poet did not ignore ethnicity, but he was not inclusive. He had a section devoted to Irish songs, some of which he learned from a woman raised in McKinley, Iowa. [6] In addition, he noted five songs adopted Irish tunes. The Scots songs were buried in the ones from the South. Only one song had a German tune, "O, Tannenbaum." [7] "In de Vinter Time" was recognized as a mazurka that "came with Polish and Czeko-Slovak emigration to the Corn Belt." [8]
No doubt, ethnic material was submerged in the occupational songs. Few of the jobs he mentioned were permanent. Loggers in northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota were farmers in the summer. Hobos weren’t the only ones who worked for crews that followed the steam-powered machines that harvested wheat in Kansas in late summer. Young men like Sandburg also took such temporary jobs in late summer. [9]
Sandburg learned early that ethnicity was not valued. As a child, he changed his surname from "berg" to "burg" and anglicized Carl August to Charlie. [10] After he published his "Hog butcher for the world" poetry collection, [11] he supplemented his income as a newspaper reporter by "meeting audiences to whom I talked about poetry and art, read my verses, and closed a program with a half- or quarter-hour of songs, giving verbal footnotes with each song." [12]
He often learned songs at these programs from audience members. [13] He also must have noted which songs were accepted and which were not, and modified his public repertoire accordingly.
The one area where Sandburg intended to make his audiences a bit uncomfortable was songs from the union movement. In 1907 he began working for Eugene Debs’ Socialist party in Wisconsin. [14] His section of "Hobo Songs" included several from the International Workers of the World. He said he learned one when he was covering the strike by copper miners on Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula in 1913. [15]
When I was going to a Camp Fire Girls’ summer camp in lower Michigan in the 1950s, Dykema’s repertoire was more important than Sandburg’s. Younger girls sang two song published by Sandburg: "She’ll be Comin’ ’round the Mountain" and "Down in Valley" during the day. [16]
On the occasional evening when older campers and counselors felt like singing more after supper, they fell back on songs people knew without having sung them before in camp. Three were Stephen Foster songs, including the two mentioned by Dykema; [17] five were popular songs from the early twentieth century, [18] and, less often, "Home on the Range." [19]
The important difference between the two men was Sandburg worked as a soloist and collected from individuals, while Dykema was from a Dutch Calvinist family where he grew up singing in church. [20] The only comment Sandburg made on group singing in the Songbag was:
"barbershop harmonizers of midwest towns used to make up their own melodies and then mix in the words. In Galesburg, boys from the Q. railroad shops, from Colton’s foundry and the Burlington brickyards would meet in front of Brown’s hotel or the Union hotel, practice with their voices as they strolled off Main Street, and then make the rounds of the ice cream ‘sociables’ held by various churches on a summer evening." [21]
Sandburg’s most important contribution to the 1960s commercial folk music revival was the persona he adapted from Walt Whitman as the solitary bard who toured the country and returned to tell the less adventurous. [22] He accompanied himself with a six-string guitar years before it was popular in country music. [23]
Many copied Sandburg, perhaps without realizing it. Among those from Illinois who followed him was Burl Ives, who called his 1940 New York City radio program The Wayfaring Stranger. [24] Billy Grammer’s most popular country recording was "Gotta Travel On." [25]
End Notes
1. Carl Sandburg. The American Songbag. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1927.
2. Carl Sandburg. Always the Young Strangers. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1953; reprinted in 1991 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Chapter 1.
3. James A. Keene. "Peter Dykema." 100–119 in Giants of Music Education. Centennial, Colorado: Glenbridge Publishing, 2010. 102. Dykema was discussed in the post for 28 April 2019. Dutch settlement in the United States is shown by the green counties in the map at the bottom of the rightmost column.
4. Sandburg counted 280 songs, [26] but several had variants. Paul Stamler included fragments in his total of 298.5. [27]
5. Most of Sandburg’s African-American songs were heard by whites; a few came from collections that were not clearly identified. Instead of building an image of Black music, the lyrics added to his picture of songs passing from singer to singer or, to be technical, from active to passive tradition bearers. For instance, Florence Heizer heard a woman sing "Great Gawd, I’m Feelin’ Bad" while ironing, [28] while Charles Hoening heard four harvest hands sing "Bird in a Cage" when he was working on a threshing crew. [29]
6. "Mother McKinley, formerly of McKinley, Iowa, and later of Chicago." [30] I could find no reference to that town in Iowa. The name Mother McKinley usually referred to the mother of President McKinley who lived in Chicago for a while. [31] However, Nancy Campbell Allison McKinley was from Ohio and died in 1897, [32] when Sandburg was still a youth in Galesburg. "Mother McKinley" may have become a nickname given to others, or a pseudonym for someone who did not want to be identified.
7. Sandburg, Songbag. "The Kinkaiders." 278. From the Edwin Ford Piper collection.
8. Sandburg, Songbag. 334. From the "students and faculty members of Cornell College" in Mount Vernon, Iowa.
9. Sandburg spent the summer of 1897 rambling from place to place as a hobo; he worked as a dishwasher in some towns, did odd jobs in others, and worked with threshing crews in Kansas. [33]
10. Sandburg, Strangers. 39.
11. Opening line of the poem "Chicago." Chicago Poems. New York: H. Holt and Company, 1916.
12. Sandburg, Songbag. ix. One group who invited him was the Poetry Society of South Carolina. [34] This was the same group who produced the collection of spirituals mentioned in the post for 10 March 2019. The one person he specifically mentioned was Julia Peterkin, [35] who also visited Ruby Pickens Tartt. [36]
13. Sandburg, Songbag. ix. "After a recital and reception" at the University of Oregon’s Crossroads Club "one evening three years ago, we held a song and story session lasting till five o’clock in the morning." [37]
14. Paul J. Stamler. "Commodification and Revival." 207–221 in The Ballad Collectors of North America. Edited by Scott B. Spencer. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2012. 212.
15. Sandburg, Songbag. 186. "The Dying Hogger." He wrote "once on a newspaper assignment during the copper mine strike in the Calumet region, I spent an hour with a ‘wobbly’ who had been a switchman, cowboy, jailbird."
16. "Down in the Valley" was from Music Makers, a CRS songbook sold by the Camp Fire Girls. Its version came from Alta May Calkins. Her husband worked for the Ohio Farm Bureau. [38] Sandburg collected his version from Frances Ries of Batavia, Ohio. [39] He may have heard it when he was researching his biography of Abraham Lincoln, [40] since Batavia was the closest town to Ulysses S. Grant’s birthplace. [41]
17. Dykema’s collection was discussed in the post for 28 April 2019. The other Stephen Foster song was "Old Black Joe."
18. "There’s a Long, Long Trail" [42] followed by "Let the Rest of the World Go By," [43] "Shine on Harvest Moon" [44] followed by "The Bells Are Ringing for Me and My Gal," [45] and "Down by the Old Mill Stream." [46]
19. Wikipedia. "Home on the Range." John A. Lomax included "Home on the Range" in his 1910 Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, mentioned in the post for 27 January 2019. It was recorded in 1927 by Vernon Dalhart, [47] and popularized by Bing Crosby in 1933. [48]
20. Keene. 102.
21. Sandburg, Songbag. 464. In my hometown in Michigan in the 1950s, they were called ice cream socials. Q was the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy railroad. In his autobiography he mentioned singing in a quartet in a church program and later, with three others, who met outside a cigar store. [49]
22. Sandburg ended his preface to Songbag [50] with lines from Whitman’s "Song of the Open Road" from the second edition of Leaves of Grass. Brooklyn: 1856. [51]
23. Sandburg started his lecture tours in 1919. [52] Jimmie Rodgers made the guitar the primary instrument in country music with his first recordings in 1929.
24. Wikipedia. "Burl Ives." He was from Jasper County in central Illinois. "Wayfaring Stranger" was introduced by John Jacob Niles, who was born in Louisville in 1892. He began collecting when Burroughs Adding Machine Company sent him to eastern Kentucky during World War I to sell and service equipment in local stores. He moved to New York in 1925. [53]
25. Wikipedia. "Billy Grammar." He was from Franklin County in southern Illinois. "Gotta Travel On" was written by David Lazar, Larry Ehrlich, Paul Clayton and Tom Six. It was popular in 1959.
26. Sandburg, Songbag. vii.
27. Stamler. 217.
28. Sandburg, Songbag. 238.
29. Sandburg, Songbag. 213.
30. Sandburg, Songbag. 35.
31. Philip McFarland. Mark Twain and the Colonel. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012. 22.
32. Marc Power. "Nancy Campbell McKinley (Allison)." Geni website. 23 May 2018.
33. Sandburg, Strangers. Chapter 19.
34. Sandburg, Songbag. ix. Barbara Bellows said he "played his guitar" during his performance. [54]
35. Sandburg, Songbag. 447. He also mentioned Peterkin in his autobiography. [55]
36. Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens. Toting the Lead Row. University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981. 12. Tartt was mentioned in the post for 23 January 2019.
37. Sandburg, Songbag. 20.
38. Camp Songs. 58.
39. Sandburg, Songbag. 148.
40. The first volume of Sandburg’s biography, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, was published by Harcourt in New York in 1926.
41. Camp Songs. 54.
42. Alonzo Elliott and Stoddard King. "There’s a Long, Long Trail a-Winding." New York: M. Witmark and Songs, 1914.
43. Ernest Roland Ball and Joseph Keirn Brennan. "Let the Rest of the World Go By." New York: M. Witmark and Songs, 1919.
44. Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth. "Shine on Harvest Moon." New York: Jerome H. Remick and Company, 1908.
45. George William Meyer, Edward Ray Goetz, and Edgar Leslie. "For Me and My Gal." New York: Waterson, Berlin and Snyder Company, 1917.
46. Tell Taylor. "Down by the Old Mill Stream." Chicago: Forster Music, 1910.
47. Vernon Dalhart. "Home on the Range." Brunswick 137. 1927.
48. Bing Crosby. "Home on the Range." Brunswick 6663. Recorded 27 September 1933, Los Angeles. Released 1933.
49. Sandburg, Strangers. 71, 158.
50. Sandburg, Songbag. viii.
51. Wikipedia. "Song of the Open Road (Poem)."
52. William Ruhlmann. "Sandburg (Sandberg), Carl (August)." Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians. Edited by Nicolas Slonimsky and Laura Diane Kuhn. New York: Schirmer Books, 2001.
53. Camp Songs. 51.
54. Barbara L. Bellows A Talent for Living: Josephine Pinckney and the Charleston Literary Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. 42.
55. Sandburg, Strangers. 447.
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