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.
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