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.