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."
Sunday, May 19, 2019
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.
Sunday, April 28, 2019
Folk Revival - Midwestern United States
Topic: Folk Music Revival
The American folk-song revival began, in part, as a reaction against the migration of people from southern and eastern Europe that began in the 1880s after technological improvements in steamships made voyages by the poor economically viable. [1]
In 1913, Peter Dykema headed a committee within the Music Supervisors National Conference tasked with identifying songs that should be sung in every public school. [2] Most of the eighteen were nineteenth-century sentimental songs, with two by Stephen Foster. [3] There also were three Scots [4] and one Irish song. [5] The implicit message was people from the British Isles could revive or perpetuate their musical traditions, but everyone else needed to abandon their’s.
A different edition was published in 1914. [6] Five songs were eliminated: one shanty and one religious song were replaced with others of the same type. [7] The post-Civil War popular songs disappeared, and songs from England and Wales took their place. [8]
German content was disguised. One of the rounds was "Oh, How Lovely Is the Evening." [9] Friedrich Wilhelm Kücken’s 1827 setting for a romantic poem by Helmina von Chézy, [10] was identified as a Thuringian folk-song in 1913. "How Can I Leave Thee" was little different from Foster’s lyrics. Michael Mark said the 1914 edition included a translation of "O, Tannenbaum," but didn’t indicate if it was the Christmas song or the tune for some other words. [11]
General teachers, not trained musicians, were the ones who led singing in most schools, and publishers were eager to accommodate their needs. [12] Norman Hall provided them with a larger collection in 1915. [13] He said his purpose was to offer "not the popular song of the day but the songs that have stood the test of time: the songs of true sentiment, of school days, and early childhood, folk songs and national songs." [14] During World War I, he said his goal was "to amalgamate our people" with "our home and folk songs." [15]
Of the 166 items in The Golden Book of Favorite Songs, the nine labeled as Scots and the six identified as Irish were clearly identifiable as national songs, while the three Italian and eighteen German ones only were identified as tunes. Several were classic pieces, [16] but some were by Abt, Kücken, Nägeli, and Silcher. [17] "O Tannenbaum was not identified as the melody for "Michigan, My Michigan." [18]
Folklorists would deny lyrics by Robert Burns and Thomas Moore were authentic folk texts, but that missed the point. Dykema and Hall were seeking to define a common American song repertoire, and, to them, there was no difference between people who lived in towns where Dykema taught [19] and those living in the country where Hall advertized his wares. [20]
End Notes
1. The problem for steamships crossing the Atlantic was the need to carry enough coal to make the trip. After Alfred Holt solved this problem in 1865, other inventions in the 1870s made long-range shipping economically possible. [21] The final step was the organization of corporations that shipped from Liverpool, [22] Hamburg, [23] Genoa, and Naples. [24]
2. James A. Keene. "Peter Dykema." 100–119 in Giants of Music Education. Centennial, Colorado: Glenbridge Publishing, 2010. 113. The Music Supervisors National Conference collection was Standard Songs: Eighteen Songs for Community Singing. Boston: C. C. Birchard, 1913. I couldn’t locate a copy of the songbook; contents are from WorldCat entry.
3. "My Old Kentucky Home" and "Old Folks at Home"
4. "Annie Laurie," "Auld Lang Syne," and "Flow, Gently Sweet Afton." The lyrics of the last two were by Robert Burns.
5. "The Minstrel Boy." The lyrics were by Thomas Moore.
6. Music Supervisors National Conference. Eighteen Songs for Community Singing. Boston: C. C. Birchard, 1914.
7. "Bow, Ye Winds, Heigh Ho" was replaced with "A Capital Ship." "Come, Thou Almighty King" replaced "Sweet and Low."
8. I couldn’t locate a copy of the songbook; contents are from Michael L. Mark. A Concise History of American Music Education. London: Rowman and Littlefield Education, 2008. 94. The Welsh song was "Ash Grove."
9. According to Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, the melody was written in 1826 by Christian Johann Philipp Schulz. (Letter to author, 20 December 1976.)
10. German Wikipedia. "Friedrich Wilhelm Kücken." The German title was "Ach, wie ist’s möglich dann."
11. Mark. 94. James Fuld discovered the melody first appeared in 1799 with the words "Es lebe hoch" in a collection produced by a German nationalist and youth leader, Rudolf Zacharias Becker. The "Tannenbaum" text was published in 1820. [25]
12. Clarence C. Birchard published the collections. He had been involved with public school music publishers since the 1890s when his employer, Ginn and Company, organized summer training schools for which it supplied the materials. [26] He founded his own company in 1901. [27] He later was quoted as saying: "We are teaching music not to make musicians but to make Americans" [28]
13. N. H. Aitch. The Golden Book of Favorite Songs. Chicago: Hall and McCreary, 1915. Aitch was a pseudonym for Hall. He used edition numbers for print runs. In 1923, the book was revised by a team of music educators led by John Beattie.
14. Aitch. 3. Apart from questions of taste, the primary reason Hall and other textbook publishers were not interested in "the popular song of the day" was the copyright law of 1909 that required publishers to pay royalties to reprint pieces. The cost became more onerous in 1917 when Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., ruled anyone playing a piece in public had to pay for the privilege. [29]
15. Norman H. Hall. Quoted by "‘National Week of Song Will Amalgamate American People.’" Musical America 29:42:26 April 1919. 42.
16. It included Georg Friedrich Händel’s "Hallelujah Chorus" and "Largo." The first was from the Messiah, a 1741 oratorio. [30] The second was from "Ombra mai fu," an aria in the 1738 opera Serse or Xerxes. [31]
17. Nägeli was discussed in the post for 14 April 2019. Abt and Silcher were mentioned in the post for 21 April 2019.
18. The rest of the songs were, like Hall said, sentimental, religious, Civil War, and patriotic songs, or songs specific to the classroom. Five were by Foster.
19. By 1913, Dykema had taught in Aurora, Illinois, and New York City. [32]
20. Hall began as a textbook seller in Chicago in the 1890s. [33] He had established Hall and McCreary in the city by 1905. [34] Nothing more is known about him, and I found nothing on McCreary. His partner in publishing the first Golden Book was Frederick A. Owen of Danville, New York. He offered a correspondence school for teachers in 1889, and began publishing the Normal Instructor in 1891 to provide teachers with materials and ideas. [35]
21. Wikipedia. "Steamship."
22. "The Departure Gates: How Your Ancestors Came to America." Ancestry website. 5 July 2016.
23. "Hamburg-Amerika Line." Immigration to the United States website.
24. "Departure Gates.
25. James J. Fuld. The Book of World-Famous Music. New York: Dover Publications, 2000 edition. 355–356.
26. Edward Bailey Birge. History of Public School Music in the United States. Washington, D.C.: Music Educators National Conference, 1966.
27. "Birchard." International Music Score Library Project website.
28. Brian Cardany. "Clarence C. Birchard." Arizona State University website.
29. Wikipedia. "Copyright Act of 1909."
30. Wikipedia. "Messiah (Handel)."
31. Wikipedia. "Ombra mai fu."
32. Wikipedia. "Peter W. Dykema."
33. Advertisement following page 247. Western Teacher 2:247+:March 1894.
34. Advertisement. Publishers Weekly 66:1904:28 January 1905.
35. "Frederick A. Owen (1867 – 1935)." Danville Area Historical Society blog.
The American folk-song revival began, in part, as a reaction against the migration of people from southern and eastern Europe that began in the 1880s after technological improvements in steamships made voyages by the poor economically viable. [1]
In 1913, Peter Dykema headed a committee within the Music Supervisors National Conference tasked with identifying songs that should be sung in every public school. [2] Most of the eighteen were nineteenth-century sentimental songs, with two by Stephen Foster. [3] There also were three Scots [4] and one Irish song. [5] The implicit message was people from the British Isles could revive or perpetuate their musical traditions, but everyone else needed to abandon their’s.
A different edition was published in 1914. [6] Five songs were eliminated: one shanty and one religious song were replaced with others of the same type. [7] The post-Civil War popular songs disappeared, and songs from England and Wales took their place. [8]
German content was disguised. One of the rounds was "Oh, How Lovely Is the Evening." [9] Friedrich Wilhelm Kücken’s 1827 setting for a romantic poem by Helmina von Chézy, [10] was identified as a Thuringian folk-song in 1913. "How Can I Leave Thee" was little different from Foster’s lyrics. Michael Mark said the 1914 edition included a translation of "O, Tannenbaum," but didn’t indicate if it was the Christmas song or the tune for some other words. [11]
General teachers, not trained musicians, were the ones who led singing in most schools, and publishers were eager to accommodate their needs. [12] Norman Hall provided them with a larger collection in 1915. [13] He said his purpose was to offer "not the popular song of the day but the songs that have stood the test of time: the songs of true sentiment, of school days, and early childhood, folk songs and national songs." [14] During World War I, he said his goal was "to amalgamate our people" with "our home and folk songs." [15]
Of the 166 items in The Golden Book of Favorite Songs, the nine labeled as Scots and the six identified as Irish were clearly identifiable as national songs, while the three Italian and eighteen German ones only were identified as tunes. Several were classic pieces, [16] but some were by Abt, Kücken, Nägeli, and Silcher. [17] "O Tannenbaum was not identified as the melody for "Michigan, My Michigan." [18]
Folklorists would deny lyrics by Robert Burns and Thomas Moore were authentic folk texts, but that missed the point. Dykema and Hall were seeking to define a common American song repertoire, and, to them, there was no difference between people who lived in towns where Dykema taught [19] and those living in the country where Hall advertized his wares. [20]
End Notes
1. The problem for steamships crossing the Atlantic was the need to carry enough coal to make the trip. After Alfred Holt solved this problem in 1865, other inventions in the 1870s made long-range shipping economically possible. [21] The final step was the organization of corporations that shipped from Liverpool, [22] Hamburg, [23] Genoa, and Naples. [24]
2. James A. Keene. "Peter Dykema." 100–119 in Giants of Music Education. Centennial, Colorado: Glenbridge Publishing, 2010. 113. The Music Supervisors National Conference collection was Standard Songs: Eighteen Songs for Community Singing. Boston: C. C. Birchard, 1913. I couldn’t locate a copy of the songbook; contents are from WorldCat entry.
3. "My Old Kentucky Home" and "Old Folks at Home"
4. "Annie Laurie," "Auld Lang Syne," and "Flow, Gently Sweet Afton." The lyrics of the last two were by Robert Burns.
5. "The Minstrel Boy." The lyrics were by Thomas Moore.
6. Music Supervisors National Conference. Eighteen Songs for Community Singing. Boston: C. C. Birchard, 1914.
7. "Bow, Ye Winds, Heigh Ho" was replaced with "A Capital Ship." "Come, Thou Almighty King" replaced "Sweet and Low."
8. I couldn’t locate a copy of the songbook; contents are from Michael L. Mark. A Concise History of American Music Education. London: Rowman and Littlefield Education, 2008. 94. The Welsh song was "Ash Grove."
9. According to Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, the melody was written in 1826 by Christian Johann Philipp Schulz. (Letter to author, 20 December 1976.)
10. German Wikipedia. "Friedrich Wilhelm Kücken." The German title was "Ach, wie ist’s möglich dann."
11. Mark. 94. James Fuld discovered the melody first appeared in 1799 with the words "Es lebe hoch" in a collection produced by a German nationalist and youth leader, Rudolf Zacharias Becker. The "Tannenbaum" text was published in 1820. [25]
12. Clarence C. Birchard published the collections. He had been involved with public school music publishers since the 1890s when his employer, Ginn and Company, organized summer training schools for which it supplied the materials. [26] He founded his own company in 1901. [27] He later was quoted as saying: "We are teaching music not to make musicians but to make Americans" [28]
13. N. H. Aitch. The Golden Book of Favorite Songs. Chicago: Hall and McCreary, 1915. Aitch was a pseudonym for Hall. He used edition numbers for print runs. In 1923, the book was revised by a team of music educators led by John Beattie.
14. Aitch. 3. Apart from questions of taste, the primary reason Hall and other textbook publishers were not interested in "the popular song of the day" was the copyright law of 1909 that required publishers to pay royalties to reprint pieces. The cost became more onerous in 1917 when Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., ruled anyone playing a piece in public had to pay for the privilege. [29]
15. Norman H. Hall. Quoted by "‘National Week of Song Will Amalgamate American People.’" Musical America 29:42:26 April 1919. 42.
16. It included Georg Friedrich Händel’s "Hallelujah Chorus" and "Largo." The first was from the Messiah, a 1741 oratorio. [30] The second was from "Ombra mai fu," an aria in the 1738 opera Serse or Xerxes. [31]
17. Nägeli was discussed in the post for 14 April 2019. Abt and Silcher were mentioned in the post for 21 April 2019.
18. The rest of the songs were, like Hall said, sentimental, religious, Civil War, and patriotic songs, or songs specific to the classroom. Five were by Foster.
19. By 1913, Dykema had taught in Aurora, Illinois, and New York City. [32]
20. Hall began as a textbook seller in Chicago in the 1890s. [33] He had established Hall and McCreary in the city by 1905. [34] Nothing more is known about him, and I found nothing on McCreary. His partner in publishing the first Golden Book was Frederick A. Owen of Danville, New York. He offered a correspondence school for teachers in 1889, and began publishing the Normal Instructor in 1891 to provide teachers with materials and ideas. [35]
21. Wikipedia. "Steamship."
22. "The Departure Gates: How Your Ancestors Came to America." Ancestry website. 5 July 2016.
23. "Hamburg-Amerika Line." Immigration to the United States website.
24. "Departure Gates.
25. James J. Fuld. The Book of World-Famous Music. New York: Dover Publications, 2000 edition. 355–356.
26. Edward Bailey Birge. History of Public School Music in the United States. Washington, D.C.: Music Educators National Conference, 1966.
27. "Birchard." International Music Score Library Project website.
28. Brian Cardany. "Clarence C. Birchard." Arizona State University website.
29. Wikipedia. "Copyright Act of 1909."
30. Wikipedia. "Messiah (Handel)."
31. Wikipedia. "Ombra mai fu."
32. Wikipedia. "Peter W. Dykema."
33. Advertisement following page 247. Western Teacher 2:247+:March 1894.
34. Advertisement. Publishers Weekly 66:1904:28 January 1905.
35. "Frederick A. Owen (1867 – 1935)." Danville Area Historical Society blog.
Sunday, April 21, 2019
Folk Revival - German Americans
Topic: Folk Music Revival
The failure of the Revolution of 1848 in German-speaking central Europe sent refugees to the United States. Historians tend to emphasize the intellectuals who immigrated, but many more came for economic reasons.
By 1900, before the influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, 54% of Cincinnati’s population was German. Migrants sailing on the Hamburg America line debarked at Hoboken, New Jersey (58% German), and headed up the Hudson for the Erie Canal. At the transfer point to Lake Erie, Buffalo, New York, was 43% German. Detroit, Michigan, on the narrows between Lakes Erie and Huron, was 41% German. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Lake Michigan was 70%. Along the Mississippi where the Rock Island railroad crossed the river, Davenport, Iowa, was 62% German. Saint Louis, Missouri, may have been slave country, but it sat on the Mississippi river where the Missouri branched north to good farmlands in the interior. Its population was 45% German. [1] These are the blue areas on the map near the bottom of the rightmost column.
The most important of these locations for camp songs was Ohio where Lynn Rohrbough established his cooperative publishing house in 1929. [2] His immigrant ancestor, John Conrad Rohrbough, had moved from Bavaria in the middle 1700s, and settled in what became Hampshire County, West Virginia. [3] His father, George Elmore Rohrbough, relocated to the Aspen area in Colorado. [4]
In Upper Sandusky, forty-some miles northwest of Rohrbough’s Delaware, Ohio, [5] Germans trickled west from Pennsylvania as soon as the prairie land was opened for settlement. Then came farmers and small tradesmen from every part of the old Holy Roman Empire. The English-speaking Evangelical Lutheran Church organized in 1849; the Church of God in 1851; Trinity Reformed Church of the Synod of the Reformed Church that offered German and English Sabbath schools in 1852; the Roman Catholics, with a few Irish among the Germans, in 1857; the United Brethren Church in 1858; Trinity Church of the Evangelical Association, with German and English Sunday schools, in 1860; and the German-speaking Evangelical Lutheran Church in 1868. [6]
The German speakers brought their singing traditions with them. The first singing society in Cincinnati, Ohio, met in a tavern on Thursdays in 1838. It must have been a liedertafel because "The singers seated themselves around a table, and alongside the music book of each stood the quart of beer." [7]
Male choruses from Louisville, Kentucky, and Madison, Indiana, both located on the Ohio river, joined a Cincinnati sängerfest in 1849 with delegations that arrived from Columbus, Saint Louis, and Milwaukee. [8] Its unaccompanied vocal music was a combination of familiar German composers, like Mozart, and ones who wrote for four-part male choruses like Franz Abt [9] and Friedrich Silcher. [10]
Wyandot County organized its first sängerbund, the Upper Sandusky Maennerchor, in 1858. They attended the Buffalo sängerfest in 1860. It lost some younger members during the Civil War, but continued to send groups to sängerfests. By 1884 there was less support for preserving the traditions of their "German-born fathers," but it still met every Sunday and Thursday. [11]
Of the five founding members profiled in the 1884 county history, two were members of the German Lutheran Church. Two emigrated from Saxony in the east, one from Westphalia in the north, one from Württemberg in the southwest, and one from Switzerland. In Europe, one was a physician, one a goldsmith, one a wagon maker, one a mechanic, and one a student. The first to arrive came with his brother in 1849; the rest immigrated between 1850 and 1858. Ewald Brauns organized the "fine instrumental bands which have been the pride of their city so many years." [12]
While individuals who joined German-speaking churches and musical organizations may have maintained old world traditions, others spread their singing traditions when they joined local community institutions like the Masons and Odd Fellows. [13]
Charlotte Vetter’s family moved from Kassel in Hesse to Oberlin, Ohio, [14] where she was born toward the end of the Civil War in 1865. [15] She married Luther Halsey Gulick, whose father and grandfather had been Presbyterian missionaries in Hawaii. [16]
She remembered, for twenty years beginning sometime around 1890, she, her husband, and children "camped on the Thames River" in Connecticut. They were in their mid-twenties when they embarked on their lonely errands into the wilderness. The Gulicks soon "invited friends and relatives to camp nearby. One summer there were seventy-five people about us in family groups." To fill time between meals, they fell back on habits acquired in religious meetings:
"Every morning we all met to sing. Sometimes we gathered around a fire, according to the weather; but unless it rained we met out under the sky, and sang sometimes for hours at a time. Our favorites were some of the immortal old hymns. If I could ask those who made that group what they now remember of those summers with the greatest pleasure, I believe that most would speak of the singing together." [17]
She and several of her in-laws founded private girls’ camps that became models for others. Gulick’s brother, Edward Leeds Gulick, established Aloha Hive in Vermont in 1905. [18] He was a Congregational minister in Groton, Connecticut. [19]
Edward’s wife, the former Harriet Marie Farnsworth, was the sister of the Charles Hubert Farnsworth who founded Hanoum in Vermont in 1909. [20] He collaborated with Cecil Sharp on the collection that introduced "The Keeper" to America, [21] and taught public-school music methods at Teacher’s College, Columbia. [22]
Most important, Vetter Gulick and her husband established Sebago in Maine in 1907 where they experimented with what became the Camp Fire Girls. In 1915, a publicist for the camp told would-be imitators:
"After breakfast in the bungalow all went to the craft house, where every morning they met to sing. The girls sat Turk-fashion on the floor facing Hiiteni [Vetter Gulick] and Alaska [Edith Kempthorne], who had taken her place at the piano. Two carefully selected hymns were
sung, then everyone stood and repeated the Lord’s prayer, after which they sang more hymns and camp songs to their heart’s content. It was difficult to stop singing. Often Hiiteni allowed the singing hour to encroach upon craft-work time." [23]
For them, as for their German ancestors, it was the singing that mattered, not the songs.
End Notes
Some of this material appeared in a different form in Camp Songs, Folk Songs.
1. Albert Bernhardt Faust. The German Element in the United States. Boston: Mifflin, volume 1, 1909. 580.
2. Larry Nial Holcomb. "A History of the Cooperative Recreation Service." PhD diss. University of Michigan, 1972. 63.
3. "John Conrad Rohrbough." Ancestry website. His father was Johann Reinhart Rohrbach who lived in Höchstadt. [24] His wife’s parents moved from Basel to Philadelphia to Virginia. [25]
4. "Elmore George Rohrbough." Progressive Men of Western Colorado. Chicago: A. W. Bowen and Company, 1905. 85–86.
5. I lived near Upper Sandusky in the early 1970s and visited the Wyandot County 4-H day camp in 1974.
6. The History of Wyandot County Ohio. Chicago: Leggett, Conaway and Company, 1884. 538–542.
7. Charles Frederic Goss. Cincinnati, the Queen City, 1788-1912. Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1912. 465. Liedertafil were discussed in the post for 14 April 2019.
8. Goss. 466. Sängerfest were discussed in the post for 14 April 2019. The significance of the Cincinnati festival was discussed by Barbara Lorenzkowski in Sounds of Ethnicity. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010. 110.
9. Abt moved from Saxony to Zürich where he wrote volkstümliches lied that were "easily mistaken for genuine folksong." [26] The "Foot Traveler" was included in an 1885 school music-book, School Bells. [27] Osbourne McConathy added it to the 1922 revision of the third volume of the Progressive Music Series. [28]
10. Silcher became a musician after meeting Carl Maria von Weber, mentioned in the post for 14 April 2019. Silcher was famous for opposing Wilhelm I of Württemberg in 1824, but today is known for his arrangements of German folk songs. [29]
11. Wyandot County. 548, 551.
12. Wyandot County. John Agerter, 555; Adolphus Billhardt, 570; Ewald Brauns, 572; John K. Engel, 588; John Seider, 647.
13. In Upper Sandusky, Billhardt, Engel, and Seiler were members of the Free and Accepted Masons. Agerter and Engel were members of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows.
14. Katherine Gulick Fricker . "John Vetter." Geni website. 17 April 2016.
15. "Charlotte ‘Lottie’ Emily Gulick (Vetter)." Geni website. 4 December 2016.
16. The immigrant Hendrick van Gulick left Amsterdam for New York in the 1600s. [30] His father, Jan Schalcken van Gulick, was born in Jülich. [31] The duchy of Gülich was an early battleground in the Counter Reformation. The Dutch Republic took control, then the Spanish in 1622. [32]
17. Mrs. Luther Halsey Gulick. "Introduction." In Ethel Rogers. Sebago-Wohelo Camp Fire Girls. Battle Creek, Michigan: Good Health Publishing Company, 1915. 14.
18. Wayne Henry Friedman. "Edward Leeds Gulick, Sr." Geni website. Last updated: 1 December 2016.
19. Frances Gulick Jewett. Luther Halsey Gulick: Missionary in Hawaii, Micronesia, Japan, and China. London: Elliott Stock. Copyrighted by Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society of Boston in 1895. 308.
20. Martha H. Wiencke. "Charles Hubert Farnsworth." Thetford Historical Society website. March 2006. The siblings were born in Turkey to Congregational missionaries.
21. Cecil J. Sharp and Charles H. Farnsworth. Folk-songs, Chanteys, and Singing Games. New York: H. W. Gray, 1909.
22. Wiencke. One of his students was Charles Leonhard, [33] mentioned in the post for 8 July 2018.
23. Rogers. 48. She was using their camp names. Kempthorne was from Australia.
24. "Antoni Reger." Ancestry website.
25. "Catherine Shook." Ancestry website.
26. Edward F. Kravitt. "Franz Abt." Grove Music Online. Edited by L. Macy. Quoted by Wikipedia. "Franz Abt."
27. James Cartwright Macy and L. O. Emerson. School Bells. Cleveland: S. Brainard’s Sons, 1884.
28. Horatio Parker, Osbourne McConathy, Edward Bailey Birge, and W. Otto Miessner. Progressive Music Series. Boston: Silver, Burdett and Company, 1922 edition. Book 3.
29. Wikipedia. "Friedrich Silcher."
30. Gene Daniell. "Hendrick Gulick." Geni website. 16 October 2018.
31. "Jan Schalcken van Gulick." Geni website. 27 October 2017.
32. Wikipedia. "Jülich."
33. George N. Heller. Charles Leonhard. Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1995. 40.
The failure of the Revolution of 1848 in German-speaking central Europe sent refugees to the United States. Historians tend to emphasize the intellectuals who immigrated, but many more came for economic reasons.
By 1900, before the influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, 54% of Cincinnati’s population was German. Migrants sailing on the Hamburg America line debarked at Hoboken, New Jersey (58% German), and headed up the Hudson for the Erie Canal. At the transfer point to Lake Erie, Buffalo, New York, was 43% German. Detroit, Michigan, on the narrows between Lakes Erie and Huron, was 41% German. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Lake Michigan was 70%. Along the Mississippi where the Rock Island railroad crossed the river, Davenport, Iowa, was 62% German. Saint Louis, Missouri, may have been slave country, but it sat on the Mississippi river where the Missouri branched north to good farmlands in the interior. Its population was 45% German. [1] These are the blue areas on the map near the bottom of the rightmost column.
The most important of these locations for camp songs was Ohio where Lynn Rohrbough established his cooperative publishing house in 1929. [2] His immigrant ancestor, John Conrad Rohrbough, had moved from Bavaria in the middle 1700s, and settled in what became Hampshire County, West Virginia. [3] His father, George Elmore Rohrbough, relocated to the Aspen area in Colorado. [4]
In Upper Sandusky, forty-some miles northwest of Rohrbough’s Delaware, Ohio, [5] Germans trickled west from Pennsylvania as soon as the prairie land was opened for settlement. Then came farmers and small tradesmen from every part of the old Holy Roman Empire. The English-speaking Evangelical Lutheran Church organized in 1849; the Church of God in 1851; Trinity Reformed Church of the Synod of the Reformed Church that offered German and English Sabbath schools in 1852; the Roman Catholics, with a few Irish among the Germans, in 1857; the United Brethren Church in 1858; Trinity Church of the Evangelical Association, with German and English Sunday schools, in 1860; and the German-speaking Evangelical Lutheran Church in 1868. [6]
The German speakers brought their singing traditions with them. The first singing society in Cincinnati, Ohio, met in a tavern on Thursdays in 1838. It must have been a liedertafel because "The singers seated themselves around a table, and alongside the music book of each stood the quart of beer." [7]
Male choruses from Louisville, Kentucky, and Madison, Indiana, both located on the Ohio river, joined a Cincinnati sängerfest in 1849 with delegations that arrived from Columbus, Saint Louis, and Milwaukee. [8] Its unaccompanied vocal music was a combination of familiar German composers, like Mozart, and ones who wrote for four-part male choruses like Franz Abt [9] and Friedrich Silcher. [10]
Wyandot County organized its first sängerbund, the Upper Sandusky Maennerchor, in 1858. They attended the Buffalo sängerfest in 1860. It lost some younger members during the Civil War, but continued to send groups to sängerfests. By 1884 there was less support for preserving the traditions of their "German-born fathers," but it still met every Sunday and Thursday. [11]
Of the five founding members profiled in the 1884 county history, two were members of the German Lutheran Church. Two emigrated from Saxony in the east, one from Westphalia in the north, one from Württemberg in the southwest, and one from Switzerland. In Europe, one was a physician, one a goldsmith, one a wagon maker, one a mechanic, and one a student. The first to arrive came with his brother in 1849; the rest immigrated between 1850 and 1858. Ewald Brauns organized the "fine instrumental bands which have been the pride of their city so many years." [12]
While individuals who joined German-speaking churches and musical organizations may have maintained old world traditions, others spread their singing traditions when they joined local community institutions like the Masons and Odd Fellows. [13]
Charlotte Vetter’s family moved from Kassel in Hesse to Oberlin, Ohio, [14] where she was born toward the end of the Civil War in 1865. [15] She married Luther Halsey Gulick, whose father and grandfather had been Presbyterian missionaries in Hawaii. [16]
She remembered, for twenty years beginning sometime around 1890, she, her husband, and children "camped on the Thames River" in Connecticut. They were in their mid-twenties when they embarked on their lonely errands into the wilderness. The Gulicks soon "invited friends and relatives to camp nearby. One summer there were seventy-five people about us in family groups." To fill time between meals, they fell back on habits acquired in religious meetings:
"Every morning we all met to sing. Sometimes we gathered around a fire, according to the weather; but unless it rained we met out under the sky, and sang sometimes for hours at a time. Our favorites were some of the immortal old hymns. If I could ask those who made that group what they now remember of those summers with the greatest pleasure, I believe that most would speak of the singing together." [17]
She and several of her in-laws founded private girls’ camps that became models for others. Gulick’s brother, Edward Leeds Gulick, established Aloha Hive in Vermont in 1905. [18] He was a Congregational minister in Groton, Connecticut. [19]
Edward’s wife, the former Harriet Marie Farnsworth, was the sister of the Charles Hubert Farnsworth who founded Hanoum in Vermont in 1909. [20] He collaborated with Cecil Sharp on the collection that introduced "The Keeper" to America, [21] and taught public-school music methods at Teacher’s College, Columbia. [22]
Most important, Vetter Gulick and her husband established Sebago in Maine in 1907 where they experimented with what became the Camp Fire Girls. In 1915, a publicist for the camp told would-be imitators:
"After breakfast in the bungalow all went to the craft house, where every morning they met to sing. The girls sat Turk-fashion on the floor facing Hiiteni [Vetter Gulick] and Alaska [Edith Kempthorne], who had taken her place at the piano. Two carefully selected hymns were
sung, then everyone stood and repeated the Lord’s prayer, after which they sang more hymns and camp songs to their heart’s content. It was difficult to stop singing. Often Hiiteni allowed the singing hour to encroach upon craft-work time." [23]
For them, as for their German ancestors, it was the singing that mattered, not the songs.
End Notes
Some of this material appeared in a different form in Camp Songs, Folk Songs.
1. Albert Bernhardt Faust. The German Element in the United States. Boston: Mifflin, volume 1, 1909. 580.
2. Larry Nial Holcomb. "A History of the Cooperative Recreation Service." PhD diss. University of Michigan, 1972. 63.
3. "John Conrad Rohrbough." Ancestry website. His father was Johann Reinhart Rohrbach who lived in Höchstadt. [24] His wife’s parents moved from Basel to Philadelphia to Virginia. [25]
4. "Elmore George Rohrbough." Progressive Men of Western Colorado. Chicago: A. W. Bowen and Company, 1905. 85–86.
5. I lived near Upper Sandusky in the early 1970s and visited the Wyandot County 4-H day camp in 1974.
6. The History of Wyandot County Ohio. Chicago: Leggett, Conaway and Company, 1884. 538–542.
7. Charles Frederic Goss. Cincinnati, the Queen City, 1788-1912. Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1912. 465. Liedertafil were discussed in the post for 14 April 2019.
8. Goss. 466. Sängerfest were discussed in the post for 14 April 2019. The significance of the Cincinnati festival was discussed by Barbara Lorenzkowski in Sounds of Ethnicity. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010. 110.
9. Abt moved from Saxony to Zürich where he wrote volkstümliches lied that were "easily mistaken for genuine folksong." [26] The "Foot Traveler" was included in an 1885 school music-book, School Bells. [27] Osbourne McConathy added it to the 1922 revision of the third volume of the Progressive Music Series. [28]
10. Silcher became a musician after meeting Carl Maria von Weber, mentioned in the post for 14 April 2019. Silcher was famous for opposing Wilhelm I of Württemberg in 1824, but today is known for his arrangements of German folk songs. [29]
11. Wyandot County. 548, 551.
12. Wyandot County. John Agerter, 555; Adolphus Billhardt, 570; Ewald Brauns, 572; John K. Engel, 588; John Seider, 647.
13. In Upper Sandusky, Billhardt, Engel, and Seiler were members of the Free and Accepted Masons. Agerter and Engel were members of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows.
14. Katherine Gulick Fricker . "John Vetter." Geni website. 17 April 2016.
15. "Charlotte ‘Lottie’ Emily Gulick (Vetter)." Geni website. 4 December 2016.
16. The immigrant Hendrick van Gulick left Amsterdam for New York in the 1600s. [30] His father, Jan Schalcken van Gulick, was born in Jülich. [31] The duchy of Gülich was an early battleground in the Counter Reformation. The Dutch Republic took control, then the Spanish in 1622. [32]
17. Mrs. Luther Halsey Gulick. "Introduction." In Ethel Rogers. Sebago-Wohelo Camp Fire Girls. Battle Creek, Michigan: Good Health Publishing Company, 1915. 14.
18. Wayne Henry Friedman. "Edward Leeds Gulick, Sr." Geni website. Last updated: 1 December 2016.
19. Frances Gulick Jewett. Luther Halsey Gulick: Missionary in Hawaii, Micronesia, Japan, and China. London: Elliott Stock. Copyrighted by Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society of Boston in 1895. 308.
20. Martha H. Wiencke. "Charles Hubert Farnsworth." Thetford Historical Society website. March 2006. The siblings were born in Turkey to Congregational missionaries.
21. Cecil J. Sharp and Charles H. Farnsworth. Folk-songs, Chanteys, and Singing Games. New York: H. W. Gray, 1909.
22. Wiencke. One of his students was Charles Leonhard, [33] mentioned in the post for 8 July 2018.
23. Rogers. 48. She was using their camp names. Kempthorne was from Australia.
24. "Antoni Reger." Ancestry website.
25. "Catherine Shook." Ancestry website.
26. Edward F. Kravitt. "Franz Abt." Grove Music Online. Edited by L. Macy. Quoted by Wikipedia. "Franz Abt."
27. James Cartwright Macy and L. O. Emerson. School Bells. Cleveland: S. Brainard’s Sons, 1884.
28. Horatio Parker, Osbourne McConathy, Edward Bailey Birge, and W. Otto Miessner. Progressive Music Series. Boston: Silver, Burdett and Company, 1922 edition. Book 3.
29. Wikipedia. "Friedrich Silcher."
30. Gene Daniell. "Hendrick Gulick." Geni website. 16 October 2018.
31. "Jan Schalcken van Gulick." Geni website. 27 October 2017.
32. Wikipedia. "Jülich."
33. George N. Heller. Charles Leonhard. Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1995. 40.
Sunday, April 14, 2019
Folk Revival - Germany
Topic: Folk Music Revival
The English folk revival, as mentioned in the post for 7 April 2019, was partly a reaction against events precipitated by the 1707 Act of Union that ended conflicts with Scots, and partly an outgrowth of the rise of a middle class in an economy dependent more on trade and textiles than agriculture.
The religious wars in Hapsburg-controlled lands did not end until Josef II issued the Patent of Toleration in 1781 that allowed Protestants to exist so long as they did not erect churches. [1] In other parts of the Holy Roman Empire, which he headed, religion was dictated by the beliefs of hereditary leaders.
The Empire finally died when Napoléon defeated the Hapsburgs at Austerlitz in 1804. [2] By then, many parts of the German-speaking states and Switzerland had been invaded. Interest in the rights of man promoted by the French Revolution mingled with the realities of military defeat and economic chaos.
A number of intellectuals, including university students, wanted a state larger than a duchy that was capable of defending its people. [3] Since it couldn’t be based on heredity or religion, they sought some other criteria to define themselves.
Johann Gottfried Herder had suggested in 1766 that nations were composed of individuals who shared a language that socialized them into a common culture. [4] This implied a criticism of his native Prussia where Friedrich Wilhelm III spoke French better than German. [5]
He refined his view of history after reading Michael Denis’ translation of James MacPherson’s Ossian collection mentioned in the post for 7 April 2019. [6] Herder implied German-speakers could recover the cultural integrity they lost in the Renaissance by reading poetry written in the Middle Ages. [7] He published his first collection of folk songs in the 1778 Volkslieder. [8]
In his preface to the Volkslieder, Herder emphasized folk songs must be heard to be appreciated. [9] Even though the "verse, form and contents be bad, the song will live and will be sung. It will be improved upon by people, but the soul of the song, the poetic tone, and melody will remain." [10]
The Lutheran’s [11] emphasis on the ballad as something sung set his interests apart from those of the English who stressed the words. The act of singing, rather than the antiquity of the texts, became the way middling volk asserted their importance [12] in a society still marked by rigid class lines.
In 1809, while Napoléon still controlled large parts of the former Holy Roman Empire, Carl Friedrich Zelter organized a liedertafel in Berlin where twenty-four men met to sing around a table in imitation of King Arthur. The repertoire was innocuous songs about nature, [13] but everything the group did dramatized Herder’s view that a language was shaped by the environment where people lived, "their own earth and sky." [14] Within a few years new groups were organized along the Rhine. [15]
The same year, in Zürich, [16] Hans Georg Nägeli suggested "if people started singing together with hundreds of thousands, from any background whatsoever, they would feel more closely related to one another to such an extent that it would mean a decisive step towards a more complete humanity." [17] The son of a Swiss-Reformed rector [18] organized a male liederkranz to sing four-part music.
In 1823, Nägeli was considering moving to Frankfort-am-Main and scheduled a series of lectures on music for the commoner. He followed with a lecture tour the next year in the southwest. His lectures were published in Stuttgart in 1823. [19] James Garratt said, "by 1830, male-voice choirs on the Stuttgart model had sprung up in around two dozen towns in Württemberg, Baden and Bavaria." [20]
Würzburg invited several liederkranz to come together in 1828. [21] John Tibbetts said "the participants loved it so much that two years later that had a huge Sängerfest in Franfurt-am-Maim." [22] He noted it was a free city, "a neutral ground where Protestants and Catholics together could sing." [23]
The repertoire became more political in the 1830s and 1840s, when songs from the 1813 uprising against Napoléon were sung. Especially popular were poems by Theodor Körner. [24] He had written some to German folk melodies and sung them to a guitar or recited them in camp before he died at Gadebusch in 1813. [25]
Some Körner poems were set to music by Carl Maria von Weber in 1815. [26] This excited the jealousies of professional musicians who believed amateur groups should limit themselves to the hunting and drinking songs [27] of elite student clubs, [28] and pay to hear trained musicians, like themselves, perform more complex music.
Many of these vocal groups did not survive the repression that followed the failure of the 1848 revolution. Barbara Lorenzkowski remarked, singers turned to folk music [29] in groups renamed sängerbunds. Such local texts overtly denied support for a supra-state identity associated with the early liedertafel, but they also may have been protests against the hegemony being imposed by Prussia.
End Notes
1. Wikipedia. "Patent of Toleration."
2. Wikipedia. "Holy Roman Empire."
3. Many proposed "a modern German nation-state based upon liberal democracy, constitutionalism, representation, and popular sovereignty." [30] The dream animated the Revolutions of 1848, which were snuffed by conflicts between Prussia and the Hapsburgs who wanted to control the German-speaking state. [31] Their term, "pan German," was used for different ends by the Nazis, and fell into disfavor. Wikipedia had entries instead on "Romantic Nationalism," "German Nationalism," and "Civic Nationalism."
4. Michael Forster. "Johann Gottfried von Herder." Standford University Plato website. 23 October 2001; last updated 25 August 2017. He cited Herder’s On the Change of Taste from 1766, This Too a Philosophy of History, and On the Cognition and Sensation.
5. Rulemann Friedrich Eylert. Characteristic Traits and Domestic Life of Frederick William III, King of Prussia. Translated by Jonathan Birch. London: George Bell, 1845. 140–141. The emphasis on French culture was mentioned by Wilson [6] and by Godfried van Benthem van den Bergh. [32]
6. William A. Wilson. "Herder, Folklore and Romantic Nationalism." Journal of Popular Culture 6:819–835:1978. 821. Wilson stressed Herder was influenced by the notes that drew on ideas developed in 1725 by Giambattista Vico in Scienza Nuova.
7. Wilson. 824. One could point to 1232 when Frederick II granted princes territorial autonomy within the Holy Roman Empire as the time when the idea of a shared culture began to disintegrate. [33]
8. Wilson said it was retitled Stimmen der Volker in Liedern after Herder’s death (page 828). "Lieder" is the German word for song.
9. Louise Kathryn Goebel. "Herder’s Conception of Popular Poetry." BA thesis in German. University of Illinois, June 1912. 12.
10. Herder. Preface to Volkslieder. Translated by Goebel. 13.
11. Andrew Hamilton. "Herder’s Theory of the Volksgeist." Counter-Currents website. 20 May 2011. "Ordained in 1765, Herder became assistant master (teacher) at the Lutheran cathedral school in Riga."
12. Herder wrote: "there is only one class in the state, the Volk (not the rabble) and the king belongs to this class as well as the peasant." Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität. Translated by Robert Reinhold Ergang. Herder and the Foundations of German Nationalism. New York: Octagon Books, 1966 edition. 206.
13. John C. Tibbetts. Schumann: A Chorus of Voices. Milwaukee: Amadeus Press, 2010. 59–60.
14. Quotation from Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Translated as Ideas on the Philosophy of History of Mankind by T. Churchill. New York: Bergman Publishers, 1966 edition. 197. Cited by Alan Patten. "‘The Most Natural State’: Herder and Nationalism." Princeton University website. June 2010.
Elsewhere Patten said "Herder also associated nations and peoples with a particular territory, marked by a certain climate and topography." William Wilson observed: "From the writings of Charles de Montesquieu, Herder received further support for his concept of independent culture types. From them he also received a new idea-that these culture types are to a large degree determined by the physical environment in which nations are located." [23]
15. Tibbetts. 60.
16. Zürich had been a battlefield in 1799. [35]
17. Quoted by Kristinz Lajosi and Andreas Stynen. "Introduction." 1–13 in Choral Societies and Nationalism in Europe. Edited by Lajosi and Stynen. Leiden: Brill, 2005. 3.
18. "Hans Georg Nägeli." Wetzipedia website.
19. Celia Applegate. Bach in Berlin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Publication information and page number not provided in on-line version.
20. James Garratt. Music, Culture and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 117.
21. Tibbetts. 60. Garratt said the first regional festival was held in Plochingen, Würtemburg, in June 1827. [36] Charles Frederic Goss thought the Würzburg festival occurred in 1845. [37]
22. Tibbetts. 60. Sängerfests were festivals that brought together musical groups from several areas; some were small, and others drew from large geographic areas.
23. Tibbetts. 60.
24. Garratt. 188.
25. Wikipedia. "Lyre and Sword." The collection was published in 1814 as Leyer und Schwerdt. [38]
26. Carl Maria von Weber and Theodor Körner. Leyer und Schwerdt, opus 41. Berlin: A. M. Schlesinger, 1815. It was republished in 1830 and 1848.
27. Garratt. 120.
28. The student drinking tradition grew out of the kneipe held by the studentenverbindungen, who were members of the still-strong aristocracy. The also were known for their dueling traditions and promotion of military values. [39]
29. Barbara Lorenzkowski. Sounds of Ethnicity. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010. 107. While her book focuses on Buffalo, New York, it is the best book in English on choral singing traditions in Germany.
30. Dirk Verheyen. The German Question: A Cultural, Historical, and Geopolitical Exploration. Boulder: Westview Press, 1999. 7. Cited by Wikipedia, German Nationalism.
31. Verheyen. 7–8.
32. Godfried van Benthem van den Bergh. "Herder and the Idea of a Nation." Human Figurations. May 2018.
33. Wikipedia. "Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor."
34. Wilson. 821.
35. Wikipedia. "Switzerland in the Napoleonic Era."
36. Garratt. 117.
37. Charles Frederic Goss. Cincinnati, the Queen City, 1788-1912. Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1912.
38. Theodor Körner. Leyer und Schwerdt. Berlin: Nicolai Universitäs- und Landesbibliothek, 1814.
39. German Wikipedia. "Studentenverbindung."
The English folk revival, as mentioned in the post for 7 April 2019, was partly a reaction against events precipitated by the 1707 Act of Union that ended conflicts with Scots, and partly an outgrowth of the rise of a middle class in an economy dependent more on trade and textiles than agriculture.
The religious wars in Hapsburg-controlled lands did not end until Josef II issued the Patent of Toleration in 1781 that allowed Protestants to exist so long as they did not erect churches. [1] In other parts of the Holy Roman Empire, which he headed, religion was dictated by the beliefs of hereditary leaders.
The Empire finally died when Napoléon defeated the Hapsburgs at Austerlitz in 1804. [2] By then, many parts of the German-speaking states and Switzerland had been invaded. Interest in the rights of man promoted by the French Revolution mingled with the realities of military defeat and economic chaos.
A number of intellectuals, including university students, wanted a state larger than a duchy that was capable of defending its people. [3] Since it couldn’t be based on heredity or religion, they sought some other criteria to define themselves.
Johann Gottfried Herder had suggested in 1766 that nations were composed of individuals who shared a language that socialized them into a common culture. [4] This implied a criticism of his native Prussia where Friedrich Wilhelm III spoke French better than German. [5]
He refined his view of history after reading Michael Denis’ translation of James MacPherson’s Ossian collection mentioned in the post for 7 April 2019. [6] Herder implied German-speakers could recover the cultural integrity they lost in the Renaissance by reading poetry written in the Middle Ages. [7] He published his first collection of folk songs in the 1778 Volkslieder. [8]
In his preface to the Volkslieder, Herder emphasized folk songs must be heard to be appreciated. [9] Even though the "verse, form and contents be bad, the song will live and will be sung. It will be improved upon by people, but the soul of the song, the poetic tone, and melody will remain." [10]
The Lutheran’s [11] emphasis on the ballad as something sung set his interests apart from those of the English who stressed the words. The act of singing, rather than the antiquity of the texts, became the way middling volk asserted their importance [12] in a society still marked by rigid class lines.
In 1809, while Napoléon still controlled large parts of the former Holy Roman Empire, Carl Friedrich Zelter organized a liedertafel in Berlin where twenty-four men met to sing around a table in imitation of King Arthur. The repertoire was innocuous songs about nature, [13] but everything the group did dramatized Herder’s view that a language was shaped by the environment where people lived, "their own earth and sky." [14] Within a few years new groups were organized along the Rhine. [15]
The same year, in Zürich, [16] Hans Georg Nägeli suggested "if people started singing together with hundreds of thousands, from any background whatsoever, they would feel more closely related to one another to such an extent that it would mean a decisive step towards a more complete humanity." [17] The son of a Swiss-Reformed rector [18] organized a male liederkranz to sing four-part music.
In 1823, Nägeli was considering moving to Frankfort-am-Main and scheduled a series of lectures on music for the commoner. He followed with a lecture tour the next year in the southwest. His lectures were published in Stuttgart in 1823. [19] James Garratt said, "by 1830, male-voice choirs on the Stuttgart model had sprung up in around two dozen towns in Württemberg, Baden and Bavaria." [20]
Würzburg invited several liederkranz to come together in 1828. [21] John Tibbetts said "the participants loved it so much that two years later that had a huge Sängerfest in Franfurt-am-Maim." [22] He noted it was a free city, "a neutral ground where Protestants and Catholics together could sing." [23]
The repertoire became more political in the 1830s and 1840s, when songs from the 1813 uprising against Napoléon were sung. Especially popular were poems by Theodor Körner. [24] He had written some to German folk melodies and sung them to a guitar or recited them in camp before he died at Gadebusch in 1813. [25]
Some Körner poems were set to music by Carl Maria von Weber in 1815. [26] This excited the jealousies of professional musicians who believed amateur groups should limit themselves to the hunting and drinking songs [27] of elite student clubs, [28] and pay to hear trained musicians, like themselves, perform more complex music.
Many of these vocal groups did not survive the repression that followed the failure of the 1848 revolution. Barbara Lorenzkowski remarked, singers turned to folk music [29] in groups renamed sängerbunds. Such local texts overtly denied support for a supra-state identity associated with the early liedertafel, but they also may have been protests against the hegemony being imposed by Prussia.
End Notes
1. Wikipedia. "Patent of Toleration."
2. Wikipedia. "Holy Roman Empire."
3. Many proposed "a modern German nation-state based upon liberal democracy, constitutionalism, representation, and popular sovereignty." [30] The dream animated the Revolutions of 1848, which were snuffed by conflicts between Prussia and the Hapsburgs who wanted to control the German-speaking state. [31] Their term, "pan German," was used for different ends by the Nazis, and fell into disfavor. Wikipedia had entries instead on "Romantic Nationalism," "German Nationalism," and "Civic Nationalism."
4. Michael Forster. "Johann Gottfried von Herder." Standford University Plato website. 23 October 2001; last updated 25 August 2017. He cited Herder’s On the Change of Taste from 1766, This Too a Philosophy of History, and On the Cognition and Sensation.
5. Rulemann Friedrich Eylert. Characteristic Traits and Domestic Life of Frederick William III, King of Prussia. Translated by Jonathan Birch. London: George Bell, 1845. 140–141. The emphasis on French culture was mentioned by Wilson [6] and by Godfried van Benthem van den Bergh. [32]
6. William A. Wilson. "Herder, Folklore and Romantic Nationalism." Journal of Popular Culture 6:819–835:1978. 821. Wilson stressed Herder was influenced by the notes that drew on ideas developed in 1725 by Giambattista Vico in Scienza Nuova.
7. Wilson. 824. One could point to 1232 when Frederick II granted princes territorial autonomy within the Holy Roman Empire as the time when the idea of a shared culture began to disintegrate. [33]
8. Wilson said it was retitled Stimmen der Volker in Liedern after Herder’s death (page 828). "Lieder" is the German word for song.
9. Louise Kathryn Goebel. "Herder’s Conception of Popular Poetry." BA thesis in German. University of Illinois, June 1912. 12.
10. Herder. Preface to Volkslieder. Translated by Goebel. 13.
11. Andrew Hamilton. "Herder’s Theory of the Volksgeist." Counter-Currents website. 20 May 2011. "Ordained in 1765, Herder became assistant master (teacher) at the Lutheran cathedral school in Riga."
12. Herder wrote: "there is only one class in the state, the Volk (not the rabble) and the king belongs to this class as well as the peasant." Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität. Translated by Robert Reinhold Ergang. Herder and the Foundations of German Nationalism. New York: Octagon Books, 1966 edition. 206.
13. John C. Tibbetts. Schumann: A Chorus of Voices. Milwaukee: Amadeus Press, 2010. 59–60.
14. Quotation from Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Translated as Ideas on the Philosophy of History of Mankind by T. Churchill. New York: Bergman Publishers, 1966 edition. 197. Cited by Alan Patten. "‘The Most Natural State’: Herder and Nationalism." Princeton University website. June 2010.
Elsewhere Patten said "Herder also associated nations and peoples with a particular territory, marked by a certain climate and topography." William Wilson observed: "From the writings of Charles de Montesquieu, Herder received further support for his concept of independent culture types. From them he also received a new idea-that these culture types are to a large degree determined by the physical environment in which nations are located." [23]
15. Tibbetts. 60.
16. Zürich had been a battlefield in 1799. [35]
17. Quoted by Kristinz Lajosi and Andreas Stynen. "Introduction." 1–13 in Choral Societies and Nationalism in Europe. Edited by Lajosi and Stynen. Leiden: Brill, 2005. 3.
18. "Hans Georg Nägeli." Wetzipedia website.
19. Celia Applegate. Bach in Berlin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Publication information and page number not provided in on-line version.
20. James Garratt. Music, Culture and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 117.
21. Tibbetts. 60. Garratt said the first regional festival was held in Plochingen, Würtemburg, in June 1827. [36] Charles Frederic Goss thought the Würzburg festival occurred in 1845. [37]
22. Tibbetts. 60. Sängerfests were festivals that brought together musical groups from several areas; some were small, and others drew from large geographic areas.
23. Tibbetts. 60.
24. Garratt. 188.
25. Wikipedia. "Lyre and Sword." The collection was published in 1814 as Leyer und Schwerdt. [38]
26. Carl Maria von Weber and Theodor Körner. Leyer und Schwerdt, opus 41. Berlin: A. M. Schlesinger, 1815. It was republished in 1830 and 1848.
27. Garratt. 120.
28. The student drinking tradition grew out of the kneipe held by the studentenverbindungen, who were members of the still-strong aristocracy. The also were known for their dueling traditions and promotion of military values. [39]
29. Barbara Lorenzkowski. Sounds of Ethnicity. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010. 107. While her book focuses on Buffalo, New York, it is the best book in English on choral singing traditions in Germany.
30. Dirk Verheyen. The German Question: A Cultural, Historical, and Geopolitical Exploration. Boulder: Westview Press, 1999. 7. Cited by Wikipedia, German Nationalism.
31. Verheyen. 7–8.
32. Godfried van Benthem van den Bergh. "Herder and the Idea of a Nation." Human Figurations. May 2018.
33. Wikipedia. "Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor."
34. Wilson. 821.
35. Wikipedia. "Switzerland in the Napoleonic Era."
36. Garratt. 117.
37. Charles Frederic Goss. Cincinnati, the Queen City, 1788-1912. Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1912.
38. Theodor Körner. Leyer und Schwerdt. Berlin: Nicolai Universitäs- und Landesbibliothek, 1814.
39. German Wikipedia. "Studentenverbindung."
Sunday, April 7, 2019
Folk Music Revival - England
Topic: Folk-Music Revival
"Kumbaya" became well known through the commercial folk-music revival in the 1960s. Fans of the popular music style have an agreed upon history that it began with Pete Seeger [1] in the 1940s and spread through popular groups like The Weavers [2] and Kingston Trio in the 1950s. It flourished in the 1960s with soloists like Joan Baez [3] and Bob Dylan only to die from a combination of political fatigue and changes in adolescent taste marked by the appearance of The Beatles. [4]
That chronology is accurate in that it highlights the artists who were most popular. What it fails to do is explain why the movement arose in the first place because it only documents the contributions of Seeger. In fact, the commercial folk music revival drew together many musical currents that each was the product of an earlier folk revival.
They all were political, since the mere acknowledgment society is stratified is controversial. Historians of medieval Europe used "folk" and "popular" as interchangeable labels for the arts of commoners in a two-tiered, agrarian society dominated by courts, manors, and churches. When urban areas emerged, the word "popular" was reallocated to merchants and skilled tradesmen. Folklore remained the domain of rural peoples. [5] Perhaps populaire or vernacular [6] would be a better term today since popular has become synonymous with mass media sales.
The beatification of the folk occurred in the nineteenth century with modernization that took the form of industrialism in England and political unification in central and eastern Europe. Some intellectuals reacted by positing an idyllic past that could be used as a paradigm for addressing then contemporary conditions.
Thomas Percy published the defining English collection in 1765 during the reign of George III. People still were coming to terms with the 1707 Act of Union that eliminated the Scots parliament. [7] Then, when Anne died in 1714, the last of the Stuarts was replaced with the German-speaking Hanovers.
James MacPherson had threatened to reignite the Jacobite conflicts in 1760 when he published Fragments of Ancient Poetry. [8] He claimed he had collected Gaelic ballads in the Scots highlands [9] written by Ossian, a third-century poet. [10] This implied Celts were the first great artists of the United Kingdom. Most important, they thrived before the Romans conquered the island. [11]
Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry [12] included both Scots and English ballads, but emphasized their age. They came from the period when Henry VII established the Tudors in 1485. [13] Popular knowledge of the middle ages was scant in the mid-1700s, and the term Gothic was used. Kenneth Clark noted the term implied both the flowering of medieval arts and the Goths [14] who sacked Rome in 410. [15]
Neither MacPherson nor Percy were purists; each revised their ballads for publication, and MacPherson probably created much of his material. As Danni Glover noted, both were writing for a newly emerging upper middle class market with readers who wanted "romantic wildness" presented in "a smooth, elegant style." [16]
Both excited the imagination of other writers. Goethe and Johann Gottfried Herder were influenced by MacPherson. [17] Walter Scott published his The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border after reading Percy. [18]
At the time the two men were writing, the idea of an imagined story like a novel had not yet emerged. Each gave their works the illusion of history by claiming they were based on old manuscripts. [19] Percy made his available. MacPherson did not. [20]
Demands for textual purity came in the nineteenth century when scholars began collecting what they assumed were relics of the past. They began defining the traits that made the texts and tunes unique to the United Kingdom. Not surprisingly, they exhumed musical forms like pentatonic scales that existed before post-Bachian musical styles were introduced by Händel in the court of George I and by Haydn during the reign of George III. [21]
Francis James Child went farther. The Harvard professor set out to publish "every valuable copy of every known ballad" from English and Scots tradition, including manuscript versions, and variants from Germany and Scandinavia. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads [22] became the new master corpus.
As mentioned in the post for 6 February 2019, Child’s major impact in this country began in 1917 when Cecil Sharp found versions of old ballads still being sung in the Southern Appalachians. [23] That stimulated collectors to begin searching for what they still believed were survivals of some defunct tradition.
When Baez recorded "Kumbaya" on her first album in 1962, [24] she also performed three Child ballads: "Matty Groves" (Child 81), "Geordie" (209), and the "House Carpenter" (243). Percy noted the first was "ancient, and has been popular; we find it quoted in many old plays." [25] He did not mention the other two, though both were reported from Scotland and England according to Child. [26]
End Notes
1. Seeger will be discussed in a future post.
2. The Weavers were discussed in the post for 3 October 2017.
3. Baez was discussed in the post for 9 October 2017.
4. Wikipedia. "American Folk-Music Revival." This is as good a quick summary as exists online.
5. Modern folklorists have changed their focus from traditional art forms and anthropology to the study of communication and sociology, and changed the name of their field to folkloristics.
6. This term was used by Marina Ritzarev. "‘A Singing Peasant’: An Historical Look at National Identity in Russian Music." Le Web Pédagogique website. 2014.
7. Steve Newman. Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. 44.
8. James Macpherson. Fragments of Ancient Poetry. Edinburgh: G. Hamilton and J. Balfour, 1760.
9. Wikipedia. "Ossian" and "James Macpherson."
10. "Fragments of Ossian, an Invented Early Scots Epic Poem." British Museum website.
11. Danni Glover. "Studies in Language Change in Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. MPhil thesis. University of Glasgow, 2014. 15.
12. Thomas Percy. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. London: J. Dodsley, 1765.
13. Stephanie Barczewski. Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 100.
14. Kenneth Clark. The Gothic Revival. London: Constable and Company, 1928; 1964 Penguin edition. 24–25. "in 1750 the middle age was still one dark welter from which the Goths alone emerged with a convenient name" (page 24.)
15. Wikipedia. "Goths."
16. Glover. 17.
17. Wikipedia, Ossian.
18. Ray M. Lawless. Folksingers and Folksongs in America. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1965 edition. 271.
19. Glover. 38. She was discussing the work of Ian Watts. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkley: University of California Press, 1957.
20. MacPherson’s use of verisimilitude led to charges that his work was a forgery, rather than a piece of creative writing like what is now called historical fiction.
21. This was discussed in more detail in Camp Songs, Folk Songs.
22. Francis James Child. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882-1898. Quotation from "Advertisement to Part I," 1:vii (five volume edition).
23. Cecil James Sharp and Olive Dame Campbell. English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917.
24. Joan Baez. Joan Baez in Concert. Vanguard VRS9112. 1962.
25. Thomas Percy. Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript. Edited by John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall. London: Trübner, 1867–1868. Quotation from Child 2:243 (five volume edition).
26. Both appeared in volume four of the five volume edition of Child.
"Kumbaya" became well known through the commercial folk-music revival in the 1960s. Fans of the popular music style have an agreed upon history that it began with Pete Seeger [1] in the 1940s and spread through popular groups like The Weavers [2] and Kingston Trio in the 1950s. It flourished in the 1960s with soloists like Joan Baez [3] and Bob Dylan only to die from a combination of political fatigue and changes in adolescent taste marked by the appearance of The Beatles. [4]
That chronology is accurate in that it highlights the artists who were most popular. What it fails to do is explain why the movement arose in the first place because it only documents the contributions of Seeger. In fact, the commercial folk music revival drew together many musical currents that each was the product of an earlier folk revival.
They all were political, since the mere acknowledgment society is stratified is controversial. Historians of medieval Europe used "folk" and "popular" as interchangeable labels for the arts of commoners in a two-tiered, agrarian society dominated by courts, manors, and churches. When urban areas emerged, the word "popular" was reallocated to merchants and skilled tradesmen. Folklore remained the domain of rural peoples. [5] Perhaps populaire or vernacular [6] would be a better term today since popular has become synonymous with mass media sales.
The beatification of the folk occurred in the nineteenth century with modernization that took the form of industrialism in England and political unification in central and eastern Europe. Some intellectuals reacted by positing an idyllic past that could be used as a paradigm for addressing then contemporary conditions.
Thomas Percy published the defining English collection in 1765 during the reign of George III. People still were coming to terms with the 1707 Act of Union that eliminated the Scots parliament. [7] Then, when Anne died in 1714, the last of the Stuarts was replaced with the German-speaking Hanovers.
James MacPherson had threatened to reignite the Jacobite conflicts in 1760 when he published Fragments of Ancient Poetry. [8] He claimed he had collected Gaelic ballads in the Scots highlands [9] written by Ossian, a third-century poet. [10] This implied Celts were the first great artists of the United Kingdom. Most important, they thrived before the Romans conquered the island. [11]
Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry [12] included both Scots and English ballads, but emphasized their age. They came from the period when Henry VII established the Tudors in 1485. [13] Popular knowledge of the middle ages was scant in the mid-1700s, and the term Gothic was used. Kenneth Clark noted the term implied both the flowering of medieval arts and the Goths [14] who sacked Rome in 410. [15]
Neither MacPherson nor Percy were purists; each revised their ballads for publication, and MacPherson probably created much of his material. As Danni Glover noted, both were writing for a newly emerging upper middle class market with readers who wanted "romantic wildness" presented in "a smooth, elegant style." [16]
Both excited the imagination of other writers. Goethe and Johann Gottfried Herder were influenced by MacPherson. [17] Walter Scott published his The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border after reading Percy. [18]
At the time the two men were writing, the idea of an imagined story like a novel had not yet emerged. Each gave their works the illusion of history by claiming they were based on old manuscripts. [19] Percy made his available. MacPherson did not. [20]
Demands for textual purity came in the nineteenth century when scholars began collecting what they assumed were relics of the past. They began defining the traits that made the texts and tunes unique to the United Kingdom. Not surprisingly, they exhumed musical forms like pentatonic scales that existed before post-Bachian musical styles were introduced by Händel in the court of George I and by Haydn during the reign of George III. [21]
Francis James Child went farther. The Harvard professor set out to publish "every valuable copy of every known ballad" from English and Scots tradition, including manuscript versions, and variants from Germany and Scandinavia. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads [22] became the new master corpus.
As mentioned in the post for 6 February 2019, Child’s major impact in this country began in 1917 when Cecil Sharp found versions of old ballads still being sung in the Southern Appalachians. [23] That stimulated collectors to begin searching for what they still believed were survivals of some defunct tradition.
When Baez recorded "Kumbaya" on her first album in 1962, [24] she also performed three Child ballads: "Matty Groves" (Child 81), "Geordie" (209), and the "House Carpenter" (243). Percy noted the first was "ancient, and has been popular; we find it quoted in many old plays." [25] He did not mention the other two, though both were reported from Scotland and England according to Child. [26]
End Notes
1. Seeger will be discussed in a future post.
2. The Weavers were discussed in the post for 3 October 2017.
3. Baez was discussed in the post for 9 October 2017.
4. Wikipedia. "American Folk-Music Revival." This is as good a quick summary as exists online.
5. Modern folklorists have changed their focus from traditional art forms and anthropology to the study of communication and sociology, and changed the name of their field to folkloristics.
6. This term was used by Marina Ritzarev. "‘A Singing Peasant’: An Historical Look at National Identity in Russian Music." Le Web Pédagogique website. 2014.
7. Steve Newman. Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. 44.
8. James Macpherson. Fragments of Ancient Poetry. Edinburgh: G. Hamilton and J. Balfour, 1760.
9. Wikipedia. "Ossian" and "James Macpherson."
10. "Fragments of Ossian, an Invented Early Scots Epic Poem." British Museum website.
11. Danni Glover. "Studies in Language Change in Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. MPhil thesis. University of Glasgow, 2014. 15.
12. Thomas Percy. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. London: J. Dodsley, 1765.
13. Stephanie Barczewski. Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 100.
14. Kenneth Clark. The Gothic Revival. London: Constable and Company, 1928; 1964 Penguin edition. 24–25. "in 1750 the middle age was still one dark welter from which the Goths alone emerged with a convenient name" (page 24.)
15. Wikipedia. "Goths."
16. Glover. 17.
17. Wikipedia, Ossian.
18. Ray M. Lawless. Folksingers and Folksongs in America. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1965 edition. 271.
19. Glover. 38. She was discussing the work of Ian Watts. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkley: University of California Press, 1957.
20. MacPherson’s use of verisimilitude led to charges that his work was a forgery, rather than a piece of creative writing like what is now called historical fiction.
21. This was discussed in more detail in Camp Songs, Folk Songs.
22. Francis James Child. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882-1898. Quotation from "Advertisement to Part I," 1:vii (five volume edition).
23. Cecil James Sharp and Olive Dame Campbell. English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917.
24. Joan Baez. Joan Baez in Concert. Vanguard VRS9112. 1962.
25. Thomas Percy. Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript. Edited by John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall. London: Trübner, 1867–1868. Quotation from Child 2:243 (five volume edition).
26. Both appeared in volume four of the five volume edition of Child.
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