The Folk Box Anthology Of American Folk Songs
Folk song has never been a total stranger to city ears. There were urban song-makers and people moving from rural areas to keep the body of traditional music alive in the cities. Any child who had heard a lullaby, a skip-rope rhyme, a tradi- tional song at school was exposed to folk music. Adults would absorb folk song almost as well in the city, sometimes with folk hymns at church or drinking songs or at community sings.
What has happened in the last decade, however, is a totally different development. For the first time of importance, folk music became popular music in the city as well as in less-populated areas.
Since the mid-fifties, folk song has become a major form of American popular music. The reasons are manyfold:
1. The current folk revival-arrival was a musical reaction to the emptiness, vacuity and monotony of the five years of poor rock 'n' roll that preceded it.
2. The "revival-arrival" was a musical extension of the post-war do-it-yourself trend. Increasing reliance on ma- chines and services by specialists had cut most Americans off the limb of self-reliance to which so many had clung since frontier days. The major trend away from being a mere recipient-spectator in life had its expression in all sorts of home crafts, the spread of photography as a mass artistic expression, for instance. Musically, this spurred the folk revival.
The simplicity of most folk melodies and the accessibility of a few simple chords on guitar or banjo have opened the way toward a mass music-making many never realized they were capable of.
3. The search for self-expression in music. In the rural folk tradition, a person would frequently sing about what he felt most keenly, or else retell some diverting, arresting or moral tale in ballad form.
Folk music, on closer examination, held more meaning than the factory-packaged, pat-formula, machine-tooled song written by some Tin Pan Alley songsmith.
At the core of most American folk song, aside from the purely instrumental, is a sort of directness of expression, a link-to-life that is rare in our popular music. The "pop" music purveyors are one arm of a predominately escapist- oriented mass entertainment industry, concerned with myth and romanticism rather than reality, enamored with life's fantasies rather than its hard facts.
Folk music is far from being a totally literal transcription of life. It is irradiated with symbol, metaphor, and legend and its own brand of romanticism. But its fealty to life and to genuine, not imagined, emotions is obvious. Folk song deals in passion rather than antiseptic hand-holding love. It does not shy from facing suffering, anger, social injustice head-on. Instead of the fanciful escapist fripperies that dominate Tin Pan Alley lyrics, folk song has its roots and its blossoms in the real world.
This has been a magnet for a generation growing up in the wake of World War II. "The time has come," the youngsters were saying, "for treating us like adults. Perhaps if our parents would have faced more facts and did less escaping there would have been a better world for us to be born. into. We want to have sexual freedom, and freedom to know what the real story is. Don't treat us as children and we won't act like children..." This has been the thinking of a bold new generation of war babies now coming into their late teens and early twenties.
Social and political commitment. This search for a personal meaningfulness in music also leads to a demand by the new audience for a relation of their art to their social environment. The fear, conformity and silence of the early fifties, when McCarthyism frightened or inhibited social comment and political involvement, has ceased, at least for now. But the late fifties and early sixties saw a group of youngsters who weren't going to be silenced by anything or anyone. They spoke out boldly about the world's inequities and in- justices. Folk music, in the form of topical songs and con- temporary broadsides, was a logical outgrowth.
The local Americans who are involved in the folk revival- arrival are the sort of young activists who are joining the Peace Corps, are volunteering for the hazardous service with the Southern integration movement, and otherwise trying to do something about their world. This is the generation that is singing the songs of the poor and the downtrodden, and as such, they are going beyond the music to be interested in the lives of the two great unresolved groups in American life: those who suffer from poverty and those who suffer from discrimination.
It would be unrealistic to regard the folk revival-arrival as something that happened totally outside the mainstream of American business. Somewhere in the 1957-1958 period, when The Kingston Trio was scoring a tremendous popular success, the organized elements of the American music industry realized that "there was gold in them thar hillbillies."
Then ensued the giddiest part of the folk revival. A tasteless and superficial television show called "Hootenanny" started in the spring of 1963. Quickly it spurred a six month commercial debauch of American folk song. Dozens of tour. ng troupes bearing the "hootenanny" banner spread around the land, going to auditoriums and colleges and places where only big dance bands and rock 'n' roll performers had been Defore. The recording market was glutted with folk music that was distorted, hoked-up, disguised, and destroyed. For good six months of 1963, there was such folk music in the air of America as to nearly invalidate the whole movement. But popularization did not do lasting harm. The vapidity of much of the pop "folk" music soon wore thin on the audience's ears, and a movement toward the better, more serious and esthetically valid folk music was under way. Not everything that had been done to exploit the popularity of folk music by the business interests had been to its detriment. In several instances, the popular folk arrangements of such groups as Peter, Paul and Mary and The Chad Mitchell Trio had made inroads on educating and elevating taste.
Even that goliath of Detroit, The Ford Motor Company, realized the appeal of folk music and the importance of the vast youth market by initiating a large series of traveling concerts called "The Ford Caravan of Music-Folk and Jazz Wing-Ding."
In spite of, not because of, the organized music industry, folk music grew in popularity and broadened the audience for serious folk song, of the sort contained in The Folk Box.
QUESTIONS OF STYLE
One of the things that has kept many lovers of fine music from an appreciation of folk song has been the strange breadth of "acceptable" vocal qualities. There is, indeed, tremendous latitude in vocal quality among native folk singers or even among the leaders in the urban revival.
A whole new set of standards must be taken into account in the appreciation of folk music. Granted, a beautiful voice and instrumental virtuosity are universally appealing, whether in the backwoods or the conservatory. Beyond that, standards for folk and primitive versus bel canto are worlds apart.
The voice of a native singer can be beautiful even if it is rough, scrapy, harsh, bellowing, lacking in nuance or subtlety. This is not to say that a Memphis Minnie, a Jean Ritchie, a Bulgarian peasant woman singing in incredibly complex intervals, a Tom Ashley or a Leadbelly are not capable vocalists. They are. So, too, are the "city" singers Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Ed McCurdy, Theodore Bikel and dozens of others.
But it is the middle-ground of stylists that seem to cause the greatest problems for those bringing a set of classical- operatic-bel canto standards to folk song. Other things than vocal polish are important. The content of the song, the expressiveness of the lyrics, the involvement of the singer with the meaning of the song, the method of delivery whether dramatic or theatrical, or even in a traditional ballad- singer's deadpan absence of emotionalism-all these are more important in folk song than clarity of tone, subtlety of shading, range, etc.
Unfortunately, folk singers themselves have clouded the issue of standards in performance. Because of the looseness. of measuring quality of rural singers, many professional singers of folk song have taken greater liberties than they should with matters of technique. Also, many youngsters singing mostly for themselves have been unwisely moved into seeking careers when the instrinsic talent was simply not there.
The standards for listening to folk music are diverse and must remain flexible. So many regional idiosyncrasies enter into the picture women in the mountains have nasal constricted voices, Negro women have large, sinuous, open- throated styles that no one standard of esthetic merit can be applied. But even in the most primitive of native folk singers' voices there is a new sort of beauty to be dis- covered. The roughness or "crudeness" of some archaic styles have a distinct beauty of their own. Repeated listening and a resetting of standards to incorporate new elements of musical beauty will open the doors to a fascinating new language of musical expression.
THE URBAN FOLK MOVEMENT
For all the wholesome currents in the folk song movement, there are many strange and seemingly inconsistent elements that have also kept "outsiders" from understanding the social patterns and music of folk music.
There was a time when folk song was widely regarded as an adjunct of a left-wing political movement. At still an- other time, it was only the roseate, let's-all-pull-together world of the Campfire Boys and Girls. Today, the urban revival has borrowed from this past, but has gone on to incorporate other contemporary social movements.
For a time young intellectuals, despairing of any outlets for their art or philosophies, entered into a phase of nihilistic hedonism, the beatnik. The beats espoused freedom, anti- authoritarianism, unconventionality in dress, speech, manners. They saw their only salvation in "being on the road," talking the feeling-denying language of the jazz hipster, the liberation and the anti-social "kick" of smoking marijuana. The transcendence of the beat was to be found along the highways, outside the inhibiting, constraining city.
Some of the elements of the beat world have gravitated toward the urban folk revival. For them it is a better and more socially responsible outlet. There is still freedom, there is the romanticism of the primitive, the noble savage, there is the weapon of direct honesty in being and saying what is felt.
The unconventionality of some of the young urban folk leaders should not detract from their validity as people, artists, spokesmen, or leaders. The rigid, conformist world of Madison Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue has not done such a good job in running American life that it can dismiss a widespread current among the youth simply because of a few surface idiosyncrasies.
Most important is that the young rebels who have found. direction in folk music are maturing with the more basic, less complicated standards of rural life and mores. They may feign the life of being Negro bluesmen or mountaineers, but it is an honest search for a better set of values than their middle-class life has presented them with.
BRIEF HISTORY OF THE FOLK SONG REVIVAL
In pre-history, all human knowledge and culture were transmitted by sign language, then through song and speech. Then the written word and the printed word were used as conveyor belts on which one generation would leave its accumulated learning, to pass on to future generations.
Until recently, folk song, tale, legend, myth and riddle. were transmitted almost as they had been in pre-literate societies. The leap from mouth to ear, from elder to child was the route for passing a large body of music. But mass communication and electronics have changed all that. Folk song, ironically, was preserved and codified not only by rural singers, but by a few earnest scholars who saw here the profiles of an oral literature, an oral history that deserved preservation and study.
A brief history of the background of the present revival touches on many persons, but must simultaneously omit many. Only a few of the most important contributors to today's revival will be mentioned.
One of the things that has kept many lovers of fine music from an appreciation of folk song has been the strange breadth of "acceptable" vocal qualities. There is, indeed, tremendous latitude in vocal quality among native folk singers or even among the leaders in the urban revival.
A whole new set of standards must be taken into account in the appreciation of folk music. Granted, a beautiful voice and instrumental virtuosity are universally appealing, whether in the backwoods or the conservatory. Beyond that, standards for folk and primitive versus bel canto are worlds apart.
The voice of a native singer can be beautiful even if it is rough, scrapy, harsh, bellowing, lacking in nuance or subtlety. This is not to say that a Memphis Minnie, a Jean Ritchie, a Bulgarian peasant woman singing in incredibly complex intervals, a Tom Ashley or a Leadbelly are not capable vocalists. They are. So, too, are the "city" singers Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Ed McCurdy, Theodore Bikel and dozens of others.
But it is the middle-ground of stylists that seem to cause the greatest problems for those bringing a set of classical- operatic-bel canto standards to folk song. Other things than vocal polish are important. The content of the song, the expressiveness of the lyrics, the involvement of the singer with the meaning of the song, the method of delivery whether dramatic or theatrical, or even in a traditional ballad- singer's deadpan absence of emotionalism-all these are more important in folk song than clarity of tone, subtlety of shading, range, etc.
Unfortunately, folk singers themselves have clouded the issue of standards in performance. Because of the looseness. of measuring quality of rural singers, many professional singers of folk song have taken greater liberties than they should with matters of technique. Also, many youngsters singing mostly for themselves have been unwisely moved into seeking careers when the instrinsic talent was simply not there.
The standards for listening to folk music are diverse and must remain flexible. So many regional idiosyncrasies enter into the picture women in the mountains have nasal constricted voices, Negro women have large, sinuous, open- throated styles that no one standard of esthetic merit can be applied. But even in the most primitive of native folk singers' voices there is a new sort of beauty to be dis- covered. The roughness or "crudeness" of some archaic styles have a distinct beauty of their own. Repeated listening and a resetting of standards to incorporate new elements of musical beauty will open the doors to a fascinating new language of musical expression.
THE URBAN FOLK MOVEMENT
For all the wholesome currents in the folk song movement, there are many strange and seemingly inconsistent elements that have also kept "outsiders" from understanding the social patterns and music of folk music.
There was a time when folk song was widely regarded as an adjunct of a left-wing political movement. At still an- other time, it was only the roseate, let's-all-pull-together world of the Campfire Boys and Girls. Today, the urban revival has borrowed from this past, but has gone on to incorporate other contemporary social movements.
For a time young intellectuals, despairing of any outlets for their art or philosophies, entered into a phase of nihilistic hedonism, the beatnik. The beats espoused freedom, anti- authoritarianism, unconventionality in dress, speech, manners. They saw their only salvation in "being on the road," talking the feeling-denying language of the jazz hipster, the liberation and the anti-social "kick" of smoking marijuana. The transcendence of the beat was to be found along the highways, outside the inhibiting, constraining city.
Some of the elements of the beat world have gravitated toward the urban folk revival. For them it is a better and more socially responsible outlet. There is still freedom, there is the romanticism of the primitive, the noble savage, there is the weapon of direct honesty in being and saying what is felt.
The unconventionality of some of the young urban folk leaders should not detract from their validity as people, artists, spokesmen, or leaders. The rigid, conformist world of Madison Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue has not done such a good job in running American life that it can dismiss a widespread current among the youth simply because of a few surface idiosyncrasies.
Most important is that the young rebels who have found. direction in folk music are maturing with the more basic, less complicated standards of rural life and mores. They may feign the life of being Negro bluesmen or mountaineers, but it is an honest search for a better set of values than their middle-class life has presented them with.
BRIEF HISTORY OF THE FOLK SONG REVIVAL
In pre-history, all human knowledge and culture were transmitted by sign language, then through song and speech. Then the written word and the printed word were used as conveyor belts on which one generation would leave its accumulated learning, to pass on to future generations.
Until recently, folk song, tale, legend, myth and riddle. were transmitted almost as they had been in pre-literate societies. The leap from mouth to ear, from elder to child was the route for passing a large body of music. But mass communication and electronics have changed all that. Folk song, ironically, was preserved and codified not only by rural singers, but by a few earnest scholars who saw here the profiles of an oral literature, an oral history that deserved preservation and study.
A brief history of the background of the present revival touches on many persons, but must simultaneously omit many. Only a few of the most important contributors to today's revival will be mentioned.
The most celebrated of the 19th-century ballad scholars in America was Francis James Child, a Harvard professor. His collection, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, is a landmark in poetry scholarship of the last century. Child, like other early folklore scholars, was primarily interested in the literary content of balladry, rather than the musical or sociological facets. He codified the 305 principal "classic" ballads of the English-speaking world, in a canon that is still used today to identify this or that ballad as Child #12 or Child #205. His work has recently undergone the long-needed revision the addition of the music and variants-by a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Bertrand Bronson, in an invaluable series being published by the Princeton University Press.
Another giant in the study of folk song. John A. Lomax, was a different sort of man completely. Lomax did not work in the library, but took his research into the field. Beginning with a fascination with cowboy songs and songs of the Texas Negroes, he began a lifetime of travel in search of Americana in the memories of the plain people of this country. He and his son, Alan Lomax, who continued and expanded on his work, are among the greatest collectors in the history of folk song. Long before the world recognized any intrinsic worth in these tunes and ditties, the Lomaxes had tried to light the fires of enthusiasm among the intellectual world for the riches existing in folk song.
Another famous collector was the Briton, Cecil Sharp, who carried his quest for old English songs to the Cumber- land Mountains of Kentucky, where he was to find many intact in the daily singing of families such as the Ritchies of
Viper. Kv.
Falling somewhere between the academics and the field collectors was Carl Sandburg. A poet in the vein of Walt Whitman, who also had "heard America singing," Sandburg could not avoid being fascinated by the poetic outpouring he heard in the farm-houses and on the ranchlands of America. While touring colleges in the late twenties amassing research for his famous Lincoln biography, Sandburg used to "sing for his supper"; inevitably, he sang folk songs.
Charles Seeger, head of the famous Seeger clan, was a musicologist at Harvard who was quick to sense the depth and substance of folk song. He went on to become one of the early "ethnomusicologists," a new breed of specialist who studied the musics of folk and primitive peoples stylistically, ethnologically and comparatively. The elder Seeger is the inventor of a still little-known device called the Melo- graph, a machine that has transformed the nature of study. ing non-Western music by visually recording music that could be notated on a graph.
During the thirties, there was a great deal of folk and topical song connected with the organizing of the labor movement. The names of Aunt Molly Jackson, Jim Garland, Harry McClintock and others dominate this era. Songs of an earlier. era in labor history, those of the Wobblies, returned to popularity at this point, but there was much being written for the struggles of the Kentucky and Pennsylvania coal miners, the textile and auto workers, and elsewhere around the country.
The early thirties saw no major "star" on the city scene, but there was one singer, Jimmie Rodgers, who dominated the popular music industry. Rodgers, born in Meridian, Miss., is known as the father of country music. Although he wrote and performed commercially-oriented popular songs in the hillbilly vein, he was essentially an outgrowth of mountain folk song.
Personalities of rural performers-turned-city-musicians began to appear in the late thirties and early forties. The Kentuckian, Burl Ives, was to make the first breakthrough to a mass audience for folk music with his easy, unpressured way with a folk melody. Josh White of Greenville, S. C., was to fuse an unbridled sexuality with a highly personalized vocal and guitar style and a musical expressiveness from out of youthful experience into a commanding vehicle for Negro music. With the heavy interest in Negro life and culture that developed in the Roosevelt era and the early years of World War II, Josh White was symbol, spokesman and interpreter for a vast reservoir of Negro blues and religious song. In Chicago, at about this time, Big Bill Broonzy, a sophisticated bluesman, was exploring other aspects of Negro thinking and music for a growing audience.
The development of professional folk singers or balladeers as nightclub and concert singers thus brought to the fore such figures as Richard Dyer-Bennet, Burl Ives, Cynthia Gooding and Oscar Brand. On another level, the first major group in the early forties were The Almanac Singers, a group that included Pete Seeger, Millard Lampell (the writer), Woody Guthrie and Butch Hawes. Indeed, out of Almanac House, their old residence on 10th Street in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, were to come many leaders in the sub- sequent folk revival..
Two of the strongest figures of this period were Woody Guthrie, the Oklahoma ballad-maker whom many regard as America's greatest writer of folk songs, and Leadbelly. The latter, as Huddie Ledbetter, was a dynamic, energetic font. of song. He was discovered by John and Alan Lomax in a Louisiana State Prison at Angola in 1938. Leadbelly, with the assistance of the Lomaxes, sang his way to freedom, and was to invigorate the urban folk community with his personality and such songs as The Midnight Special and Goodnight Irene.
Another giant in the study of folk song. John A. Lomax, was a different sort of man completely. Lomax did not work in the library, but took his research into the field. Beginning with a fascination with cowboy songs and songs of the Texas Negroes, he began a lifetime of travel in search of Americana in the memories of the plain people of this country. He and his son, Alan Lomax, who continued and expanded on his work, are among the greatest collectors in the history of folk song. Long before the world recognized any intrinsic worth in these tunes and ditties, the Lomaxes had tried to light the fires of enthusiasm among the intellectual world for the riches existing in folk song.
Another famous collector was the Briton, Cecil Sharp, who carried his quest for old English songs to the Cumber- land Mountains of Kentucky, where he was to find many intact in the daily singing of families such as the Ritchies of
Viper. Kv.
Falling somewhere between the academics and the field collectors was Carl Sandburg. A poet in the vein of Walt Whitman, who also had "heard America singing," Sandburg could not avoid being fascinated by the poetic outpouring he heard in the farm-houses and on the ranchlands of America. While touring colleges in the late twenties amassing research for his famous Lincoln biography, Sandburg used to "sing for his supper"; inevitably, he sang folk songs.
Charles Seeger, head of the famous Seeger clan, was a musicologist at Harvard who was quick to sense the depth and substance of folk song. He went on to become one of the early "ethnomusicologists," a new breed of specialist who studied the musics of folk and primitive peoples stylistically, ethnologically and comparatively. The elder Seeger is the inventor of a still little-known device called the Melo- graph, a machine that has transformed the nature of study. ing non-Western music by visually recording music that could be notated on a graph.
During the thirties, there was a great deal of folk and topical song connected with the organizing of the labor movement. The names of Aunt Molly Jackson, Jim Garland, Harry McClintock and others dominate this era. Songs of an earlier. era in labor history, those of the Wobblies, returned to popularity at this point, but there was much being written for the struggles of the Kentucky and Pennsylvania coal miners, the textile and auto workers, and elsewhere around the country.
The early thirties saw no major "star" on the city scene, but there was one singer, Jimmie Rodgers, who dominated the popular music industry. Rodgers, born in Meridian, Miss., is known as the father of country music. Although he wrote and performed commercially-oriented popular songs in the hillbilly vein, he was essentially an outgrowth of mountain folk song.
Personalities of rural performers-turned-city-musicians began to appear in the late thirties and early forties. The Kentuckian, Burl Ives, was to make the first breakthrough to a mass audience for folk music with his easy, unpressured way with a folk melody. Josh White of Greenville, S. C., was to fuse an unbridled sexuality with a highly personalized vocal and guitar style and a musical expressiveness from out of youthful experience into a commanding vehicle for Negro music. With the heavy interest in Negro life and culture that developed in the Roosevelt era and the early years of World War II, Josh White was symbol, spokesman and interpreter for a vast reservoir of Negro blues and religious song. In Chicago, at about this time, Big Bill Broonzy, a sophisticated bluesman, was exploring other aspects of Negro thinking and music for a growing audience.
The development of professional folk singers or balladeers as nightclub and concert singers thus brought to the fore such figures as Richard Dyer-Bennet, Burl Ives, Cynthia Gooding and Oscar Brand. On another level, the first major group in the early forties were The Almanac Singers, a group that included Pete Seeger, Millard Lampell (the writer), Woody Guthrie and Butch Hawes. Indeed, out of Almanac House, their old residence on 10th Street in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, were to come many leaders in the sub- sequent folk revival..
Two of the strongest figures of this period were Woody Guthrie, the Oklahoma ballad-maker whom many regard as America's greatest writer of folk songs, and Leadbelly. The latter, as Huddie Ledbetter, was a dynamic, energetic font. of song. He was discovered by John and Alan Lomax in a Louisiana State Prison at Angola in 1938. Leadbelly, with the assistance of the Lomaxes, sang his way to freedom, and was to invigorate the urban folk community with his personality and such songs as The Midnight Special and Goodnight Irene.
Guthrie may yet be an even greater influence on Ameri- can folk song. He wrote more than a thousand songs in his most creative period, 1938 to 1948, many of which already bear the stamp of classics: So Long, It's Been Good to Know You, Pastures of Plenty, This Land Is Your Land.
The year 1948 is a major year in American folk song. That year, when Henry A. Wallace ran unsuccessfully on the Progressive party third ticket for President, saw one of the greatest applications of topical songs to a political movement. But on the show business level, 1948 was historic for being the year that The Weavers were organized and the year that Hank Williams was moving into national prominence.
The Weavers grew out of such groups as The Almanac Singers and People's Artists, who had been deeply involved in the Wallace campaign. The original group, Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman, were looking to carry on the earlier singing tradition and to bring a large body of international folk song to a wide audience. After making its debut at The Village Vanguard, the group jumped onto the Hit Parade with Kisses Sweeter Than Wine and Goodnight, Irene. Only the developing fury of political black. listing was to derail the group's train toward success. The group reorganized in 1956 and finally disbanded in 1964, after fifteen successful years.
Williams was a product of, and a hero in, the commercial country music world of Nashville. The Nashville phenomenon had been developing alongside the folk music revival. Much of the composed songs from the Tennessee capital were banal and bore the relationship that pop art does to fine art. Still, a few performers were so infused with self-expres sion and so caught the imagination and served the needs of the "little" man in rural America, that it must be con- sidered as part of the over-all popular musical culture allied to folk music. Williams continued the Jimmie Rodgers tradition, and like "The Singing Brakeman," died prematurely, in 1951, leaving a legacy of music and legend.
From such rivers have flowed thousands of tributaries. The Kingston Trio in 1957 were to do what The Weavers had done before them. With a song by Frank Proffitt, a North Carolina mountaineer, called Tom Dooley, The Kingston Trio started another, perhaps the greatest phase in urban pop- ularity of folk song. Peter, Paul and Mary soon succeeded in reaching even more listeners and to deal in a music of greater depth.
Professional folk performers today must number in the hundreds, opposed to the few dozen who had specialized in folk song in the thirties and forties. This number keeps growing. The Newport Folk Festival of 1964, for example, attracted a total of 70,000 persons and offered 228 per- formers. This is the largest event of its kind, yet still did not encompass the mass of professional and traditional folk singers or the millions of fans.
WHERE TO HEAR FOLK MUSIC
Time was that a folk song devotee in an American city was an isolated aficionado who had to seek out rare re- cordings or rare concerts. This is no longer the case. Such recording companies as Jac Holzman's Elektra Records, Moe Asch's Folkways Records, Maynard and Seymour Solomon's Vanguard Records, and other labels such as Prestige, Arhoolie, Folk-Lyric, Folk-Legacy, Mercury, Delmark, as well as the four majors, Columbia, RCA-Victor, Decca and Capitol, have built a catalogue of folk LPs that staggers the imagi- nation.
Live performances are easy to come by. Thanks to the dedicated efforts of such proponents of old-time music as John Cohen, Mike Seeger, Ralph Rinzler and Israel G. Young, one can hear almost as much good country music in the city as in the country.
Student festivals that have leaned toward authenticity have even helped change the attitudes of professional con- cert managers. Among the best of these festivals are those at the University of Chicago, Syracuse, the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles, Swarthmore and the University of Illinois, which have broadened the scope and deepened the understanding of the student audience. The Newport Folk Festival, now run by a board of seven singers and a nonprofit foundation that returns its profits to the field from which they came, promises to be a leading factor in perpetuating the folk music movement in the United States.
Countless nightclubs and coffeehouses have sprung up in the last few years specializing in good folk music. From coast to coast, new forms for listening to serious, and enjoy. able (the terms are not mutually exclusive) folk song exist. One can hear folk song in the Sunday sings at Washington Square Park in Manhattan, at "Grand Ole Opry," the 39-year- old marathon radio show on station WSM in Nashville; in college dormitories, at Old-Time Fiddler's Conventions in Union Grove, N. C., or Galax, Va. The list is growing daily.
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR IN FOLK MUSIC
As comprehensive an anthology as the music on these four records provide, it must be considered as only a taste. Remember that for each song or artist chosen, another three were considered and had to be rejected. This is a basic col- lection for every home library, but one can continue to build from there. The discography and bibliography at the end of this book will open the door toward further exploration into a limitless world in traditional and contemporary folk music.
Folk song has great variety, in mood, expression and performing style.
There is no such thing as a right way to interpret any song. The rural people perhaps deserve the closest attention, because to them folk song is no surface entertainment, but a deeper form of communication in a world whose communication media they do not have or have limited access to.
Here is a sample of America singing. Joy and sorrow, escape and protest, solace and anger, reverence and irreverence are all here. Listen for the people behind the song, for, in the final analysis, folk song is nothing more nor less than people talking of themselves and the things they hold dear.
Notes by Robert Shelton
The United States is a nation of immigrants. American civilization and culture are a fusion of nearly every other society in the world. To what went before, the immigrants and the immigrant's children added their own.
Driven by poverty, discrimination, wars and the hopelessness of their lives in Europe, millions flocked to ships bound for America. "I left Ire- land and mother because we were poor" goes the line of an old song collected in the Carolinas.
But it was not just escape that pushed the immigrants across the sea. There was the magnetism of a new life in the New World: there was land, polit- ical and religious freedom, a wide-open frontier. A country of opportunity and of hope. These are the lineaments of the American dream that we learn in school. This generation knows all too well how that dream has turned into a nightmare for minority group members. This generation knows that the dream of 18th and 19th century immigrants has not always been realized.
Other millions came here in chains. The West African slave trade, a profitable traffic in human bodies, also imported the men and women who built the American civilization and culture. Although they may have traveled with little baggage to America, the settlers and the slaves carried their cul- tural luggage with them, the folkways, the legends and tales, the holidays and customs, and, inevitably, the songs.
A large legacy of folk culture came with the immigrants because so many of them were of the socio-economic classes to whom folk culture was a method of communication. The bulk of the settlers and slaves were of peasant or working class back- ground.
The year 1948 is a major year in American folk song. That year, when Henry A. Wallace ran unsuccessfully on the Progressive party third ticket for President, saw one of the greatest applications of topical songs to a political movement. But on the show business level, 1948 was historic for being the year that The Weavers were organized and the year that Hank Williams was moving into national prominence.
The Weavers grew out of such groups as The Almanac Singers and People's Artists, who had been deeply involved in the Wallace campaign. The original group, Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman, were looking to carry on the earlier singing tradition and to bring a large body of international folk song to a wide audience. After making its debut at The Village Vanguard, the group jumped onto the Hit Parade with Kisses Sweeter Than Wine and Goodnight, Irene. Only the developing fury of political black. listing was to derail the group's train toward success. The group reorganized in 1956 and finally disbanded in 1964, after fifteen successful years.
Williams was a product of, and a hero in, the commercial country music world of Nashville. The Nashville phenomenon had been developing alongside the folk music revival. Much of the composed songs from the Tennessee capital were banal and bore the relationship that pop art does to fine art. Still, a few performers were so infused with self-expres sion and so caught the imagination and served the needs of the "little" man in rural America, that it must be con- sidered as part of the over-all popular musical culture allied to folk music. Williams continued the Jimmie Rodgers tradition, and like "The Singing Brakeman," died prematurely, in 1951, leaving a legacy of music and legend.
From such rivers have flowed thousands of tributaries. The Kingston Trio in 1957 were to do what The Weavers had done before them. With a song by Frank Proffitt, a North Carolina mountaineer, called Tom Dooley, The Kingston Trio started another, perhaps the greatest phase in urban pop- ularity of folk song. Peter, Paul and Mary soon succeeded in reaching even more listeners and to deal in a music of greater depth.
Professional folk performers today must number in the hundreds, opposed to the few dozen who had specialized in folk song in the thirties and forties. This number keeps growing. The Newport Folk Festival of 1964, for example, attracted a total of 70,000 persons and offered 228 per- formers. This is the largest event of its kind, yet still did not encompass the mass of professional and traditional folk singers or the millions of fans.
WHERE TO HEAR FOLK MUSIC
Time was that a folk song devotee in an American city was an isolated aficionado who had to seek out rare re- cordings or rare concerts. This is no longer the case. Such recording companies as Jac Holzman's Elektra Records, Moe Asch's Folkways Records, Maynard and Seymour Solomon's Vanguard Records, and other labels such as Prestige, Arhoolie, Folk-Lyric, Folk-Legacy, Mercury, Delmark, as well as the four majors, Columbia, RCA-Victor, Decca and Capitol, have built a catalogue of folk LPs that staggers the imagi- nation.
Live performances are easy to come by. Thanks to the dedicated efforts of such proponents of old-time music as John Cohen, Mike Seeger, Ralph Rinzler and Israel G. Young, one can hear almost as much good country music in the city as in the country.
Student festivals that have leaned toward authenticity have even helped change the attitudes of professional con- cert managers. Among the best of these festivals are those at the University of Chicago, Syracuse, the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles, Swarthmore and the University of Illinois, which have broadened the scope and deepened the understanding of the student audience. The Newport Folk Festival, now run by a board of seven singers and a nonprofit foundation that returns its profits to the field from which they came, promises to be a leading factor in perpetuating the folk music movement in the United States.
Countless nightclubs and coffeehouses have sprung up in the last few years specializing in good folk music. From coast to coast, new forms for listening to serious, and enjoy. able (the terms are not mutually exclusive) folk song exist. One can hear folk song in the Sunday sings at Washington Square Park in Manhattan, at "Grand Ole Opry," the 39-year- old marathon radio show on station WSM in Nashville; in college dormitories, at Old-Time Fiddler's Conventions in Union Grove, N. C., or Galax, Va. The list is growing daily.
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR IN FOLK MUSIC
As comprehensive an anthology as the music on these four records provide, it must be considered as only a taste. Remember that for each song or artist chosen, another three were considered and had to be rejected. This is a basic col- lection for every home library, but one can continue to build from there. The discography and bibliography at the end of this book will open the door toward further exploration into a limitless world in traditional and contemporary folk music.
Folk song has great variety, in mood, expression and performing style.
There is no such thing as a right way to interpret any song. The rural people perhaps deserve the closest attention, because to them folk song is no surface entertainment, but a deeper form of communication in a world whose communication media they do not have or have limited access to.
Here is a sample of America singing. Joy and sorrow, escape and protest, solace and anger, reverence and irreverence are all here. Listen for the people behind the song, for, in the final analysis, folk song is nothing more nor less than people talking of themselves and the things they hold dear.
Notes by Robert Shelton
The United States is a nation of immigrants. American civilization and culture are a fusion of nearly every other society in the world. To what went before, the immigrants and the immigrant's children added their own.
Driven by poverty, discrimination, wars and the hopelessness of their lives in Europe, millions flocked to ships bound for America. "I left Ire- land and mother because we were poor" goes the line of an old song collected in the Carolinas.
But it was not just escape that pushed the immigrants across the sea. There was the magnetism of a new life in the New World: there was land, polit- ical and religious freedom, a wide-open frontier. A country of opportunity and of hope. These are the lineaments of the American dream that we learn in school. This generation knows all too well how that dream has turned into a nightmare for minority group members. This generation knows that the dream of 18th and 19th century immigrants has not always been realized.
Other millions came here in chains. The West African slave trade, a profitable traffic in human bodies, also imported the men and women who built the American civilization and culture. Although they may have traveled with little baggage to America, the settlers and the slaves carried their cul- tural luggage with them, the folkways, the legends and tales, the holidays and customs, and, inevitably, the songs.
A large legacy of folk culture came with the immigrants because so many of them were of the socio-economic classes to whom folk culture was a method of communication. The bulk of the settlers and slaves were of peasant or working class back- ground.
Folk culture was especially well-suited for travel and the colonist's life here.
How much eas- ier it was to carry a tale in one's memory rather than a lot of bound books; how much easier to carry a ballad in the mind than a spinet and volumes of printed music.
The songs on Side 1 of The Folk Box were chosen to illustrate some of the contributing forces to the formation of an American folk music. Some will illustrate parent styles of ballad and folk-lyric in Scotland, Ireland and England, Africa, Minnesota or the chant of the Navajo Indians, who were here before the tide of immigration.
Although it is a generalization with many exceptions, American folk song is a product of the fusion of two major musical cultures: those of Scotland, Ireland and England as a unit, with that of West Africa. The exceptions to the generalization are a field that have yet to be fully explored by students or devotees of the folk revival. The Western half of the United States shows the strong influence of the songlore of Mexico and other Spanish-speaking lands. Parts of New England, Louisiana and the Champlain Valley still show strong French influence. In the Midwest, the impress of Scandinavian tradition is greatest. There are dozens of ethnic minorities in America, each of which still manages to retain its folk traditions.
GREENSLEEVES/Cynthia Gooding.
A classic of Anglo-American folk song, with a melody that seems ageless. Little is known of its origin, ex- cept that it comes from England before the 17th century. As many as 40 verses have been collected, but this version pares it down to its most popular form in this country. Cynthia Gooding, who has studied old English ballads deeply, interprets it in a fashion that spans time and oceans. The song's rather earthy origins have disappeared in the face of its lyric beauty.
DOWN IN THE COAL MINE/Ian Campbell Folk Group. The Ian Campbell Folk Group, a contemporary quintet from Britain, takes us into the work setting of the sort of person who emigrated to America. This song was collected by A. L. Lloyd and published first in Coal Dust Ballads (Workers Music Association). The words are believed to have been written by a Durham miner around 1885, to an Irish traditional tune known as The Roving Journey- man or The Red-Haired Boy.
GEORDIE/Ewan MacColl.
Ewan MacColl, one of the leaders in the British folk revival, offers a classic ballad (Child 209) in a stark, unaccompanied style. It concerns the imprisonment of a Scot, and the efforts of his admiring lady to save him. It is believed to have been written about George Gordon, the fourth Earl of Huntley, who died in the battle of Corrishire in 1562. He was im- prisoned in 1554 and released shortly thereafter. An ingratiating melody with an opening verse that is familiar on both sides of the Atlantic.
WHISKEY IN THE JAR/Irish Ramblers. The Irish Ramblers, a contemporary group of three brothers named Clancy, offer this flavorful bit of Old World whimsey. A catchy, infectious drinking song, for fun, not analysis. The Irish, the whiskey jar and versions of this song have all moved to America.
The promise of immigration was followed by the realities of settling the wild new land. From the earliest landings at Plymouth and Jamestown, the colonists were to face hardships, tests to their endurance and their ingenuity. The pioneer spirit was born in or inculcated in the men who built this country.
The settling of the Eastern Seaboard and the Westward Expansion are among the most romantic sa- gas of the modern world. It has been such an epic struggle that countless films, novels, poems and songs have grown out of this adventuresome era.
Songs of the American tradition follow this story along, from the Revolution, through the early political problems, the War of 1812, the emergence of a formal city society and the continuing exploration of the frontier.
Here are a sampling of songs that give the fla- vor of the early years of life on this continent. The songs tell the story in a new way, with a new penetration. Wherever the American pioneer went, he found security, solace and self-expression in folk song. The songs document his movement, his growth and the growth of a new civilization around him.
WHEN FIRST TO THIS COUNTRY/New Lost City Ramblers. An unusual pioneer love song, with so many gaps in its narratives that large portions of the lyrics have obviously been dropped in oral transmission. Performed here in a Southern white mountain string band revival style by Tom Paley and Mike Seeger of The New Lost City Ramblers, a city trio that has consciously and successfully endeavored to re-create the music of the twenties and thirties for the audience of today:
SPRINGFIELD MOUNTAIN/Susan Reed, Susan Reed re-creates what is probably the first popular native-born ballad in America. The song has had at least two lives, a serious version which the colo- nists could empathize with, because snakes did abound in New England, and the perils of nature were always at hand, and as a comic burlesque. This song springs from an actual episode, in 1761, when a Timothy Myrick of Springfield Mountain, Mass. (later Wilbraham), was killed by a rattle-
snake.
GOOD OLD COLONY TIMES/Ed McCurdy. Ed McCurdy sings a bantering tune popular in Britain and early America, also known as The Three Rogues. Recent research, Alan Lomax, the folklorist, has pointed out, indicates that the old belief that colonial New England knew only the staid hymns of the Puritans is quite incorrect. There was anoth- er, brighter and freer life for the Puritans, as this joggy tune illustrates. But the likelihood is that this English tune didn't get popular here un- til 1800, long after colony days.
JEFFERSON AND LIBERTY/Oscar Brand. An election song of 1800 that may have come into popularity, or been changed, after Jefferson's election. It comments on the despised Alien and Sedition Acts. Oscar Brand sings this noblest of all political songs, which is to the tune of Alistair McAlistair.
DARLING COREY/Pete Seeger. The frontier was a place for independence, and many a Pennsylvanian and Kentuckian wanted to be independent of paying Federal taxes on their home-made liquor. This bright little gem of rural moonshining is among the first songs to show a sharp break in American folk song from its British ancestors. Here is the hard-driving banjo, the fast tempo, the high, yodeling mountain singing that seems so ap- propriate for this tune about a hard-drinking, hard-gambling gal named Corey. Pete Seeger, who has done more to popularize American folk song than any other performer, is heard in a 1950 perform- ance.
JESSE JAMES/Jack Elliott. Songs of American badmen, like the earlier English Robin Hood cycle, do much to explain the difference in values between middle-class and "folk." Many folk songs venerate mythical heroes such as Paul Bunyan and other super-men. But here, the reversal of val- ues, as with later songs about Pretty Boy Floyd, Stagolee and other badmen, show a strange sympathy for the outlaw. This is the story of the betrayal of James by a "Judas" seeking a reward, Sung by Jack Elliott, one of the best of the city musici- ans, who went on to assimilate and master rural style.
ROCK ISLAND LINE/Leadbelly. As much a symbol in the American mind of freedom as the ram- bling man is the railroad, Before the highways
and the jet aircraft, the steel rails were a road away from something bad and toward something hope- ful, a new job, a long-parted lover. Leadbelly, the giant of Negro folk song, catches all the dynamism, the strength of the iron horse strutting
down the rails. Here are two pinions of American folk music, Leadbelly and Rock Island Line, joined together with the cross-ties of music.
OREGON TRAIL/Woody Guthrie. One of the lesser-known masterpieces of Woody Guthrie. Al- though Guthrie composed very few original tunes, his reworking and rewording of traditional melo- dies was so gifted that he created new entities. Here is a typical Guthrie veneration of the Amer- ican soil, the beauty of moving around the land- всаре. A latter-day pioneer, he would not be chained in actuality or in his imagination to the life of the city.
SWANNANOA TUNNEL/Erik Darling. A tunnel through Swannanoa Gap, North Carolina, was com- pleted in 1883, and this Southern Mountain tune celebrates the event. Erik Darling, formerly of The Weavers, now of The Rooftop Singers, learned this version from Lee Haring and Frank Hamilton. Also known as John Henry's Hammer Song. Another evocation of the work and struggle that went into the building of America.
How much eas- ier it was to carry a tale in one's memory rather than a lot of bound books; how much easier to carry a ballad in the mind than a spinet and volumes of printed music.
The songs on Side 1 of The Folk Box were chosen to illustrate some of the contributing forces to the formation of an American folk music. Some will illustrate parent styles of ballad and folk-lyric in Scotland, Ireland and England, Africa, Minnesota or the chant of the Navajo Indians, who were here before the tide of immigration.
Although it is a generalization with many exceptions, American folk song is a product of the fusion of two major musical cultures: those of Scotland, Ireland and England as a unit, with that of West Africa. The exceptions to the generalization are a field that have yet to be fully explored by students or devotees of the folk revival. The Western half of the United States shows the strong influence of the songlore of Mexico and other Spanish-speaking lands. Parts of New England, Louisiana and the Champlain Valley still show strong French influence. In the Midwest, the impress of Scandinavian tradition is greatest. There are dozens of ethnic minorities in America, each of which still manages to retain its folk traditions.
GREENSLEEVES/Cynthia Gooding.
A classic of Anglo-American folk song, with a melody that seems ageless. Little is known of its origin, ex- cept that it comes from England before the 17th century. As many as 40 verses have been collected, but this version pares it down to its most popular form in this country. Cynthia Gooding, who has studied old English ballads deeply, interprets it in a fashion that spans time and oceans. The song's rather earthy origins have disappeared in the face of its lyric beauty.
DOWN IN THE COAL MINE/Ian Campbell Folk Group. The Ian Campbell Folk Group, a contemporary quintet from Britain, takes us into the work setting of the sort of person who emigrated to America. This song was collected by A. L. Lloyd and published first in Coal Dust Ballads (Workers Music Association). The words are believed to have been written by a Durham miner around 1885, to an Irish traditional tune known as The Roving Journey- man or The Red-Haired Boy.
GEORDIE/Ewan MacColl.
Ewan MacColl, one of the leaders in the British folk revival, offers a classic ballad (Child 209) in a stark, unaccompanied style. It concerns the imprisonment of a Scot, and the efforts of his admiring lady to save him. It is believed to have been written about George Gordon, the fourth Earl of Huntley, who died in the battle of Corrishire in 1562. He was im- prisoned in 1554 and released shortly thereafter. An ingratiating melody with an opening verse that is familiar on both sides of the Atlantic.
WHISKEY IN THE JAR/Irish Ramblers. The Irish Ramblers, a contemporary group of three brothers named Clancy, offer this flavorful bit of Old World whimsey. A catchy, infectious drinking song, for fun, not analysis. The Irish, the whiskey jar and versions of this song have all moved to America.
The promise of immigration was followed by the realities of settling the wild new land. From the earliest landings at Plymouth and Jamestown, the colonists were to face hardships, tests to their endurance and their ingenuity. The pioneer spirit was born in or inculcated in the men who built this country.
The settling of the Eastern Seaboard and the Westward Expansion are among the most romantic sa- gas of the modern world. It has been such an epic struggle that countless films, novels, poems and songs have grown out of this adventuresome era.
Songs of the American tradition follow this story along, from the Revolution, through the early political problems, the War of 1812, the emergence of a formal city society and the continuing exploration of the frontier.
Here are a sampling of songs that give the fla- vor of the early years of life on this continent. The songs tell the story in a new way, with a new penetration. Wherever the American pioneer went, he found security, solace and self-expression in folk song. The songs document his movement, his growth and the growth of a new civilization around him.
WHEN FIRST TO THIS COUNTRY/New Lost City Ramblers. An unusual pioneer love song, with so many gaps in its narratives that large portions of the lyrics have obviously been dropped in oral transmission. Performed here in a Southern white mountain string band revival style by Tom Paley and Mike Seeger of The New Lost City Ramblers, a city trio that has consciously and successfully endeavored to re-create the music of the twenties and thirties for the audience of today:
SPRINGFIELD MOUNTAIN/Susan Reed, Susan Reed re-creates what is probably the first popular native-born ballad in America. The song has had at least two lives, a serious version which the colo- nists could empathize with, because snakes did abound in New England, and the perils of nature were always at hand, and as a comic burlesque. This song springs from an actual episode, in 1761, when a Timothy Myrick of Springfield Mountain, Mass. (later Wilbraham), was killed by a rattle-
snake.
GOOD OLD COLONY TIMES/Ed McCurdy. Ed McCurdy sings a bantering tune popular in Britain and early America, also known as The Three Rogues. Recent research, Alan Lomax, the folklorist, has pointed out, indicates that the old belief that colonial New England knew only the staid hymns of the Puritans is quite incorrect. There was anoth- er, brighter and freer life for the Puritans, as this joggy tune illustrates. But the likelihood is that this English tune didn't get popular here un- til 1800, long after colony days.
JEFFERSON AND LIBERTY/Oscar Brand. An election song of 1800 that may have come into popularity, or been changed, after Jefferson's election. It comments on the despised Alien and Sedition Acts. Oscar Brand sings this noblest of all political songs, which is to the tune of Alistair McAlistair.
DARLING COREY/Pete Seeger. The frontier was a place for independence, and many a Pennsylvanian and Kentuckian wanted to be independent of paying Federal taxes on their home-made liquor. This bright little gem of rural moonshining is among the first songs to show a sharp break in American folk song from its British ancestors. Here is the hard-driving banjo, the fast tempo, the high, yodeling mountain singing that seems so ap- propriate for this tune about a hard-drinking, hard-gambling gal named Corey. Pete Seeger, who has done more to popularize American folk song than any other performer, is heard in a 1950 perform- ance.
JESSE JAMES/Jack Elliott. Songs of American badmen, like the earlier English Robin Hood cycle, do much to explain the difference in values between middle-class and "folk." Many folk songs venerate mythical heroes such as Paul Bunyan and other super-men. But here, the reversal of val- ues, as with later songs about Pretty Boy Floyd, Stagolee and other badmen, show a strange sympathy for the outlaw. This is the story of the betrayal of James by a "Judas" seeking a reward, Sung by Jack Elliott, one of the best of the city musici- ans, who went on to assimilate and master rural style.
ROCK ISLAND LINE/Leadbelly. As much a symbol in the American mind of freedom as the ram- bling man is the railroad, Before the highways
and the jet aircraft, the steel rails were a road away from something bad and toward something hope- ful, a new job, a long-parted lover. Leadbelly, the giant of Negro folk song, catches all the dynamism, the strength of the iron horse strutting
down the rails. Here are two pinions of American folk music, Leadbelly and Rock Island Line, joined together with the cross-ties of music.
OREGON TRAIL/Woody Guthrie. One of the lesser-known masterpieces of Woody Guthrie. Al- though Guthrie composed very few original tunes, his reworking and rewording of traditional melo- dies was so gifted that he created new entities. Here is a typical Guthrie veneration of the Amer- ican soil, the beauty of moving around the land- всаре. A latter-day pioneer, he would not be chained in actuality or in his imagination to the life of the city.
SWANNANOA TUNNEL/Erik Darling. A tunnel through Swannanoa Gap, North Carolina, was com- pleted in 1883, and this Southern Mountain tune celebrates the event. Erik Darling, formerly of The Weavers, now of The Rooftop Singers, learned this version from Lee Haring and Frank Hamilton. Also known as John Henry's Hammer Song. Another evocation of the work and struggle that went into the building of America.
KENTUCKY MOONSHINER/Ed McCurdy. famous American drinking song, also a descendant of an Irish song on the same delightful proposition. Sung by Ed McCurdy, this song has been compared by the poet Carl Sandburg to the keening of the Gaels. Band 11
GREEN, GREEN, ROCKY ROAD/Alabama School Children. A children's ring game recorded at Lilly's Chapel School, in York, Alabama, in 1950 by Harold Courlander. An elaborate game played by Negro children in the South. An interesting com- mentary on the urban revival is that this song has been beautifully arranged by Len Chandler, a college trained Negro singer, and the version by the pop-folk group, The New Christy Minstrels, became a national hit in 1963.
"Without singing, we have no strength," a Zulu work gang member once told Harold Courlander, an expert on Negro folk traditions. Although the la- borer was an African, the sentiment is universal. One of the most functional uses of folk song is in the day-to-day work situation. In many instan- ces where group work is involved, the use of a work-call leader becomes a vital factor in com- pleting the work on time. Setting a firm tempo, the leader has the members of the work gang res- pond antiphonally. Workers as well as bosses benefit,
Besides setting a rhythmic pace, the work song can be a great morale-builder, relieving drudgery with melody or a catchy lyric. While the most obvious link to Old World tradition is to be found in Negro work song, there are many instances of the work song still in use today in white tradition.
Whether it is a shoeshine boy keeping time, or a cowboy soothing restless cattle, or Menhaden fishermen rhythmically pulling in a net, American music is strong in the traditional work song. Two other bodies of folk song grew out of the work situation: songs about particular trades and crafts and the union songs which helped solidify the workers' movements. What a contrast between the songs of the 19th century wagoners, canal boatmen, railroad men, and the songs of union organizing!
Most of the descriptive songs about trades and crafts were in ballad form, descendants of English and Irish street ballads of the 18th century rather than of the classic ballads about lords and ladies.
A profile of America at work can be drawn through the songs the people have invented and passed on, the songs that helped the work go smoothly, and the songs that described the work, and then, finally, sought to improve the work situation through unions.
-
PICK A BALE OF COTTON/Leadbelly.
Leadbelly had the qualities of a folk hero, beside be- ing one of our greatest folk singers. His strength and virility were real, but they were in a direct line of descendancy from the folk heroes, John Henry and Paul Bunyan. He seemed to embody the indomitable pride of the Negro people. In this bright song of the cotton fields of East Texas, Leadbelly shows that the work song can be joyous. "I was picking a thousand pounds of cotton a day," he said, and this tune makes you believe him.
"Now, this was when I was around Dallas, Texas, picking cotton. I was pickin' a thousand pounds of cotton a day. And the way you get a thousand pounds of cotton a day, you've got to jump around to get it. You can't fool around and pick a thou- sand pounds of cotton a day."
HAUL ON THE BOWLINE/Seafarers Chorus. The Seafarers Chorus featuring Eugene Brice and conducted by Milt Okun perform this old shanty of sailing days. Although this is a very sophisticated set- ting, much of the drive and functionalism of the old sailor's song is re-created. This is believed to be a fragment of an Irish tune. James
Goodfriend has written of this song: "Sweating up' was what those short hard hauls to raise a top-gal- lant or a royal sail in a hard wind were called. It was 'haul on the bowline, the bowline haul' and everybody fell back with all his weight on the rope and then gasped for breath and scrambled for a new grip, while the canvas flapped a few feet higher in the wind and the shanteyman started the next verse."
PADDY WORKS ON THE RAILWAY/Pete Seeger, Pete Seeger sings this fine testimonial to Irish- American rail gangs, also known as Paddy Works on the Erie. The potato famine of 1840 sent thousands of Irish to this country. Many ended up working on such rail lines as the Erie, the Pennsylvania and the Union Pacific. The first rail passenger ser- vice began around 1830, when there were only 23 miles of track. By 1860 America had more than 30,000 miles of track. This melody is presumably Irish, but the sentiments were sweated out on the plains of America.
I RIDE AN OLD PAINT/Harry Jackson. Harry Jackson, the Chicago-born artist who chose life on a Wyoming ranch when a young man and who has fre- quently returned to that life, here sings in definitive cowboy style a classic of the range. We have become so accustomed to hoked-up cowboy songs from film soundtracks that this interpretation might well come as a surprise with its heavy stamp of authenticity. This is a riding song, which lopes along with the gait of the singer's horse. Old Paint, especially its chorus, was used to calm cat- tle who were on the verge of stampeding.
ZEBRA DUN/Cisco Houston. Another side of cowboy life is revealed here by the late Cisco Houston, longtime traveling companion of Woody Guthrie. This is a delightful ballad about a practical joke at the expense of a newcomer to the cat- tle country, but, as the story will reveal, the greenhorn is not to be outsmarted. Folklorists have differed about the origins of this song. John Lomax ascribed it to a Negro camp cook on the Pecos River, but Kenneth S. Goldstein believes it is of white cowboy authorship.
It has been estimated that more than half of all American folk songs are religious in content or origin. Certainly the history of organized religion has been a story of man's use of music to express prayers, hopes and devotion to his God.
The complexity of American religious folk song is readily apparent. Again, as with the bulk of secular folk song, there are two main influences: the Anglo-Scots-Irish and the West African. In this instance more than other genres of folk song, the printed song hymn, anthem or spiritual -- played a greater part than oral transmission. Frequently, the religious songs that were learned from the published hymnals, were to undergo changes through use as the early colonists broke out into the frontier wilderness. Many of these songs, differing regionally and in their texts and melodies, have been called "folk hymns."
One form of notated music that is still flourishing as a living tradition in the South is that of sacred harp singing. To make it easier for members of rural or frontier churches to follow the hymnals, a method of fa-sol-la notation with symbols rather than notes was used. This sacred harp singing leads to some wild and eerie dissonances and harmonies, quite unlike any other choral folk style in the United States.
A recurring, and often thankless, debate that goes on among folk song students is concerned with the origin of the Negro spiritual, which is felt by many to be our greatest form of religious music. One scholar, George Pullen Jackson, has contended persuasively that the Negroes on slave plantations heard the white European-derived religious songs, and "borrowed" them. Much more persuasive is the contention that no matter what the origin of Negro spirituals, the transformation made the songs into something new. The Negro spiritual has become a great treasury of world music, first spread to Europe by a chorus from Fisk University in 1871. Now, concert singers and even opera stars will sing these gems of lyricism and folk poetry. Rich in Biblical allusion and poetic expression, the spirituals are among the proudest product of the merger of European and African traditions into a new matrix of American folk song.
Nowhere does a musical integration exist in more dramatic form in the South than in its religious music. Segregated church congregations may be singing one hymn that another small Negro "praise house" may be singing at the same time. Although the churches may be embattled, the music can and does cross over.
The Negro church, during the crucial racial strife, is social center, command headquarters as well as house of worship. Out of the varied inte- gration battles have grown many religious-inspired "freedom songs," of which there will be more to say on the last side of The Folk Box.
Enthusiasm over Negro religious music from "holy blues" to spirituals to modern gospel -- should not obscure the beautiful devotional group singing in the white mountain gospel tradition. A fine example of this is "Amazing Grace" on Side 5, grouped with other examples of country music.
MARY HAD A BABY/Marilyn Child and Glenn Yarbrough. A modern interpretation of an old Negro Christmas spiritual. Glenn Yarbrough and Marilyn Child have retained the spirit but enlarged the sweep of this tender, almost personal retelling of the birth of Jesus. As in many primitive peoples, religion had an immediacy to the Negroes in slavery that made the Christmas story no distant far-off happening, but an event that seemed recent and close.
The soil of the American countryside was fertile for growing a native folk tradition. In early days, before roads, radios and films, rural folk had to be self-reliant in matters of entertainment and culture. No one would provide these diversions for them, so they learned how to provide them for
themselves.
A direct line of development can be found in American country music, from the old fiddle-banjo combinations to the string bands of the nineteen- twenties and thirties, through such dominant commercial influences as The Carter Family up to the emergence of modern Bluegrass bands and the compan- ion development of a popular country-music industry based in Nashville.
There have been pendulum swings of interest in American folk music between the rural Negro styles and those of the Southern white mountaineer. Negro music had been the dominant interest in the thirties and forties, when the collecting of the Lomaxes was to make such a great impress.
Since 1957, however, there have emerged several dedicated advocates of previously neglected aspects of white country music. This interest went beyond the readily accepted traditional balladeer or instrumentalist. It extended to the curious phenome- non known as "hillbilly" music that flourishing body of composed and commercial rural folk song that sprang from traditional roots into a new trib- utary of popular music.
Such collector-scholar-popularizers as Prof. D. K. Wilgus, Ralph Rinzler, John Cohen and Mike Seeger began to see great musical and human values in the "hillbilly" tradition that had been over- looked by many.
They began by closely studying the commercial country music recordings of the nineteen-twenties and thirties. They found an exciting ensemble style in such colorful old string bands as The Carolina Tarheels, The Skillet-Lickers and others. They traced the genealogy of these string bands right through the various bands of Bill Monroe, popularly known as "The Father of Bluegrass." The city audience responded tentatively, then warmly, to the Bluegrass "movement." The instrumental splash, the interweaving ensembles, the high-pitched, athletic singing, the polish and professionalism of Bluegrass bands led to a whole new pantheon of favored musicians: Monroe, Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt, Carter and Ralph Stanley, the Osborne Brothers. and countless others.
This side of The Folk Box surveys a vast field that the proponents of "hillbilly" music as serious folk expression have exposed us to. We start with the roots in Ireland, through banjo tunes and old- time ballads right up to modern Bluegrass. We stop the survey short of the whole Nashville phenomenon, the large industry spawned by "Grand Ole Opry" and other radio shows which took the old hill country music and made it into America's other popular music.
SLIGO REEL and MOUNTAIN ROAD/Willy Clancy. The roots of American hoedowns, fiddle-banjo combinations and Bluegrass were in Europe. Scottish and Irish pipers and fiddlers came to this country and soon their old jigs, hornpipes and schottiches began to develop American accents. These pipe tunes by Willy Clancy, recorded in Ireland, will show the affinity, rhythmically and in spirit, with the mountain music that was to follow.
OLD JOE CLARK/Eric Weissberg. A brilliant bit of banjo-playing by a city musician, Eric Weissberg, whom some regard the equal, if not the master, of traditional country banjo style. This breakdown is one of the longest and most popular of all Southern Mountain tunes. Verses have been collected in all parts of the United States. So have legends of who the real Joe Clark was. Suffice it to say that this catches the flavor of the rural hoedown.
COO-COO BIRD/Clarence Ashley. A beautiful old-time ballad with modal banjo-playing, performed by Clarence (Tom) Ashley. A re-discovery of 1960, Ashley had a long career in music, from the travel- ing medicine shows at the early part of the century through the string band era and then a new resurgence for appreciative city audiences in the six- ties. With a face as beautifully gnarled as a con- tour map of his own beloved Southern Appalachians, Ashley is a fascinating remnant of another era. This superb song has been sung by hosts of city singers. The curious modal tuning, the wistful- ness and unpressured manner of its vocal delivery, the esthetic richness of its symbolic words, all add up to a classic of old-time folk singing. Band 4 SHADY GROVE/Tom Paley. Tom Paley, an original member of The New Lost City Ramblers, in a fine example of a Southern Mountain courting ly- ric. Some of the stanzas of Shady Grove appear in other hoedowns such as Old Joe Clark and Cindy. It is also done in a modal scale. Paley learned the song from two New Yorkers who first heard it sung by Rufus Crisp of Kentucky.
FLOP-EARED MULE/Eric Weissberg and Marshall Brickman. The greater the attention paid to mountain music and "hillbilly" style, the more complexity became evident. This banjo tune, again played by Eric Weissberg, with another talented city musician, Marshall Brickman, on guitar, demon- strates the most sophisticated of banjo techniques -- "Scruggs picking." A flurry of notes show the banjo's most virtuosic potential, sounds flurrying like confetti in the wind. A detailed explanation of this style of banjo-playing can be found in notes to Folk Banjo Styles (Elektra) and American Scruggs Banjo (Folkways).
NOTTAMUN TOWN/Jean Ritchie. When the famous British collector, Cecil J. Sharp, came to this country around the time of World War I, he was collecting English, not American folk songs. Be- cause of the persistence of tradition, he was able to locate here, songs and styles he couldn't find in England. The Ritchie Family of Viper, Ky., were to be his principal informants. Here, the youngest daughter of the Ritchies, Jean, sings a song
learned from her uncle Jason, a song she goes on to describe in its "strange combination of nonsense words and ethereal tune. We never knew where it came from nor what it meant, but in England I found the same kind of magic, upside-down, inside-out song being sung as part of the ancient, ritualistic Mummers Plays. I am convinced that 'Nottamun Town' had such an origin." It is interesting to compare this song with Bob Dylan's Masters of War on Side 7. Dylan freely adapted this old melody to a new purpose.
Band 8 CRIPPLE CREEK/Doc Watson. Doc Watson in an instrumental version of another old-time hoe- down and square-dance tune. Watson, a blind musician from the hills of western North Carolina, has been astounding city listeners with the fluidity and originality of his guitar technique. Here it flows in all its finery, showing some of the lengths to which the "simple" folk styles have evolved.
PRETTY POLLY/The Dillards. The Dillards, a celebrated Bluegrass band from the Ozarks, in a modern treatment of one of the most famous American murder ballads. It was originally a British come- all-ye called The Gosport Tragedy, but has under- gone great transformations here. In this version, it gets the full Bluegrass treatment, contrapuntal instrumental weaving against the vocal line. Band 10 THE YELLOW ROSE OF TEXAS/George Pegram and Walter Parham. A song dating from the Civil War era that has had a dozen lives, most recently as a popular hit. Because the text rarely varies, Kenneth S. Goldstein says, this "suggests a pos- sible sheet music or book tradition rather than one resulting from oral circulation." It is performed by two North Carolinians, George Pegram and Walter Parham. Pegram's eccentric, lurching vocal adds considerable interest.
Jazz, considered to be America's chief contribution to world music, is a step-child of folk music.
Although jazz modernists have carried the music far from its folk roots, jazz was born in the throats of countless Negro plantation workers and field-hands. The roots of jazz course back to the blues, not the city, sophisticated blues, but the country blues.
The blues form is quite distinct from any musical form to be found in other ethnic musics, but its emotional form is a cousin to many. American blues is comparable to the cante jondo of the Andalusian, the doina of the Rumanian peasant, the fado of the Portuguese.
All have a common emotional relationship. While all these song forms have variety of form and mood, they stress the emotion of sorrow and complaint. They are subjective statements, mostly, about trouble in the singer's life.
American blues is a product of two earlier folk music forms: the field-holler (or arhoolie) and the work song. At sometime in the 19th century -- no one can say for sure these two forms merged into a new style of singing born of trouble. The rhythm necessary for group work was not needed, but the fairly regular beat was there, as well as "the blue tonality," the jazz element that later spasm bands and brass bands were to use to evolve into New Orleans jazz.
After jazz developed into swing and the various permutations of pop music, it was easy to lose the thread of the blues. But countless jazz men have always said that the blues are basic, a jazz man had to have a feeling for the blues or he couldn't play jazz well.
It is worth remembering that the biggest interest in folk music followed hard after the rock 'n' roll craze of the early fifties. It was not surprising then that the young folk audience found the blues of great interest, because most rock 'n' roll was an extension of the blues.
Most unusual perhaps has been the development of a coterie of white city blues singers, some of whom hew closer to rural blues style than many Negro performers who went on to play rhythm and blues or rock 'n' roll. The purists here will still insist that only the Negro can lay claim to definitive blues interpretation.
We disagree with this narrow view, and offer on this side the dramatic evidence of blues by some of the giants of folk blues as well as some by outstanding latter-day interpreters. We feel the current city white interpreters have as much right to sing the blues as anyone. Perhaps not a birth- right, but certainly the qualities of identification and empathy that impel much of the urban folk song movement should not be cut off from country blues, and, in many ways, these white blues interpreters have done the blues a service, opening the door for another generation to discover the many faces of the blues.
LOST JOHN/Sonny Terry. One of the great country blues singers and mouth-harp (harmonica) players still on the performing scene is Sanders Terrell, better known as Sonny Terry. Blind from his birth in South Carolina, Terry has never lost the rough, grainy, deeply involved singing of the root blues players. Here, in a well-known prisoner's escape song, he carries on a lively debate with his harmonica, whooping and yelling with a sort of wild joy. To many of the country blues men the guitar or mouth-harp was a second voice, and they would use the instrument to carry on a sort of antiphonal debate, as Sonny Terry does here.
I WONDER WHEN I'LL GET TO BE CALLED A MAN/Big Bill Broonzy. The late Big Bill Broonzy was a sophisticated blues writer and singer to- ward the end of his life. Although this song never gained wide currency as a folk blues, the clear statement of the singer's needs show an interesting side of the blues.
It
SEE THAT MY GRAVE IS KEPT CLEAN/Blind Lemon Jefferson. A classic of the country blues sung by one of its giants, Blind Lemon Jefferson of East Texas. Jefferson, as equally revered by jazz students as he is by folk devotees, had an amazing ability to compress and convey emotion into a few simple phrases. This selection is taken from a 78 rpm disc he recorded in 1928. is believed to have been his last, or among his last, recordings before his death in Chicago. Notice how the guitar imitates the sound of a church bell near the end of this famous blues. Band
HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN/Hally Wood. Hally Wood sings a famous woman's blues song of prostitution. When the country blues moved to New Orleans and other cities, there was a great change in its form and sophistication. Instead of being a purely personal vehicle, it became a performer- audience medium. This song falls into the early city blues category. Its meaningful moral is torn out of the pages of New Orleans' large brothel area around the time of World War I. House of the Rising Sun is a classic example of the passage through tradition of a folk song. It has roots in an English ballad of the 16th century called The Unfortunate Rake. This earlier version traveled to America and several centuries later was trans- formed into a cowboy song, The Cowboy's Lament. After the Civil War, Negro cowboys brought the song back with them into the South where it has attained, in part, this form.
GREEN, GREEN, ROCKY ROAD/Alabama School Children. A children's ring game recorded at Lilly's Chapel School, in York, Alabama, in 1950 by Harold Courlander. An elaborate game played by Negro children in the South. An interesting com- mentary on the urban revival is that this song has been beautifully arranged by Len Chandler, a college trained Negro singer, and the version by the pop-folk group, The New Christy Minstrels, became a national hit in 1963.
"Without singing, we have no strength," a Zulu work gang member once told Harold Courlander, an expert on Negro folk traditions. Although the la- borer was an African, the sentiment is universal. One of the most functional uses of folk song is in the day-to-day work situation. In many instan- ces where group work is involved, the use of a work-call leader becomes a vital factor in com- pleting the work on time. Setting a firm tempo, the leader has the members of the work gang res- pond antiphonally. Workers as well as bosses benefit,
Besides setting a rhythmic pace, the work song can be a great morale-builder, relieving drudgery with melody or a catchy lyric. While the most obvious link to Old World tradition is to be found in Negro work song, there are many instances of the work song still in use today in white tradition.
Whether it is a shoeshine boy keeping time, or a cowboy soothing restless cattle, or Menhaden fishermen rhythmically pulling in a net, American music is strong in the traditional work song. Two other bodies of folk song grew out of the work situation: songs about particular trades and crafts and the union songs which helped solidify the workers' movements. What a contrast between the songs of the 19th century wagoners, canal boatmen, railroad men, and the songs of union organizing!
Most of the descriptive songs about trades and crafts were in ballad form, descendants of English and Irish street ballads of the 18th century rather than of the classic ballads about lords and ladies.
A profile of America at work can be drawn through the songs the people have invented and passed on, the songs that helped the work go smoothly, and the songs that described the work, and then, finally, sought to improve the work situation through unions.
-
PICK A BALE OF COTTON/Leadbelly.
Leadbelly had the qualities of a folk hero, beside be- ing one of our greatest folk singers. His strength and virility were real, but they were in a direct line of descendancy from the folk heroes, John Henry and Paul Bunyan. He seemed to embody the indomitable pride of the Negro people. In this bright song of the cotton fields of East Texas, Leadbelly shows that the work song can be joyous. "I was picking a thousand pounds of cotton a day," he said, and this tune makes you believe him.
"Now, this was when I was around Dallas, Texas, picking cotton. I was pickin' a thousand pounds of cotton a day. And the way you get a thousand pounds of cotton a day, you've got to jump around to get it. You can't fool around and pick a thou- sand pounds of cotton a day."
HAUL ON THE BOWLINE/Seafarers Chorus. The Seafarers Chorus featuring Eugene Brice and conducted by Milt Okun perform this old shanty of sailing days. Although this is a very sophisticated set- ting, much of the drive and functionalism of the old sailor's song is re-created. This is believed to be a fragment of an Irish tune. James
Goodfriend has written of this song: "Sweating up' was what those short hard hauls to raise a top-gal- lant or a royal sail in a hard wind were called. It was 'haul on the bowline, the bowline haul' and everybody fell back with all his weight on the rope and then gasped for breath and scrambled for a new grip, while the canvas flapped a few feet higher in the wind and the shanteyman started the next verse."
PADDY WORKS ON THE RAILWAY/Pete Seeger, Pete Seeger sings this fine testimonial to Irish- American rail gangs, also known as Paddy Works on the Erie. The potato famine of 1840 sent thousands of Irish to this country. Many ended up working on such rail lines as the Erie, the Pennsylvania and the Union Pacific. The first rail passenger ser- vice began around 1830, when there were only 23 miles of track. By 1860 America had more than 30,000 miles of track. This melody is presumably Irish, but the sentiments were sweated out on the plains of America.
I RIDE AN OLD PAINT/Harry Jackson. Harry Jackson, the Chicago-born artist who chose life on a Wyoming ranch when a young man and who has fre- quently returned to that life, here sings in definitive cowboy style a classic of the range. We have become so accustomed to hoked-up cowboy songs from film soundtracks that this interpretation might well come as a surprise with its heavy stamp of authenticity. This is a riding song, which lopes along with the gait of the singer's horse. Old Paint, especially its chorus, was used to calm cat- tle who were on the verge of stampeding.
ZEBRA DUN/Cisco Houston. Another side of cowboy life is revealed here by the late Cisco Houston, longtime traveling companion of Woody Guthrie. This is a delightful ballad about a practical joke at the expense of a newcomer to the cat- tle country, but, as the story will reveal, the greenhorn is not to be outsmarted. Folklorists have differed about the origins of this song. John Lomax ascribed it to a Negro camp cook on the Pecos River, but Kenneth S. Goldstein believes it is of white cowboy authorship.
It has been estimated that more than half of all American folk songs are religious in content or origin. Certainly the history of organized religion has been a story of man's use of music to express prayers, hopes and devotion to his God.
The complexity of American religious folk song is readily apparent. Again, as with the bulk of secular folk song, there are two main influences: the Anglo-Scots-Irish and the West African. In this instance more than other genres of folk song, the printed song hymn, anthem or spiritual -- played a greater part than oral transmission. Frequently, the religious songs that were learned from the published hymnals, were to undergo changes through use as the early colonists broke out into the frontier wilderness. Many of these songs, differing regionally and in their texts and melodies, have been called "folk hymns."
One form of notated music that is still flourishing as a living tradition in the South is that of sacred harp singing. To make it easier for members of rural or frontier churches to follow the hymnals, a method of fa-sol-la notation with symbols rather than notes was used. This sacred harp singing leads to some wild and eerie dissonances and harmonies, quite unlike any other choral folk style in the United States.
A recurring, and often thankless, debate that goes on among folk song students is concerned with the origin of the Negro spiritual, which is felt by many to be our greatest form of religious music. One scholar, George Pullen Jackson, has contended persuasively that the Negroes on slave plantations heard the white European-derived religious songs, and "borrowed" them. Much more persuasive is the contention that no matter what the origin of Negro spirituals, the transformation made the songs into something new. The Negro spiritual has become a great treasury of world music, first spread to Europe by a chorus from Fisk University in 1871. Now, concert singers and even opera stars will sing these gems of lyricism and folk poetry. Rich in Biblical allusion and poetic expression, the spirituals are among the proudest product of the merger of European and African traditions into a new matrix of American folk song.
Nowhere does a musical integration exist in more dramatic form in the South than in its religious music. Segregated church congregations may be singing one hymn that another small Negro "praise house" may be singing at the same time. Although the churches may be embattled, the music can and does cross over.
The Negro church, during the crucial racial strife, is social center, command headquarters as well as house of worship. Out of the varied inte- gration battles have grown many religious-inspired "freedom songs," of which there will be more to say on the last side of The Folk Box.
Enthusiasm over Negro religious music from "holy blues" to spirituals to modern gospel -- should not obscure the beautiful devotional group singing in the white mountain gospel tradition. A fine example of this is "Amazing Grace" on Side 5, grouped with other examples of country music.
MARY HAD A BABY/Marilyn Child and Glenn Yarbrough. A modern interpretation of an old Negro Christmas spiritual. Glenn Yarbrough and Marilyn Child have retained the spirit but enlarged the sweep of this tender, almost personal retelling of the birth of Jesus. As in many primitive peoples, religion had an immediacy to the Negroes in slavery that made the Christmas story no distant far-off happening, but an event that seemed recent and close.
The soil of the American countryside was fertile for growing a native folk tradition. In early days, before roads, radios and films, rural folk had to be self-reliant in matters of entertainment and culture. No one would provide these diversions for them, so they learned how to provide them for
themselves.
A direct line of development can be found in American country music, from the old fiddle-banjo combinations to the string bands of the nineteen- twenties and thirties, through such dominant commercial influences as The Carter Family up to the emergence of modern Bluegrass bands and the compan- ion development of a popular country-music industry based in Nashville.
There have been pendulum swings of interest in American folk music between the rural Negro styles and those of the Southern white mountaineer. Negro music had been the dominant interest in the thirties and forties, when the collecting of the Lomaxes was to make such a great impress.
Since 1957, however, there have emerged several dedicated advocates of previously neglected aspects of white country music. This interest went beyond the readily accepted traditional balladeer or instrumentalist. It extended to the curious phenome- non known as "hillbilly" music that flourishing body of composed and commercial rural folk song that sprang from traditional roots into a new trib- utary of popular music.
Such collector-scholar-popularizers as Prof. D. K. Wilgus, Ralph Rinzler, John Cohen and Mike Seeger began to see great musical and human values in the "hillbilly" tradition that had been over- looked by many.
They began by closely studying the commercial country music recordings of the nineteen-twenties and thirties. They found an exciting ensemble style in such colorful old string bands as The Carolina Tarheels, The Skillet-Lickers and others. They traced the genealogy of these string bands right through the various bands of Bill Monroe, popularly known as "The Father of Bluegrass." The city audience responded tentatively, then warmly, to the Bluegrass "movement." The instrumental splash, the interweaving ensembles, the high-pitched, athletic singing, the polish and professionalism of Bluegrass bands led to a whole new pantheon of favored musicians: Monroe, Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt, Carter and Ralph Stanley, the Osborne Brothers. and countless others.
This side of The Folk Box surveys a vast field that the proponents of "hillbilly" music as serious folk expression have exposed us to. We start with the roots in Ireland, through banjo tunes and old- time ballads right up to modern Bluegrass. We stop the survey short of the whole Nashville phenomenon, the large industry spawned by "Grand Ole Opry" and other radio shows which took the old hill country music and made it into America's other popular music.
SLIGO REEL and MOUNTAIN ROAD/Willy Clancy. The roots of American hoedowns, fiddle-banjo combinations and Bluegrass were in Europe. Scottish and Irish pipers and fiddlers came to this country and soon their old jigs, hornpipes and schottiches began to develop American accents. These pipe tunes by Willy Clancy, recorded in Ireland, will show the affinity, rhythmically and in spirit, with the mountain music that was to follow.
OLD JOE CLARK/Eric Weissberg. A brilliant bit of banjo-playing by a city musician, Eric Weissberg, whom some regard the equal, if not the master, of traditional country banjo style. This breakdown is one of the longest and most popular of all Southern Mountain tunes. Verses have been collected in all parts of the United States. So have legends of who the real Joe Clark was. Suffice it to say that this catches the flavor of the rural hoedown.
COO-COO BIRD/Clarence Ashley. A beautiful old-time ballad with modal banjo-playing, performed by Clarence (Tom) Ashley. A re-discovery of 1960, Ashley had a long career in music, from the travel- ing medicine shows at the early part of the century through the string band era and then a new resurgence for appreciative city audiences in the six- ties. With a face as beautifully gnarled as a con- tour map of his own beloved Southern Appalachians, Ashley is a fascinating remnant of another era. This superb song has been sung by hosts of city singers. The curious modal tuning, the wistful- ness and unpressured manner of its vocal delivery, the esthetic richness of its symbolic words, all add up to a classic of old-time folk singing. Band 4 SHADY GROVE/Tom Paley. Tom Paley, an original member of The New Lost City Ramblers, in a fine example of a Southern Mountain courting ly- ric. Some of the stanzas of Shady Grove appear in other hoedowns such as Old Joe Clark and Cindy. It is also done in a modal scale. Paley learned the song from two New Yorkers who first heard it sung by Rufus Crisp of Kentucky.
FLOP-EARED MULE/Eric Weissberg and Marshall Brickman. The greater the attention paid to mountain music and "hillbilly" style, the more complexity became evident. This banjo tune, again played by Eric Weissberg, with another talented city musician, Marshall Brickman, on guitar, demon- strates the most sophisticated of banjo techniques -- "Scruggs picking." A flurry of notes show the banjo's most virtuosic potential, sounds flurrying like confetti in the wind. A detailed explanation of this style of banjo-playing can be found in notes to Folk Banjo Styles (Elektra) and American Scruggs Banjo (Folkways).
NOTTAMUN TOWN/Jean Ritchie. When the famous British collector, Cecil J. Sharp, came to this country around the time of World War I, he was collecting English, not American folk songs. Be- cause of the persistence of tradition, he was able to locate here, songs and styles he couldn't find in England. The Ritchie Family of Viper, Ky., were to be his principal informants. Here, the youngest daughter of the Ritchies, Jean, sings a song
learned from her uncle Jason, a song she goes on to describe in its "strange combination of nonsense words and ethereal tune. We never knew where it came from nor what it meant, but in England I found the same kind of magic, upside-down, inside-out song being sung as part of the ancient, ritualistic Mummers Plays. I am convinced that 'Nottamun Town' had such an origin." It is interesting to compare this song with Bob Dylan's Masters of War on Side 7. Dylan freely adapted this old melody to a new purpose.
Band 8 CRIPPLE CREEK/Doc Watson. Doc Watson in an instrumental version of another old-time hoe- down and square-dance tune. Watson, a blind musician from the hills of western North Carolina, has been astounding city listeners with the fluidity and originality of his guitar technique. Here it flows in all its finery, showing some of the lengths to which the "simple" folk styles have evolved.
PRETTY POLLY/The Dillards. The Dillards, a celebrated Bluegrass band from the Ozarks, in a modern treatment of one of the most famous American murder ballads. It was originally a British come- all-ye called The Gosport Tragedy, but has under- gone great transformations here. In this version, it gets the full Bluegrass treatment, contrapuntal instrumental weaving against the vocal line. Band 10 THE YELLOW ROSE OF TEXAS/George Pegram and Walter Parham. A song dating from the Civil War era that has had a dozen lives, most recently as a popular hit. Because the text rarely varies, Kenneth S. Goldstein says, this "suggests a pos- sible sheet music or book tradition rather than one resulting from oral circulation." It is performed by two North Carolinians, George Pegram and Walter Parham. Pegram's eccentric, lurching vocal adds considerable interest.
Jazz, considered to be America's chief contribution to world music, is a step-child of folk music.
Although jazz modernists have carried the music far from its folk roots, jazz was born in the throats of countless Negro plantation workers and field-hands. The roots of jazz course back to the blues, not the city, sophisticated blues, but the country blues.
The blues form is quite distinct from any musical form to be found in other ethnic musics, but its emotional form is a cousin to many. American blues is comparable to the cante jondo of the Andalusian, the doina of the Rumanian peasant, the fado of the Portuguese.
All have a common emotional relationship. While all these song forms have variety of form and mood, they stress the emotion of sorrow and complaint. They are subjective statements, mostly, about trouble in the singer's life.
American blues is a product of two earlier folk music forms: the field-holler (or arhoolie) and the work song. At sometime in the 19th century -- no one can say for sure these two forms merged into a new style of singing born of trouble. The rhythm necessary for group work was not needed, but the fairly regular beat was there, as well as "the blue tonality," the jazz element that later spasm bands and brass bands were to use to evolve into New Orleans jazz.
After jazz developed into swing and the various permutations of pop music, it was easy to lose the thread of the blues. But countless jazz men have always said that the blues are basic, a jazz man had to have a feeling for the blues or he couldn't play jazz well.
It is worth remembering that the biggest interest in folk music followed hard after the rock 'n' roll craze of the early fifties. It was not surprising then that the young folk audience found the blues of great interest, because most rock 'n' roll was an extension of the blues.
Most unusual perhaps has been the development of a coterie of white city blues singers, some of whom hew closer to rural blues style than many Negro performers who went on to play rhythm and blues or rock 'n' roll. The purists here will still insist that only the Negro can lay claim to definitive blues interpretation.
We disagree with this narrow view, and offer on this side the dramatic evidence of blues by some of the giants of folk blues as well as some by outstanding latter-day interpreters. We feel the current city white interpreters have as much right to sing the blues as anyone. Perhaps not a birth- right, but certainly the qualities of identification and empathy that impel much of the urban folk song movement should not be cut off from country blues, and, in many ways, these white blues interpreters have done the blues a service, opening the door for another generation to discover the many faces of the blues.
LOST JOHN/Sonny Terry. One of the great country blues singers and mouth-harp (harmonica) players still on the performing scene is Sanders Terrell, better known as Sonny Terry. Blind from his birth in South Carolina, Terry has never lost the rough, grainy, deeply involved singing of the root blues players. Here, in a well-known prisoner's escape song, he carries on a lively debate with his harmonica, whooping and yelling with a sort of wild joy. To many of the country blues men the guitar or mouth-harp was a second voice, and they would use the instrument to carry on a sort of antiphonal debate, as Sonny Terry does here.
I WONDER WHEN I'LL GET TO BE CALLED A MAN/Big Bill Broonzy. The late Big Bill Broonzy was a sophisticated blues writer and singer to- ward the end of his life. Although this song never gained wide currency as a folk blues, the clear statement of the singer's needs show an interesting side of the blues.
It
SEE THAT MY GRAVE IS KEPT CLEAN/Blind Lemon Jefferson. A classic of the country blues sung by one of its giants, Blind Lemon Jefferson of East Texas. Jefferson, as equally revered by jazz students as he is by folk devotees, had an amazing ability to compress and convey emotion into a few simple phrases. This selection is taken from a 78 rpm disc he recorded in 1928. is believed to have been his last, or among his last, recordings before his death in Chicago. Notice how the guitar imitates the sound of a church bell near the end of this famous blues. Band
HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN/Hally Wood. Hally Wood sings a famous woman's blues song of prostitution. When the country blues moved to New Orleans and other cities, there was a great change in its form and sophistication. Instead of being a purely personal vehicle, it became a performer- audience medium. This song falls into the early city blues category. Its meaningful moral is torn out of the pages of New Orleans' large brothel area around the time of World War I. House of the Rising Sun is a classic example of the passage through tradition of a folk song. It has roots in an English ballad of the 16th century called The Unfortunate Rake. This earlier version traveled to America and several centuries later was trans- formed into a cowboy song, The Cowboy's Lament. After the Civil War, Negro cowboys brought the song back with them into the South where it has attained, in part, this form.
