CHAPTER ONE
On the Trail of Folk Songs
By the 1920s, folk musicârural and urban, North and South, black and white, foreign and domesticâfrom a variety of sources had numerous outlets in the United States, including books and articles by folk music collectors, commercial phonograph records and field recordings, radio programs, public shows and concerts, fiddle contests, folk festivals, and plenty of home entertainments. It posed some commercial competition for Tin Pan Alley tunes and popular band music, while occupying an important musical, social, and cultural niche. The groundwork had been laid for folk musicâs subsequent role in promoting a nationalist agenda, particularly on the left of the political spectrum.1
Carl Sandburgâs highly influential songbook The American Songbag appeared in 1927 and quickly captured a welcoming audience while documenting the current state of folk music scholarship. He parted company from the established experts, however, in significantly broadening the concept of folk music, following on the heels of John Lomax and the other cowboy collectors since the centuryâs beginning. In contrast, and five years before The American Songbag, Louise Pound, an English professor at the University of Nebraska, had issued American Ballads and Songs with scores of selections. âThe pieces in the following collection depend for their vitality upon oral, not upon written transmission,â she explained in the introduction. âThey have a subliterate existence, as apart from verse preserved in a form fixed by the printed page.⌠Other characteristics of genuine folk-songs are that they have retained their vitality through a fair period of time and that all sense of their authorship and provenience has been lost by their singers.â Pound adhered to the academic definition of a ballad or folk song as having been passed down orally for centuries with no known author.2
Sandburg rejected such a narrow approach. Born in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1878, he had dropped out of school after the eighth grade, hit the road during the hard times of the late 1890s, served in the army during the Spanish-American War, and then entered college. He next resumed his travels, began writing poetry, and became a Socialist Party organizer and a journalist. In 1912, he moved with his family to Chicago, which he was to be closely identified with. Within a decade, he became a famed poet and writer, having picked up a love of folk songs along the way. With a rudimentary voice and guitar style, he nonetheless began to sing in public in 1925, starting with âThe Buffalo Skinners,â which he had learned from John Lomaxâs collection Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910). While busy with his famed Lincoln biography and extensive public speaking schedule, Sandburg continued to pick up songs and ballads throughout the country; he managed through much hard work to finish The American Songbag by late 1927. âThere is presented herein a collection of 280 songs, ballads, ditties, brought together from all regions of America,â he explained. âThe music includes not merely airs and melodies, but complete harmonizations or piano accompaniments. It is an All-American affair, marshaling the genius of thousands of original singing Americans.â While â100 pieces, strictly folk songs, have never been published; they have been gathered by the compiler and his friends from coast to coast and from the Gulf to Canada,â he nonetheless included a long list of published collections. He divided the songs into numerous sections, illustrating his eclectic approach: dramas and portraits, minstrel songs, pioneer memories, Great Lakes and Erie Canal songs, hobo songs, prison and jail songs, âThe Big Brutal City,â âBlues, Mellows, Ballets,â Mexican border tunes, railroad songs, as well as lumberjack and sailor songs. Sandburg furnished each selection with a prefatory note. His focus was on songs and ballads in English, except for a few in Spanish. An immediate popular and critical success, the songbook remained in print into the next century and served to open the door to a less academic, more comprehensive and straightforward, as well as nationwide, understanding of folk music.3
Among the large number of grassroots music collectors besides Sandburg, Robert Gordon explored a variety of musical sources, expanding the field but with little initial impact. Born in 1888 in Bangor, Maine, as an undergraduate and then a graduate student at Harvard, he studied with the ballad scholars George Lyman Kittredge and F. B. Gummere. He next taught in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley, 1918â24. His interest in folk songs led to his editing the âOld Songs That Men Have Sungâ column in Adventure magazine, beginning in 1923 for over four years, which reached 2 million mostly male readers. This was similar to the music features in Railroad Manâs Magazine and Sea Stories. Gordonâs column reached a national audience, and he received a wide range of song texts from his readers, amateur collectors who were guided by Gordonâs advice. He particularly liked collecting songs along the San Francisco waterfront, working with Frank Kester, who ran the sea songs and stories column âThe Dogwatchâ in the Oakland Tribune. Gordon used a cylinder record player to record over 200 local songs, mostly shanties and other sea songs, from sailors and hoboes, but also some Child ballads, blues, and bawdy songs.4
Gordon returned to the East in 1924 and the next year began an odyssey that took him to the South, resulting in many hundreds of recordings. In Asheville, North Carolina, he recorded Bascom Lamar Lunsford, a noted banjo player and collector who was also recorded by OKeh Records, since the commercial companies were now hot on the trail of rural black and white musicians in the South for commercial release. One of the pioneering field collectors in the South, along with Lawrence Gellert, Gordon preferred dance tunes and American ballads. From 1926 to 1928, he relocated to Darien, Georgia, where he focused on documenting African American musicians; he even entertained Carl Sandburg in 1927, on the trail for his own folk music research.
For a year (1927â28), Gordon published a series of articles on folk songs in the New York Times Magazine, on the basis of his fieldwork. âOf folk-song alone, America has a body perhaps greater in extent than that possessed by any other nation,â he wrote in the first issue, âand certainly unsurpassed in interest and in variety of types.â Gordon had done much work with African American musicians but had little feeling for their culture or history: âThe negro of the South is perhaps our best folk-singer. He possesses not one but a dozen distinct types of folk-song ranging from the tragic and the sentimental to sheer bubbling humor. Some of his typesâperhaps most of themâhe derived in the beginning from the whites, for he is a marvelous assimilator. But in nearly every case he has so thoroughly made over the material that it would be unfair to say that is not now his own.â Subsequent articles dealt with mountain songs, African American sea shanties from coastal Georgia, spirituals, outlaw ballads and jailhouse songs, lumberjack songs, old ballads, banjo tunes, nursery ballads, and cowboy songsâan eclectic mix rich with song lyrics. For those who missed the Times articles, the federal government reprinted all of them in 1938, although the publicationâs circulation was limited.5
In early 1927, Gordon offered a complete set of his âOld Songsâ columns to Carl Engel, chief of the Music Division of the Library of Congress. Impressed with Gordonâs folklore credentials, and with the backing of Herbert Putnam, the librarian of Congress, Engel appointed Gordon to head the newly created Archive of American Folk Song (AAFS) in July 1928 at the Library of Congress. While Gordon continued his research and donated some of his field recordings to the AAFS, he spent little time in Washington; and because of the governmentâs mounting financial problems, his job ended in 1932. He died in 1961 and unfortunately never published a book on folk songs that would have summarized his lifeâs work.
Lawrence Gellert, born Laslo Grunbaum in Hungary in 1898, grew up in New York. He moved to the South in the early 1920s, perhaps due to a nervous breakdown, and was soon living in Tryon, North Carolina, where he became interested in African American folk songs and folklore. Using a crude machine, he began recording informants in North and South Carolina, as well as parts of Georgia, including in chain gangs. His brother Hugo Gellert, then becoming a noted radical artist, became involved with the Communist Partyâs publication New Masses, first appearing in 1926, with Michael Gold and Joseph Freeman as executive editors. Under Goldâs direction, the May 1930 issue included Philip Schatzâs article âSongs of the Negro Worker,â using some of the songs that Gellert had been sending to Hugo. The article gave a political twist to known African American work songs, but some of Gellertâs finds were variants of those that had already appeared in Howard Odum and Guy Johnsonâs Negro Workaday Songs (1926). By the mid-1930s, Gellertâs self-styled African American âsongs of protestâ had become influential within Communist Party circles.6
Robert Gordon and Lawrence Gellert were not alone in focusing on the unique range of folk music to be found in the country, soon going beyond the traditional interest in ballads from the British Isles. Francis James Child, a professor of medieval studies and English literature at Harvard, published five volumes of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882â96), which quickly dominated the ballad-collecting field. In the United States, William Wells Newell authored two articles on âearly American balladsâ in the Journal of American Folklore (JAF) (1899â1900). While Child ballads long continued to fascinate folklorists, a source of native songs was quickly discovered that deftly altered the field. In 1910, John A. Lomax issued Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, which brought increased attention to these unique tunes. N. Howard âJackâ Thorpâs Songs of the Cowboys had appeared in 1908, which included âOld Paint,â âThe Cowboyâs Lament (Streets of Laredo),â and âThe Old Chisholm Trail,â but this limited edition received little notice. Lomaxâs book, however, made a major impact. Charles Finger followed with Sailor Chanteys and Cowboy Songs in 1923; then four years later, he issued the expanded Frontier Ballads, now with more from the West but missing the sea songs. Also, in 1927, the writer Frank Shay published My Pious Friends and Drunken Companions, with illustrations by the Jazz Age artist John Held Jr. He included âCasey Jones,â âSam Bass,â âThe Dying Hobo,â and âClementine.â âThe music-lover who frequents the symphony concerts and delves deep into the works of Wagner and De Bussy [sic] will dismiss them as trivial,â Shay explained. âThe folk-lorist will dismiss them with the phrases profane and vulgar. To him they are but the product of low resorts, gutter songs, the communal musical expression of an artistically destitute society.â For Shay, however, they truly represented the music of the folk.7
By 1910, Olive Dame Campbell had assembled a collection of native white songs from Kentucky, Georgia, and Tennessee, but she could find no publisher. She was not the only woman in the South with an interest in local song lore. Katherine Pettit and May Stone, the founders of the Hindman Settlement School in Knott County, Kentucky, in 1902, had been collecting songs from the children at their school; George Lyman Kittredge at Harvard published some of their collection as âBallads and Rhymes from Kentuckyâ in the JAF in 1907. From 1912 to 1915, E. C. Perrowâs âSongs and Rhymes from the Southâ appeared in the JAF, including 270 texts from the Appalachian region. In 1916, Loraine Wyman and Howard Brockway issued Lonesome Tunes: Folk Songs from the Kentucky Mountains, quickly followed by Josephine McGillâs Folk-Songs of the Kentucky Mountains (1917). Wymanâs Twenty Kentucky Mountain Songs appeared in 1920.8
Child, an American, had set the standard for future collectors of British ballads before war had broken out in Europe in late 1914. On the other hand, Cecil Sharp, a British traditional song and dance scholar, first traveled to the United States with his colleague Maude Karpeles in 1914. Returning in 1916, and with the collaboration of Olive Dame Campbell, the wife of a missionary schoolteacher and social reformer in Appalachiaâthe namesake for the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina, founded in 1925 by his wife following his deathâthey collected 400 songs from sixty-seven informants in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. They published much of their collection in English Folk-Songs of the Southern Appalachians (1917). The following year, while the Great War raged, Sharp and Karpeles gathered another 600 songs and in 1918 an additional 625 tunes before returning to England. Sharp died in 1924, and in 1932 Karpeles produced English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, the final two volumes of their collection, with another 274 songs. Along with the bulk of American collectors at the time, Sharp had the romantic, and highly fanciful, notion that the backwoods southerners were cut off from modern society, living in a cultural cocoon. Many had already migrated to industrial centers, however, while radio programs and phonograph records were soon plentiful, further connecting rural with urban, and modern, influences. There were few isolated settlements by the 1920s.9
While Sharp and others were gathering songs and ballads from southern white musicians, a separate group of collectors began focusing on African American singers and songsters. Howard W. Odum, born in Georgia and a graduate of Emory College in 1904, entered the University of Mississippi as a graduate student and soon discovered a wealth of African American songs. While a fellow in Psychology at Clark University in Massachusetts, he published his highly detailed âReligious Folk Songs of the Southern Negroesâ in the American Journal of Religious Psychology and Education in 1909. Next, armed with a cylinder record player, he collected and published 115 secular songs in the JAF in 1911. Odumâs major study with Guy B. Johnson, The Negro and His Songs, appeared in 1925, quickly followed by their Negro Workaday Songs (1926), a year after Dorothy Scarboroughâs fascinating On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs.10
African Americans appeared on phonograph records as early as the 1890s, performing the popular coon songs, from both white and black composers, as well as spirituals and much else. The team of Bert Williams and George Walker began recording in 1901, while an increasing number of black musicians entered the recording studios through the nineteen-teens. Various styles and types of blues songs and performers were popular before the 1920s, playing in juke joints, barber shops, and on concert stages. A national commercial breakthrough came in 1920 with Mamie Smithâs OKeh recording of âCrazy Blues,â which sparked the blues fad of the following decade and after. Five companies soon dominated the race market: Brunswick, Gennett, Paramount, Victor, and Columbia (which included OKeh after 1926). The female classic blues singers, such as Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, backed by piano players or jazz bands, originally captured the national market. Until 1927, the female singers dominated the output of race records, although there were a few exceptions. Papa Charlie Jackson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Blind Blake recorded for Paramount in Chicagoâthe company was located in Grafton, Wisconsinâin the mid-1920s, before the floodgates opened after 1926, spurred by Jeffersonâs popularity. A few rather obscure bluesmen also recorded early for Gennett in Richmond, Indiana.11
The last three years of the decade, however, witnessed numerous recording sessions in the South, particularly by Columbia and Victor in Atlanta, Memphis, Dallas, and New Orleans. The rural bluesmen included Blind Willie McTell; the Memphis Jug Band and Cannonâs Jug Stompers; Big Bill Broonzy, along with Georgia ...