In a country that has not been mellowed by antiquity, that has not
possessed songs for its peasantry or traditions for its singers, one
cannot look for a wealth of folk-stuff. In such a country—the United
States, to be specific—what folk-poetry there is, has followed the path
of the pioneer. At first these homely songs were merely adaptations and
localized versions of English ballads and border minstrelsy, of which
the “Lonesome Tunes” discovered in the Kentucky mountains by Howard
Brockway and Loraine Wyman are excellent examples. But later, a more
definitely native spirit found expression in the various sections of
these states. In the West (during the seventies) Bret Harte and John Hay
celebrated, in their own accents, the rough, big-hearted miners,
ranchers, steamboat pilots, the supposed descendants of the emigrants
from Pike County, Missouri. In the Middle West the desire for local
color and music led to the popularity of James Whitcomb Riley’s Hoosier
ballads and the spirited jingles of Eugene Field. In the South the
inspiration of the negro spirituals and ante-bellum songs was utilized
to excellent effect by Irwin Russell, Joel Chandler Harris and, later,
by Paul Laurence Dunbar. The Indian, a more genuine primitive, has been
as difficult to transplant poetically as he has been to assimilate
ethnically. But, in spite of the racial differences in sentiment,
religion and philosophy, brave attempts to bring the spirit of the
Indian originals into our poetry have been made by Mary Austin,
Constance Lindsay Skinner, Natalie Curtis Burlin, Lew Sarett and Alice
Corbin Henderson.
In the West today there is a revival of interest in backwoods melodies
and folk-created verse. John A. Lomax has published two volumes of
cowboy songs—most of them anonymous—full of tang, wild fancy and robust
humor. The tradition of Harte and Hay is being carried on by such racy
interpreters as Harry Herbert Knibbs, Badger Clark and Edwin Ford Piper.
But, of all contemporaries who approximate the spirit of folk-poetry,
none has made more striking or more indubitably American contributions
than Vachel Lindsay of Springfield, Illinois.