Introduction

Since the sort of folk-song indicated by the title of this book is in

all probability unfamiliar to many, I shall assume that my chief task

in this Introduction is to make its nature clear. The first step in

this explanation will be to distinguish the present material from some

other better known sorts of folk-song.

"Is it mountain songs you are collecting? Is it those old ballads?"

"Is it the negro spirituals?" These questions were put to me again and

again by interested persons while the present collection was in the

making.

No, these are not mountain songs and still they are. What do we mean

by mountain songs? The very first mountain song I ever recorded was

sung to me on the treeless flats of North Dakota. It had arrived there

from Kentucky by way of Saint Louis and Los Angeles and had been

carried over this circuitous route to its northwestern place of

recording by the singers in three generations of one family. The first

sailor's shanty I ever heard was in the mountains of Virginia. It had

come from a logging camp in Michigan by way of Chicago. Every

folk-song hunter can tell similar tales; and all such experiences

convince us that the naming of a type of song after a restricted

region or a particular environment, while furnishing a convenient

designation, may lead also to much misunderstanding.

The mountain songs designation is one of the least appropriate. Its

only justification lies in the fact that some types of traditional

song, the secular ballads among them, have persisted perhaps in larger

numbers in mountainous regions like those of the southern Appalachians

and the Ozarks and are more widely sung there than elsewhere. These

songs were Irish, Scotch, and English across the water. They came from

highlands and lowlands. They were the common possession of early

Americans of those ethnic stocks,--those people who never left the

tidewater parts, those who came into the highlands and settled there,

and those greater numbers who trekked through the mountain gaps, down

the western slopes and spread into the rolling country and plains. The

present collection is of songs sung by all these people in all of

these parts in early and more recent times and now. Hence, to call

them "mountain songs" would be quite inadequate and misleading.[1]

Those who asked if the present collection were to be of the "old

ballads" manifested by their question some acquaintance with one

variety, an important one withal, of traditional secular folk-song in

America. My answer to them was negative, as it is to my present

readers. This collection is made up neither of the secular ballads nor

of their close relatives, the secular folk-_songs_, as far at least as

their _texts_ are concerned. Nor is it a collection of negro

spirituals or negro songs of any kind. And yet it is one of

folk-songs, and spiritual ones, as its title truthfully indicates. I

shall now attempt to explain this; for it must seem to some an

anomaly. The explanation will necessitate my making a brief survey

first of recent trends in the activities of those interested in

folk-songs.

_Recent Trends in Song Search_

Until recent years practically all the folk-songs published in America

have been those with secular texts. The existence of traditional

spiritual folk-songs in this land seems not to have been recognized by

folklorists. Negro songs were, to be sure, largely spiritual and they

have been regarded as folksongs; but that was an entirely different

matter, one in which the students of the white man's culture were not

primarily interested. Early curiosity as to the "slave songs" was not

academic. It was rather a popular interest allied with one which was

of a missionary-religious nature. The songs themselves, as they became

known in northern and eastern centers during the post-Civil War period

through the activities of traveling concert groups from southern negro

schools, were popularly believed in those parts to be the negroes' own

creations and to be rooted in Africa. They were regarded thus as lying

essentially outside the sphere of the white man's cultural traditions.

These attitudes of mind tended to hold apart the two groups, those

concerned with the white man's song traditions and those interested in

the religious songs of the black folk. It was a negro-song apologist,

Henry E. Krehbiel, who signed, as he thought, the decree of complete

separation of the two song bodies with his book _Afro-American Folk

Songs_ in 1914; and for most people that was definitive. Even as late

as the end of the 1920's Krehbiel's word stood practically

unchallenged. I shall adduce evidence presently however of the error

of his assumption.

In the mean time knowledge of our own American folk-songs deepened and

broadened. The earlier interest, one which grew out of the soil tilled

by Francis J. Child and was confined to the ballads alone, shorn of

their tunes, expanded in the latter part of the second decade of the

present century into one which included also folk-_songs_ and the

tunes of both ballads and songs. Notable among folklorists with this

more comprehensive outlook was the late Cecil J. Sharp who, after long

experience in the English folk-song field, took up the hunt in the

southern Appalachians. Even the first collection of a part of his

findings, published in 1917, provided a revelation as to the wealth of

the existing material and was recognized as a model in the matter of

musical recording. From then on, the gathering of folk-songs was

carried on with renewed enthusiasm and with greater stress laid on the

melodies.

One phase of song hunting began in the middle of the 1920's outside

the circle of the folklorists and in complete ignorance of the facts

that what was sought was genuine folk material. I refer to the study

in the field of the southern religious "country singings". I make this

charge of ignorance the more unhesitatingly since it was my own, and

since I worked alone in that field for some years. A report of the

early stages of my work appeared in 1933 in a volume entitled _White

Spirituals in the Southern Uplands_. Readers of that book have

probably recognized that, while I may have told the story of the

country singing institution quite thoroughly, I realized then only

dimly that the songs under observation were folk-traditional. This

realization has come since then gradually, first by reason of a series

of accidental findings and more recently as the result of rather

extended study.

Why the folklorists never came upon this material before it fell into

my hands is not hard to explain. One reason is that the strongest link

binding the songs in question to the traditional secular folk-songs is

their _tunes_, and all musical considerations were generally

neglected, especially by the earlier folklorists in this land. Another

reason was probably that folklorists never thought, any more than I

did, of singing _groups_ which used _song books_, as likely

environment for their search. A third reason was that the country

songs were _religious_, a sort which was and is still generally

thought of as _church music_ and thus as being far removed from the

folk. And finally, collectors have as a rule sought folk-songs in the

mountains and other _remote_ places; whereas the country singings are

found in the less sparsely populated parts of the lower uplands.

Cecil Sharp should have escaped much of this prejudice and

misconception; for his own British Isles are full of religious

folk-songs, as he well knew; even though they do not appear there to

any extent in a group-singing environment. But that he did not escape

it is indicated clearly by his experience in the southern mountains,

as he tells of it in the Introduction to his _English Folk Songs from

the Southern Appalachians_. When he came to a home in the mountains

and made known his desire to hear songs, he was generally

misunderstood. The mountain people thought he wanted to hear them sing

"hymns". But he did not; and though he does not tell us why, he

indicates that it was because he was convinced that the "hymns" were

not folk-songs. At any rate, he soon learned to ask for "love songs".

And as a result there appeared but two songs of a religious nature,

the 'Cherry Tree Carol' and 'Hicks' Farewell', among the 122 in his

first publication. In the subsequent two-volume collection of his

American findings, edited by Maud Karpeles and published in 1932, we

find a group of but half a dozen religious songs under the heading

"Hymns". There are also a few biblical ballads in the collection.

Some years after Sharp missed all but completely his opportunity to

become the discoverer, or uncoverer, of American religious folk-songs,

one of his English co-workers, Anne G. Gilchrist, found some

remarkable analogies between the secular folk-songs of England on the

one hand and the spiritual songs of the early Primitive Methodists of

that land and the early American revivalists on the other; and she

published a report of her research in the _Journal of the [English]

Folk-Song Society_, viii (1927-1931), pp. 61-95, in an article

entitled "The Folk Element in Early Revival Hymns and Tunes." This was

a real though brief contribution to the very subject which engages us

here; for it demonstrated the linking of the nineteenth century

religious songs with the older and principally secular folk tradition

of her land.

At about the same time, two Americans made smaller contributions.

Ethel Park Richardson recorded eleven of the white man's "spirituals"

from oral tradition, as it seems, and included them in her _American

Mountain Songs_; and Samuel E. Asbury furnished the Texas Folk-Lore

Society with a group of camp-meeting songs which he had heard in the

1880's in western North Carolina. The Society published them in 1932.

On Miss Gilchrist's pages and even more often on the pages of American

collectors in the late 1920's appeared indications of a growing belief

that the old white spirituals were the progenitors of the negro

spirituals and that, therefore, Krehbiel's assumption as to negro

authorship of the slave songs was in a measure erroneous. Among those

who shared constructively in this belief were Newman I. White and Guy

B. Johnson. Mr. White consulted a number of the old country-song

manuals to good advantage in the preparation of his _American Negro

Folk-Songs_. His use of them was to find merely _textual_ antecedents

of negro spiritual borrowings. Mr. Johnson used some of the same

manuals happily in the preparation of his _Folk Culture on St. Helena

Island_. His purpose, like that of Mr. White, was to show negro song

sources; but his work had the added merit of calling attention to some

_musical_ analogies between the spiritual songs of the white and the

black Americans. My own contributions to the solution of the problem

of negro song sources are mentioned on page 9 of this Introduction.

All this evidence assumes considerable weight in proof of the thesis

that the negro spirituals, instead of lying outside the white people's

song tradition, represent a selective adoption and carrying-on of that

tradition.

If the preceding paragraphs have in a measure made clear the nature of

the songs to be presented here, they have done so by the method of

elimination and by a review of some of the directions taken recently

by students of song, trends which seem to have led inevitably to the

uncovering of the body of song found in the old manuals of the country

singers and to the establishing of its status as folk-song. It is the

revealing of this material and the establishing of its identity which

are the chief reasons for the existence of the present volume.

_Varieties of Religious Songs_

The old song books spoken of above contain various sorts of religious

pieces. Among these are the early psalm tunes, evangelical hymns,

spiritual songs, religious ballads, "fuguing" songs, and anthems. Each

of these varieties represents loosely a phase of, or a period in,

religious, musical, or poetic development. Some are folk-songs and

many are not. The psalm tunes with their Old-Testament texts--the

sober song fare of the early Protestants in Europe, in the British

Isles, and in the American Colonies--are probably to some extent of

folk origin; but since psalm singing in early America can not be

looked on as a free expression of the folk, and since the psalm tunes

themselves gave way easily to other far more folky types of religious

song, I have chosen to exclude them from the present discussion and

collection. The fuguing songs are examples of an early American art

development in composing and in group singing in New England during

the latter part of the eighteenth century. Despite their enduring

popularity in southern rural folk-singing circles and despite the fact

that many of them are found to be constructed on the basis of

folk-melodic themes, I have decided that they would be inappropriate

to this collection. The same objection, that they are of an

essentially _composed_ nature, holds also for the anthems and has

demanded their elimination.

After making these exclusions I centered attention on three mutually

rather distinct types of song all of which seemed to be in varying

degrees folk products--the _religious ballads_, _hymns_, and

_spiritual songs_.