In the traditional ballad 'In Seaport Town' there is a recurring
phrase:
Till at last they came to that lonesome valley.
This "valley" suggested to the religious mind the emotional depression
of the almost converted mourner as well as the valley of death; and
thus came into existence the beautiful spiritual 'Lonesome Valley':
You got to go that lonesome valley,
You got to go there by yourself
whose tune is closely related to that of the secular song.
The 'Poor Stranger' of the English secular ballad who appeared also as
"poor strange girl," a "roving soldier," and a "rebel soldier," all of
whom are "far from my home," exerted both melodic and textual
influence on the 'Heaven-Born Soldier' who urges his comrades to
Come along and shout along
And pray by the way.
The melody which Johann Sebastian Bach, the great adapter of
folk-tunes, made a peasant sing in his _Cantata_ 'Mer hahn en neue
Oberkeet' spread to England and became there the setting of a number
of popular texts in the first half of the eighteenth century. One of
these songs, dating from 1772, was 'Farewell, Ye Green Fields and
Sweet Groves' which gave birth, probably also in England, to the
religious song 'Green Fields', found in every old southern fasola
book. Its opening lines are
How tedious and tasteless the hours
When Jesus no longer I see.
Sweet prospects, sweet birds and sweet flowers
Have all lost their sweetness to me.
With 'Saw Ye my True Love' as a model, the task of making the
religious text 'Saw Ye My Savior,' sung to the same tune, was a
grateful one.
The happy inebriate who is his own hero in 'Way Up On Clinch Mountain'
is reformed and regretful in 'John Adkins' Farewell' where he gives
warning to other alcoholics in the same melodic strain.
From the above examples it would seem that the secular text contained
often some hint which led the religious adapter in making his new
poetic lines; and that the secular tune usually followed as a matter
of course.
The comparison of tunes shed no actually new light on the age of the
tunes. But it made clear the fact that the folk's stock of melodies is
assembled from divers times. The tunes of two songs in this
collection, 'New Orleans', and 'Hark my Soul', have tonal trends
strikingly similar to that of melodies found in the eleventh and early
thirteenth centuries respectively. From the early seventeenth century
we find 'Mourner's Lamentation' which was in those earlier times 'Wae
is Me for Prince Charley', a Jacobite song about Charles II of
England. 'Beggar' is a remake of 'A-Begging We Will Go' which has been
traced back to 1611. 'Captain Kidd' or 'Kidd', as it is disguised in
the fasola books, dates from the first part of the eighteenth century.
It is significant that most of the tunes mentioned in the above
paragraphs are comparatively modern in their musical aspects. This
fact leads to the suspicion that the really old-sounding tunes, those
in the antique modes--dorian, phrygian, and the like, especially in
their gapped forms--originated in still earlier times. Here is an
inviting field for the student of comparative folk-melodism.
_Conclusion_
I have been impressed, as I have come to know these tunes better, with
their variety and beauty. They are believed, by the country folk who
still sing them, to be "the most beautiful music on earth." When I
first heard this sweeping judgment I put it down as emanating from an
understandable though extravagant zeal, one which was all the greater
perhaps since the singers, mostly oldsters, felt they were fighting
for the very life of a dying cause. But I now see I was mistaken. The
songs are living vigorously without being fought for. The country folk
clearly realized--however they may have expressed the
realisation--that the "good old songs" were ingrained in their racial
souls and that for this reason it was the most completely
soul-satisfying of all music from whatever source.
If this was and still is the firm belief of those uncounted thousands
who know and sing the country songs, those who are still carrying on
the tradition for the sheer love of it and the joy they get out of it;
then is there not an inspiration for us? Is that picture not an
incentive to look into, to learn to know this _tonal tradition_, the
chief one in our ethnic background? This quest might well lead to an
examination of our other _acquired_, not _inherited_, musical concepts
and judgments, in search for reasons why, in acquiring them, we have
ignored the simpler art of the past. And from this approach we might
open the question as to whether these reasons are valid,--wise or
unwise.
American folk-music, basing squarely on that of the British Isles, is
purer, I assert, and more completely representative of the _peoples_
among whom it has developed, and less representative of _individual_
creative activity than is the folk-music of other Western peoples. As
evidence of this I present this collection, commending it to the
serious consideration of those interested in fundamental phases of
American culture.
This collection challenges, I feel, the attention also of those
interested in the songs of the churches. Urban congregational singing
depends on hymnals. Hymnals are made by successions of revision
committees. These committees have been either hostile to, or
incognisant of, American folk-hymns. The perusal of almost any
protestant hymn-and-tune book will prove this. Thus we have the
strange anomaly: _groups whose prime purpose is to induce more general
singing by the masses, refusing recognition, in their books of songs,
to the melodism of those masses and putting in its place the tonal
products of individuals_.
There are of late some exceptions to this attitude. In the _Christian
Science Hymnal_, where one finds numerous folk-tunes from many other
lands, there are two variants of melodies to be found in the present
collection, that is, of 'Pilgrim' and 'Marion'. The editors found
these tunes, however, not in America but in the British Isles.
The Methodists who were, as we have seen, originally largely
responsible for the appearance of folk-tunes in the American religious
environment, have for the past fifty years progressively eliminated
them from their authorized hymnals. But their latest revised edition
of 1935 indicates that this tendency has been checked. I find in that
volume seven tunes which are identical with melodies in the present
collection, namely, with 'Green Fields', 'New Britain', 'Beloved',
'Nettleton', 'Friends of Freedom', 'Plenary', and 'Romish Lady'. There
are also five other tunes in the Hymnal called "early American
melodies" which I have not been able to identify as folk-melodies.
In England the evangelical protestant hymnal makers seem now to be
folk-minded. The English Methodists, at least, have welcomed into
their latest _Hymn Book_ no less than 43 traditional folk-tunes of the
British Isles. They have even used two tunes--'Rhode Island' and
'Pisgah'--the latter of which appears in the present collection, and
have called them "American", even though one of them, 'Pisgah', came
hither from England, as Miss Gilchrist has pointed out.
Then there are the folklorists. How will they greet this collection?
My stressing of tunes and saying little about texts will be regarded
by some of the old-line folklorists--especially those who still
conceive all such material as "popular poetry"--with disapproval.
Others, those who are sure that folk-song is dying out and therefore
see the collector's duty simply as that of retrieving the last bits of
it, may greet the present collection as a new acquisition to the
museums. Such a response would arouse in me no enthusiasm and little
satisfaction; for I demur completely from narrow interpretations of
the status, meaning, import, and destiny of folk-lore, folk-songs,
_these_ folk-songs. I do not participate in the pessimism of the
folk-song fatalists.
The lore of a folk comprehends, as I understand it, the whole of its
basic cultural accomplishments. Understood in this broadest and
deepest sense, a folk-lore is truer, more vital and more significant
than an art-lore. It is a clearer mirror of a people's past, a more
reliable interpreter of its present trends, and a safer prophet of its
culture to come. It is all this because it is the body and soul of
that culture, where art is merely a vestment. The art which fits best
this body and soul, this basic ethnic character, is the best art. The
art of ancient Greece was great for this reason. All students of
esthetics since Lessing and Winckelmann have recognized this. They
have recognized also that the great periods in the art of any enduring
people are those when its gifted creators are in closest harmony with
the genius of their race; and that its barren periods are those when
the masters have been faithless to their own and have sought afar "the
good which lies so near."
_Acknowledgements_
I wish to express here my deep gratitude to Mr. Hilton Rufty for his
generous help in verifying the musical aspects of this collection and
in helping me solve many a knotty problem in interpreting the tunes
which I have transcribed from the old singing-school books. Mr. John
Powell has earned my sincere thanks for reading critically the entire
manuscript, calling my attention to a number of inaccuracies, and to
many secular melodies related to those in this volume.
The present collection would have been far less comprehensive without
the use of a number of unique source books placed at my disposal by
friends. I wish therefore to acknowledge gratefully the co-operation
of Mr. Will H. Ruebush for providing me with _The Olive Leaf_ and _The
Social Harp_; Mrs. Annabel Morris Buchanan for _The Union Harmony_
(Hendrickson); Mr. E. S. Lorenz for _The Revivalist_ and _Songs of
Grace_; Mr. John Lair for the _Scots Musical Museum_; The Lawson
McGhee Library (Knoxville, Tennessee) for _The Church Harmony_ and
_The Supplement to the Kentucky Harmony_; Mr. W. E. Bird for _The
Southern and Western Pocket Harmonist_; and Miss Lucille Wilkin for
_The Western Harmony_. The University of North Carolina Press has
kindly allowed me to reproduce several songs from _White Spirituals in
the Southern Uplands_. For this I wish to express my sincere thanks.
I wish also to thank those who have furnished me with songs from oral
tradition. Among such helpful contributors are Professor Donald
Davidson, Mr. Don West, Mr. Samuel E. Asbury, Mr. Francis Arthur
Robinson, and Miss Will Allen Dromgoole. My gratitude is hereby
expressed also to Dr. Carleton Sprague Smith, Chief of the Music
Division of the New York Public Library, and to Dr. Oliver Strunk,
Chief of the Music Division of the Library of Congress for their
helpfulness.
My daughter, Frances Helen Parker, and my sisters, Carol Jackson
Ransom and Genevieve Jackson Beckwith, have given me invaluable help
in preparing this book for the printer and in correcting the proofs.
For this I am deeply and lastingly grateful to them.
George Pullen Jackson
Vanderbilt University