[1]John Powell's article "In the Lowlands Low", in the _Southern
Folklore Quarterly_, Vol. i., No. 1, provides a corrective for
those who think loosely of our American music tradition as one
observable in the highlands only.
[2]The churchman's frown on the early intrusion of the folk into hymn
making may be seen in _The English Hymn_ by Louis F. Benson, pp.
291ff.
[3]See Warren A. Chandler, _Great Revivals and the Great Republic_,
pp. 109ff. and 138f.
[4]Samuel E. Asbury tells me that the camp meetings at Rock Springs,
Lincoln County, North Carolina, which he attended in his youth in
the 1880's had been the "mating grounds" for that state for fifty
years.
[5]Compare my article on this subject in _The American Mercury_ of
June, 1932.
[6]Anne G. Gilchrist, in her article cited above, assumes this
song-book recognition of the revival tunes to have _begun_ in
1842. The _height_ of this activity was, to be sure, around that
date, that is, from a decade earlier to a decade later. See JFSS,
viii., 63 f.; and compare p. 11 of this work.
[7]The new edition of _The Original Sacred Harp_, 1936, was not used
in making the present collection.
[8]All these books use the country people's own shape notation,
described at length in _White Spirituals_. See also my article
"Buckwheat Notes," in the _Musical Quarterly_, xix., No. 4, and
the Preface of this book.
[9]In Chapter xxi of _White Spirituals_ is the story of how the
city-controlled denominations have shown uniformly and
increasingly an aversion to the old revival type of song.
[10]The following is a comment made in this connection by John Powell.
"It may be well to remember here that only in comparatively recent
times has any distinction been made between the use of already
existing material (melodic and thematic) and the use of material
created by the composer. The Contrapuntists relied very largely on
folk-music for their basic material. Bach followed this example to
a great extent; Handel not only did this but took material
composed by others at his own sweet will with no thought of
deception and with no contemporary reproach of plagiarism. Haydn,
Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms followed frequently the same
practice. In the literary field in Elizabethan times it would be
difficult to find a play the fundamental material of which was not
drawn from already existing sources. The word _composer_ literally
means the one who puts together a piece. The material of this
piece may, or may not, be invented by such composer. These
reflections would seem to explain and to justify the modest claims
of the American singing-school book compilers to authorship of
songs, and such thoughts should make us approach their labors, not
with caviling, but with gratefulness for their invaluable service
to American traditional song."
[11]On examining the first 50 tunes of the Folk-Hymns in this
collection, I find _within_ their melodic phrases a total of only
17 jumps of a fifth and 10 of a sixth. Sevenths and octaves--I
found but two each--appeared only as the intervals between the end
note of one phrase and the beginning note of the following one.
[12]My own hearing of these tunes at the southern country singings has
convinced me that the dorian mode is far more widely used than the
above statistics, based on the notation, indicate. That is, I have
heard the sixth clearly _raised_ in numbers of songs where the key
signature called for a flatting.
[13]Observations made in recent years of the folk-tunes in the British
Isles show modality to be on the decline. In Germany the modes are
already practically gone, with the regular major and minor scales
taking their places.
[14]From this statement it will be seen that I hold with those who
look on the full diatonic scales as having evolved from the gapped
ones, rather than the other way around. This however is still a
matter of controversy.
[15]To those who desire to follow in more detail the problem of the
essence of the folk-tune, I commend Cecil Sharp's _English
Folk-Song, Some Conclusions_, especially chapters VI and VII.
Despite Sharp's having come to his "conclusions" thirty years ago
and even though they are concerned with the folk-songs of the
British Isles only, they have not, to my knowledge, been
essentially altered by subsequent thought on the subject; and they
apply, by and large, to American folk-tunes as well.
[16]A real defect of this system of cataloguing inheres in the
difficulty, sometimes the impossibility, of determining the proper
key signatures of gapped tunes. And the difficulty is augmented by
the tendency of all the old recorders to regard dorian tunes as
natural minor ones (or aeolian). I have reproduced all such
doubtful tunes here just as I found them. I have catalogued them,
however, (and inserted them here serially according to that
catalog arrangement) in an order which is determined by what has
seemed to be their proper modal form. Among the songs which are
touched by this modal (and hence key-signature) uncertainty are
Nos. 20, 21, 22, 37, 51, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 97, 115, 144, 148,
236, 237, 249, and 250.
[17]Author of Southern Harmony.