Folk-Song Collectors of Yore
In the earlier years of the camp-meeting movement, few if any of the songs produced in and for that environment appeared in print. The whole body of revival song was therefore generally known as “unwritten music.” The first recordings were of the texts only. They appeared in the form of booklets and bore some such title as “Hymns and Spiritual Songs / for the Pious of all Denominations / as Sung in Camp Meetings.” They were prepared first by itinerant preachers or song leaders who saw in the Great Revival a chance to serve the cause, and perhaps to make money. That these books filled a great need is attested by their ubiquity during the period which may be designated roughly as from 1800 to 1840.
The musical notation of the tunes they sang was the least concern of the revival folk. It is quite probable that the camp-meeting crowds of those times never saw their tunes in musical notation. It is evident that the first recordings of this unwritten music were not made by the revivalists themselves, and that the first book collections of such recordings were not made primarily for use in revivals. The books in which these tunes first appeared were the country singing manuals of which I have spoken above. The singing masters were quick to recognize the value of the rousing revival songs and saw to it that their own institution benefitted from their vogue. The Christian Harmony, published in New Hampshire in 1805 was perhaps the first book to record the revival tunes. The Olive Leaf, a Georgia book of 1878 was the last.[6]
We sometimes have the compiler’s own story of his sources. In the preface to William Caldwell’s Union Harmony for example, the compiler tells us that “many of the airs which the author has reduced to system [notated] and harmonized have been selected from the unwritten music in general use” among Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians. William Walker says, in the preface to his Southern Harmony, “I have composed parts to a great many good airs, which I could not find in any publication or in manuscript, and assigned my name as the author.” William Hauser’s preface to his compendious Hesperian Harp is lacking in my copy of his work (the only copy in existence, I believe); but the compiler’s method of finding songs becomes clear when we peruse his pages of song. On the page with ‘[Patton]’, for example, he notes that he first heard the Rev. William Patton, of Missouri, sing the song which bears his name “at a camp-meeting, North Cove, Burk Country, North Carolina, in 1831 or 1832.” The song entitled ‘Houston’ was an “air I learned from my mother when a small child.” As to ‘[Land of Rest]’ he states that the “inspiration of this tune [was] caught from a female voice at a distance, at Barbee’s Hotel, High Point, N. C., June 9th, 1868.” Under the song entitled ‘Rev. James Axley’s Song,’ in the same compiler’s Olive Leaf, he tells who the Rev. Axley was and how he, Hauser, came to record the preacher’s favorite tune. John G. McCurry gives a song called ‘Good-By’ in his Social Harp and tells that he put it down “as played on the accordion by Mrs. Martha Hodges of Hartwell,” Georgia.
Instances like these cited above are numerous. They all go to convince us of the great service rendered by the rural singing masters of yore in the preservation of a body of song, in the collecting and publishing of which no one else seems to have been interested.
The country singing books on which I have drawn for most of the songs of this collection, are in the main those which were at my disposal while I was preparing White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands. From the Georgia-Carolina section were The Southern Harmony in its 1835 and 1854 editions; The Southern and Western Pocket Harmonist (1845); The Sacred Harp which first appeared in 1844 but whose oldest edition at my disposal has been that of 1859; its three descendants, The Union Harp (1909), The Sacred Harp (Cooper edition, 1902 and four subsequent printings; I consulted the fifth reprint), and The Original Sacred Harp (1911);[7] The Hesperian Harp (1848); The Social Harp (1855); The Christian Harmony (1866); and The Olive Leaf (1878). Among the books originating in the eastern half of Tennessee I searched The Western Harmony (1824); The Columbian Harmony (1825); The Union Harmony (1837); The Knoxville Harmony (1838); The Harp of Columbia (1848); and The Western Psalmodist (1853). From the Valley of Virginia I used The Kentucky Harmony (1814); the German Choral-Music (1816); The Supplement to the Kentucky Harmony (1820); The Virginia Harmony (1831); Genuine Church Music (1832); and The Union Harmony (1848). From Saint Louis I had The Missouri Harmony (1820). I found also some material in two publications which are still in use among the Primitive Baptists, The Primitive Baptist Hymn and Tune Book (1902) and Good Old Songs (1913).[8] Two books, invaluable compendiums of the very sort of songs I was seeking, came to my hand too late for consideration in White Spirituals. They were The Revivalist, published in Troy, New York, in 1868; and Jeremiah Ingalls’ Christian Harmony, published in New Hampshire in 1805. The latter contains scores of religious folk-songs—among them many spiritual songs—which duplicate, though in variant forms, the songs which are found in abundance in the southern country-song manuals. The Revivalist, more than 60 years younger, is a veritable treasure trove of the same sorts of song. Together the two books open new vistas as to the spread and active life period of the song movement under observation. The New Hampshire book, made by a Vermont compiler, proves beyond doubt that the movement did not remain in the South—the section of its first prevalence presumably and of its present persistence—but spread early also into New England. The New York book points definitely to the persistence of the tradition in the northeastern section far longer than we would, without this evidence, have been warranted in assuming.
I went song hunting also among the authored hymn-and-tune-books of the big denominations, but I found little, and that little was already familiar to me from its appearance in the country-singing books.[9]
Further information as to the identity of the books mentioned above may be found in the Bibliography at the end of this volume. The abbreviations which will be used in the body of this song collection when referring to the source song books are explained in the List of Abbreviations of Titles.
Features of American Folk-Tunes
Even after recognizing the three types of religious folk-song as they are described above, it was not always easy in particular instances, to decide on acceptance into this collection or on rejection as non-folk material.
There are literally thousands of songs in the books searched. In the Original Sacred Harp alone there are 609, and the Hesperian Harp holds 677. And while other books are slimmer and duplications from book to book are numerous, it must still be quite evident that it was no easy task to identify just the songs I was after. At times I had to apply a number of criteria. Often the folky nature of the text pointed to an equally folky tune. There was another hint sometimes in the name given as that of the composer of the song. When I met with the names Moore, Walker, Chapin, Breedlove, White, Carrell, Davisson, Hauser, McCurry and a number of others, in the upper right corner of the song page, then I was practically certain that the song on that page was usable. For the men in question were, in reality, not composers. They were recorders and arrangers of unwritten music.[10]
When an example of the old unwritten music made its way into the authorized church hymnals—as happened to a restricted degree from fifty to seventy-five years ago—it was called a “Western Melody” or a “Southern Melody.” Such designations became another reliable token of folk source.
More important than any external indications in determining whether I was dealing in a particular instance with a folk-tune, was the character of the tune itself. The ability to recognize a folk-tune comes to the student of such music gradually, somewhat as does the recognition of a strange language or dialect. It came to me that way; but after assembling my tunes I felt that their general folk character might to some degree be reduced to a set of definite traits. I therefore reexamined not only my own melodies but also those far more numerous tunes in the secular collections of Sharp and others, for such characteristics as tonal trend, rhythmic trend, tonality (modal character), and musical form. Since there is no available definition of a folk-tune and since probably no succinct one can be made, I am hoping that my deductions in the following paragraphs as to some earmarks of American folk-tunes may be helpful to others who are interested in our traditional melodism, as they have been helpful to me.