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.