Rufty’s Classification; Chart of Tunes
In identifying the modal character of the “gapped” tunes I have deemed it advisable to proceed by an entirely arbitrary method, free from any sort of theoretical connotation. Should a missing tone be presupposed to make either a major or minor, perfect or imperfect, interval with the tonic, there arise at once ambiguities of modality. For purposes of harmonic treatment it is quite necessary to decide upon which particular mode a gapped tune suggests, but in studying the purely melodic aspects it is reasonable to accept the tune as an entity, considering it in its actual tonal structure and not with regard to its possible modal permutations. To accomplish this purpose I have evolved a chart, based on methods used by Cecil J. Sharp in his English Folksongs from the Southern Appalachians, which for the great majority of the tunes in this collection is an adequate system of classification. The arrangement of the chart is very simple: there are five columns, each beginning with one of the five pentatonic scales. Immediately below each pentatonic scale are four hexatonic scales which are formed by the addition of the missing tones, singly and in their variable positions. The system permits these variables to be read in terms of natural and flatted tones. Lastly in each column are three regular heptatonic modes which are the outgrowth of supplying both missing tones simultaneously and in variable combination. The gaps in the pentatonic and hexatonic scales are indicated by slurs and the numerical positions from the tonic of the missing tones. The supplied missing tones are indicated by black notes, and in fitting any given tune to any scale on the chart I have endeavored where possible to let these black notes indicate the weak tones. Since it was possible, so far as the actual tonal structure of the tunes was concerned, to have a choice in the placing of them, the device of indicating weak tones was a happy solution to a more careful classification. Above each tune in this book I have indicated the modal and, following this and in parentheses, the tonal pattern of the tune with the heptatonic scale as a norm, that is, treating gapped tunes arbitrarily as broken-down heptatonic tunes. A Roman numeral indicates a major or perfect interval with the tonic; an Arabic numeral a minor interval. In event of augmented or diminished fourths or fifths I have used conventional signs. A gap is indicated by a dash.
As a practical example of classification let us take at random, say, ‘[Weeping Savior]’, a song of the present collection. Counting the tones of the melody we find six with the sixth degree missing. We observe that the tune has a major second, minor third, perfect fourth and fifth, no sixth, and a minor seventh. By transposition we see that from a standpoint of the tonal pattern alone the tune can be listed either as Hexatonic, Mode 2, A or Mode 4, b. But the examination of structural detail shows clearly that 3 being a strong tone and 2 being decidedly weak gives preference to the first classification under Mode 2.
While pentachordal and hexachordal tunes (which do not conform to this system of classification) may be perfect entities, I have, nevertheless, for purposes of uniformity classified them on a heptatonic basis, that is, as heptatonic tunes with the sixth and seventh, or seventh alone, missing respectively. Similarly, while it is somewhat tautological to say, for instance, a tune is heptatonic ionian, I have prefixed the term heptatonic to facilitate identification and to balance the constantly recurrent pentatonic and hexatonic.
An examination of these spiritual folk-tunes reveals a great predominance of gapped scales. Only 23 per cent of them use the full seven-tone series; 44 per cent are hexatonic; 23 per cent are pentatonic; and seven tunes use only from 1 to 5 of their scale.
CLASSIFICATION CHART OF TUNES
The incidence of the different modes has been impossible to ascertain. We are sure of a mode, as Mr. Rufty has noted, only when the scale tones are all represented in the melody. Proceeding however in questionable instances according to the more or less clear modal implication, I have found that about 52 per cent of these tunes may be interpreted as ionian (major), about 30 per cent as aeolian, 7.5 per cent each as dorian[12] and mixolydian, and three tunes as phrygian.
I leave the interpretation of the significance of these figures to others. I venture to suggest however that they will be found to indicate a survival of gapped and modal tunes that is unique in the folk-music of today among peoples of European stock.[13]
A modally constructed tune is, as I have indicated, almost sure to be a folk-tune. And if a melody shows the characteristic gaps, its folk nature is quite assured. Indeed, the complete filling-in of the gaps, creating two half steps, is a sign, though not always a sure one, of art influence.[14]
The above paragraphs show in a general way a few of the more important and evident features by which American folk-tunes may be recognised.[15] Their presence or absence in specific cases has helped me to decide as to the fitness of a tune for acceptance into this collection.
Tunes of Religious and Worldly Folk-Songs Compared
I have indicated above ([page 6]) that many of the present tunes were borrowed outright from secular folk-songs. The tune-to-tune relationships were discovered to some degree, as I have indicated, by accident. A spiritual tune would remind me of a secular one. I would look it up in Sharp or elsewhere, verify the relationship, and note it under the proper song in this collection. Such accidents, however, account for but comparatively few of my related-tune discoveries. In most instances they came to light as the result of a methodical comparison made possible by my having catalogued my spiritual folk-tunes and a large number of secular folk-melodies. I shall not go into a detailed explanation of this cataloguing method here, chiefly because it is one which, though it answered my own purposes well, would probably be found inadequate as a tool for students of comparative melody in general. I shall say merely that the catalog was a card index of tune beginnings, all transposed to a key which had two flats as its signature. The arrangement was based on the scale position or relative pitch of the first few tones. At the beginning of the catalog were those tunes which began on b-flat, then came those beginning on c and so on. The arrangement among those tunes beginning on any one tone, followed the same pitch sequence, from lowest to highest, taking into consideration the second, third, and more notes of the tune beginnings where necessary. That is, my lexicographical arrangement was like that of the dictionary, but with notes on a regular staff taking the place of letters, and with the scale steps taking the place of alphabetical sequence.
The actual working out of this scheme may be observed in the arrangement of tunes in this collection. In each of the three parts the tunes appear in their catalog sequence.[16]
Through a consistent comparison of the tunes in this catalog with those in secular tune files made on the same plan, I have been able to discover the organic relationship of upwards of 150 melodies in this collection to an even greater number of traditional folk-tunes associated with secular texts. This greater number is explained by the fact that one and the same tune in this collection was often found related to a number of worldly songs. To one tune ‘[Pilgrim]’, for example, I discovered 17 secular related melodies. The relationship runs in degree all the way from one which is barely recognizable to one which consists in an almost note-for-note identity.
The catalogs were also of distinct value in bringing to light scores of interrelated tunes within the collection, and thus in bringing to light the tune families mentioned on [page 14] above.
The search for kindred secular tunes was most fruitful in the case of the ballads and somewhat less so for the hymns. Among the spiritual songs the search yielded surprizingly meager results. The reason lay probably in the nature of the spiritual-song tunes themselves. These tunes—whatever their source—were often altered through the arbitrary intrusion of refrains and choruses. Among these tunes, therefore, my finding of secular analogies was limited usually to melodic parts instead of whole tunes.
To be sure, the tune relationships, religious to secular, which I have pointed out, touch little more than half the songs under scrutiny. But when it is taken into consideration that the related secular tunes were all found in a body of British Isles-American melodies not much greater than that of the spiritual tunes themselves, then it would not seem unreasonable to assume that a complete catalog of American worldly folk-tunes would reveal cognates to many more, possibly to all of the tunes presented here. The kinships already discovered, however, warrant the assumption that these spiritual tunes are part and parcel of the ancestral folk-melodism of the English-speaking peoples.
The worldly-religious tune comparison has also shed more light on the motives which led the revival folk to borrow from the store of secular melody and on the manner of that borrowing. We have indicated above our belief that one motive was the crying need for rousing and familiar tunes. Another reason seems to have been the mere fact that the borrowed tunes were worldly. Worldliness was of itself an asset. Fighting the devil with his own weapons had its distinct advantages in revival technics. But just how and why a particular secular tune came into the religious atmosphere is not always evident. In some instances, however, the examination of the secular original song makes this clear.
When the revivalist heard the Scottish-American sing
Will you go, Lassie, go
To the braes o’ Balquhidder?
he evidently saw at once the possibilities of turning the text to his own evangelistic purposes, and wasted little time in making it over into ‘Sinner’s Invitation:’
Sinners go, will you go
To the highlands of heaven?
which he sang to the same tune.
The ballad tune to
O’Reilly on the rolling sea
Bound for Amerikee
went over easily into the song which told of the Christian voyager who was ‘Bound for Canaan.’
The old ballad ‘Geordie’ begins
As I walked over London bridge.
The revival singers took this hint, with its tune phrase, and produced, in ‘Victoria’:
I have but one more river to cross.
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
Nashville, Tennessee, April 10, 1937
Opened, The Original Sacred Harp, 1911 edition measures twenty inches across. On the left hand page is a “fuguing” song composed in Alabama in 1908 in the eighteenth-century New England manner. ‘Jester’ on the right hand page is a typical camp-meeting spiritual song.