Thou art bothin God and man, gwat woldyst Thou be more?
So blyssid be the tyme!
(From the Sloane MSS. Quoted from The Study of Folk Songs, by Countess Martinengo-Cesaresco).
American Folk Music
We come now to a question that has been the subject of many arguments and debates. Many claim that we have no folk music in the United States, and others claim that we have. It would take a whole volume to present both sides and we must reduce it to a sugar-coated capsule.
Although we know that Stephen Foster wrote Old Folks at Home, The Old Kentucky Home, Uncle Ned, Massa’s in the Cold, Cold Ground, and Old Black Joe, they express so perfectly the mood and spirit of the people that they are true folk songs. Harold Vincent Milligan in his book on Stephen Foster says: “Every folk-song is first born in the heart and brain of some one person, whose spirit is so finely attuned to the voice of that inward struggle which is the history of the soul of man, that when he seeks for his own self-expression he at the same time gives a voice to that vast ‘mute multitude who die and give no sign.’”
And again speaking of Stephen Foster, Mr. Milligan says: “Although purists may question their right to the title ‘folk songs’ his melodies are truly the songs of the American people.”
The folk music of which we have told you has been the music portraits of different peoples such as the Russian, the Polish, the French, the German, the English, the Irish and so on. If there has been a mixture of peoples or tribes as in England where there were Britons, Danes, Angles, Saxons and Normans, it happened so long ago that they have become molded into one race. We are all Americans but we are not of one race, and we are still in the process of being molded into one type.
We unite people of all nations under one flag and one government, but we have been sung to sleep and amused as children by the folk songs of the European nations to which our parents and grandparents belonged! And so we have heard from childhood Sur le Pont d’Avignon, Schlaf Kindlein Schlaf, Wurmland, The Volga Boat Song, Sally in our Alley, or The Wearing of the Green, none of which is American.
In spite of all these obstacles to the growth of a folk music in America, we have several sources from which they have come.