As our earliest settlers in Virginia and New England were English, they brought with them many of their folk songs and some of these have remained unchanged in the districts where people of other nations have not penetrated. The Lonesome Tunes of the Kentucky mountains, also of Tennessee, the Carolinas and Vermont are examples of this kind of English folk song in America.
In Louisiana which was settled by the French, we find a type of folk song that is very charming. It is a combination of old French folk song with negro spiritual, and is brought to us by the Creoles.
In California there is a strong Spanish flavor in some of the old ballads that date from the time of the Spanish Missions. There are also mining songs of the “days of ’49,” including Oh Susannah, by Stephen Foster, and we defy you to get rid of the tune if once it “gets you!”
Then there are cow-boy songs of the Plains, The Texas Rangers, The Ship that Never Returned, The Cow-boy’s Lament and Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie; the Lumberjack songs of Maine; the well known air of the Arkansas Traveller, which was a funny little sketch for theatre of a conversation between the Arkansas traveller and a squatter which is interrupted by snatches of a tune; and in addition a whole book full of songs sung in the backwoods settlements, hunting cabins and lumber camps in northern Pennsylvania.
So if you seek, you can find a large number of folk songs without going to the Indian or the Negro.
The Civil War brought out a number of new national songs among them Glory Hallelujah and Dixie. Dixie was written in 1859 as a song and “walk-around” by the famous minstrel Dan Emmett, and became a war song by accident. It had dash and a care-free spirit, and the rollicking way it pictured plantation life attracted the soldiers of the South when they were in the cold winter camps in the North. Its rhythm is so irresistible that it makes your hands and feet go in spite of yourself. Besides these two the soldiers of the Civil War marched to Rally Round the Flag, Boys, Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys are Marching, Home, Sweet Home, Lily Dale, The Girl I Left Behind Me, Hail Columbia and The Star Spangled Banner.
We have told you so much about the Indian and his song that it is unnecessary now to dwell at length on his music. Of course some American composers have used Indian folk legend and music, but after all it remains the musical portrait of the Red Man and has not become the heart language of the white man.
We have, however, a real folk-expression that has had a great deal of influence on our popular music and will probably help to create a serious music to which we can attach the label “Made in America,” and that is the music of the American Negro.
In Chapter II we showed you what the Negro had brought from his native Africa, and also that he had been influenced by his contact with the white race. His music is not the result of conscious art and of study but is a natural outburst in which he expresses his joys and sorrows, his tragedies and racial oppression. Also we find rhythms, melody and form that have grown as a wild flower grows, and are different from any we have met heretofore.
Mr. Krehbiel in his book Afro-American Folksongs says of the Negro slave songs: “They contain idioms which were transplanted hither from Africa, but as song they are the product of American institutions; of the social, political and geographical environment within which their creators were placed in America, of the influences to which they were subjected in America, of the joys, sorrows and experiences which fell to their lot in America.”