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.”