Illustrations
[1. Typical country singers of early American spiritual folk-songs] Frontispiece [2. The “big singings” take place at county seats and in even larger centers] Frontispiece [3. “Dinner on the grounds”] xii [4. Classification chart of tunes] facing page 16 [5. The Original Sacred Harp, 1911 edition] 24 [6. The sole occurrence of ‘The Babe of Bethlehem’] 26 [7. The ‘Morning Trumpet’ in seven-shape notation] 26 [8. Benjamin Franklin White, and Thurza Golightly White, of Hamilton, Georgia] 86 [9. The White memorial in Atlanta] 86 [10. The Sacred Harp appeared in 1844] 86 [11. The Southern Harmony, 1835] 166 [12. William (Singin’ Billy) Walker, of Spartanburg, South Carolina] 168 [13. William Walker’s grave in Spartanburg, South Carolina] 168
“Dinner on the grounds” is one of the traditional features of all country singings.
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.