American Songs for American Children (6 articles- Attached)
B. A. Botkin and Alan Lomax
Music Educators Journal, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Jan., 1944), pp. 24-25
[Contents (pages are attached- click on page on left hand column below this page)
I. Jennie Jenkins; John Henry
II. Captain Jinks; Down in the Valley; My Lover is a Sailor Boy; So Long, It's Been Good To Know You
III. Jinny Crack Corn; New River Train; Here Rattler Here; Drill Ye Tarriers Drill
IV. Farmer; Young Man Who Wouldn't Hoe Corn; Wayfaring Stranger
V. Risselty Rosselty; All Around the Maypole; Old Blue
VI. Hog Drovers; Rolly Trudum; Darby Ram
This series was not continued after the sixth article.]
American Songs for American Children
M.E.N.C. COMMITTEE ON FOLK MUSIC OF THE UNITED STATES TO DEVELOP a program of "American Songs for American Children" the Music Educators National Conference has set up a Committee on Folk Music of the United States. As Number 11 under "Relations and Resources Influencing Curriculum Development," the Committee conceives of its function as one that touches "Relations and Resources" at almost every point, from community activity to research. (See Sept.-Oct. issue, page 20.)
Basic to this activity is the principle stated by Charles Seeger in his Foreword to American Songs for American Children: "one essential basis of music education in a country is the folk music of that country." This axiom is basic not only to music education but also to American education, for to know American folk music is to know the American experience with which it is inextricably bound up. And because folk music, like folk tradition generally, is part of a world stream, there is no conflict there between being "at home" with our own music and giving a home to the music of the rest of the world.
In accordance with this principle of a basic and interrelated activity, the Committee has formulated the following five-point program:
(1) To publish more folk music. Two years ago it Milwaukee the Music Educators National Conference, in cooperation with the Music Division of the Library of Congress, presented a successful program of "American Songs for American Children." As a result of the ensuing demand for copies, the edition of the Conference booklet of the same title was soon exhausted. To continue to make folk-song material available to the schools, the Committee will select two or three folk songs for publication in each issue of the JOURNAL, beginning, in this issue, with two of the best songs reprinted from the booklet. Teachers and pupils who use the songs are invited to send in their reactions and suggestions. In this way it is hoped to accumulate, over a period of time, a body of tested and approved material.
(2) To work on the principle that folk music begins at home. Folk-song activity is conceived of as an arc, with collection at one end and publication at the other. Since direct contact with the sources is one of the best ways of cultivating a taste for folk music, directors of music will be encouraged to locate and record folk musicians and folk-music groups in their communities. Here the pupils can serve as intermediaries and collectors for singers of their own families and acquaintance. The experience of many European countries in utilizing the schools as a collecting agency has amply demonstrated the twofold benefit resulting from such activity: first, the enrichment of folk-song collections; second, the development of consciousness of the existence of folk music in every community. In this connection the policy of the Archive of American Folk Song of the Library of Congress, as stated by Harold Spivacke, chief of the Music Division, bears repeating: "Intensive work must be carried on by local authorities, and we have long hoped for the day when every state in the Union will have its own folk-song archive with which we could cooperate."
(3) To survey folk-song publications. As a guide to the further collection and publication of American folk songs, more information is needed on what already has been published. To this end the Committee will undertake a survey of available folk music in textbooks and regular folk-song collections. It is hoped that such an investigation will serve to uncover gaps and blind spots as well as to provide a basic bibliography and study guide.
(4) To coilperate with record companies. The phonograph record has proved one of the most effective means of teaching folk songs. Existing catalogs and appraisals of recordings indicate the wealth of material already available, as well as the possibilities for increasing the variety of selection and presentation. In addition to the many excellent commercial albums of folk songs and folk dances, there are such authentic productions as the Library of Congress' "The Ballad Hunter" series of fifteen-minute transcriptions by John A. Lomax, documenting the songs with background descriptions and collector's anecdotes. As a means of bringing music educators together with the record companies and exchanging ideas, representatives of the major companies have been invited to confer with the Committee and participate in its program. More work needs to be done on listing and evaluating records as a step toward formulating standards.
[NOTE: For a description of the Library of Congress' six record albums of Folk Music of the United States, see the April 1943 JOURNAL.]
(5) To plan a folk-song session at the 1944 conference. The Committee will focus attention on its activities at a folk-song session at the St. Louis conference in March. As a practical demonstration of teachers' participation, a folk singer will lead the teachers themselves in the singing of folk songs. Experience to date in the use of folk music in the schools indicates that all attempts to orient the curriculum in this direction must begin by teaching the teachers.
-B. A. BOTKIN
[The impetus for the series appears to be this earlier article by Charles Seeger, written during WWII]
American Music for American Children
Charles Seeger
Music Educators Journal, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Nov. - Dec., 1942), pp. 11-12
American Music for American Children
CHARLES SEEGER
IN THE UNITED STATES, domestic values have developed in a broad way among the people as a whole. Various regions of the country, rural and urban populations, the least and the most privileged social strata, have contributed essentially, though not always equally, to what we call the American way of life. During the last century, however, as leadership became more highly organized, foreign values were increasingly imposed, especially in the arts. And so in many fields we have seen conflicts between these two types of values-the wholecloth of' domestic values most characteristic of the new way of life, stemming from the oldest immigrants to the Western Hemisphere, and the patchwork of more recent importations from the mother cultures of Europe. In few fields has this conflict been more bitterly and stubbornly contested than in that of music. Remarkable achievements have been made by both sides. It would be hard to imagine a United States without its rich folk music and brilliant popular music, on the one hand, or its far-reaching development of fine-art music-its symphony orchestras, chamber music, and music education on the other.
We have no reason to regret either the stubborn resistance of our folk singers to more "cultivated" influences or the idealistic strivings of our musical progressives from Lowell Mason to the League of Composers. The thing we should regret is that the conflict between them ever existed. For it has pitted oral and written traditions against each other and produced disparities of music taste and usage between city and country which tend to drive people apart and render them unable to understand each other or the whole of which they are parts.
It may be said that one mark of a mature and vigorous people is its ability to be at home with itself, to accept itself and to value itself for what it is. But no less important is its ability to be at home in the world at large to give and take in the free intercourse of peoples without too much regrettable loss on any side. If, as many of us believe, the United States is come of age as a world culture, will it not be upon the basis of the integrity of its domestic values that it will be able to adjust itself to the influx of foreign values which inevitably pour into its life? And will it not be upon this same basis that it can expect to take a leading part in the world adjustments now claiming so large a part of its attention?
The process of knowing and accepting itself is now well under way in the' United States, in nearly every field. In the Latin-American countries, whose history so much resembles ours, processes similar to those in the Anglo-American countries have been maturing for some time. We can see ourselves acting, then, not only in a national but in a hemisphere picture.
In this large frame the program "American Songs for American Children" presented at the biennial convention of the Music Educators National Conference in Milwaukee in the spring of 1942 signalizes a step taken in the United States whose counterpart has already been taken by some of our Southern neighbors. It is a step to which we have looked forward for some years-perhaps the most momentous single step to be taken toward the time when the United States will be at home with its own music. This step is the adherence of the music educators of the United States to the principle that one essential basis of music education in a country is the folk music of that country. It gives substance to our effort to make music serve in the larger picture of hemisphere relations. And this is perhaps the most practical path toward the eventual setting up of a world community of musics, when and if, as we must hope, the present world struggle shall resolve itself and construction of a sane and democratic order on this earth shall progress more through cooperative than through competitive channels.*
Acceptance of the principle, however, while perhaps the most important single step, constitutes only an initial phase of the broad process of music development which is now taking place in the United States. There are still several obstacles to overcome in the practical application of the principle.' It is my intention, therefore, to attempt a clarification of some of the conditions under which we must work toward our goal, and to detail some of the stages through which we must pass before the principle may become translated into reality.
As I see it, the first condition prerequisite to utilization of our own folk music as one essential basis of our music education is: to see our music education as an integral part of American music as a whole-as possibly the most effective agency we have for the integration of American music within itself and within the culture of which it is a part.
The term "American music" (that is to say, United-States-of-American music) may be used in two senses: first, as designating the music and music activity actually existing in the United States; second, as referring to the part of this music that expresses or characterizes the American people as distinguished from other peoples. In the first sense, the term refers to an unprecedented quantity of highly diversified and almost entirely unintegrated music activity; in the second, to a quality not yet well defined but critically discernible to a sufficient number of people at this time.
The oldest element in the existing music picture, the American Indian, has become of great importance in Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. In the United States, as in Chile and Brazil, this element may eventually loom larger in the national picture; this is, however, a hypothetical question at the present time. The next oldest element is that brought to the New World by the European conquerors and by the colonists who followed them for three or four centuries. Under conditions of pioneer life, fine-art and the higher forms of popular music could not thrive. Even in colonial periods, fine-art music was given only restricted cultivation.
The great bulk of music activity depended upon oral rather than written traditions. Though we have only the sketchiest kind of historical evidence, we may infer that local, regional, and even continental development of folk music took place. On the whole, as far as we can see, the lines of demarcation were established by language. Local language majorities known as Spanish-American, Portuguese-American, French-American, and others came to exist in the United States as elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere. Here, however, these have become known as "foreign-language minorities," in view of the overwhelming dominance of the Anglo-American majority. Wherever English has been spoken there has gone along with it, as far as popular and folk music are concerned, English-Scotch-Irish music traditions.
The third element to develop in New World music was the African. The Negro slaves and their descendants learned the idioms of Anglo-American folk and popular music, and, in some localities, of Spanish- and French-American. To the extent to which they maintained social life among themselves, African traits appeared in their use of the idioms of European origin. The resulting hybrid has spread widely and has been much imitated by the rest of the population. The fourth element in the picture of -American music is that brought to the New World by its own people of wealth and by professional music students who went back to Europe during the nineteenth century and acquired, with the psychology of the colonist returning to the mother country, a musical attitude and taste of distinct and peculiar character. Highly idealistic, eclectic, and infused with missionary zeal, the returning travelers became the leading music professionals and amateurs of the young republic. They brought with them knowledge of the masterworks of German, French, and Italian music, and of the techniques requisite for their performance and study, but neither knowledge nor even consciousness of the social function of music in Germany, France, and Italy. They brought a love of the folk music of Europe, but a contempt for. the folk music of America. With a doctrine of "music, the universal language," their descendants cultivated the "cosmopolitan style," though the Europe they admired was discovering the practically unintelligible primitive musics and only slightly less unintelligible fine-art musics of Arabia, India, China, Japan, and Indonesia, and was soon to use the "beautiful art of peace" as a weapon in street fighting and in civil and international war.
It is in terms of this fourth element that music education as we know it has grown. Until shortly after 1900 it developed in harmony with the outstanding national figures in the concert-music profession, Theodore Thomas, Paine, MacDowell, Parker, and the rest-all Europophiles, Europeans born and bred or at least trained in Europe. The actual music produced, in the schools as well as in the concert halls, when not of actual European composition, was mainly of the nondescript character of the "cosmopolitan style" of the nineteenth century. No traffic was had with contemporary popular music, which went its own way. Native folk music was considered not to exist-and went its own way also.
During the first and second decades of the twentieth century, the leading concert composers broke with nineteenth- century European romanticism. By the twenties a new "cosmopolitan style" had been developed, and a mild rapprochement with jazz was entered into though soon abandoned. In the thirties, American folk music was "discovered" by all but a few constitutional unsympathetics. During this period, roughly 1900 to 1940, music education first took the important step of including in its "materia musica" the older popular music of Foster, Work, Root, Emmet, Bland, and others. Later, some folk songs crept in, mostly cowboy, mountaineer, and sailor songs. On the whole, however, the nineteenth century "cosmopolitan style" was adhered to. This has effectively blocked rapprochement with the leading American composers, whose twentieth-century "cosmopolitan style" was a belligerent denial of the old romanticism of nostalgia and beauty for beauty's sake. So, although folk and popular idioms have been upon a sound footing of mutual borrowing and stealing since long before 1900, contemporary music education and fine-art composition have, up to this very year, lived in separate worlds, shut off from each other and from the "evils" of oral tradition with its spawn of hybrids: hill-billy, boogie-woogie, jazz-blues, swing improvisations, and the like.
To know even a little of each of these varieties of music experience is one thing; to learn to appreciate them as products, and hence expressions, of the genius of America, is quite another. But it can be done. We have both personal and group inertia and resistances to overcome. But these can be overcome.
If, as I believe we agree, integration of our national culture is our most important present task, we shall have not only every stimulus to deepen musical knowledge and broaden musical taste, but also the satisfaction of knowing that music education is already in a clear position of leadership in the national music picture.
[* This and the three preceding paragraphs appeared, in substance, in the May-June issue as an excerpt from Mr. Seeger's foreword to the folk-song pamphlet distributed at the Milwaukee convention; that foreword was an excerpt from this series of articles.]
[NOTE: This is the first of two articles by Mr. Seeger on American
music; the second will appear in the January issue.]