Bluegrass Messengers

Folk-Songs of America: Recording and Liner Notes

[This is a tribute LP which was produced by the Library of Congress in 1978, a sampling of folksongs from the cylinders Gordon recorded between 1922-1932. Included here are the excellect LP notes and MP3's of the songs. This information is also available at the Library of Congress site.

Gordon wrote a series of NY times articles titled, Folk Song of America, in the 1920s for the NY Times Sunday Magazine. These articles were reproduced in a booklet published in 1938. The articles have lyrics of the various folksongs Gordon collected but there is no music. R. Matteson 2011]

Folk-Songs of America: The Robert Winslow Gordon Collection, 1922-1932

Foreword
by Joseph C. Hickerson

July 1, 1978, marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Archive of Folk Song in the Library of Congress. We are celebrating the semi-centennial year with a symposium and an exhibit on the archive's history, a special concert by folk musicians, an article for the Library's Quarterly Journal, and a commemorative long-playing recording. Throughout these events will be woven the name and accomplishments of the archive's first director (1928-32), Robert Winslow Gordon.

The recognition we give Gordon for his role in the archive's beginnings not only serves as leitmotif for our fiftieth-year celebrations but also publicizes an American folklorist whose work has been largely unknown. The reasons for Gordon's lack of acclaim are several. First, he pioneered folksong documentation at a time when the subject was appreciated by but a handful of specialists and aficionados. Second, his publications were few and largely ephemeral; he refused to compromise accuracy and scholarship for mass publication and exposure. Finally, federal support for folklore documentation and preservation was tenuous in the late 1920's and early 1930's. It took ten years, the Depression, and the New Deal to assure federally funded activities in folklore.

Robert W. Gordon's collection of over nine hundred cylinder and disc recordings, ten thousand songs in manuscript, and numerous ephemeral and popular publications related to folksong lay in storage in the Library's Music Division stacks for more than three decades. The accomplishments of later directors of the archive overshadowed the dormant treasures of the archive's first director. During the 1940s and 1950s, few scholars were aware of the Gordon collection, and virtually no one worked with it. More assiduous researchers such as Benjamin A. Botkin, Austin E. Fife, and D.K. Wilgus perused it. Others, including Herbert Halpert and Kenneth S. Goldstein were cognizant of the collection and realized the need to bring it to light.

I grew aware of the great riches of the Gordon collection soon after I began working at the archive in 1963. During the next ten years, I was able to direct a number of researchers to the collection for interesting song texts, often predating any other report on the songs in question. Occasionally, scholars were provided with tape copies of particular cylinders for their comparative and historical studies. Thus Gordon's pioneering efforts influenced the subsequent scholarship of Archie Green, Norm Cohen, Judith McCulloh, and a few others.

As time passed, other "champions" of R.W. Gordon stepped forward. Archie Green spoke of his accomplishments on many occasions, perhaps never more eloquently than in November 1968 at the annual meeting of the American Folklore Society in Bloomington, Indiana. Interest also accrued at the University of Oregon, where Gordon's personal papers had been bequeathed through the auspices of Prof. Arthur Brodeur, Gordon's colleague and friend of many years. University of Oregon folklorist J. Barre Toelken directed students to this collection once it was housed in the university library's special collection as part of the Randall V. Mills Memorial Archive of Northwest Folklore (q.v. Grimm).

Duplicating Gordon's original cylinders onto tape in the Recording Laboratory of the Library of Congress. From left to right: Robert B. Carneal, Head, Recorded Sound Section; Debora G. Kodish; Professor Neil V. Rosenberg, Memorial University of Newfoundland; and Erika Brady, LC staff engineer. Photo by Carl Fleischhauer, June 1978.

In 1973 my own efforts to make the Gordon collection more accessible were joined by those of Deborah G. Kodish, a Lehigh University undergraduate who discovered its variety and extent while on a ballad research project. Subsequently, as an intern in the Archive of Folk Song, Kodish explored the many boxes of typescripts, correspondence, and index cards. During this period and later while working on her master's degree in the Folklore Department of the Memorial University of Newfoundland under the direction of Prof. Herbert Halpert and Prof. Neil V. Rosenberg, she made a number of lists and indexes and helped to prepare the manuscripts for preservation on microfilm. She interviewed Robert Gordon's daughter, Mrs. Roberta P. G. Nye, and her family in Shalotte, North Carolina, and also a number of other people throughout the country who had known Gordon. These researches, which were supported by grants from Memorial University, culminated in an exemplary thesis.

In 1976 the archive was able to place the Gordon cylinders on the Recording Laboratory's schedule for preservation duplication (the Gordon discs had been copied onto tape several years before). In preparation for this, two archive interns, Rebecca Martin and Susan J. Grodsky, prepared a provisional shelflist based on Gordon's own card index. The cylinders were copied by Mark Schellhammer under the supervision of Chief Engineer Robert B. Carneal.

Debora Kodish's study of Gordon at the Memorial University of Newfoundland spurred Herbert Halpert to order a set of the Gordon tapes for the university's folklore archive. Once the tapes and shelflist arrived in St. John's, folklore archivist Neil V. Rosenberg assigned to a graduate student, Robert McCarl, the task of listening to and further annotating the tapes. Rosenberg and the new Folklore Department director, Kenneth S. Goldstein, asked McCarl to give particular attention to items appropriate for issuance on an LP disc. Goldstein's and Rosenberg's keen interest in a publication of selected Gordon recordings dovetailed with interest in the Library of Congress in a suitable commemoration of the archive's anniversary. Initial selection for the LP was energetically carried out by Goldstein and Rosenberg in Newfoundland and by Kodish at the Library. Rosenberg and Kodish were on hand for a final tape duplication supervised by Carneal and assisted by Assistant Chief Engineer John E. Howell and Erika Brady, staff engineer.

The interest and efforts of many people led to the conception and completion of this recording. Extreme thanks are tendered to everyone who collaborated in this project. In addition, we thank the singers and musicians who recorded for R.W. Gordon and their next-of-kin who, when located, gave us permission to include selections on this LP. For general encouragement and specific guidance, we are much indebted to Kenneth S.Goldstein, Archie Green, Herbert Halpert, Alan Jabbour, Bert Nye, Roberta Gordon Nye and family, and J.Barre Toelken. Grateful acknowledgement is also tendered to Loyal Jones and to the James Stikeleather, Jr., family for photographs and to Sharon Cochrane, Donna Jean Fusione, Frank J. Gillis, John Hasse, Gerald E. Parsons, Jr., and Cindy Turpin for their assistance with annotations, transcriptions, and bibliography.

To the memory of Robert Winslow Gordon we dedicate this recording.

Joseph. C. Hickerson
Head, Archive of Folk Song

------------------------------------
Introduction
By Debora G. Kodish

The recordings on this album represent one man's ambitious attempt to document the extent and variety of American folksong. Like many other folklorists in the first decades of this century, Robert Winslow Gordon studied English Literature at Harvard under George Lyman Kitteredge. Unlike other folklorists, however, Gordon abandoned a career in academia, because he believed the duties of the profession hampered him in his determination to learn everything there was to know about folksong in America. He became, instead, a free-lance writer supporting himself with articles on folksong in popular magazines.

Gordon carried his heavy cylinder recorder (and later, his disc machine) to the San Francisco waterfront, the Appalachian Mountains, and the Georgia coast in order to record the diverse singing traditions of this country. He recorded nearly a thousand cylinders, collected nearly ten thousand more song texts from the readers of his popular articles, and gathered many thousand additional song versions from old camp-meeting and revival songbooks, broadsides, folios, and hillbilly recordings--ephemeral material of which few of his colleagues were aware. Gordon never believed that his collecting was finished and never wrote the definitive volumes of collectanea and theory that he planned. Nevertheless, in his theoretical orientation, his scientific outlook, his dedication to technical accuracy, and his interest in phonographic and photographic documentation, Gordon was a pioneer among the folklorists of the 1920s and 1930s.

The field recordings Gordon made reflect his broad research interests and his unusual eclecticism. To him, the recordings were exciting aesthetically, theoretically and technically. To us, listening fifty years later, they are perhaps even more exciting, for time has added another dimension, and we appreciate them for what they tell us about the epoch in which they were recorded and the man who recorded them.

Robert Winslow Gordon was born in Bangor, Maine, on September 2, 1888. As a youth he was fascinated with technology and tinkered with radios, airplanes, and cameras. Later, at Exeter and then at Harvard, he continued his technical experiments. Although Gordon received a privileged education, he worked hard both in and out of the classroom. He waited table, sold subscriptions, and took numerous other odd jobs to pay for tuition, books, and inevitably, radio and camera parts.

Gordon began his study of English literature at Harvard in 1906 and remained in Harvard's English department in varying capacities until 1916. During this time he crossed paths with many of the scholars who were to play significant roles in the development of American folklore studies over the next few decades. Although he knew these men, Gordon was highly independent. Even as a student he was known for the curiousness and perspicacity, the thoroughness and perfectionism that were both to bless and plague his career.

In 1912, while he was teaching literature and composition courses under his mentors George Lyman Kitteredge and Barrett Wendall, he met and married Roberta Peter Paul of Darien, Georgia. Their only child, a daughter named Roberta, was born in 1914 while the couple was living in Cambridge.

Although he had not completed his Ph.D. dissertation, Gordon accepted the position of assistant professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley and, with his family, moved west in 1917. His interests in folksong, material culture, folk belief and technology all blossomed in the West.

Although he taught graduate courses in folklore, supervised theses, and read theoretical papers to learned societies, Gordon differed greatly from his academic colleagues. Nowhere was this more evident than in the matter of collecting folksong. While others typically took down ballad texts from graduate students, Gordon spent much of his time collecting songs on the Oakland and San Francisco waterfronts, where he won the cooperation of stevedores, sailors, captains, hoboes, and convicts. The first two selections on this record were probably recorded on one of Gordon's waterfront forays between 1923 and 1924.

During his years in California, 1917-24, Gordon gathered more than one thousand shanties and sea songs, at least three hundred of which he recorded on cylinders, making his the largest collection of maritime songs then in existence. Gordon was not interested in the sheer number of texts; instead he hoped to learn from this large body of data something of the role that Afro-American traditions and popular minstrel show materials played in the development of the sea shanty. He was successful in his fieldwork, but most of his colleagues in Berkeley's English department failed to recognize it. Few of them knew what he was doing on the waterfront, and many expressed the wish that he would spend his time in more orthodox academic pursuits. Gordon, however, was not inclined to explain his research or his methods.

At approximately the same time he began his fieldwork in the Bay Area, Gordon launched a collateral program of long-range research. In 1923, he began to edit the column "Old Songs That Men Have Sung" in the pulp magazine Adventure. By printing songs that his readers requested and advertising for additional texts and verses, Gordon used the column to build up an immense and eclectic collection of folksong as well as a broad network of correspondents and informants from all over the United States and overseas. His reputation as "the Adventure man" made his name familiar to many sailors, convicts, and hoboes in the Bay Area before they met him with phonograph in hand. His connection with Adventure was to prove more useful in the field than in the faculty meeting, however. The "Old Songs" column--which was later praised by folklorist Archer Taylor as the greatest contribution to the study of American folksong of its time-- was another source of dissatisfaction to Gordon's Berkeley colleagues, who would have preferred his endeavors to find expression in a more conventional way. Gordon, committed to "a popular scholarly approach," continued all his life to publish authoritative, interesting articles where they would be read by wide audiences.

Gordon's California collecting came to an end when English department politics threatened the job of a lifelong friend and colleague. In defending his friend, Gordon embarrassed the head of the department. He was sent on sabbatical for the year 1924-25 and was informed that he would not be rehired. Gordon left Berkeley and returned to Harvard, planning to finish his doctorate. But he decided instead to undertake a year-long trip (1925-26) with the object of making the definitive recorded collection of American folksong. Gordon arranged to support his first year in the field through a contract for a series of articles from the New York Times Magazine (the series title provides the title of this album), a $1,200 Sheldon traveling fellowship from Harvard, discounts and donations on equipment from the Edison, Ford, and Eastman companies, and loans from friends. The variety of his sources for support notwithstanding, his resources amounted to little, and his trip trembled constantly on the brink of financial disaster. Nevertheless, with the discovery of plentiful material and willing informants, he soon abandoned his original itinerary and stretched one year of fieldwork into four. Gordon felt that he was discovering material that shed light on the problems of folksong origin and development. He collected many versions of particular songs and explored their historical, social, and cultural backgrounds. By reconstructing the histories of specific songs, Gordon expected to gain insights into the evolution of folk literature in general. The two versions of "Blow Boys Blow" presented on side B reflect this theoretical concern.

Gordon regularly traveled many miles out of his way to track down a bit of information that might aid him in understanding a specific song history. On his way to Asheville, North Carolina, where he intended to set up his first field station, he made a detour in order to interview and record two men who claimed to be the authors of "The Wreck of Old 97." In 1924, this song (sung by Vernon Dalhart) had become the first hillbilly record to sell a million copies. Fred Lewey was one of the pair who claimed authorship, and his historic rendition is included here. It later figured in litigation surrounding the copyright ownership of the song – a court case that helped establish Gordon's reputation as an expert witness and to demonstrate the application of folklore scholarship to practical affairs.

Gordon arrived in Asheville in October and set up his tent in the hills outside of town. There he typed his transcriptions, wrote his "Old Songs" column for Adventure, and descended to town only for mail and supplies. One of the first persons he met in the Asheville area was a young banjo playing lawyer, Bascom Lamar Lunsford. Lunsford played and sang into Gordon's cylinder machine and took him around the mountains introducing him to other musicians and singers. Nancy Weaver Stikeleather and James Stikeleather, John W.Dillon, Ernest Helton, W.E. Bird, Julius Sutton, and the Reverend H.G. Holly were among Gordon's other North Carolina informants. The fiddle tunes, ballads, and religious songs they perform on this record represent some of Gordon's chief research interests and favorite "finds."

By Christmas 1925, Gordon had been living away from his family for more than a year. The separation was difficult, emotionally and financially, and he decided to move to a field station on the southern coast of Georgia--to Darien, the childhood home of Mrs. Gordon. The reunited family occupied a two-room house, and Gordon resumed work, eagerly setting out to record the Afro-American traditions of the Georgia coast. The rowing songs and the boat songs which he discovered are represented on this record by the performances of Mary C. Mann and J. A. S. Spencer. Mary Mann, a deaconess at a local black church, had organized a school in Darien in which she taught young black women the domestic skills they needed to find employment. Mary Mann had a large repertoire herself, and she encouraged her students and members of her church to contribute their songs to Gordon as well.

Gordon felt that he occupied a special position in the Darien black community. He had earned the trust and friendship of several local blacks, among them W.M. Givens, whose niece was sometimes employed by the Gordons. One day she came running terrified into their home. Her uncle had been bitten by a poisonous snake. Gordon rushed back with her, put a tourniquet on the man's leg, cut the bite, and sucked out the venom. Billy Givens was soon walking again, and Gordon had earned a friend for life--a friend who also happened to be a fine singer. He can be heard singing "Deep Down in My Heart" on side B. All of Gordon's Georgia informants lived within a day's drive of Darien, for Gordon did not have enough cash to buy gasoline most of the time and was obliged to return to the station where he had credit. Nor did he always take the car on field trips; he knew the countryside for fifteen miles around Darien from his long walks.

Money remained a problem, and although Gordon saw no end to his collecting, he was looking for a steadier source of income than freelance writing could provide. He wanted the chance to collect, examine, and theorize about American folksong without financial worry. Gordon had done extensive research at the Library of Congress, and in the fall of 1926 he brought his dream to Carl Engel, chief of the Music Division at the Library. Engel was interested in Gordon's work and considered him America's foremost authority on folksong. When Gordon asked for institutional support, Engel responded enthusiastically. Gordon's dream fit neatly into Engel's own hopes of establishing a graduate institute for the study of musicology at the Library of Congress, which would include a national center for the collection and study of folk music. As no government funds were available, private donors were solicited and subscriptions raised. In July 1928, Herbert Putnam, the Librarian of Congress, appointed Gordon "specialist and consultant in the field of Folk Song and Literature." Gordon later proposed a title that he thought would appeal more to the imagination of the general public: director of the Archive of American Folk Song.

During the first year of the archive's existence, Gordon remained in Darien collecting the shouts, rowing songs, rags, reels, and turning songs that were of primary importance in the study of American folk song and of special significance in learning how folksongs start and spread. The December 1928 meeting of the Modern Language Association, in Louisville, Kentucky, lured him away from home by providing opportunities to work in a new region, to publicize his national folksong archive, and to ask for the cooperation of all interested scholars. It may have been on this trip to Louisville that Gordon met Nellie Galt and Ben Harney, both of whom may be heard on side B of this record.

Although Engel, Putnam, and Gordon shared a belief in the importance of a center devoted to the collection and study of American traditional music, they did not agree upon the methods by which such a center should develop. Gordon wanted the freedom of a research scientist--financial backing and complete support while he went about his independent investigations. Putnam and Engel, however, felt compelled to write repeatedly to Darien, requesting information as to his whereabouts and activities. Perceiving that his great distance from the Library was a barrier to harmonious relations, Gordon concluded his Georgia fieldwork and, in September 1929, moved with his family to Washington.

Once his archive was installed in the southwest corner of the Library's attic, Gordon devoted a great deal of time to experimentation with recording apparatus. He conducted his own tests with cylinder and wire recorders and stayed in close consultation with commercial firms. Borrowing a new model of Amplion disc recorder in 1932, he traveled to West Virginia, Kentucky, and Virginia to try it in the field. His recordings of Betty Bush Winger and F.H. Abbot on side B stem from this field experiment with disc recording.

Gordon's difficulties with the Library were only momentarily relieved by his move to Washington. The depression put an end to the donations which had sustained his position, and in 1933 the last of these funds ran out. This, coupled with the Library's disappointment in his performance, cost Gordon his job. It was a blow from which he never recovered.

He spent his final year at the Library indexing the texts he had amassed during his tenure as editor of the "Old Songs" column, the transcriptions of the material he had recorded in his fieldwork, and the collections of other folklorists which he had acquired for the archive.

Gordon's active career as a folklorist ended in 1933, although some of his most important publications appeared after that. He worked in the Washington, D.C., area, primarily as a technical editor and as a professor of English, until his death on March 29, 1961.

It is now fifty years since Gordon was appointed first director of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, and therefore a fitting moment to reexamine and appreciate his achievements, and to publish some of his collectanea. Many of the original cylinders considered for this commemorative disc are in poor condition, badly worn from overuse by Gordon himself. It is probable that he transcribed song texts from his original field recordings. He also played them over for informants and colleagues. Thus the very items in which Gordon was most interested are now the items in poorest condition. His collection is so large, however, that there is no lack of significant material of good recorded quality.

We have also been guided in our choices by Gordon himself. We have tried to put together the sort of album that he might have assembled. Our selections are items about which Gordon wrote and which seemed to him to be keys to the comprehension of American folksong, i.e., items which document the interplay between black and white traditions and reflect the influence of popular, commercial culture (minstrel and tent shows, camp meetings and phonograph records) upon folk traditions.

In his writings, Gordon tried to recreate the contexts in which he recorded these songs. He constantly lamented that the printed page could not do justice to the beauty of the music or the skill of the singer. He wished that his readers could be transported to the mountain cabin or the lowland church to share with him there the excitement of a live performance. With a little imagination, we can now, fifty years later, feel some of that excitement.

------------------------------

Annotations and Texts (With sound recordings links )
Neil V. Rosenberg
Department of Folklore
Memorial University of Newfoundland

The articles, books, and records cited in abbreviated form in the following notes are listed in full in the bibliography at the end of the booklet. My intention is not to give exhaustive citations, but to provide information which sets the songs and tunes in a comparative historical context. The transcriptions of song texts given here are complete in so far as this LP is concerned, but various technical or editorial considerations have occasionally forced the omission of some parts of the original recordings.

The extensive liner notes for this recording have been broken up by the band numbers on the LP in order to make them more readily available in the online version. Sources for the citations found in Neil Rosenberg's liner notes may be found on the page "Works Cited."

The following monophonic sound files are in .MP3 format. Note that these songs were originally recorded on wax cylinders, and are presented here as recorded on the Library of Congress, Archive of Folk Culture LP, published in 1978.

---------------------------------Side A--------------------------

Band A1:

Haul the Wood Pile Down: Singer unknown. Bay Area, California. Early 1920s.

Roll the Old Chariot Along: Singer unknown. Bay Area, California. Early 1920s.

Band A1
The first two selections are sea shanties from Gordon's California collection. They were almost certainly recorded in the San Francisco Bay Area, probably in Oakland, in the early twenties. The singer appears to have been a veteran of sailing ships, for he begins the first song with appropriate instructions to the short-haul crew. Notice how he emphasizes the words haul, down, which are signals for the crew to pull together. Hugill speculates that this song, "sung at both capstan and pumps" (p.161), is of West Indian or southern United States origin. Aside from it's use as a shanty, it has stylistic and historical connections with the minstrel stage. Doerflinger (p.350) dates it from an 1887 songster, Delaney's Song Book No.3, where the words are credited to Edward Harrigan. Sheet music copyrighted in 1887 by William A. Pond & Co., New York, also credits the words to Harrigan, gives the score to Dave Braham, and adds the information "As sung in Edward Harrigan's drama, "Pete"(in Harrigan and Braham's Popular Songs As Sung by Harrigan and Hart, Volume 2, New York: Wm. A. Pond & Co., 1892, pp.51-52). It was recorded by latter-day minstrel showman and Grand Ole Opry pioneer Uncle Dave Macon (NLCR, pp.226-28). The reference to "Yankee John" in this version may reflect contact with the shanty "Yankee John, Stormalong" (Hugill, p.80). The combination of sea shanty and blackface minstrelsy reflected in this song no doubt appealed to Gordon, who was keenly interested in the interplay between nineteenth century black and white, folk and popular, musics.

HAUL THE WOODPILE DOWN
Click to Listen: [MP3 file]
Gordon cyl.50, ms. Cal. 104B
Anon
Bay Area, California
Early 1920s

Spoken:
Cast her up! Sweat up that weather main brace.
Fetch on there, boys, look to it, come on,
Shake a leg, all together now.

Sung:
Yankee John with his sea boots on,
Haul the woodpile down.
Yankee John with his sea boots on,
Haul the woodpile down.
Way down in Florida,
Way down in Florida,
Way down in Florida,
Haul the woodpile down.

"Roll the Old Chariot Along" has direct connections with black folk music of the nineteenth century, appearing in most of the standard collections of spirituals (Dett, pp. 192-93; Fenner and Rathbun, pp. 106-7; Johnson, pp. 110-11). Sandburg published a variant (pp. 196-97), and it has also been noted by collectors of shanties, including Hugill (pp. 150-51) and Doerflinger (pp. 49-50, 357). A version of this was sent to Gordon by an Adventure reader (3758) and he collected another text in California (Cal. 243). There were many black sailors on the crews of nineteenth-century vessels. They brought with them traditions of work songs, and their songs, religious and secular, were usually rhythmic and thus suited for the many kinds of gang labor needed on the big sailing ships. Gordon devoted a chapter in Folk-Songs of America to "Negro work songs from Georgia" (pp. 13-19).

ROLL THE OLD CHARIOT ALONG
Click to Play: [MP3 file]
Gordon cyl. 50, ms. Cal. 104A
Anon
Bay Area, California
Early 1920s

Roll the old chariot along
And we'll roll the old chariot along
And we'll roll the old chariot along
And we'll all hang on behind.

If the devil's in the way,
We'll roll it over him
If the devil's in the way,
Why we'll roll it over him,
If the devil's in the way,
We'll roll it over him.
And we'll all hang on behind.
---------------------------------------

Band A2:

Old Ninety Seven
Sung by Fred Lewey in Concord, N.C., October 15, 1925.

Based on an event of September 27, 1903, "The Wreck of the Old 97" is today one of the most popular American ballads (see Laws, pp.213-14), but when Gordon first encountered it in 1923, as a text fragment sent to Adventure, it was unfamiliar to him. In January 1924 he published a composite text based on three versions sent to him by readers. The same month, Henry Whittier's phonograph recording was issued, which led to the song's national popularity when it was copied later that year by Vernon Dalhart. When Gordon began his Harvard-sponsored recording trip in the fall of 1925, one of his first ventures into the field led him after the composers of the song. This recording of Fred Lewey and those of C. W. Noell, who also claimed a hand in the composition of the song, were the results.

The complicated and fascinating story of Gordon's subsequent role in the copyright litigation concerning the song has been told by Norm Cohen (Cohen B.). Gordon played an important role in tracing the history of the song, and he continued to collect versions of it after this recording was made. The index to his manuscript collection at the Library of Congress includes some ten additional variants.

By the time Gordon came to the song its history was no longer easy to unravel. A number of singers had their own versions, and at least three songmakers had produced songs on the subject, which had mixed in different forms. Eventually one of the songmakers, David Graves George, sued RCA Victor for royalties on their recording of Dalhart. The trial lasted from 1929 to 1933. Gordon, as a defense witness, used the recording given here, along with other information, to help Victor build the case that Lewey and C. W. Noell, who had sung their song about the wreck together in the years immediately after it's composition, had at least as much claim for composing the song as George. Here as in other areas of his research, Gordon treated his folksong collecting as a scientific endeavor; he was seeking evidence to help solve a problem.

Lewey's performance is noteworthy not only because of his claim for it as the original of this now famous song, but also because of the way it tells the story. Of special interest to folklorists is the line, "He said he'd pull his train on time into Spencer or he'd jerk it right square into hell." This expresses a common occupational belief. For example, in the lumberwoods there are stories and songs about a man who swears to finish his job or eat his supper in hell. This detail is not present in later variants of the song, but may represent oral traditions concerning the wreck.

OLD NINETY SEVEN
Click to Play: [MP3 file]
Gordon cyl. A6, ms. NC4
Fred Lewey
Concord, N.C.
Oct 15, 1925

One bright Sunday evening I stood on a mountain
Just watching the smoke from below.
It was springing from a long slender smokestack
Way down on the southern road.

It was Ninety Seven, the fastest train
That the south has ever seen;
But she run too fast on that fatal Sunday evening,
And the death list numbered fourteen

Chorus:
Did she ever pull in? No she never pulled in,
Though at one forty-five she was due;
For hours and hours has the switchman been
watching
For the fast mail that never came through.

The engineer was a fast brave driver
On that fatal Sunday eve,
And his fireman leaned far out at Lynchburg
Waiting for the signal to leave.

When he got aboard, well, he threw back his throttle
And although his air was bad
People all said when he passed Franklin Junction
That you couldn't see the men in the cab.

Did he ever pull in? No he never pulled in,
Though at one forty-five he was due
For hours and hours has the switchman been
watching
For the fast mail that never came through

There's a mighty bad road from Lynchburg to
Danville,
And although he knew this well
He said he'd pull his train on time into Spencer
Or he'd jerk it right square into hell.

When he hit the grade from Lima to Danville
His whistle began to scream;
He was found when she wrecked with his hand on
the throttle
Where he'd scalded to death from the steam.

Did he ever pull in? No he never pulled in,
Though at one forty-five he was due;
For hours and hours has the switchman been
watching
For the fast mail that never came through
------------------------------------------------
Band A3:

The Old Grey Mare: Sung by Bascom Lamar Lunsford in Asheville, N.C., October 19, 1925
Hesitation Blues: Sung by Bascom Lamar Lunsford in Asheville, N.C., October 19, 1925
Not A-Gonna Lay My Religion Down: Sung by Bascom Lamar Lunsford in Asheville, N.C., October 19, 1925

Band A3
In his New York Times articles, reprinted in 1938 by the WPA as Folk-Songs of America, Gordon referred to the recordings he made in North Carolina during the fall and winter of 1925 as "The Asheville Collection." This reflected his appreciation for the interest and support shown his recording project by the Chamber of Commerce and various private citizens of Asheville. One of the most helpful among this latter group was the young lawyer Bascom Lamar Lunsford. Lunsford already was known for his large collection of mountain songs. Frank C. Brown of Duke University had recorded him on cylinders in 1922 (Jones, p. 7) and when Gordon met him, Lunsford had just made his first commercial records. Gordon published a version of "Cindy" in Adventure for Jan. 30, 1926 (pp. 191-92). There he mentioned that another Lunsford song was available on Okeh phonograph record 40155, thus showing his gratitude to Lunsford by publicizing his record. Several years later, when Lunsford recorded again for Brunswick, that company publicized Gordon's work with him through a blurb in their "Brunswick Record Edition of American Folksongs," which stated that Lunsford had the "largest collection of Southern Mountaineer Songs in the World" and that "Hundreds of them were recorded for Harvard university for their historic value" (Green, pp. 73-78). During the twenties folklorists and the record companies often shared informants, but rarely was either aware of the other. This is probably the only instance in which each publicized the activities of the other.

Gordon had published a text of "The Old Gray Mare" in Adventure for March 20, 1925 (p. 192) and had received another text from a reader shortly after that (Gordon MSS 911). He was no doubt pleased to find the same song in the repertoire of Lunsford. Lunsford and Stringfield (pp.36-37) later published it in their 1931 folio, and Lunsford recorded it again in 1935 for the Library's Archive of Folk Song (AFS 1787 A1). The song has been encountered by several other collectors in the South: E. C Perrow (p. 123), Frank C. Brown ( III, p. 217) and Leonard Roberts (pp. 190- 91), whose text is very similar to Lunsford's. The line "I took it home and put it in the ooze" refers to the pasty mixture of hardwood ash and water in which the green hide is soaked to remove the hair.

THE OLD GRAY MARE [MP3 file]
Gordon cyl. A19, ms. NC19
Bascom Lamar Lunsford
Asheville, North Carolina
Oct. 19, 1925

Oh, once I had an old gray mare,
Once I had an old gray mare,
Once I had an old gray mare,
And I hitched her in and I thought I'd plow.

Chorus:
Not a-gonna work for a nickel anymore,
Not a-gonna work for a nickel anymore,
Not a-gonna work for a nickel anymore,
Not a-gonna work for a nickel anymore.

I hitched her in and I thought I'd plow,
Hitched her in and I thought I'd plow,
Hitched her in and I thought I'd plow,
She swore by golly that she didn't know how.