Review: Josiah Combs' Folk-Songs of the Southern United States
by John Jacob Niles
Music Educators Journal, Vol. 54, No. 9 (May, 1968), pp. 73-74
FOLK-SONGS OF THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES. By Josiah H. Combs. Edited by D. K. Wilgus. Austin & London: The University of Texas Press, 1967. 245 pp., Foreword, Index, and Appendixes. $6.00.
Folk-Songs of the Southern United States is a most important publication, and it will be welcomed wherever a serious study of this subject is made. Personally, I was very sad to discover that there was not a note of music in the entire 245 pages. This I consider to be a serious deficiency because most enlightened students and investigators of folk songs have come to the belated
realization that the text is only onehalf the ballad. The music is the other half.
According to my records, the first time I had an opportunity to talk with Josiah Combs at length was in England in 1918, when he was a hospital corpsman and I was an injured aviator. I discovered then that Mr. Combs was skeptical, to say the least, of all musicians and especially of those who admitted that they were singers of American folk music. At that time, my philosophy concerning folk songs had not been formed, but Mr. Combs, who was six years older than I, knew exactly what he thought and what he expected to do once the war was over.
It will take me a year to digest this remarkable book, and I will be much longer at achieving a full appreciation of the excellent Foreword by D. K. Wilgus. I am in complete agreement with Mr. Combs on the origin of the ballad; it obviously was never produced by communal effort. Not being a musician, Mr. Combs made certain statements about the music of the ballad
that will not stand up in any way whatever. It is not easy to understand exactly what he meant when he wrote about the present music of the ballads, but it seems he was of the opinion that the tunes sung in the United States were essentially the same as those once sung, or sung now, in the British Isles. It is my considered judgment that this is false. The folk tunes
we sing in the Southern Appalachians are our own. The texts are another matter; they come directly from English and Scottish sources. But Josiah Combs' Folk-Songs of the Southern United States is a major contribution to ballad, poetry, and language study.
-JOHN JACOB NILES, Boot Hill Farm,
Lexington, Kentucky 405021