Review: Folk-Songs of the Southern United States
by Francis Edward Abernethy
The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 72, No. 1 (Jul., 1968), pp. 117-119
Folk-Songs of the Southern United States. By Josiah H. Combs. Edited and translated by D. K. Wilgus. Austin (University of Texas Press), 1967. Pp. xxvii+254. Appendix, index. $6.oo.
When Josiah Combs published his doctoral dissertation, Folk-Songs du Midi des Etats-Unis, at the University of Paris in 1925, he placed himself among the first of the American scholars in folklore. The interest in folk music that was begun by Bishop Percy, furthered by Sir Walter Scott, and climaxed by the collection of Francis James Child, had not been strong enough in the 1920o's to make folk music completely acceptable among academicians. Academic respectability was, however, being bestowed on it by Combs' scholarly contemporaries, Cecil Sharp, John Lomax, and Louise Pound. The fact that respectability has been attained is demonstrated by the large number of works on folk music now in circulation and by the University of
Texas and the American Folklore Society's publishing of Combs' dissertation as Folk-Songs of the Southern United States.
Although Folk-Songs can be strongly recommended as a complete and scholarly collection of Appalachian folk music, it is certainly more than a gathering together of songs and variants. Combs' concentration on the relation of the music to the people is what gives the book its extra value. Folk-Songs is a historical and sociological study of a fairly homogenous group of people and of the music of their past and present.
"Southern United States" in the title of the book might be misleading to some readers; it was to me. When I first noticed the title I thought that the area under discussion was the Deep South. It is not. Combs' area-and it is the land of his own birth-is bordered by the Appalachian Range on the west and the Blue Ridge Mountains on the east. The people are from English stock who moved into these mountains in the eighteenth century. The language of these "Southern Highlanders," Combs' own designation, is the language of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The people that migrated to the Highlands were the offspring of the dispossessed, the indentured servants, and the convicts who were flushed out of England during that time. They
found a place in the Highlands where nobody bothered them because nobody wanted what little they had. Josiah Combs was a part of these people and he writes about them and their musical culture interestingly and with understanding.
Just about everyone who has ever collected folk music has come away saddened that it is on its way out. Pepys, Percy, Scott, Childs, and Sharp felt that what they did not write down would be gone in a very few years. Combs was convinced of this in 1925, and I wish I knew enough about the man to know his reaction to Vance Randolph's three-volume Ozark Folksongs in 1947-1949. I hope he was pleased to find that there were still places where singing for the pleasure of one's friends and one's self continued. Josiah Combs' finale was romantically nostalgic but unnecessarily pessimistic as he viewed the social and
artistic leveling brought about by the mass media of the 1920's: "For the damsel with the 'dulcimore' is retreating before the boy with the banjo, and the second phase, perhaps the last one, of traditional balladry is beginning to close its account among the English-speaking peoples."
Stephen F. Austin State College
FRANCES EDWARD ABERNETHY