Review: Folksingers and Folksongs in America
by John Jacob Niles
Music Educators Journal, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Nov. - Dec., 1965), p. 107
FOLKSINGERS AND FOLKSONGS IN AMERICA. By Ray M. Lawless. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce. 750 pp. preface, illustrations, and indices. $10.
If Dr. Lawless had written this "handbook of biography, bibliography and discography" fifty years ago, it would have been a rather slim pamphlet instead of a 750-page encyclopedia concerning the most startling development in American music history. In 1915 Child, Kittredge and Gummere had published. By 1917 Campbell and Sharp had brought out their first small volume. There followed Cox in 1925, Reed Smith in 1928, Arthur Kyle Davis in 1929, Richard Green in 1935 -and suddenly the list becomes much too long for any book review.
These, of course, were the collectors. Fifty years ago there were very few folk singers, in the sense of entertainers employing folk materials. Carl Sandberg and John Jacob Niles were collecting the folk song and legend near at hand and also singing. The elder Lomax in Texas was lecturing and singing, and there were a few cowmen in Los Angeles who were raising their voices with the music of the mining camps and the ranches.
But none of us knew it was loaded. I had written "Go 'way from My Window" and the currently popular tune "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair," but the only people who were willing to listen to me, outside my own family, were a few ladies in the women's and music clubs. They thought folksingers were "quaint" and "cute." This was the situation fifty years ago, and if I seem to be emphasizing the date, it is because Dr. Lawless has written it into the very first lines of his prologue.
The extensive (145 pages of small type) discography in Dr. Lawless's book is of particular interest to me, because as I write, I have beside me the 1940 Victor catalogue, and in it there is only one admitted folksinger, John Jacob Niles, and one album titled Early American Ballads. In the Victor catalogue I was flanked by Ellen Ney, pianist, Grace Moore, soprano, Pierre Monteux, conductor, and Paderewski, pianist. In those days folksingers were listed in the Red Seal division of the Victor catalogue; so far as I can tell there was no Schwann. We have come a long way from that solitary listing twenty-five
years ago to the huge section in Dr. Lawless's book listing the singers, the titles, the companies involved in the production of records of folk music. Of course, even before 1940 there were other commercial recordings. Most significant were those done in the field, notably in North Carolina.
Dr. Lawless has made a great contribution through this volume to the historical side of the burgeoning folk music situation. It is hardly possible to write so much about so many and get every detail absolutely correct. It is nothing short of miraculous that
the errors are so few. Every folksinger should have a copy of this work, and libraries, of course, will have to have it on their shelves. Dr. Lawless, who at present is a teacher at Metropolitan Junior College in Kansas City, Missouri, is to be congratulated indeed.
-JOHN JACOB NILES, authority on American folk music, composer, instrument- maker, and author, Louisville, Kentucky.