Some Folk-Ballads and the Background of History
by John Gould Fletcher
The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Summer, 1950), pp. 87-98
[Fletcher references Randolph and quotes the lyrics to several songs collected by Randolph. There's no music and little actual discussion of the history of a particular song. There's background information about the cultures that make up the Ozark region. R. Matteson 2011]
SOME FOLK-BALLADS AND THE BACKGROUND OF HISTORY
By John Gould Fletcher
Little Rock, Arkansas
In looking through the four volumes of Mr. Vance Randolph's monumental work on Ozark Folksongs,[1] the most extensive collection of similar material so far published in the United States, and by far the largest ever gathered from any single region, one is struck by the fact that a certain number of these ballads, accumulated by Mr. Randolph during the years 1922-1942, relates to actual historical events.
The entire work is arranged as follows ; in the first volume, there is a section devoted to ballads of traditional British origin (following the scheme set up by Professor Child) which were brought, no doubt, by the ancestors of the present Ozark population, from Tennessee and North Carolina, Kentucky and other southern border regions, to their present home. As Mr. Randolph has pointed out, more than three- fourths of the ballads from the United States so far collected, have come from the South, mostly from Virginia; and are essentially akin in their general outlook on life and destiny, to the attitudes taken up for centuries by the British people, especially those who have lived on both sides of the Scottish border. Of the one hundred and seven traditional Child ballads so far collected in the United States, Randolph has found forty-one in Missouri and Arkansas and Eastern Oklahoma; following them by seventy-nine listed as later importations. With almost no exceptions, all these are from that part of Europe previously covered by Bishop Percy, in his "Reliques of Ancient British Poetry" in 1765, and by Sir Walter Scott in his "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border" in 1802. That they have persisted, with some modifications of text, to be sung by hardy mountaineers all the way from the Atlantic seaboard to the Oklahoma prairies, says more than many volumes of text concerning the nature of American customs and usages, or the supposedly purely economic origin of the American Constitution.
The ballads of specific American origin, on the other hand, are of chief interest as displaying the new attitudes toward life developed by the Ozark people at the conclusion of their Western migration. These ballads are in Mr. Randolph's second volume, under the titles, "Songs about Murderers and Outlaws", "Western Songs and Ballads," "Songs of the Civil War," and "Negro and Pseudo-Negro Songs." This list, in itself, reveals a good deal concerning the attitude of the Ozark people to the new environment in which they found themselves. Having crossed the Mississippi, and by sheer self-dependence and pioneer spirit, having made homes for themselves in what had been a wilderness, they found the prairies open before them to the westward, and a new type of pioneering called for by necessity.
Of the thirty-two western songs printed in Mr. Randolph's second volume, all were presumably known to that great Texan, John A. Lomax - though Mr. Randolph prints one or two which never appeared in any of Lomax's collections. This interest in the West, stimulated no doubt by the vast rise of the range-cattle industry and the heyday of the Cowboy, during the period 1840-1860, was also immensely stimulated by the sensational news about California gold, in the early months of 1849. Josiah Gregg, the most famous of Santa Fe traders, had already investigated and followed the Canadian River Route, starting
at Fort Smith, which he recommended as being generally superior to the usual one followed from Independence, Missouri, along the course of the Upper Arkansas, before he wrote his classic "Commerce of the Prairies". What Gregg had explored, other expeditions, hurrying to get to California, and stake out good claims, were ready to follow.
During the early months of 1849, hundreds of wagons lined the meadows between Van Buren and Fort Smith - and dozens of adventurous youths framed themselves into Arkansas' "California Army." All this is reflected by "Sweet Betsey from Pike", which Randolph prints ; no doubt the Pike County mentioned in this rollicking ballad is the one by that name in Missouri. It is also reflected in "Oh Susannah", which Stephen Foster wrote without thought of California- and found, no doubt to his surprise, becoming a folksong, with the word "California" substituted for the original "Indiana". After this episode, the main body of the Ozark people, no doubt, still tended to cling to their mountain fastnesses; the conservative elders among them going on with "Barbery Allen", "The House-Carpenter", and "False Lamkin"; the youngsters, especially if they had taken part in the Mexican War or the California Gold Rush, coming back (with pockets full or empty) to sing "The Texas Rangers," or "The Dying Cowboy", or "Little Jo, the Wrangler". These last, found by Mr. Randolph in the Ozarks, could not be picked up so readily by any balladcollector in either Tennessee or North Carolina.
But it is the songs about murderers and outlaws, as well as those about the Civil War (Mr. Randolph prints forty-six of the former, and forty-three of the latter, so that the interest is fairly divided) that should most engage any reader's interest. For the purposes of this essay, I propose to discuss the songs about murderers and outlaws last, in the second section of this essay. The Civil War ballads, on the other hand, have been the most difficult to obtain - and they reflect more, I think, on the actual objective sequence of events, than on the peculiar psychology of the Ozark people. Many of them, as Randolph has pointed out, exist in both Northern and Southern versions, thus revealing how the "borderland of the South" represented by Southern and Central Missouri, North Arkansas, and the "Indian Nation", found itself fixed in its first great historic dilemma, by being divided in its loyalties during the struggle that still separates, psychologically, a great part of the nation.
As early as the 'fifties, German settlers began to make their appearance in some numbers in Northwestern Arkansas, as some had settled in Little Rock - or along the Southwest Trail that led to Texas even earlier. These settlers were, for the most part, refugees from the convulsions that had torn Central Europe apart and had finally destroyed the shadowy ghost of the old Germanic Empire, in the wake of Napoleon's conquests, by 1806. In most of the German States, especially in those, which being Protestant, were but little allied in spirit to conservative, Catholic Austria or Bavaria, there had grown up, since the days of Frederick the Great (parallelling in time the American Revolution) - an intense desire for unity. Slavery was non-existent among these States, and serfdom had been abolished, I think, by Prussia as early as 1802. For the rest, Hanover tended in its policy to lean towards England; Saxony followed Prussia; Bavaria remained loyal to Austria. But as early as 1785, a league was formed among the German princes, comprehending Saxony, Hanover, and six other smaller dukedoms and principalities; and in 1806 on the eve of the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon himself formed the Confederation of the Rhine, which ultimately included all German-speaking peoples except the Austrians, the Prussians, the inhabitants of Brunswick, and those who lived in the dukedom of Hesse.
Union was the great dream of all the German exiles, who now began to come out of their ravaged countries and to move down from New York and Pennsylvania along the Ohio and down the Mississippi, in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. Cincinnati as well as St. Louis came early under their influence. Freedom from religious persecution was important, but union was still more important. Unlike their compatriots left at home, they were not easily stirred, either, to make wars on each other. The second great wave of German settlers, who came over after the Revolution of 1848 had been crushed, felt even more disposed towards Union, and to a republican form of government. They brought with them special technical skills, a love for books and music, a higher degree of education, than the Ozarks could boast, as they moved into the Ozark country.
As early as 1853, as Professor Clarence Evans has shown in a valuable paper (Memoirs, Letters and Diary Entries of German Settlers in Northwest Arkansas, 1853- 1863; Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. VI, number 3, Autumn 1947) two brothers, both born in Germany, with their wives, founded the Hermannsburg settlement, now known as Dutch Mills, where they became millers, farmers, and doctors. No doubt they were regarded by their neighbors with suspicion as the Civil War came on. That they did not favor secession, owned few negroes, spoke a peculiar jabber (soon corrupted from "Deutsch" to "Dutch"), were thrifty and neat, kept to themselves, made all the difference. They were subject, during the period that elapsed between the secession of Arkansas and the Battle of Prairie Grove, to immeasurable annoyances, acts of vandalism - and finally escaped to join a brother-in-law in Missouri, in December 1863. This brother-in-law was serving with the Union Army.
No doubt these people, who later compiled a rare book on their attitude, and their sufferings, at first enjoyed being in Arkansas. They were made to suffer, and finally to lose one of their number (the wife of the older brother, Johann Heinrich Hermann, died soon after their exodus) because the very same Ozark people who had at first been tolerant had turned against them. These hillmen were the people who in the first Arkansas Convention held to consider Secession, had refused to go out of the Union. They owned few, if any slaves. But they accepted the idea of Secession after Sumpter had been fired upon, out of a poetical and highly impractical desire for independence and self-government.
The German population of St. Louis, and of the hill country southward, had also been skillfully organized under General Nathanael Lyon (a West Pointer from Connecticut) and Franz Sigel (a refugee from the Revolution of 1848) to oppose the Missouri State Government, in its attempt to get out of the Union. On August 10, 1861, Lyon and Sigel, with only about five thousand volunteers, opposed Sterling Price, who had recruited twice as many from his Missouri slave-holding neighbors, and who was aided by a few Arkansas troops, at Wilson's Creek, about ten miles Southwest of Springfield - and Sigel's men had broken, and had run away. Lyon held his ground, but was killed on the field, and his men retreated, leaving Springfield to be captured the next day. Price's Confederates, actually not recognized as an official legal army, by the Richmond government, but acting at a time when Missouri had not yet gone out of the Union, pressed on to the Missouri River Valley, and took Lexington, not far from Kansas City. But Fremont, sent to the spot by Lincoln, reorganized the Union forces sufficiently to drive them back to Springfield, and out of the State, by the winter of 1861-2.
Mr. Randolph prints in his second volume, no less than five ballads: "The Battle of Pea Ridge", "Manassa Junction", "I Fight Mit Sigel", "The Yankee Dutchman", "Joe Stiner", which with the "Dick German, The Cobbler" song in the first volume, are all markedly satirical towards the German in the Civil War. The attitude is perhaps best summed up in "The Yankee Dutchman" :-
My heart is broken in von little bit,
I'll tell you all what for;
My sweetheart was a very patriotic girl,
She drove me off mit de war.
I fight for her de battle of de flag,
Just as brave as ever I can ;
But a long time ago she nix remember me,
And ran off mit anudder man.
Chorus: Oh, Florrie, what makes you so unkind,
As to go mit Hans in Germany to dwell,
And to leave poor Schnapps behind.
We travelled all day when the rain came down,
So fast like Moses flood;
I slept all night mit my head upon a stump,
And I sunk down in de mud.
De nightmare came, and I catch him mighty bad,
I dreamt I slept with a ghost;
I woke in the morning frozen in the mud
Just stiff like one stone post.
At length we took one city in de South
We held it one whole year ;
I got plenty of sauerkraut
And lots of larger beer.
I met one rebel lady in the street,
Just pretty as ever can be;
I made me gallant bow to her
And ach, she spit on me!
One should compare this reference, along with the references to "Feds and flop-eared Dutch" in "The Pea Ridge Battle" and to "Tories and dirty Dutch, Hessians and Yankees bloody" in "Manassa Junction", and also with "I Fight Mit Sigel" in order to see that - for a considerable time in the Civil War, - the Ozark people despised and ridiculed the Germans. Certainly, the Ozark attitude of suspicion of all "furriners"- an attitude which covers up a certain shyness, natural enough to a people rather remote and independent by nature - was intensified by the struggle incidental to the Civil War. The way in which the German was seen, as rather a figure of fun, in these ballads, may have come from the initial success of the Confederates at Pea Ridge. Having myself examined a considerable collection of Confederate Civil War ballads in the Huntington Library, I can testify that it was only the early fights of that contest that were riotously celebrated. Before the war came to an end, most of the Confederate troops were singing dirges of the most doleful description. Many of these, too, appear in Mr. Randolph's collection. They were certainly later in date than the ones I mention.
II. The Ozarkers' independence of spirit, their desire not to be "messed around with" by outsiders, their determination to be let alone and to govern themselves, rather than be governed, is even more manifest in the section which Mr. Randolph devotes to "Songs about Outlaws and Murderers". He ascribes the popularity of these songs, much more easily obtainable than the Civil War ones (after all, the Ozarks people suffered about as much from the depredations of lawless bands of bushwhackers and jayhawkers as did Professor Evans' Germans, and were left with little enough to boast about) to the natural belligerency of spirit frequently manifested in the region. But this is not the only reason. Pride of place is justly given to the "Cole Younger" and the "Jesse James" ballad, with its contempt for the betrayer, Robert Ford:-
It was Robert Ford, the dirty little coward,
I wonder how he does feel ;
For he ate of Jesse's bread, and he slept in Jesse's bed,
Then he laid poor Jesse in his grave.
What was the reason why the Ozark people should glorify such a cold-blooded killer as was Jesse James, and his bandit accomplice, Cole Younger, so that the former, at least, appeared to them like a veritable Robin Hood - "he robbed the rich and gave to the poor?" No doubt, the reason was highly complex. The James boys did not begin their career of banditry till after the Civil War. Unquestionably, they often hid out in the Ozarks wilderness, between their exploits, They were generous with their stolen money, to many a poor Ozark family. They, quite possibly, magnified their own early service under Quantrill's guerillas, on the Kansas border into a life-long devotion to the lost cause of the Confederacy which may have been, in heart at least, sincere - for no historian can say to this day just what side Charles Quantrill really was on! Moreover, the James boys - and their like - especially appealed to the Ozark people precisely because the mountain folk, after espousing the cause of the Confederacy out of a poetic desire to attain independence than for any better reason, had gone back to the Union, only to find themselves again let down by the Carpetbaggers.
Let us remember that the year 1871, when Pulaski County, out of sheer hatred for Powell Clayton and his regime, refused to grant lands for the establishment of a State University, but Washington County gave the land required, was also the year when Pope County (also in the Ozarks) flared up in open warfare against Clayton's militia and one of his sheriffs.
To be an outlaw, even a murderer, was in those days of Reconstruction, not so bad a thing. There could be heroism in it, when to most of the hillmen, any form of government, except self-government, had become despicable. Moreover, the James boys were respectable in other ways. Jesse James, I have read, always went to church on Sundays, and his older brother, Frank, was, in his later years, a Baptist elder. If they swore or used dirty talk, they presumably did not do so before ladies.
Mr. Randolph is perhaps right in saying that the Ozarks toleration for outlawry and killing, did not extend to horse-thieves and other petty villains. His main evidence on this point seems to me to be the very remarkable "Horse- Traders' Song" which is so good and so unique in many respects that I give it without comment:
It's do you know those horse-traders?
It's do you know their plan?
It's do you know those horse-traders?
It's do you know their plan?
Their plan is for to snide you,
And get whatever they can:
I've been around the world.
They'll send their women from house to house
To git whatever they can;
They'll send their women from house to house
To git whatever they can;
Oh yonder she comes a runnin', boys,
With a hog- jaw in each hand;
I've been around the world.
It's look in front of our horses, boys,
Oh yonder comes a man;
It's look in front of our horses, boys,
Oh yonder comes a man;
If I don't git to snide him,
I won't get nary a dram,
I've been around the world.
Oh, now we stop for supper, boys,
We've found a creek at last;
Oh, now we stop for supper, boys,
We've found a creek at last ;
Oh, now we stop for supper, boys,
To turn out on the grass,
I've been around the world.
Go saddle up your snides, boys,
And tie 'em to the rack;
Go saddle up your snides, boys,
And tie 'em to the rack;
The first man that gets 'em
Will pay us to take them back;
I've been around the world.
Come on now, boys,
Let's go git a drink of gin;
Come on now, boys,
Let's go git a drink of gin;
For yonder comes the women, boys,
To bring us to camp again,
I've been around the world.
III. To summarize this argument, the Randolph collection is one that should be read by future Arkansas historians, as a vivid and rewarding experience, often more indicative of the actual temper of the people under stress and strain, than pages of impersonally phrased war reports, or reams of official correspondence, or legislative acts can ever be. Without a sense of the human element involved in making history, all history- however well documented- is worthless.
Voltaire, himself an excellent historian, said that history was a pack of tricks played by the dead upon the living. Emerson said that it was the lengthened shadow of a man; Carlyle, and others, seem to have held that what mattered after all was the deeds of great men, rather than what the people lived through - but Mr. Randolph's anonymous authors give us the true point of view of the people. To them history is grim tragedy or sentimental pathos:-
'Twas just before the last fierce fight,
Two soldiers drew a rein;
With a parting word and a touch of a hand,
They might never meet again.
One had blue eyes and curly hair
Eighteen scarce a month ago;
The other was tall, dark, stern, and proud
With haggared eys to show.
They rode along to the crest of the hill,
While the cannon shot and shell,
While volley after volley came,
To cheer them as they fell.
Among the dead and dying lay
A boy with curly hair;
And close by his side lay a tall dark man
Who was dead beside him there.
I have slightly modified, for the sake of shortening, this particular text. It can only be matched by the following:
In eighteen hundred and sixty-one,
Hurrah, hurrah,
In eighteen hundred and sixty-one,
Hurrah, hurrah,
In eighteen hundred and sixty-one,
The great Rebellion is just begun;
We'll all drink stone-blind;
Johnny, come fill up the bowl!
In eighteen hundred and sixty- five,
Hurrah, hurrah,
In eighteen hundred and sixty-five,
Hurrah, hurrah,
In eighteen hundred and sixty-five,
We'll git Abe Lincoln dead or alive,
We'll all drink stone-blind;
Johnny, come fill up the bowl!
"Brief is the choice, yet endless" between history considered as a fate that may befall us all, and which must be met with resolution befitting such dignity as we may muster, and history become relentless madness and vengeance. Both sides are fairly presented by Mr. Randolph. The historians, this collection of folk-balladry tells us, should write not only from the documents themselves, but from the heart.[2]
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Footnotes:
1. Osark Folksongs, collected and edited by Vance Randolph, edited for the State Historical Society of Missouri by Floyd C. Shoemaker, Secretary, and Frances G. Emberson, research associate, in four volumes, published by the State Historical Society for Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, 1946, 1948, 1949.
2. All quotations in this essay are taken from Randolph's Ozarks Folksongs.