Bluegrass Messengers

The Forget-Me-Not Songsters and Their Role in the American Folksong Tradition by Norm Cohen
American Music, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Summer, 2005), pp. 137-219

NORM COHEN
The Forget-Me-Not Songsters and Their Role in the American Folksong Tradition

[Norm Cohen is the author of Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong (1981) and Traditional Anglo-American Folk Music: An Annotated Discography of Published Recordings (1994). He has edited and/or annotated two dozen albums, and written extensively on various aspects of folk, country, and popular music. He is a retired physical chemist and currently teaches chemistry in Portland, Oregon.]

In 1904 Henry Marvin Belden, already a knowledgeable ballad/folksong scholar though yet to cap a distinguished career with his erudite annotations to the exemplary field collections from Missouri and North Carolina, published a short article in Modern Philology titled "The Ballad of Lord Bakeman." [1] It began:

"There has come into my hands recently (through the kindness of Mr W. S. Johnson, of Tuscumbia, Mo.) a humble but very interesting little volume of British and American ballads. The first fifty pages and an unknown number at the end are lost, as well as title page and cover, so that the title and the date and place of publication can be only conjectured. The pages (2' by 4' inches in size) have the running head Popular Songs, which was no doubt the title. The date is some time after 1835, for one of the pieces contains that date. ... That it is an American compilation is abundantly proved by the contents. ... It has evidently seen hard service in the state of Missouri, where it has been for at least a generation, and perhaps ever since it was printed. I should be very glad if anyone could supply the title-page of the book. The Congressional Library was unable to identify it. [2]"

The contents are for the most part of the broadside or what [Francis James] Child calls the "vulgar ballad" character, quite innocent of literary touch, with the exception of two or three pieces. One of these is Holmes's "Ballad of the Oysterman," which seems to have acquired an early and genuine popularity, being printed here within a few years after its composition, and with variations that point conclusively to oral transmission. For the rest, the range of subject and of age is considerable, but there is hardly any range of tone. From "Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor" to "Fannie Blair," from "The Men of Kent" and "The London 'Prentice" to "The New York Trader" and "The Female Sailor," all are thoroughly of the people and for the people. Among them is a version of "Young Beichan" differing in some respects from any of the versions given by Child. [3]

Belden continued with a discussion of the versions of "Young Beichan" or "Lord Bateman" that Child included in his path-breaking opus magnum, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, other broadside versions, and the way in which the text under discussion related to both. To my knowledge, Belden thus became the first scholar in print whose attention was drawn to the cheaply printed, though widely popular, Forget-Me-Not Songster (FMNS). Widely popular a half century earlier, I should add; note that without a title page Belden found no one in ca. 1904-either in Missouri or at the Library of Congress-who could identify the volume in its mutilated condition.[4] Cheaply printed "songsters," mostly pocket-sized and soft-covered, were collections of the texts of popular songs of the day. Many were sold by performers; others were distributed by manufacturers as effective advertisements of their wares. Some focused on a particular topic, such as temperance, politics, abolition, minstrel songs, Irish songs, pirate songs, the grange movement, or the circus.

I don't know exactly when Belden learned the identity of his "humble but interesting little volume," but a decade later, Child's intellectual heir, George Lyman Kittredge, was festooning published collections of folksong with references to several songsters, including three different editions of the Forget-Me-Not, as well as various American broadside publications. Whereas Belden wrote from a university office in the hinterlands of Columbia, Missouri, where he had been holed up for ten years, Kittredge occupied a position at Harvard, within sniffing distance of the musty pages of the splendid Houghton and Widener libraries, and not a great many leagues from another distinguished repository of popular Americana, the Harris Collection at Brown University, Rhode Island.

As one of the editors of the Journal of American Folk-Lore, Kittredge took the liberty (who could deny him?) of adding annotations to articles by Albert H. Tolman as well as to his own that catalogued the numerous cheap print analogs he had found relating to the field-collected versions of ballads and songs. [5]

Belden did not mention songsters frequently in his later publications, though he became increasingly familiar with broadsides (especially after spending a semester in 1908 studying specimens at the British Museum). Possibly he backed away from his initial enthusiasm after learning more about the variety and extent of nineteenth-century songsters. In his head note to the same ballad ("Young Beichan"), he wrote:

"It has been suggested that the frequent and widespread occurrence of this ballad as traditional song may be due to its frequent appearance in broadside and songbook print. ... The argument may easily, however, be turned the other way: that ballad printers used it because it was known to be a favorite. Cause and effect are not easily distinguished in such cases. [6]

Is there a touch of defensiveness in his comments? An urge to validate the songsters as repositories of ballads "of the people and by the people"? I leave the (dis)proof as an exercise for the reader. Nevertheless, in the next half-century ballad scholars increasingly came to recognize songsters as-at the very least-relevant to their studies, and took pains to note occurrences of traditional songs in cheap print.

In 1928 W. Roy Mackenzie cited analogs from three different FMNSs and other songsters for some nineteen songs in his collection, Ballads and Sea Songs from Nova Scotia, and shortly thereafter, Barry Eckstorm, and Smyth not only cited songster and broadside texts but included some in their Maine collection. [7]

G. Malcolm Laws reported twenty-seven American ballads from British broadsides to have analogues in the two FMNSs at his disposal. [8] Tristram Coffin, in a corresponding bibliographic study of the ballads canonized by Child, found six traditional "Child" ballads among the contents of four FMNSs. [9]

But beyond these scattered bibliographic notices, only a few scholars actually used songster texts as significant documents in the study of folksong. [10] A distinguished example of the latterw as Ed Cray's study of "Barbara Allen," which offered the first detailed analysis of the songster literature with respect to a traditional ballad. [11] By mid-twentieth century, the frontier of folksong scholarship had moved from cheap print to commercial recordings.

Songsters, Hillbilly Music, and Folk Music
The recent posthumous publication of Guthrie T. Meade's Sources of Country Music represents the culmination of more than fifty years of scholarship into the history of American country music and its close relation to traditional Anglo-American folk music.[12] Meade's biblio-discography is a comprehensive listing of all pre-1942 country music recordings ("hill billy" music) that had analogs among published folksong collections.

At the time he began his work, most folksong scholars paid little or no attention to such recordings. Meade's purpose was to reveal how many traditional songs could be found among them. Among his numerous references were several hundred songsters of the nineteenth century.

Though clearly not folksong collections, songsters provided early printed references for many of the songs in his purview. Meade noted in his introduction that many early hillbilly musicians possessed songsters and used them as sources for texts. Indeed, some hillbilly recordings seem to have had no other source than a songster publication.

Half a century ago, when D. K. Wilgus, Archie Green, Ed Kahn, and their colleagues pioneered research into the close connection between folk and hillbilly music, they stressed the functional similarity between commercial sound recordings of the 1920s and '30s and cheap print broadsides, chapbooks, songsters-of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This argument established the relevance of recordings to folksong scholarship-a connection not generally appreciated in the 1950s. Cheap print, on the other hand, was by then a well-known commodity-even though half a century earlier scholars of the stature of ballad expert Francis James Child were dismissive of the medium, attributing to it a deleterious role, if any, in folk tradition.

Today, our accumulated understanding tips the scales in the other direction. We are well informed about the evolution of the country music industry; we have interviewed and documented early performers, writers, and entrepreneurs. We have catalogued the products of the industry and studied its impact on popular music and other idioms. We know how and where the records were sold and advertised, and in many instances we know how many were sold. Furthermore we have documented ancillary media: country music on radio, in concert, in fiddle contests/conventions, and in song folios. All of this could be accomplished because scholarly interest arose within just three or four decades of the beginnings of recorded country music-while the artifacts themselves were abundant and many of the pioneer figures were still alive (and, in some cases, still performing).

But what of the cheap print songsters? How many analogous questions can we answer for this once-popular medium? How were they disseminated? How many sold? Who bought them? Whence came the songs? It is too late to ask the compilers, publishers, purveyors, purchasers, or users. (One wonders whether Kittredge, aware of songsters only a halfcentury after their heyday, ever thought of seeking out their publishers, or anyone else associated with their production.) Instead, we must trawl through academic waters of the nineteenth century to net what shells of information were accidentally scattered about by writers primarily casting about for other fish. This study is an attempt to gather together what little we know about one especially popular group of songsters from before the Civil War. There is much to be said about them, but, as will be seen, there is still much more to learn.

Forget-Me-Not Songsters
Approaching the FMNSs from the perspective of folksong, one is struck by the proportion of traditional songs in their repertoire.[13] Other songsters of the nineteenth century almost invariably contained a few traditional pieces scattered among older popular favorites or contemporary compositions, but in the FMNSs the share in most cases was close to 50 percent. How did this happen? To rephrase Belden's comment: Did the songsters merely document an existing folksong tradition, or did they provide material for subsequent generations of traditional singers? Or both? It was in the hope of learning more about the interchange between oral and printed media in the nineteenth century that I undertook this study.

I use the plural "Forget-Me-Not-Songsters" because one of the more intriguing facts about them is their multiplicity: more than a dozen slightly different versions were published by nearly as many publishers in the mid-nineteenth century. This study is based on a close examination of more than fifty distinct songsters, all bearing the identical title/subtitle:

The Forget-Me-Not Songster. Containing a Choice Collection of Old Ballad Songs, as sung by our Grandmothers.

Many follow this with the statement, Embellished With Numerous Engravings.

Nearly all have different contents: between 89 and 125 songs out of a pool of 274 different songs and ballads. Additionally, there are many "nonstandard" FMNSs with different subtitles; these drew upon a substantially different repertoire of material, mostly of a later vintage.

The standard FMNSs all had dimensions of approximately 8 x 12 cm (3 x 4?2 in) and contained (with possibly one exception) 256 pages; all had a cloth-covered board or leather-like cover, a table of contents (usually an alphabetical index at the front of the book), 14 and a scattering of wood engravings (or possibly woodcuts) of varying quality. The condition of the illustrations in many songsters (features indistinct, lines faded or missing) indicates a period of use prolonged beyond their optimum lifetime.

Almost all had a frontispiece illustration of an imaginary cutthroat named Kelly the Pirate-though the brigand was immortalized in two different cuts used in different songster editions. None had any music and few provided any credits for the songs, which was standard practice for songsters throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Most did not have even a copyright date. All lacked a price or any advertisements. Of these details, most of which were not typical of nineteenth-century songsters (especially after the Civil War), more later.

The Title
Antebellum songsters like The Forget-Me-Not Songster (sometimes Forget Me Not-a distinction in punctuation ignored in this study) had simple titles, such as The Universal Songster, The Columbian Songster, The Southern and Western Songster, The American Songster, The Eolian Songster, whether published in England, as the first of the above was, or in the United States, as the others were. The "Forget-Me-Not" title conveys a sense of old familiar songs that are cherished by the singers; the subtitle, "Containing a choice collection of old ballad songs, as sung by our grandmothers," suggests popularity a half-century earlier.

When was this title chosen, and by whom? Did it have any antecedents? The earliest songster I have found with a similar title (more precisely, just Forget-Me-Notw) as published in 1832 in Boston by Stoddard. Not at all typical, this was a small eight-page publication containing but seven songs. [15] The FMNSs of this study all seem to date from the 1840s or later-notwithstanding that a 1974 facsimile reprint asserted an original publication date of 1835. Evidence for dates will be discussed below.

The "forget-me-not" is best known as a flower (or rather, several flowers) that has become an almost universal emblem for friendship, remembrance, fidelity, loyalty, and humility-not to mention its various medicinal uses. [16] Early nineteenth-century periodical literature offered fertile soil for florid poetical effusions, legends, and parables centering on the forget-me-not. [17] These interesting associations suggest some motives for the choice of the songster title. There may be a more direct connection between the songsters and gift annuals, which were a series of volumes that were popular between 1825 and the 1860s.

Such publications containing poetry and prose, generally with handsome steel-engraved illustrations and a pre-title page designed for the giver's inscription, became popular in England and then America. Hundreds of gift annuals were published in those years with dozens of different titles, such as The Atlantic Souvenir, The Talisman, and The Token. The earliest was Forget-me-noat: Christmas, New Year's, and birthday present, which was based on earlier German models. [18]
 
In 1830 the publisher, R. Ackermann, changed the title to Forget Me Not: A Christmas, New Year's and Birthday Present for 1830, which continued annually through 1847. The 1829 issue was simultaneously published in Philadelphia by Carey, Lea and Carey.

The first annual of related title originating in America was the 1828 Forget Me Not, a New Years gift, but then the title was dropped until 1846, when Alfred A. Phillips edited The Forget-Me-Not, a gift for 1846. [19] Phillips and his publisher continued with same title (though updated) through 1851. Between 1845 and 1853 annuals were a thriving enterprise in America, with some two dozen different varieties published each year. In 1858, a full-page ad by Leavitt and Allen of New York in American Literary G azette a nd Publishers Circular, captioned "Annuals for 1858, all beautifully printed, illustrated and bound," announced thirty-one such volumes: seven royal octavo, eighteen duodecimo, and six sixteenmo. Among the duodecimos was The Forget-Me-Not. [20] The popularity of such annuals, together with the general connotation of the flower's name, may have provided inspiration for titling a book of old songs and ballads similarly.

One of the first publishers of the Forget-Me-Not Songster, Nafis and Cornish of New York, also published Forget-Me-Not annuals. The 1846 annual, perhaps contemporaneous with their songster, displays many contrasts with the latter. The annual is copyrighted and dated; the songster is not. The annual has metal engraved illustrations; the songster has rough wood engravings. The annual acknowledges an editor, the contents are credited to individual authors, and there is a preface. The songster has none of these.

The Publishers
The publishers of these songsters are not names familiar to today's book buyers. Possibly they were not even familiar to many book buyers of the 1840s. The most active firms were Nafis and Cornish (New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis), succeeded by Cornish and Lamport; John Perry (Philadelphia), G. W. Cottrell (Boston), later succeeded by Locke (Boston) and then Locke and Bubier (Boston); Turner and Fisher (New York and Philadelphia) and Fisher and Brother (Philadelphia and Baltimore); and Robert Elton, Richard Marsh, and T. W. Strong, all of New York.S trikinglyn, one of the major book publishers of the period (Wiley, Harper, Scribner's, Lippincott, Appleton) is among them. Equally noteworthy, the songster publishers were definitely not music publishers.

(After the Civil War many were.) What then did they publish, besides these songsters? Except for Cornish and Lamport and Fisher and Brother (who advertisedi n Norton's Literary Advertiser a few times in c. 1851-52), I have not found mention of any of these publishers in trade literature of the period-a fact significant of itself.

However, some songsters of the period include some pages of advertisements at the end of the volume. More commonly, some of the shorter ones-thirty-two or sixty-four pages, for example-list other publications on the back of the wraparound paper cover: Fisher and Brother's (undated) Songs of Love and Beauty, for example, proclaims, "Song Books In America, of every size, variety, and style .. the songs of every clime ... Almanacs... Plays, Operas and Farces,... Old Plays in America... Wholesale and Retail, Our Motto, Liberal Terms to Dealers."

A John Perry catalog, bound with some songsters in an 1858 (or later) publication, lists other songsters, gift annuals, blank books, sensational literature (Highwayman and Pirate's Own Book, Book of Murders, Awful Riots in Philadelphia), and inexpensive reprints of best-selling English authors (Lamb's T ales from Shakespeare, Scott's novels, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress-all fifty cents apiece). It is reasonable to assume, then, that these publishers throve on cheap, ephemeral street literature-songsters, chapbooks, broadsides, almanacs, tracts. While it is not surprising that the songsters emanated from a very small cluster of cities (the ones where publishing in general was concentrated), it is perhaps telling that there are no southern cities among them.

Dates of Publication
There would be no need for a section with such a heading if the FMNSs had uniformly included publication data, without which a late-twentieth- century book would be almost unthinkable. In fact, of the several songsters that form the core of this study, only two gave publication dates (more precisely, a title page date of 1847 in one case and a copyright date of 1851 in the other). One undated songster, published by Nafis and Cornish, was reprinted in 1974 by Norwood Editions (Norwood, Pennsylvania) and again in 1977 by Folcroft Library Editions (Folcroft, Pennsylvania).

In the case of the former, the Library of Congress Cataloguing- in-Publication Data on the reverse of the title page presented the statement, "Reprint of the 1835 ed. published by Nafis & Cornish, New York."2T1 he only justificationI can see for such a conjecturald ate is the fact that one of the ballads included, "Gallant Female Sailor," dates its events to 1835. Such an early date is practically out of the question for three reasons: (1) the probable dates of publication of several of the songs contained; (2) the fact that New York City directories suggest that the Nafis and Cornish partnership was not established prior to 1842; and (3) the illustration for "Lord Bateman," which in this songster and many others, copies (but not exactly) a lithograph of George Cruikshank published first in 1838.[22]

In his Book of Pirate Songs, Frank conjectured a date of "circa 1829" for FMNSs published by G. W. Cottrell and Richard Marsh; yet both include the ballad of Charles Gibbs, who was hanged in 1831, and therefore must be at least a few years later. [23] On such evidence, publisher's address, and dates of other included songs, I propose to date all the FMNSs of this group to the period 1840-61, with the terminus a quo subject to an uncertainty of a year or two. I shall return to this question later. There remains the question of why most of these songsters are undated (and not copyrighted). In the early nineteenth century, most (but by no means all) publications included dates. [24]

For fiction/literature publications, there may not have been a compelling reason for a publication date-especially if the book was an American reprint of a British title, in which case it would have had no legal copyright protection at the time. (The revision to the Copyright Act of 1802 required that every published book bear the date of copyright, but obviously that would not trouble publishers who didn't bother with copyright.) [25] Publishers of books such  as songsters of the Forget-Me-Not variety would have benefited from the  absence of a date of publication: it would be easier to keep the book in print as a "current best seller" without solid evidence to the contrary.

Another possible explanation for not dating such songsters is suggested by the fact, apparent upon close examination of extant copies, that (at least in some instances) exactly the same plates were used by different publishers for the printing process. Since there were no photographic processes available in the 1840s, duplication required having access to the original type-molds or to a stereotype copy-meaning that a mold was made of a page of type that was then used for pouring a cast of the page for later printings. Possibly one publisher compiled (and perhaps copyrighted) a songster, then sold rights to other publishers (or provided them with stereotype molds for a price). The later publishers would have no reason to date or to copyright their copied volumes.

Advertising and Distribution
If there was any mention of songsters of any sort in any of the trade literature of the 1830s through 1850s, or in the journals and magazines of the period that advertised or discussed interesting new publications, it has eluded me. [26] In the post-Civil War decades of the nineteenth century, most paper-covered pocket songsters provided ample information for their procurement. Most gave publishers' addresses and prices. Many mentioned prominente ntertainersw, ho doubtless distributedt he songsters at personal appearances, much as country music entertainers sold their own song folios a century later. Many also promised to send the requester sheet music for individual songs for a small fee and postage.

As mentioned previously, antebellum songsters often included some publisher's advertisement, but the FMNS included no advertising and no price. The absence from trade literature suggests to me that a principal means of dissemination was by street sellers (as with broadsides) and itinerant peddlers-a mode of commerce that has long since disappeared in this country (though their descendants still hawk Tupperware and Fuller brushes). The lack of price (and date) would be of no disadvantage to the peddler, who could then charge whatever the local market would bear and pass off the book as absolutely the most recent and up-to-date
compilation available. [27]

This effectively places the early songsters in the same marketing bin as chapbooks, the cheap street literature of Europe and North America that first appeared in the end of the fifteenth century but flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and into the early decades of the nineteenth. In America they appeared first around 1725 and throve for about a century. [28] Chapbooks (from Middle English ceap= trade) were so called because they were distributed by chapmen (cf. German, kaufmann). The first generation of American chapmen consisted of young men who were willing to risk life and fortune traveling the dangerous wagon trails and footpaths of colonial America. By the late eighteenth century the occupation had become somewhat safer, and attracted older men and others whose prudence exceeded their bravado. In any case, chapbooks consisted of religious, moral, and political tracts, children's literature, fantastic stories, and songs, and it is in the latter description that they overlap with songsters. Weiss's description of chapbooks is equally apt for the early songsters:

Chapbook publishers took all sorts of liberties with titles, text and illustrations. Most chapbooks are authorless and their contents were frequently selected from books that contained material likely to suit popular taste. This material in many cases was abridged, changed and mutilated, and such as was not stolen, was supplied by anonymous authors and unliterary hacks.[29]

Richardson Wright implicitly credits such chapmen with beginning the book trade in America:

In one form or another the book agent has been with us from the beginning; perhaps he will linger on to the end. At first he appeared as a peddler of broadsides, ballads, and popular books. Then, when he began to distribute religious books he assumed the position of a necessary influence for good. .... Doubtless the town bookseller used the peddler to distribute his wares, employing both the notions peddler and men specializing on [sic] books. Some of them carried such popular pieces as chapbooks, which were occasionally imported from England. [30]

Wright also describes the circumstances under which many early ballad broadsides (and perhaps songsters, if they fit his category of "pamphlets") must have been printed:

Often apprentices of printing shops, in their spare time, and, for their own private profit, were allowed to print pamphlets and sheets of ballads which were sold to peddlers. And people bought books in these early days--in some years Franklin's "Poor Richard" would sell as many as 10,000 copies. Often the peddler bartered books, taking in exchange the old for the new. [31]

Songsters were not so insubstantial as broadsides; nevertheless, in their careless printing, cheap illustrations, sloppy texts, and absence of author/composer credits, songsters of the first half of the nineteenth century resembled contemporaneous broadsides, and in particular the similar repertoires of the two media betray contiguous birth wards-if not indeed identical parents.

In his history of early printing in America, Isaiah Thomas noted several printers of the latter half of the eighteenth century whose principal products were ballads and pamphlets; songsters may well have been among the wares of the latter c ategory. [32] In particular, Nathaniel Coverly of Boston, one of the most prominent printers of traditional song material in the early 1800s, published both songsters and broadsides. I am thus inclined to assume that songsters such as the Forget-Me-Nots were printed inexpensively and largely sold by itinerant peddlers or chapmen for as many years as they proved profitable.

Absence of any specific references to FMNSs in nineteenth-century literature is so deafening that any hint, even so muted a whisper as that in novelist Helen Hunt Jackson's diary, is arresting. There, an 1852 entry, cryptic though it may be, suggests distribution of the FMNS by (itinerant?) tradesmen:

Tues. 25. - Pleasant. Mr. Palmer returned. - Packing - Started at 5 o'clock for Peoria. - (Dr. Granger.) - Connecticut. - Venders of light literature - Religious work (Simon McGuire Tricks upon Rivalry.")- Volume of Psalmody - Forget me not songster - Christy's Melodies &c. Charles O'Mallery - Night scene in the cabin. Lantern - floor sleepers. - Chambermaid.

The "Christy's Melodies" might refer to Christy's Plantation Melodies, which was advertised by publisher Fisher and Brother in Norton's Literary Advertiserin 1851. [33]

Price

Three documents provide information of the sale prices of the songsters. First is a 10 x 16-inch flyer in the possession of the Missouri Historical Society (St. Louis) headed

List of Books
Published and Offered to the Trade, By
Nafis & Cornish, 278 Pearl-Street, New-York,
And Nafis, Cornish & Co., 206 Main-Street, St. Louis, Mo.

This sheet advertised the Forget-Me-Not Annual for 1848, so it must have been published in that year or, more likely, the preceding. It lists the Forget- Me-Not Songster, "roan, gilt," Trade Price of 25 cents. The annual, by the way, cost ten times as much. Other songsters listed are The American Songster (25 cents, plain, roan, gilt), Rough-and Ready Songster (25 cents, roan, gilt), Columbian Naval and Patriotic Songster (50 cents for roan, 15 cents for boards), Naval and Patriotic (15 cents, boards), L ittle Forget-Me-Not Songster (13 cents, boards), True Lover's Songster (13 cents, boards), Little American Songster (13 cents, boards), and Highlander Songster (13 cents, boards). "Roan" means soft sheepskin, tanned in imitation of morocco (tanned goatskin); "boards" would be hardcover. The "Little" designation probably refers to size (32mo, unlike the others, which are 18mo), and may not appear on the title page as part of the title. [34]

Second, a "non-standard" FMNS published by John Perry of Philadelphia (1858 or later) included a catalog of publications at the end of the volume. Among the listings were the (standard) Forget-Me-Not Songster, The Popular National Songster, The American Songster, and The Lover's Forget- Me-Not, all selling for 25 cents. The price range for other publications is 16 to 75 cents.

Finally, we have Roorbach's bibliography, which included one (possibly two) FMNSs, both with price (25 cents)-though neither with dates of publication( but necessarilyb efore 1852). [35] That we know of upwards of thirty separate FMNSs in the time period covered by his bibliography supports the assertion that the songsters easily slipped through the holes of the general information-gatheringn ets of the publication business.

Altogether, Roorbach listed fifteen" songsters" (based on title only: I can't vouch safe that these publications included words only and not music) (see Table 1). In today's dollars this 25-50-cent range corresponds to about five to ten dollars. [36] Few books in those years, even technical ones, bore prices greater than three to four dollars per volume. The songsters were thus inexpensive in their day. (In dismaying contrast, when they turn up today in the used book market, they easily command prices exceeding $100.)



By comparison, sheet music-at least for the period into the 1830s cost regularly 121/2ce nts (or a shilling) for each page of printed music; a typical song would have cost a buyer 25 to 50 cents.[37] In other words, sheet music was a luxury affordable only by a more well-to-do clientele. The appeal of songsters, with a hundred or so songs for the cost of a single song sheet, must have been great to those with shallow pockets.[38]

Sales Figures
On this subject information is in far shorter supply than conjecture. I would be confined entirely to the latter but for a single datum: The original title page of the edition published by Nafis and Cornish and later reprinted by Norwood in 1974 (in an edition of 100 copies) boasts "150th Thousand"! Discounting the possibility of creative advertising hyperbole, I take this to mean that this songster alone sold upwards of that many copies. When we take into account the other dozen or so editions (plus those unknown to me) there may well have been a couple hundred thousand sold in the 1840s. What can we make of this, in today's age, when anything fewer than a million sales is beneath mention?

Although precise sales figures for books (and recordings) have always been difficult to obtain (publishers seem to prefer to be able to inflate sales figures as a catalyst to yet more sales), there are some tabulations of book popularity that permit some general conclusions regarding sales of the most successful books of the nineteenth century.

Trubner accumulated several pages of data on author remuneration, extent of book trade, and sales figures for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but not much about lighter popular literature. He does note that "[f]rom 1827 to 1837, the ordinary sale of a successful book was from 1000 to 1500 copies; whereas now [in 1859] 1500 of any book can be disposed of, and it is not uncommon to print 10,000. The sale of [Washington] Irving's works is by hundreds of thousands." [39]

In his study of best sellers, Mott tabulated those of each decade. [40] His criterion was that total sales had to equal 1 percent of the average population of the decade. During the 1840s, that meant sales of about 175,000. Twenty-nine books met that requirement, half of which were by American authors, including Cooper, Poe, Emerson, and Whittier. If the figure of 150,000 is reliable, the FMNSs would have earned entry into
that select company.

Hart suggested that in the 1840s and '50s, sales of 50,000 were exceptional. Discussing now-forgotten author Fanny Fern's first novel, Ruth Hall, Hart quoted the following statement: "'It has sold universally,' said Harper's (by which they meant 50,000 copies in eight months)"; and in 1853 Fern's Fern Leaves from Fanny's Portfolio sold 70,000. Fern was one of many immensely successful female authors of romantic literature of whom an envious Hawthorne, whose The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables old fewer than 10,000 copies a year, rote, "America is now wholly given over to a d--d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash-and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed." [41]

In literary periodicals of the 1830s-50s, intended mainly for an audience of women and often edited by women, sentimental poems and songs appeared regularly among didactic articles and serialized stories. Favorite subjects were dead or dying orphans, preferably blind, deaf, or hunchbacked-or some combination thereof. An 1863 article tabulated sales for literature up to about 1860. Cumulative sales for Uncle Tom's Cabin were put at 310,000, F ern L eaves. .. at 96,000, and Washington Irving's combined sales at 800,000.

Leaders in fiction of the day, individual titles might not have outsold their poor songster cousins of the same period. [42] Apart from providing some numerical reference posts, this digression would be rather beside the point if it did not remind us of the popularity of sentimental and romantic literature, in the middle of the nineteenth  century, which may well have contributed to the simultaneous (though uninventoried) popularity of songsters such as the FMNS. Needless to say, such studies took no account of cheap literature such as songsters, so one never saw a direct comparison between the latter and the main stream of fiction. Students of American literature could marvel over Melville and fawn over Fanny Fern, but cheap print was inconsequential- a dominant assessment until the last third of the twentieth century, when the study of popular culture was elevated to the proud status of collegiate departments.

The arena of sheet music provides another reference point for comparison- and also a hint to the reliability of the publisher's claimed sales figures. As of 1857, Stephen Foster had earned $1647 in royalties for his best seller, "Old Folks at Home." His publisher, Firth, Pond and Co., had claimed three years earlier that they had sold more than 130,000 copies of the same. At the then-standard royalty rate of 2 or 2 1/2 cents per copy, Foster's royalties translate to between 66,000 and 82,000 copies. [43]  The conclusion is that even allowing for some artificial inflation of the songster sales claims, the FMNS sold about the same number of copies as one of the best-selling songs of the era.

Contents
I will discuss later in itemized detail the songs that comprised the FMNS's repertoire; here some broad generalizations are in order. When one compares the FMNSs with other antebellum songsters, what is most remarkable is what is missing from the former. Specifically, there are no minstrel or "Negro" songs, no songs about "Indians," no religious songs, no Mexican war songs (even though some songsters were published after that conflict), no temperance songs, no abolition songs, and no contemporary political songs.

Favorite subjects are the Revolutionary War (18 songs), the War of 1812 (15), sailing and pirate stories (more than 50), and songs of love and/or domestict ragedy (approximately 50). I n three of these categories songsters reflect the popular topics of contemporaneous literature in general.

Wright has analyzed the subject matter of American fiction from the period 1774 to 1850. [44] For the decade of the 1840s he divided 765 published works of fiction into thirty-two categories, as shown in Table 2 (with some regrouping). Because of the rather subjective nature of the categories, it does not seem fruitful to attempt to partition the songs of the FMNSs into precisely the same divisions. Nor should one expect song topics to mimic those of popular literature. Nevertheless, his results afford an interesting comparison. Although the War for Independence established our political separation from Britain, there were no clauses in the Declaration of Independence to assert our immediate cultural separation. In the decades after 1776 Americans continued to favor British literature over the creative works of native authors, though as the century wore on the proportion steadily shifted in favor of domestic products. According to one tally, in 1820, 70 percent of the books read in the new country were of British origin.

In 1830 the corresponding figure was 60 percent, and by 1845 the preponderance of literaturew as the work of American writers. [45] The contents of the FMNSs are consistent with this trend. As far as I can tell, of the repertoire of 274 titles, close to one half are of British origin. [46] These include a dozen or so compositions by early nineteenth-century favorite poets/songwriters such as Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns, Thomas Moore, and Sir Henry Bishop, all of whom were greatly admired on both sides of the Atlantic. Scott, for example, was America's favorite novelist from 1814 until his death in 1832. The American literary urge showed itself mainly in the expression of nationalist sentiments associated with the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.

Modem readers may find it hard to understand how the works of such eminences could have been co-opted for the songsters without so much as a "by your leave" to their makers. In the case of the British authors and composers it was as simple as the fact that there was no protection in the United States for British works prior to the copyright act of 1891.

In the case of American authors it may have been due to the lack of an adequate mechanism for policing the unauthorized utilization of literary works. In some cases, however, it may have been that the songs were originally published without benefit of copyright. Literary creativity was often the casual pastime of men of leisure who had no interest in obtaining remuneration for their efforts. All of these circumstances notwithstanding, it still seems peculiar that the compilers of the songsters would so consistently have omitted the names of authors, the presence of which, one would think, would only have added to the prestige of the publication.

Of particular interest to the folklorist, over 100 of the songs have been found in oral tradition on one or both sides of the Atlantic. This is in striking contrast with other songsters of the same period. The Southern and Western Songster (late 1820s), for example, has perhaps a dozen out of close to 400. [47] A more difficult question is whether these songs were already in oral tradition at the time of the songsters' publication. There is a range of possibilities. Some songs, for example, "Barbara Allen," were firmly in oral tradition a century or two earlier, and in fact we still cannot collar the ballad's original author. On the other hand, a ballad such as "James Bird," relating to events of the War of 1812, was written and published by a known author during that war and some time in the nineteenth century entered oral tradition.

It was still being collected as late as the 1960s. Whether the FMNSs' compilers took the ballad from written sources or oral ones is a question that gets to the heart of the songsters' role in the folk tradition: were the songsters borrowers from oral tradition or contributors to it? This question can be asked of many of the 100-plus traditional songs in the songsters--but, unfortunately, not so often answered.

As noted previously, the subtitled reference to grandmother's favorites implies songs popular some forty to fifty years prior to publication, or around 1800. To some extent this claim had justification, in particular, we know of a generous handful of ballads and songs that were traditional in Britain throughout the eighteenth century and therefore probably were current among colonists west of Atlantic waters as well. However, some of the songs would not have been in grandmother's repertoire, inasmuch as a considerable number concern the War of 1812. Some are demonstrably still younger-a few even from the 1830s and '40s, which is to say they were relatively new at songster publication time. Because many of the songs are difficult to date, one can make only qualitative statements. Very roughly, about 220 out of all 274 of the songs can be approximately dated (see Table 3).

It is tempting to conjecture that at first the FMNSs were indeed collections of old favorites of grandmother's day, gradually augmented with more recent pieces as the songsters underwent successive editions. Unfortunately, lack of publication dates for most of the songsters renders this an untestable hypothesis. Yet it does seem that the earlier types had larger numbers of ballads current on British broadsides (and later oral tradition); by contrast, the songs in the unusual TypeX songster that do not occur in any of the other types are entirely absent from oral tradition on both sides of the Atlantic.

In her autobiography, Virginia Clay-Clopton's recollections support this picture of mixing old and current songs in social gatherings of the 1850s:

"Middle-aged company might sing some of the more au courant songs, but they also relished the Scotch and Irish ballads that had been in vogue during their youth and that continued to have a wide following."

Mrs. Fitzpatrick, wife of an Alabama senator, for one, liked to present "'Roy's Wife of Aldivalloch' and other quaint Scotch ditties" to her circle. [48]

Who Used Them?
Songsters, providing no musical notation, could not easily have introduced new songs to theira udiences. [49] More likely their readers or owners used them to refresh their memories of familiar or forgotten favorites.  Well into the twentieth century many a Sunday afternoon was spent gathered around the parlor piano in familial song-a happy pastime now all but superannuated by more technology-intense forms of entertainment.

Songsters could have served under such circumstances-or in the absence of a musical instrument-to assist in the recollection of old favorites or flesh out texts of which their owners had only imperfect knowledge. Alternatively, they may have been used to learn songs heard in the theater: a common head note to a song stated something like, "As sung to great applause by ... at the ... Theater." Their small size, easily fitting into a coat pocket or a purse, also allowed for their employ on family outings-to a "pic-nic" in the woods or at the beach. In this latter venue they would have been far preferable to the physically larger contemporaneous songbooks-collections of both words and music, sometimes with more than one singing part, and/or guitar chords.

The selection (and omission) of subjects suggests that they were used by adults, young and old, of middle-class families, or perhaps by courting couples or groups. Inclusion of many ballads dealing with murder and domestic violence would seem to make them less suitable for younger children (though whether this bias was operative nearly two centuries ago perhapsn eeds verification). However, there was a group of songsters from which the more gruesome or sexually specific stories were consistently edited out (more on this later), which suggests that some editors specifically had in mind the relation of audience to suitability. [50]

Judging by song repertoire, location of publishers, and where the songsters have turned up as collectors' items, it seems they were more common in the North and (what was then) the West than in the South.

While we cannot assert the presence of FMNS influence in every musical event of the early nineteenth century, there is good evidence-based on handbills, program notes, diaries, and newspaper accounts of musical events of the time-that the contents of these volumes were an accurate representation of the most popular songs-new and old-of the period.

For example: At a concert at Franklin Hall, Salem, Mass., May 26,1826, the following eight songs constituted part 1 of the program:

"Oh Lady Fair,"
"While with Village Maids I stray,"
"Black-eyed Susan,"
"Should he Upbraid,"
"Dulce Domum,"
"All's Well,"
"Auld Robin Gray," and
"Bart'lemy Fair."

Of these, four are in the FMNS repertoire. [51] At Pickering Hall in the same city in March of that year, a concert was to include "See Our Bark," "Ellen Aureen," "When thy bosom heaves the sigh," "The Carrier Pigeon," "All's Well," "Sweet Home," and "The Bonny Boat," all in part 1. Three of these seven are in the FMNS corpus. [52]

Reminiscing in 1845 in The Lowell Offering about her youth in New Hampshires ome years before, the unnamed author ("M.R.G.") recalled the following ten songs being sung to everyone's great pleasure: "American Taxation,"" The Ship Carpenter,"" Major's Only Son," "The Nightingale," "Perry's Victory," "General Wolf at the Surrender of Quebec," "Sweet Phebe," "Old King Cole," "Fanny Gray," and "Rory O'Moore" [sic]. At least six are in the FMNS collection. [53] Recalling her youth in the Lowell boardinghouses in the 1830s, Harriet Robinson wrote:

"And in the long winter evenings, when we could not run home between the doffings, we gathered in groups and told each other stories, and sung the old-time songs our mothersh ad sung, such as 'Barbara Allen,' 'Lord Lovell,' 'Captain Kid,' 'Hull's Victory,' and sometimes a hymn." [54]

Two titles appeared in the FMNS. Another corroboration of the songster's proximity to contemporary folk tradition is afforded by comparison with the Stevens-Douglass manuscript- a collection of songs and ballads written down around 1840-60 in western New York. [55] Over two dozen of the eighty-nine songs in that collection and other manuscripts of the family from the same time are in the FMNS repertoire, many in versions very close to the printed texts. Whether this bespeaks of influence of the songsters is more than we dare conclude; it does, however, support the contention that these collections mirrored contemporary tastes. More examples are given in the detailed song notes below.

By the opening decades of the twentieth century, although the FMNS was unfamiliar in Missouri, it was quite well known in New England and eastern Canada. Folksong collectors Barry, Eckstorm, and Smyth found it ubiquitous in Maine, but asserted that such a songster didn't necessarily drive out singers' older traditional versions:

The Locke [Forget-Me-Not] Songster was the songbook most widely known in Maine, with more influence upon our texts than any other printed book. Yet it is noteworthy that families which had their own traditional texts did not give them up, even after they came to own a copy of The Forget Me Not Songster. One of our singers, who has owned an incomplete copy of the book-and all we have examined have been in tatters-for over fifty years, still sings her songs as she learned them from her grandmother, who probably learned them from her grandmother. [56]

Stronger evidence for the FMNS's influence on at least one singer's repertoire was found by Novia Scotia collector W. Roy Mackenzie. One of his informants, Alexander Harrison of Cumberland County, provided him with ten texts (sung and/or recited) that are, with at most two or three trivial differences, word-for-word the same as the texts published in the FMNS, although Mackenzie did not comment on that relation. In fact, in one case, the song "Bold Dighton," Mackenzie remarked on the singer's garbling of the broadside text, though apparently without realizing that in fact the singer was copying exactly the garbled text of the FMNS version. [57]

The Tunes
Musicologists may fret at the disproportionate attention given in this study to words in preference to tunes. It is a justified complaint, in as much as the contents of the songsters were indeed songs, not simply poems. But in truth we are hard-pressed to ascribe tunes except in the cases of those songs (thirty-five altogether) for which tune instructions are specifically given in the songsters. One can find in the literature other tune credits, but often there is no distinction between a composer and an arranger (of an older traditional air), nor is there any basis for choosing in those cases where more than one composer or tune have claims. (The assignment of author credits can be similarly problematic when more than one author has written or copyrighted a version of the same song.) There are also the several dozen songs and ballads that have been recovered in the late nineteenth or twentieth century from oral tradition, but there is no assurance that the tune sung then was the tune used in the 1840s. For these reasons, tune comments in this discussion are confined to the cases where there were tunes identified in the songsters themselves.

The "Standard" Forget-Me-Not Songsters
This study is based on an analysis of over seventy very similar but distinct songsters, about three dozen of which have been seen in whole or in part (by means of facsimile copies). They divide into ten distinct types. Each "Type" is identified by the set of songs it contains. However, there are also various typographic features that set apart some subtypes. The following typographic features are useful in distinguishing different types and subtypes.

1. If there is a frontispiece, it is a wood engraving of a pirate captioned "Kelly the Pirate"-a song that appears in all the songsters. The illustration depicts a pirate, either with a hat and holding a cutlass in his right hand pointing down, or hatless and with a hatchet in the same hand raised over his head. The latter illustration was taken from the cover of an earlier songster, The Pirate's Own Song Book, published by Turner and Fisher in 1841. The more common "cutlass Kelly" comes either with a plain border, a repeated fleur-de-lis-like border, or a modified Greek key border. The same border embellishes the title page. Whether the identical wood blocks are being reused is difficult to say, but there are clearly two slightly different renditions of the "cutlass Kelly" figure.

Figure1. [pic not included] The Forget-Me-No Stongster illustration for the ballad "Lord Bakeman," compared with the George Cruikshank original on which it was based. If the artist engraved the wood using a Cruikshank illustration as a direct model, the printed image would come out reversed. 2. The title-page text is usually either a Gothic font or a bold, block letter font (either solid or open). Two songsters have a typeface of their own.

3. If there is a title-page wood engraving, it is one of the following three:
a. An old man and woman seated more-or-less facing one another in front of a fireplace; the woman is reading and the man is smoking a long-stem pipe with a bottle and wine glass on a table at his side.
b. An old man and woman seated more-or-less side by side in chairs, with a fireplace at the left edge. This wood engraving also was used above the song "John Anderson, My Jo" in The Parlour Songster(Turner and Fisher, 1844).
c. A child playing on the bank of a body of water.

4. The songster published by Richard H. Elton, a New York publisher and engraver, includes four illustrations signed "Elton." Several songsters include some of his wood engravings with his name intact. Others use them without his name: either it was struck off or the wood engraving was recut by another artist. It seems reasonable that Elton's songster preceded those that used his wood engravings, and that those without his name were later than those with his name.

5. Most of the songsters contain the ballad "Lord Bateman." In some it is so spelled. Some so spelled have a small wood engraving of a man playing the guitar to a woman; this cut earlier appeared above the song, "Oh! Sing Me No New Songs To-night" in The Parlour Songster (Turner and Fisher, 1844). In other songsters, the ballad is spelled "Lord Bakeman" and the engraving is derived from one executed by George Cruikshank to illustrate a small book, The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman (London, 1838), a version of the ballad with unsigned commentary subsequently credited to Charles Dickens and William M. Thackeray.

6. The song, "American Soldier" appears in all the songsters. If it begins on page 20, it is illustrated by a wood engraving. The illustration, song title, and one stanza are on page 20. Some of the songsters lack the title and first stanza below the illustration; presumably they are later than the ones that have those details.

7. The ballad "The Female Sailor" appears in all the songsters. In some, the last page of the song (page 163) is missing and is replaced with another song--either "Billy Barlow" or "The Merry Widow." In neither case is this substituted song included in the table of contents. One assumes that the original plate that contained the conclusion of "The Female Sailor" was damaged and later publications were executed with the least possible effort: another song was substituted but the contents page was left unchanged.

8. Several editions have incorrectly numbered pages; for example, a common error is page 193 misnumbered as 391. A comparison of which songster types have which distinguishing characteristics is given as appendix B.

Sequence of Publication
Without publication or copyright dates at our disposal, we are forced to engage in some freewheeling guesswork to establish a sequence of publication for the various FMNSs. It should be said at the outset that they were not independent of one another: the consistent utilization of the same text for traditional songs when there were many possible texts from which to choose suggests that the compiler of the first FMNS provided (willingly or otherwise) the model for successive publishers.

In the 1840s no photo duplication processes were available. If the (exactly) identical pages appeared in different songsters we would have to assume that a stereotype process was used. However, the occasional differencesi n punctuation or other minor typographical features suggest that at least some of the time publishers had to typeset pages anew, but doubtless with older editions (belonging to other publishers) as models. The wood engravings similarly were used in different editions, but not without minor differences. Such differences from one edition to another may indicate an artist attempting to copy an older model, or rather just the effects of wear on a woodblock used long past its prime.

I am inclined to favor Type I as the first group of FMNSs to be published- either by Nafis or Elton, and probably around 1840-42. There are no songs from the 1840s in this group. Of the several distinct editions of this type, on the basis of the use of his wood engravings, I would give priority of publication to the one by Robert H. Elton of New York, probably in 1840/41-the first year he was listed in city directories at the address on his title page.58I f indeed his was first,t hen Nafis (succeeded by Nafis and Cornish, and then Cornish and Lamport) quickly appropriated Elton's model and used it to their own advantage. All the other songsters in this type are published by (a) Nafis, (b) Nafis and Cornish, or (c) Cornish and Lamport-in that order. According to New York City directoriesN, afis was succeededb y Nafis and Cornishi n 1842/43, which establishes the earliest possible date for the songsters published by that partnership. Cornish and Lamport succeeded Nafis and Cornish in 1851 (and their songster is dated 1851), so the others must be between 1843-44 and 1851. The latest ones of this type, by Cornish and Lamport (after 1850), are the only ones with the Greek key border on the frontispiece rather than the fleur-de-lis. The use of Elton's wood engravings with his signature is puzzling (though his name was removed from "Noble Lads of Canada"). If they were simply pirated-that is to say, copied by other artists-there's no reason why his signed name would have been retained. Possibly Elton decided to discontinue the songster and gave the production materials to Nafis and Co.-this even though he was still in business in 1860.

The Type II model (Turner and Fisher), first published in 1844-49, seems to have been based on I, but with some apparently arbitrary alterations. The inclusion of "Barbara Allen" to fill in for some other song that had been removed was done without noticing (or caring) that a different version of that ballad was already present. Perhaps, if nothing else, this is inadvertent testimony to the popularity of the ballad at the time. Types IIa and III (both Turner and Fisher) were based on II but with minor changes, and published in 1844-49 (but after II) and 1851-59, respectively.

The introduction of two songs published no earlier than 1843 and 1845 ("Bunker Hill Anniversary" and "Bunker Hill, or the Death of Warren,"r espectively)a nd the publisher's addressp uts Types V and VI (both Turner and Fisher) in the period 1845-49. (These are the only two types with "Burning of the Lexington," which occurred on January 13, 1840, and "Some Seventy Years Ago," which would seem to date from the 1840s as well.) One would assume, then, that II, IIa, V, and VI were successive, rather than overlapping publications, with a year or two between them.

Type IV (Marsh) was based on Type I, but without frontispiece or title-page illustration, and with many illustrations different from all the other songsters. The copyright date of 1847 (on some, but not all, copies) suggests it appeared a few years after Type I-unless the undated editions are earlier, perhaps even the earliest of the songsters (which is possible, since it contains no songs later than 1840). Otherwise, one wonders what the reaction of the publishers of the first Type I was to Marsh's copyrighting what was effectively their own material.

Type VII (Cornish and Lamport) marks the first major change in the songster and with an apparent policy behind the revisions. It appeared in 1851-52. However, Cornish and Lamporth ad (previously?) published a Type I songster. Perhaps there had been some objection to the salacious content; or perhaps a new and more puritanical editor joined the staff. In any case, Type VII featured a bowdlerized selection that might have appealed to a different audience. Also, Type VII saw the introduction of popular songs by Robert Burns and Thomas Moore-three by the former and five by the latter.

Types VIII (Locke and Bubier, New England News Co.), VIIIa (Locke; Locke and Bubier), VIIIb (Cottrell, Strong, Leary), and IX (Cottrell) were copies of VII but with minor changes of a nature suggesting that the plates had actually been borrowed from earlier publishers, but with some damages in the process. For example, the third page of "The Female Sailor" (p. 163) is missing and has been replaced with another song, "Billy Barlow" in VIII/VIIIa/VIIIb, and "The Merry Widow" in IX. These replacements are not mentioned in the table of contents. VIII is difficult to date, but is probably from the 1860s. There are three different examples of VIIIb by as many publishers: G. W. Cottrell, Boston (1855-61 based on address); T[homas]. W. Strong, New York (date unknown); and W. A. Leary, Philadelphia (date unknown). Probably all are unauthorized editions using Elton's artwork. Cottrell and Strong jointly published several works (including several attributed to Elton, such as Elton's Illustrated Song Book and Elton's Songs and Melodies for the Multitude, or Universal Songster), so they could have shared FMNS material. However, neither Cottrell nor Strong published a songster that duplicated the contents of Elton's (Type I). Cottrell's VIIIb and IX must be 1855-61. In sum, all of these editions date from the mid-1850s to the early 1860s.

Type X is difficult to date, but since as Fisher and Brother succeeded Turner and Fisher in 1849-50, it probably appeared in the 1850s. This songster is almost sui generis, inasmuch as it includes fifty-nine songs that appear in none of the other types. A large batch of popular songs was added: three more by Bums, nine by Moore, and five or six by Henry Bishop. To make room for these, many older traditional ballads from broadsides were dropped.

In addition to the closely related group of songsters that forms the core of this study, many others used the catch phrase "Forget me not" in the title, but their contents were distinctly different from the core. Their precise title/subtitles often serve to distinguish them from the core. Save for the important first example, published in 1832, these were mostly later than the standard songsters; they are not discussed further.

The Ubiquitous Songs (Present in All the Songsters)
A complete list of all the songs that appear in the standard FMNSs is given in appendix A. Of these, forty-three songs appear in all the FMNSs-forty-four if we include "Barbara Allen," which turns up in two different versions under different titles ("Barbara Allen" and "Bonny Barbara Allen"). (I have taken the liberty of including a forty-fifth song, "Rinordine," in this discussion even though it is missing from the Type X songster.) Twenty of them are almost certainly of American origin; all the others save perhaps one or two are British imports. There is reasonable evidence in oral tradition for all but possibly seven of these. Because of their ubiquity it seems worthwhile discussing each one individually; they are arranged in alphabetical order.

1. "American Soldier" The narrator is a sixteen-year-old infatuated by an American soldier and concerned lest her mother find out. It ends with a formulaic verse whose modest merits are representative of the work as a whole:

Now to conclude and end my song,
If there be any offended, O,
And if there is here any at all,
Its more than I intended, O.

Dichter and Shapiro mention sheet music from ca. 1798 published by G. Willig, Philadelphia, music by J. Gauline and so titled, but it cannot be identified with certainty as our song. [59] A version was collected by Susan R. Morton in 1941 in Virginia; [60] other than that I know of no references.

2. "Answer to the Garden Gate" See comments to "The Garden Gate" (below). The date of publication is not known, but presumably it would have been within a few years of "The Garden Gate," which is to say, the early 1810s.

3. "Banks of Brandywine" [Laws H 28]. The narrator teases a maid with the thought that her true lover sailor has probably married another before revealing that he himself is the long-absent lover. The story thus follows closely a common theme of many British broadsides, but no transatlantic versions of this one have been found; hence Laws catalogued it with his native American ballads rather than British imports (a weakness of his classification schemes when internal characteristics are not sufficient to establish the origins of a ballad). 61A version in the Stevens-Douglass manuscript is word-for-word identical, but many misspellings suggest that the manuscript text wasn't copied directly from the songster. [62]

There are American broadsides published by Deming and Andrews; the Deming text is almost identical to the songster. [63] The same text also appeared in the American Songster (1839).

4. "The Banks of the Schuylkill" A maid laments her lover's conscription off to war and fears she may never see him again to resume their pleasant hours spent on the banks of the Schuylkill River (southeast Pennsylvania). The text has very little narrative content, and is not always considered a ballad per se. As such, the composition challenges the rigorousness of the common definition (a ballad is a song that tells a story), reminding us that the boundary between narrative and lyric folksong can be rather fuzzy. Vance Randolph recorded a version in the Missouri Ozarks in 1941; Huntington found texts written in ships' logs in 1840 and 1843; it was also collected twice in Maine. [64] The ballad was printed on a broadside by L[eonard] Deming (Boston and Middlebury, Vermont), the text virtually identical with that of the songster. [65] The sheet contains another ballad, "Halifax Station," which is clearly about the War of 1812, and it is reasonable to assume that "Schuylkill" comes from the same period. The ballad also appears in some (but not all) editions of the American Songster as well as the much later Beadle's Banner Songster. [66]

5. "Barbara Allan"/"Bonny Barbara Allan" [Child 84] Most probably the best-known imported ballad in American folk tradition, "Barbara Allen" (spelled "Allan" in the songsters) has been collected in the field over 500 times in the last century. The earliest reference to it is an oftcited entry for January 2, 1666, in Samuel Pepys's Diary recording his evening at Lord Bruncker's: "... but, above all, my dear actress Mrs. Knipp, with whom I sang, and in perfect pleasure I was to hear her sing, and especially her little Scotch song of 'Barbary Allen.' "Pepys had first met Mrs. Elizabeth Knipp (also spelled Knepp) on the preceding December 6. She was beautiful, could sing, and had a very unpleasant husband-a triple threat in consequence of which the lusting diarist could not keep his hands off her. Their friendship rapidly escalated (or should one say, descended) into a degree of intimacy that soon became intolerablet o Pepys's wife. On January5 ,1666:

" ... and so to Greenwich, and after sitting with them a while at their house, home, thinking to get Mrs. Knipp but could not, she being busy with company; but sent me a pleasant letter writing herself Barbary Allen;" and on the following day: " ... having wrote a letter to her in the morning, calling myself Dapper Dicky in answer to hers of Barb. Allen ... " The latter is (according to a footnote) a reference to another Scots song in which a girl laments her lover's absence.[67]

It has been argued that the January 2 reference was not to the traditional ballad: in a head note to the ballad, editor Belden wrote, Mrs. [Fannie Hardy] Eckstorm in a letter written in 1940 informed me that she and [Phillips] Barry had satisfied themselves, before Barry's death, that as sung by Mrs. Knipp to the delight of Samuel Pepys in 1666 it was not a stage song at all but a libel on Barbara Villiers and her relations with Charles II; but so far as I know the details of their argument have never been published. [68]

The absence of said details in this case rather reminds one of mathematician Fermat's handwritten marginal comment in his copy of a number theory textbook that he had discovered a marvelous proof of the theorem under discussion, but the margin was too narrow to contain it. Without any record of Eckstorm and Barry's evidence (and contrariwise the suggestive evidence in the two correspondents' use of ballad characters as noms-de-plume), we must reluctantly consign their comments to the dustbin of dubious demonstrations and assume that Pepys indeed heard the ballad that we know by that name. In any event, "Barbara Allen" has appeared in cheap print (broadsides, chapbooks, songsters) with such frequency that it is impossible to disengage the oral from the printed tradition. In his study, "'Barbara Allen': Cheap Print and Reprint, "Ed Cray reported that the FMNS version of "Barbara Allen" contained at least one stanza not present in any previous versions, whether from cheap print or oral sources. [69]
The opening stanza is:

It fell about the Martinmas day,
When the green leaves were falling,
Sir James the Graham in the west country
Fell in love with BarbaraA llan.

The fourth of the eighteen stanzas is the one Cray singled out as most distinctive:

O see you not yon seven ships,
So bonny as they are sailing,
I'll make you mistress of them all,
My bonny BarbaraA llen.

(Notwithstanding the last line, the title of this version is "Barbara Allen," not "Bonny Barbara Allen.") From the fact that four recoveries from American folk tradition included this unique stanza, Cray concluded that those singers had learned their texts from the FMNSs-evidence to him of the significant impact of the songsters on oral tradition. Because none of the songsters with the "Bonny Barbara Allen" version was available to Cray at the time of his study, he was unaware of the complication of that second text, though its existence does not negate any of his conclusions.

The "Bonny Barbara Allen" version (in FMNS Types II, III, IV, VI, and VII, all probably dating from 1844-49) is only nine stanzas long. Its opening stanza is:

It was in and about the Martinmas time,
When the green leaves were falling,
That Sir John Greme in the west country
Fell in love with Barbara Allan.

It too has close (if not derivative) relatives among field-collected versions. But for some minor Americanizations in spelling, it is identical with a Glasgow broadside version printed in 1855. An editorial note on the latter claims it was taken from the fourth volume of Allan Ramsay's early and influential collection, Tea Table Miscellany, which is very close to it and even closer to the FMNS text. Also, except for spelling changes and a few textual differences, the text is the same as "Sir John Grehme and Barbara Allan. A Scottish Ballad" in Percy's Reliques. [70]

Something about the indifferent editorial practices of the compilers of the FMNSs can be concluded from the presence of both versions in three of the thirteen songster types.  The source of the latter version can then be assumed to be earlier cheap print; but what of the source of the unique first version? Did its first typesetter (from whom later ones must have copied) have access to a now lost previous printed text? Did he himself (they were almost all men) know a traditional version? Did he make up the stanza? The latter possibility cannot be ruled out: many men of distinguished literary accomplishment (e.g., Ben Franklin) did service as printers and/or typesetters. The answer to this question is not presently at hand; we can hope that further research will provide it.

However, there is evidence that suggests that the FMNS text was not the first published with the added "seven ships" stanza. I base this assertion on a unique "Barbry Allen" written down by William A. Larkin(s) in 1866 in a manuscript collection of ballad and song texts and autograph verses.[71] Larkin's version is very close to the FMNS version-including the (slightly altered) "ships" stanza-though it contains sufficient differences to assure us that it was not copied directly from that source. In fact, two differences suggest that Larkin's comes directly from a predecessor of the FMNS text, and is actually superior to the latter as far as the narrative goes. One of these two differences involves the alteration of a single word; the other, the addition of two stanzas. The word in question appears in the fifth stanza, where the FMNS text reads:

But it fell out upon a day
At the wine as they were drinking
They toasted their glasses around about
And slighted Barbara Allan.

Here, the Larkin stanza replaces the pronoun "it"

with "they" (that is, the two lovers-not the "they" of the third line), which makes more sense story-wise. The added stanzas in Larkin's writing are the last two of the ballad. The FMNS version ends abruptly with

Oh mother, mother make my bed,
O make it soft and narrow,
Since my love died for me to-day,
I'll die for him, to-morrow.

The Larkin text has two more stanzas, ending with the common rose and brier motif-a much neater conclusion. One hesitates to construct elaborate edifices on such slender foundations, but they are at the very least suggestive of an earlier source for the FMNS text.

A third, different version of "Barbara Allen" also appeared in some songsters of the same period. It contains eight double stanzas and begins with the half-stanza:

In Scarlet Town, where I was born,
There was a fair maid dwellin',
And every youth cried well awa'-
Her name was Barbara Allen. [72]

6. "The Battle of Baltimore" (or," The True Blue Virginian") This long (twelve double stanzas and choruses) ballad from the War of 1812 describes the attack and rescue (primarily by brave Virginian soldiers) of Fort McHenry in September 1814. Many personal names (Ross, Striker, Cockburn, Armstead, Cochran, Winder) are mentioned among the historical details. Two versions were collected in Virginia in 1941. [73]

7 "The Blackbird" In Irish folksong the blackbird is often a symbol for an imprisoned or fugitive lover or hero, sometimes even Bonnie Prince Charlie. The earliest version of "The Blackbird" that Zimmermann found was an undated broadside of ca. 1718, where it was titled "The Black-Bird, or the Flower of England flown." [74] Bruce Olson reports that a longer version was originally titled "The Ladies Lamentation for the Losse of her Land-Lord" and was printed by Richard Burton in 1651; [75] the opening line, "All in a fair morning for sweet recreation" became, in the songster, "It was on one fine morning, for soft recreation." However, one would assume that this song lacks the political undertones of the later texts. Wolfe no. 840 is a version from the 1820s. Lowens's no. 318 is a songster of this title, dating 1806, that (judging by later editions) contains the song itself. Sonneck lists differents ongs with the same title. [76] The text is also in the American Songster. [77] In North America the song has been collected only in the Ozarks, but it was also known in Canada. [78] A late nineteenth-century broadside by Andrews of New York is, but for one
misspelling, identical with the FMNS text.

8. "Bold Dighton" [Laws A 21] An early nineteenth-century broadside in the Harvard College Library is titled "The Escape from Basseterre," and is headed, Being the account of an action fought off Guadaloupe, in 1805, where ninety-five Americans, and near three hundred Britons made their escape at that place. - Composed by P. Russel, while lying in irons in the Moro Castle, who received two wounds in the action. [79] A Deming broadside from 1829-31 has many minor differences. A version given in the Stevens-Douglass manuscript is close enough to the FMNS text to suggest that it, rather than the Deming broadside, was the source (or, alternatively, that both had an earlier common source). For example, the broadside correctly gives the location of the action at Bassateere; both the songster and Stevens-Douglass have Bastar. The broadside says, "'Tis down by yon pier, the Tiger does lay," but the songster and Stevens-Douglass have "Down by the Umpire ... " Where the broadside has, "Mon dieu! fulu Englee!" the songster and Stevens-Douglass have "Mondieu fractre engle ... " Thompson and Cutting state that here the Harvard broadside has "Footer Englas." Where the broadside has "With twenty-six eighteens," the others have "thirty-six." [80]

9. "Bonaparte [Buonaparte] on St. Helena" Napoleon's death in 1821 was the inspiration for this lament, which has been collected on both sides of the Atlantic. The FMNS version is very close to one published by Scott.[81] Huntington found texts from two ships' logs of 1827 and 1829, from which he collated a composite quite different from the one in the FMNS; 82 the numerous differences (including the absence of the final stanza) betray the corruptive influence of shaky memory (or, alternatively, another printed version which has yet to be found).[83]

10. "Bonny Bunch of Roses" [Laws J5] Two pieces deal with Napoleon among the set of songs in all the FMNSs: "Bonny Bunch of Roses" and "Bonaparte on St. Helena." Scott interpreted the pro-Napoleonic sentiments as evidence of Irish origin, arguing that any enemy of the Britishw as a friend of the Irish. [84] The same argument could be made for American authorship, and both pieces have certainly enjoyed popularity in North America. Numerous British and American broadside versions of this ballad recount a conversation between Napoleon's widow and son; historical events suggest it probably dates from the 1820s. Four New World field-collected versions, all from Canada, have been published by Greenleaf, Creighton, and Mackenzie. [85] Later broadsides were published by DeMarsan and Wehman. One of Mackenzie's Nova Scotia texts is essentially identical with the FMNS text and certainly derived from it; Creighton's text is similar enough that it too may betray a songster hidden away in the informant'sc loset. Greenleaf's informant" had a copy of Wehman Bros.' Irish Song Book No. 1, from which they read the words of the song." This text is also identical with the FMNS text.

11. "Boys of Ohio" References to fighting British and Indians, a toast to the (unnamed) president, and mention of the king date this cheerful song to the War of 1812. Unlike "The Battle of Baltimore," it carefully avoids all historical details and personal names. It has not been recovered from oral tradition, nor do I know of any other printed sources.

12. "Brave Wolfe" [Laws A1] Once widespread in America, this was the best known of several tributes to the American hero of the French- Indian War (his name is spelled "Wolf" in the table of contents). Wolfe died in 1759; Dichter and Shapiro date the ballad to that year. Compare also Winslow, "The Death of General Wolfe"-which also includes a second poem/song of the same title-and Ford. [86] Winslow's broadside, an undated, unattributed sheet, differs considerably from the FMNS lyrics, the first stanzas of which are aligned below for comparison. A sort of addendum to the songster ballad, separately titled "A Parley-Wolfe and MontcalmT ogether,"follows it in all the songsters; it is an integral part of the broadside text." The song appearsi n the Gernseym anuscript, a songbook written by George W. Gernsey, Ohio, between the 1840s and '60s. [88]

"Brave Wolfe" (FMNS)
Cheer up my young men all,
Let nothing fright you;
Though oft objections rise,
Let it delight you
Let not your fancy move
Whene'er it comes to trial;
Nor let your courage fail,
At the first denial.

"The Death of Gen. Wolfe" (Broadside)
Cheer up your hearts young men
let nothing fright you,
Be of a gallant mind,
let that delight you;
Let not your courage fail
'till after trial,
Nor let your fancy move
at the first denial.

13. "Canada I O" [Laws C 17] This ballad shows some interesting turns in its plot. A young woman wishes to go to sea with her sailor sweetheart and see Canada, and to that end bargains with another sailor to take her on board and dress her in men's clothing. Her lover is enraged when he learnso f the ruse,a nd threatenst o bind her and throwh er overboard. The captain will not hear of it, and assures the lady her wishes will be granted. She has not been in Canada half a year when she and the captain marry, and "she's now the finest lady in Canada I O." "Canada I O" occupies a position between an antecedent older love song, "Caledonia," and a more recent "Canaday I O." In notes to a transcription of a field recording of the latter, Mrs. Fannie H. Eckstorm reported that the singer, Mrs. Annie V. Marston, asserted that the ballad was composed by Ephraim Braley, a lumberman who lived in Hudson, Maine, and who, she said, made up many songs about local people and events. She said that he composed "Canaday I O" in 1856. Mrs. Eckstorm concluded, "There can be no question of either the date or the authorship of the song, itself a revampingo f the older Englishs ea-song,C anadaI O, printedi n the FMNS (Richard Marsh, New York, 1847, pp. 110-11), and elsewhere." [89] It was in a footnote to this discussion that editor Phillips Barry observed, "The sea-song in turn, is based on an older love-song, Caledonia, first printed before 1800 in The Caledonia Garland." It would be satisfying to be able to claim that Braley learned the song from the FMNS, but evidence for such a claim is lacking. Our song, then, must date from the early 1800s; it has been collected in both Britain and America.

14. "Captain Glen" [Laws K 22a] A reference in Roxburghe Ballads, where the ballad is titled "An Excellent New Song, entitled Captain Glen," dates the piece to ca. 1770.[90] The songster text is almost identical with one that Logan says was published on a broadside bearing the date 1794.[91] Lowens's no. 247 is a songster/song with the title, "Captain Glen's Unhappy Voyage to New Barbary," published July 1803, probably in Philadelphia. Compare also Ford no. 3003.[92] In the ballad William Glen confesses to murder and the crew throws him overboard to calm the storm. In spite of its appearance in numerous nineteenth-century American songsters and broadsides, the ballad has not often been recovered from oral tradition. A Nova Scotian  version, surely learned from the FMNS, is given by Mackenzie, who considers "The New York Trader" almost certainly to be a rewriting of "CaptainG len."[93]

Other recovered texts are from Nova Scotia and North Carolina. [94] This is one of the few texts that varies in different editions of the FMNS: In Type IIa editions there are numerous small differences and the final stanza is missing; furthermore, in one of them (LC 1840a) the second and third pages are out of order.

15. "Captain Robert Kidd" [Laws K 35] William Kidd was arrested in Boston in 1699 and tried in London, where he was sentenced on May 9 and hanged on May 23, 1701, for deeds of piracy that he insisted he never committed. In fact, Kidd may have been more the victim of political intrigue than the feared perpetrator of foul deeds. Born in Scotland in around 1645, he relocated to the New World in the 1660s, and was a successful ship owner, with family and property on Manhattan Island and a reputation for waging campaigns against French privateers in the West Indies. In the 1690s he was engaged by the new governor of New York and New England, Earl Bellomont, to eliminate pirates and other unfriendly foreign vessels. This much is agreed; what is murkier is what then happened: whether Kidd turned pirate himself or simply plundered the loot of other pirates. In any event, he was arrested and taken to England, where he was eventually charged with the murder of a mutinous gunner, William Moore, and hanged.

Kidd's alleged deeds and fate, but, unaccountably, not his correct first name, are memorialized in this widespread ballad, which Mackenzie concludes must have been composed and published between the ninth and the twenty-third of Kidd's final month.[95] The original twenty-two stanza broadside of 1701 is reprinted by Firth and also Smith.[96] Mackenzie provided extensive historical details and references to other cheap print publications, almost all American. The earliest noted are broadsides no later than 1814.[97] Firth's text is the first reprint of "the unique example in the collection of Lord Crawford." [98] In this "original" text, Kidd's first name is not mentioned, and his last name is spelled "Kid." The twentyfive- stanza FMNS text is quite different, sharing only a few lines with the  older version. It was very similar (only a few scattered words are different) to a text published earlier (late 1700s?) on an anonymous broadside, "The Dying Words of Captain Kid, A noted Pirate who was hanged at Execution-Dock, in England," bearing the notice, "Sold at the Bible and Heart in Cornhill, Boston. [99]
The songster version opens with a stanza not in the 1701 text:

You captains bold and brave hear our cries, hear our cries,
You captains bold and brave hear our cries,
You captains brave and bold, tho' you seem uncontrolled,
Don't for the sake of gold lose your souls, lose your souls,
Don't for the sake of gold lose your souls.

The 1701 version begins,

My name is Captain Kid, who has sail'd [who has sail'd],
My name is Captain Kid, who has sail'd;
My name is Captain Kid.
What the laws did still forbid
Unluckily I did while I sail'd [while I sailed, etc.]

which is close to the second stanza of the songster text, though "Captain Kid" has become "Robert Kidd." Both ballads give the erroneous impression that Kidd and his crew were eventually captured by other ships. An item in the Boston Post reported that a note found in a bottle (that purported to be Captain Kidd's instructions for the location of his buried treasure) must be "humbug" because (among other reasons) it is signed Robert Kidd, whereas his name was William. [100] While this may not qualify the forger for a place in one of The World's Dumbest Crooks books, it does suggest the influence of the songster text (or of its progenitor). Versions collected in North America have been reported from Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi, North Carolina, Michigan,K ansas,a nd Florida. [101] Of these, five open with the stanza of the FMNS songster.

16. "Captain Ward" [Child 287] Seaman John Ward, from Kent, the presumed factual subject of this ballad, was an active sea rover in 1604-9, who retired to an alabaster palace in Tunis after his successful career of maritime depredations. Readers may choose between two alternate endings: either Ward was finally captured and hanged before 1610 or he died of the plague in 1622.[102]

Firth printed three ballads dealing with Ward: "The Seaman's Song of Captain Ward, the Famous Pyrate of the World, and an English-Man Born," "The Song of Dansekar the Dutchman (Second Part of the Sea- Man's Song of Ward and Dansekar)," and "The Famous Sea-Fight Between CaptainW arda nd the Rainbow."( "Dansekar"r eferst o the Dutch pirate, Simon Danser.) The latter, copied from Roxburghe Ballads, is our song, but in severely altered form.[103]

Thomson studied the various broadside prints of the ballad and concluded that the earliest was printed by Coles between 1630 and 1655. [104] In the eighteenth century the ballad was reprinted frequently on British broadsides. One broadside, printed by W. Onley of London and in the Bagford collection, was dated by the British Museum to 1680 at the earliest; however, the English ballad authority Ebsworth believed the ballad was written ca. 1620.10T5h omson,h owever, dated it closer to 1700. Most of these broadside texts are closer to the Coles text than to the songster text, the opening stanzas of which are compared below:

FMNS Coles text:
Come all ye jolly sailors bold, Strike up you lusty Gallants,
That live by tuck of drum; with musick and sound of Drum:
I'll tell you of a rank robber, For we have discryed a Rower
Now on the seas is come. upon the Sea is come.

His name is called captain Ward, His name is Captain Ward,
As you the truth shall hear; right well it doth appear:
For ther's [sic] not been such There has not been such a robber, a Rower
This hundred and fifty years. found out this thousand years.

The songster text is closer to several early American printings than to any of the Britisho nes. These include a text in The Green Mountain Songster, a manuscript written by a Vermont revolutionary soldier in 1823, a broadside published by Nathaniel Coverly in Boston, and a version in the Stevens-Douglass manuscript, which is almost identical to it.[106]

Barry, Eckstorm, and Smith presented three versions from tradition (one but a fragment) and reprint the version from FMNS (Boston, J. S. Locke [ca. 1842]), offering extensive musings about the history of the ballad and the events that inspired it. Of the songster text, they wrote, This copy [i.e., reprinting] does not undertake to reproduce all the inaccuracies and misprints of the songster text. It is clearly a corrupt form of the ballad, derived, no doubt, from a poorly printed stall-copy. The same text, with trifling variations, is in editions of The Forget Me Not Songster (Phila: Turner and Fisher; and New York: Nafis and Cornish)-also in The Pearl Songster and The Forecastle Songster.[107]

Following this text, the authors reprinted the Coverly broadside, probably printed in 1812-15 "when we were at war with England and any song casting discredit upon a royal warship would be popular." [108] An earlier American broadside is also cited by them-a copy not examined, but included in a list of ballads for sale in a broadside dated 1799. Barry, Eckstorm, and Smith concluded that the traditional Maine versions are  akin to the FMNS text, but are undecided about the place of the latter in the history of the ballad. [109] They concluded further that these American versions are in fact closer to the original, which must have been written soon after the events it described (ca. 1620), than the Onley broadside, which, they argue, was not written prior to the Stuarts' removal from the throne in 1688. Some American version must have been brought to the New World earlier than that, and was the source of the Coverly broadside, the Songster version, and the traditional versions.

Given the authors' zeal for asserting the primacy and superiority of New England ballad versions over all competitors, we might wisely suspend judgment about the chronological sequence of the various retellings of the Ward episode. As for the role of the FMNS in fixing oral tradition, however, we must, following Barry, Eckstorm, and Smith, also suspend judgment, since there are no recoveries that are unambiguously derived from the songster, while there are several that are closely related to it. The ballad has been recovered extensively from oral tradition, mostly in the Northeast and Canada. [110] The text collected in Newfoundland by Peacock in 1958 is possibly derived from the FMNS text, though it lacks five of twenty-seven stanzas and has several minor textual differences.

The Green Mountain manuscript is close to the FMNS text, especially in some unusual locutions-for example, the "tuck of drum" of the first line (an English expression in use as far back as 1500). The same locution occurs in one of the versions collected by Barry, Eckstorm, and Smith in Maine; however, this version ends with a couplet not occurring in the FMNS text relating Ward's hanging on a gallows beside the Thames river.

17. "Caroline of Edinburg[h] Town" [Laws P 27] The editors of The New Green Mountain Songster wrote, "The oldest print of 'Caroline of Edinburgh Town' is apparently a broadside by Pitts, Seven Dials, London, but it is rather to the wide circulation of the Forget Me Not Songster that the ballad owes its currency in America."[111] There may be some truth to this, but most of the other ballads originating on British broadsides that appeared in the FMNSs are confined almost exclusively to the Northeast and eastern Canada. "Caroline" is in fact something of a rover, being sighted over a surprisinglyb road swath of territory; [112] "Rinordine" is to a lesser extent, but still quite widespread. Though I am biased in favor of the influence of the FMNS, I am nevertheless disposed to look elsewhere to account for such broad distribution. A version is given in the Stevens- Douglass manuscript (ca. 1840s). Huntington gives one from an 1845 ship's log. The ballad has also been collected in Britain.[113]

18 "Charles Gibbs" A thirty-six-page pamphlet published in Providence by Israel Smith in 1831 is titled "Mutiny and murder confession of Charles Gibbs, a native of Rhode Island who, with Thomas J. Wansley, was doomed to be hung [sic] in New York on 22d of April last [i.e., 1831], for the murdero f the captaina nd mate of the brig Vineyarodn her passage from New Orleans to Philadelphia, in November 1830 ... Annexed is a solemn address to youth." (One wonders what is left for the other thirtyfive pages.) The ballad is probably from the year of the execution if not very soon thereafter, but is not mentioned in contemporary accounts, such as the aforementioned. I have no assurance that the ballad is an American production, but inasmuch as Gibbs's birth and activities were on this side of the Atlantic, and given that no British imprints of the broadsideh ave surfaced, it is a very reasonablec onjecture. The ballad has turned up twice in field collections.[114]

This would seem to be sufficient evidence to justify its inclusion in Laws's Native American Balladry.
19 "Ellen the Fair" [Laws 05] This ballad was more common in print in Britain, where it was also called "Helen the Fair." It consists of six stanzas and the narrative content is very thin. New World recoveries are given in Mackenzie (Nova Scotia, doubtless from the FMNS), and the Stevens-Douglass manuscript, which is the same except for some minor corruptions." [115] A Boston broadside was published by Deming. Mackenzie cites numerous cheap print variants but no other traditional sources.

20. "The Female Sailor" [cf. Laws N3] A young woman falls in love with a sailor, William Brown, and sails from London to Liverpool to follow him. When she arrives there she learns he has sailed to St. John's, New Brunswick. After searching unsuccessfully for her man for three years, she finally settles for wedlock with the captain of the steam packet Commerce. The woman's name is given elliptically as S-a A-a H-n, and her exploits involved the barks Hero, George, and Commerce. I have not found any traditional recoveries of this ballad. Moulden discusses this ballad briefly in the context of the following ballad and suggests that its story conforms more to the accepted nineteenth-century ethos than the Thornton tale. Both ballads were also discussed by Dugaw in the context of gender-related social issues of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries in Europe and America.[116] A broadside, "A new song called Female Sailor," published ca. 1837, is probably a different song. A Deming broadside of 1832-37 is almost identical.[117]

21. "Gallant Female Sailor" [Laws N 3] Very similar to the preceding, this broadside ballad tells of one Ann Jane Thornton on board the ships Sarah, Adelaide, and Rover, in succession, and mentions the date February 1835. A Providence, Rhode Island, broadside with a lengthy prose head note is essentially the same text.[118] It has been reported twice from Canada orally from Nova Scotia'19 and in print from Montreal.[120] Additionally, there are two Irish recoveries as well-a full text, but with numerous differences from the songster text, from the Butchers of County Derry in 1961 and a fragmentary version from County Kerry. The Nova Scotia text has the same stanzas as the songster version and is very similar, but for a few differences probably accountable for by memory lapses: the heroine is now Jane Thornton, the date has become 1865, and--curiously-the "one and thirty months she braved the tempest" has become "one and thirty-six months." Rather minor changes if indeed the songster was the source almost a century earlier. John Moulden has researched the background of this ballad and found contemporary references that vouchsafe the historicity of the tale; furthermore, he found preliminary newspaper accounts that contained the erroneous details that found their way into the Butcher text. The songster text, and its Nova Scotia standing record the factual details as they were later corrected in the public press. A pseudepigraphic account was published in 1835 in London.[121]

The Rover was a Nova Scotian privateer, active during the American Revolution, Napoleonic Wars (1793-1805), and War of 1812. Additionally, a voyage of the Sarah is recorded from Kilmorach, Ireland, to Pictou
County, Nova Scotia, in 1801. These probably have little to do directly with the Thornton account but may have contributed to the survival of the tale in Nova Scotia.

22. "[The] Garden Gate" Sabine Baring-Gould provided considerable information on this song and its successor (see below). He wrote:

["The Garden Gate" is a] song, the words of which were by W. Upton, and the music by W. T. Parke. Bell included this song in his "Songs and Ballads of the English Peasantry, "not knowing its origin. He says of it: "One of the most pleasing ditties. The air is very beautiful. We first heard it sung in Malhamdale, Yorkshire, by Willy Bolton, an old Dales' minstrel, who accompanied himself on the union-pipes." The song was published in 1809. Mr. Bell heard it sung in Yorkshire, somewhere about 1856-60; so that the song took half a century
to be, so to speak, naturalised among the Yorkshire peasantry. I have myself heard it sung by a little blacksmith who goes by the nickname of "Ginger Jack," and from whom I have taken down a great many songs, new and old. Mr. Sheppard also noted it down from a crippleds tone-breaker, whose memory was richly furnished with old songs. Alas! the dear old man, for whom I had a particular regard, is dead. He was found stiff in a ditch one bitter winter night. That the song became popular is shown by its having descended
to the condition of a broadside. As such it was issued by Catnach, Pitts, Fortey, Such, &c. Moreover, an "Answer to his Garden Gate," that is to say, a sequel, was published by the same broadside ballad
printers.[122]

The song enjoyed popularity in the United States as well, as a reminiscence from Massachusetts showed:
Uncle Peter, the notorious singer, was called upon the board to fill the interim with songs such as the company should choose to select. The first that was called for was "Sweet William."... Then followed "Black-eyed Susan."... After these, the "Garden Gate," the "Yorkshire Bite," the "Lass of Richmond Hill," and "Merry Gordon," with others of like nature.[123]

I have seen two American broadsides: one by Louis Bonsal, Baltimore, is almost identical with the FMNS text. It is four stanzas in length and the girl's name is Mary; another by Henry De Marsan, New York (1860s or '70s) is only three stanzas and the girl's name has been changed to Sylvia. The song has been collected in Ohio.[124]

23. "General Armstrong" Named after John Armstrong Jr. (1758-1843), a Pennsylvania delegate to the Continental Congress and general in the U.S. Army in the War of 1812, the General Armstrong was an American privateer that sailed out of New York during the War of 1812 and was involved in several skirmishes. On March 11, 1813, while under command of Captain Guy R. Champlin, the ship fought off the guns of a heavy British frigate near the Surinam River on the South American coast. This is the episode memorialized in our song. (Though the Surinam[e] territory was ceded to the Dutch in 1667, it was held by the English in
1799-1802 and 1804-16.) Neeser reprinted a similar text from the Sailor's Companion, an early, undated compilation.[125] On September 26, 1814, the General Armstrong was taking on water in the neutral port of Fayal in the Azores when three British men-of-war (Plantagenet, Rota, and Carnation) appeared in the harbor. British crews tried to board the American ship and 200 men were lost in the fray. The General Armstrong was scuttled in the attack. Several other ballads and poems were printed about this battle.[126] The privateer became a very popular subject of illustrations, poetry, and songs in the United States afterwards. Lowens's no. 489 is a songster of this title from 1815-20. The ballad was composed in good
broadside style, but seems not to have left a mark on oral tradition.

24. "The Girl I Left Behind Me" Chappell dated this song, alternately titled "Brighton Camp," to 1758-59 and had seen a manuscript copy of the 1770s.[127] Olson claimed it was first printed in Charms of Melodyn, .d.,
Dublin, issue 72 (ca. 1805-6); 128 Lowens's no. 385 is a (Philadelphia?) songster (1811) of this title with the song. The song is also given in the American Songster.[129] It has been recovered often in both Britain and
America. In the Type IIa, III, and VI songsters (all published by Turner and Fisher or Fisher and Brother), the song is illustrated with a cut of a woman reading a book titled "Bijou Minstrel," a Turner and Fisher songster of 1837-40.

25. "Green Mountain" The narrator describes a castle on the green mountain that serves sailors as a beacon, and grieves about his fickle Polly, whose "mind being changed runs just like the tide." Sheet music of
this title listed by Wolfe, no. 3216, i s dated 1802.[130] The Hay Library owns a Deming broadside, 1829-31, "Green Mountain Castle," which is almost certainly the same piece. Although the song shares some lines with the British ballad, "The Streams of Lovely Nancy," it seems to be a separate, perhaps American, piece. The last stanza of the songster scrambles the usual rhyme scheme of AABB to ABBA, suggesting either a printing error or else (though less likely) imperfect oral transmission.

26. "James Bird" [Laws A 5] This ballad about Bird, his participation in the naval Battle of Lake Erie on September 10, 1813, under Captain Oliver Hazard Perry, his alleged desertion, court-martial and execution in
October 1814, was penned by journalist/historian/congressman Charles Miner(1780-1865), who printed it in his newspaper, The Gleaner, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, late in 1814. The ballad dwells on Bird's bravery
in the face of fire and addresses not his supposed misdeeds; clearly the author felt that the local scion had not been accorded justice.

The ballad has been widely collected throughout the United States and Canada.[131] The ballad was still current in oral tradition in the Northeast and eastern Canada as late as the 1970s, though the fidelity of collected texts to the printed original makes one wonder whether oral transmission was the sole agent of survival for more than a century and a half. The indefatigable broadside ballad printer Leonard Deming issued a version preceding the FMNSs and textually almost identical with them. Brown University's John Hay Library owns three other broadsides, all presumably published before 1830. In two of them, the "sons of freedom"
of Miner's opening line have become "sons of pleasure"-a rather surprising alteration, but one that turns up in two of the versions collected more than a century later. Two other collected versions are unusual in ending with a stanza not in the original poem, nor any of the broadsides examined. Miner's original concludes with a stark reminder of the injustice Bird suffered:

Farewell, Bird, farewell for ever, friends and home he'll see no more.
But his mangled corpse lies buried, on LAKE ERIE'S distant shore.

The added stanza (which blends quite smoothly with Miner's style) shifts the focus to a broader perspective by praising the virtues of all those who devote themselves to any just military causes:

Bird will ever be remembered, aye unto this present day;
Oh, what can beset or wrong them who engage in war or fray?[132]

More factual details were given by C. B. G albreath and by Mary Elizabeth King, a descendant of Bird. The original twenty-two-stanza text, Miner's published account of the historic events, and comments, were included in the Richardsons' biography of Miner.[133] Another interesting example of how Bird's story was misremembered over time is provided by the text and comments of Jennie Devlin.[134]

27. "The Jolly York Fireman" This song, which has left no trail for musical bloodhounds to sniff out its origins or originator, is one of three songs in the FMNS about firemen. It is an undistinguished piece of doggerel whose lines offer no esthetic justification for its persistent appearance in all the FMNSs; yet invariably it was the first song of the volume. It would be natural to assume that it refers to the British York and not one of the many American cities of the same name-York, Pennsylvania, in particular,w hich was the colonial capital during the Britisho ccupation of Philadelphia in 1777-78. Nevertheless, I favor the latter possibility: that along with "The Philadelphia Fireman's Song" and "The New York Fireman" it is a domestic product. Its disappearance from memory soon after the era of the songsters must be considered a blessing to all of us: proof indeed that even the remarkably widespread FMNSs could not earn popularity for such an undeserving production.

28. "Kelly the Pirate" [Laws K 32] There are two traditional ballads of the same title derived from broadside texts about this fictitious pirate. Mackenzie concluded that the present one is an American derivative of the earlier British composition, which is represented in America by a broadside printed by J. M'Cleland, New York, 1824-29, with first line, "It was of the Stag frigate, a frigate of fame" (Hay collection).[135] North American recoveries include four from Canada[136] and one from Pennsylvania.[137] The latter text, and one of Mackenzie's, are nearly identical: both have a two-line chorus that the FMNS text lacks, which points to another early printed source. It also appeared in Uncle Sam's Naval and Patriotic Songster and was reprinted
by Frank, who cites several other early appearances.[138]

29. "Lavender Girl" In two stanzas the narrator tells how happy she is, selling her lavender, earning her daily bread, "ne'ver repining ne'er distress'd." A similar text was reported from North Carolina from a woman whose mother sang it since the 1860s.13T9h e song was collected in Michigan. [140] American printed versions are listed by Wolfe, dated 1820-24.[141] It appeared on Boston broadsides in 1826-29. The Lester Levy collection holds three sheet-music versions, all undated and without authorial attribution. The Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University has at least four American broadside versions. The air is
given as "Mor[g]ianai n Ireland." Though I have no evidence, I suspect a British original. Another song by the same title, credited to William Reeve, was published in 1794.

30. "The London 'prentice [Apprentice]" [Laws Q 38] The FMNS text is almost identical with one in A Collection of Old Ballads (1723);the text in Osterley Park Ballads(no. 82), from a print of ca. 1675, "The Honour of a London 'Prentice, "is very close. The notes to the latter state it was first published in Queen Elizabeth's reign, ca. 1595. There are several American imprints as well: Harvard owns a London broadside printed by Richard Hill, 1681; an early American version, reliably(?) hand-dated 1748, was "printed and sold at the Heart and Crown in Cornhill, Boston."[142] There are also two American broadsides in the Isaiah Thomas collection, one dated 1810. [143] In North America the ballad has been recovered from oral tradition only in Nova Scotia."[144]

31. "Loss of the Albion" [Laws D 21]. The ship, the Albion, was wrecked at 4 a.m. on April 22, 1822, off the Irish coast: "Full fifty four we had on board when first we did set sail / And only nine escaped the wreck to tell the dreadful tale." Many of the historical details recounted in the printed texts are correct. A version found in the Stevens-Douglass manuscript is identical with the songster. [145] The FMNS text was preceded by the same one in the American Songster.[146] A Deming broadside text has several minor differences and a chorus.[147]

32 "Loss of the Hornet" Eight ships in the U.S. Navy have been named USS Hornet. The first was a ten-gun sloop, commissioned in 1775, which served in the Revolutionary War. The second was also a ten-gun sloop
that carried the marines to Tripoli and was active in the war with the Barbary Pirates. The fourth was a five-gun schooner used as a dispatch vessel between 1813 and 1820. The third is the subject of this ballad. In
the War of 1812 it "successfully blockaded Bahia Harbor, captured HMS Resolution, sank HMS Peacock, overwhelmed HMS Penguin, and escaped capture by the HMS Cornwallis."[148]

In 1824 the Hornet, as did the USS Wildcat and USS Lynx that year, vanished in the area now known as the BermudaT riangle.[149] The cited website states that this was Hornet number three; however, according to
the ballad, the ship, which was lost in a gale on September 10 near the Mexican port of Tampico, on the Gulf of Mexico, had fought previously against pirates, which suggests that perhaps this was the second Hornet.
The ballad, as printed on broadside by Leonard Deming of Boston, was written by J. G. Ely and sung by J. Thomas. In spite of its presence in all the FMNSs, this ballad (to my knowledge) has not been recovered
from oral tradition. Perhaps this is due to the more individualized style of the poem, in contrast to the typical broadside style of the FMNS's companion ballad, "Loss of the Albion," which did enter oral tradition (see above).
Four other ballads about the Hornet'se ncounterw ith the Peacock on February2 4,1813,n eart he mouth of the Demarara River are "The Peacock Stung by the Hornet, "two different ones entitled "Hornet and Peacock," both printed on broadsides by Leonard Deming, and "The Hornet, or Victory Number Five," credited to Samuel Woodworth.[150] In addition, the sloop was mentioned in passing in several other broadside ballads
of the same period.

33. "Major Andre's Death" [Laws A 2] John Andre was a British adjutant to Sir Henry Clinton, the British commander-in-chief in 1780 during the Revolutionary War. When a disgruntled Benedict Arnold, passed
over by Washington for promotion, conceived a plan to betray the fort at West Point to the British, Andre was the contact between him and Clinton. Andre's capture by militiamen (among them, John Paulding)
on September 23, followed by his hanging as a spy on October 2, 1780, assured him a niche in the pantheon of Britain's heroes of that war; the ballad's last stanzas contrast his honor with the traitorous Arnold, using
language that suggests possibly a British author. The ballad concludes with He was a man of honor!

In Britain he was born,
To die upon the gallows
Most highly he did scorn.
And now his life has reached its end
So young and blooming still-
In Tappan's quiet countryside
He sleeps upon the hill.

In fact, in 1821 his body was exhumed and reburied in Westminster Abbey in the Hero's Corner. More usually, the ballad ends with a toast to John Paulding, the American hero primarily responsible for Andre's capture.
The ballad was first titled "Brave Paulding and the Spy" (a broadside from 1783), [151] putting the emphasis on one of the American heroes who captured Andre rather than the British spy; later prints are variously
titled "Death of Major Andre" (an undated ballad sheet printed in Providence), [152] "Major Andre" (Deming broadside, 1829-31), "Major Andre's Arrest and Execution"( De Marsan broadside, 1860)," Execution of Major
Andre," and "Major Andre's Capture." By the mid-1800s the textual differences among the broadside prints were considerable, suggesting a vigorous oral tradition in the century after the events recounted. Field
collected versions are few: Halpert reported one from New Jersey, and Lutz reported one from New York.[153] Halpert's singer used the word "horrow" for "horror," a locution found in the FMNS text, and the De
Marsan broadside as well. Eddy printed an Ohio text from an 1822 manuscript that had probably once been in oral tradition; Moore and Moore give a version collected in Oklahoma from a woman born in New York
in 1851.[154]

The FMNS illustration heading the ballad shows four men, two with muskets; one is crouching, with his boot off and papers on ground in front of him, and a horse tethered off to the side. (Andre had hidden the
secret documents he was taking to Arnold in his boot.) The composition was probably influenced by a then-famous painting by Thomas Sully, The Capture of Major Andrd (1812), which received wide circulation after
its publication.

In spite of the pro-British sentiments, the ballad has not been collected in Britain. See also "Mr. Andr's Soliloquy, " a quite different poem, in the florid style characteristic of the 1830s.[155]

34. "Noble Lads of Canada" This ballad (sometimes titled "The Battle of Plattsburg") about a battle on Lake Champlain in September 1814 was credited by local tradition to Miner Lewis of Clinton County, New York. Thompson gives historical details and a text that is three stanzas longer.[156] The Stevens-Douglass manuscript has a text almost identical with that of the songster.[157] Boston printer Leonard Deming published two different broadside texts, one of which was titled "The Bold Lads of Canada" and is very close to Thompson's. Like the latter, it is three stanzas longer than the FMNS text, but some locutions (e.g., "sons of witches" where FMNS has "sons of b- " [sic]) that suggest it was not the source of the songster text. A very different "Battle of Plattsburg" was published in some editions of the American Songster. In the table
of contents of the Type I songsters the song is titled "Noble Lords of Canada," but properly titled above the song text itself.

35. "Paul Jones" [Laws A 4] Jones's celebrated naval encounter took place on September 23, 1779, in the North Sea; Jones commanded the Bon Homme Richard and his adversary was the Serapis, commanded by
Captain Pearson. Eggleston gives the ballad as "Paul Jones's Victory." A variant titled "Paul Jones, the Pirate" is given in Roxburghe Ballads, as well as "Paul Jones-A New Song." See also Winslow no. 74, where it is titled "Capt. Paul Jones's Victory,' and Ford no. 3004, "Paul Jones's Victory."[158] Neeser printed four broadside ballads concerning Jones: "Paul Jones," "The Yankee M an-of-War," "Paul Jones-A New Song" (from Roxburghe), and our "Paul Jones's Victory," and also two poems by the Revolutionary poet, Philip Freneau. The songster and broadside texts have many textual differences; both misname the British captain: Pearson is called Percy in the broadside and Pierce in the songster. The last appearance of which I'm aware of the ballad in oral tradition was in the 1940s.[159]

36. "Remember the Poor" This song has been reported rarely in oral tradition i n America a nd Britain.[160] In Kidson, it is given under the title, "Time to Remember the Poor." A London broadside printed by Evans
from 1780-1812 is titled similarly. Dichter credits a song of this title to J. M. Kieffer, but since it is dated 1872 it may not be our song.[161]

37. "Rinordine" [Laws P 15] The eponymous hero (if such he be) of this ballad is a rather shadowy figure who protests his honor to a maid he meets, yet warns her not to mention him to her parents because they
will prove his ruin and overthrow. There seems to be more to Rinordine's character than he is willing to reveal. In his thesis, F. L. Jones mentions a ballad titled "The Soldier to his Fair Maid" and gives a date of 1802;
this would be a version of "Rinordine," and the earliest date I've seen.[162]

A broadside in the Bodleian collection printed by Woods, ca. 1814, titles the song "A New Song Called The Mou[n]tains High." The FMNS text differs considerably.[163] The editors of the The New Green Mountain Songster opined, "It must have come to America with the first Irish migrants in the early part of the nineteenth century, since a slightly different text, 'Ranordine,' was printed by Nathaniel Coverly, Jr., of Boston, in about 1813."[164] There are recordings by traditional singers on both sides of the Atlantic.[165]

38. "Rocks of Scilly" [Laws K 8] The narrator leaves his wife, Molly, and sets off to sea. En route back to England the ship is wrecked on the Rocks of Scilly and all but four of the eighty sailors are drowned. Molly
dies of heartbreak when she learns the sad news. Lowens's no. 110 is a songster titled "Four New Songs," published in Philadelphia in 1796; one of the songs is "The Shipwreck'd Sailors on the Rocks of Scylla,"
which may be related.[166] is no. 390, titled "The Irish Pedler, "published in 1811, includes a "Rocks of Scilly." A Deming broadside of 1829-31 has "The Rocks of Skilor, or The Unfortunate Sailor." A Liverpool broadside
printed by Armstrong is from 1820-24. The ballad has been collected in both Britain and Canada. New World field-collected versions are given in Creighton and Senior, and Mackenzie, both from Nova Scotia.[167] Mackenzie's must have been learned from the FMNS. Creighton/Senior's is threes tanzass hortera nd with numeroust extuald ifferences. The ballad was printed in other nineteenth-century songsters, for example, Uncle True Songster.

39. "The Rose of Ardee" The young immigrant falls in love with Nancy, the fair Rose of Ardee, but her heart is stolen by a weaver. He vows to go to the tavern and, lubricated with strong liquors, curse Nancy and the
likes of her weaver. The Stevens-Douglass manuscript has a text that is identical with the FMNS text.16A8 version was collected in Virginia in 1942, and another in Mississippi.[169] There are many British broadsides,
including one dating 1789-1820, and another by Catnach from 1813-38.[170] An American broadside by Deming is textually very different. The song has been recovered only rarely from oral tradition in both Britain and in America. Though the song appears in all the editions, it is missing from the table of contents of the Type II and IIa songsters.

40. "Star Spangled Banner" Francis Scott Key's stirring patriotic song, written after he witnessed the shelling of Fort McHenry in September 1814, is one of those songs that every American learns orally but folksong collectors never bother to record. Key showed his lyrics to Judge Joseph Hopper Nicholson (his brother-in-law) after the events; Nicholson so admired it that he authorized its publication on broadside, with
instructions that it be sung to the tune of the well-known drinking song, "The Anacreontic Song" (1779-80). It was published on September 15. Several songsters contemporaneous with the FMNS made a point of
advertising this song as among their contents, so it must long have been considered a prize inclusion. Such printings, by the way, often failed to credit Key with authorship. The song has been the subject of several monographic studies.[171]

41. "Taxation of America" Moore, echoed by Lydia Bolles Newcomb, attributed this lengthy screed to Peter St. John of Norwalk in about 1765.[172] In deed, the events to which it refersa re from that year; however, the thirty-seven-stanza version that Moore prints, which is the same as that in the FMNS, must at least have been revised later since it refers to Brandywine and Monmouth, the sites of battles of 1777 and 1778, respectively. It has also been credited to a B. Gleason and a B. Franklin.[173] A broadside version was issued by Deming in 1831. The song appears in the Gernsey manuscript, a songbook written by George W. Gernsey, Ohio, between the 1840s and 1860s.[174]

42. "Ten O 'Clock" "Ten O 'Clock," or "Remember Love, Remember" the typical title of this song as published in several sheet-music editions in the United States in 1844-45. However, there are broadside publications from England as early as 1825 (J. Catnach, London) and under various titles, including "Past Ten o'Clock, Remember Love, Remember" (J. Pitts, London), and just "Remember, Love, Remember" (J. Catnach, London, 1813-38). That the broadsides give no indication of author is characteristic; that the American sheet music offersn one as well simply reflects the lack of copyright protection in America for British authors.[175] It has been collected from traditional sources in Britain and possibly in North America as well.[176]

43. "The Wild Rover" This is another ballad in the broadside style, in which the narrator complains of how he is ill treated in the alehouses until he shows them his handful of silver. Dichter reports a ballad of this title credited to Alexander Lee (d. 1851) in an American publication of ca. 1838, but I am not certain it is the same song--or, if it is, of that being the first p ublication.[177] Based on style, a British origin is more likely (Lee was British). Several London broadside versions were published in the period 1817-40 (Jennings, Catnach, Batchelar), the earliest of which requires that it was written prior to 1828. Several versions have been recovered in Britain and in Australia; an American version was collected in 1947 in Utah from a singer who learned it in 1873-75, and a Canadian version was collected by Helen Creighton.[178]

44. "William of the Ferry" The ballad tells of William and his sweetheart due to wed, but a press-gang takes him off to sea just days before his wedding. Fortunately for the lovers, the ship capsizes and William swims to shore, where they are happily reunited. Sonneck lists a ballad of this title from 1796, but with a very different first line.[179] The London printer Catnachi ssued a broadside in 1813-38. The Hay Library has an American broadside published by Andrews, ca. 1850. Cecil Sharp collected a version in 1908 in Sussex, but I have found no American traditional traces. [18o]

45. "The Willow" Some daydreaming typesetter listed the title of this lyric of betrayed love in the FMNS table of contents as "William Tree," and so it appeared in all the Type I songsters, though the title above the actual song text is always correct. The piece has been attributed to the prolific English songwriter Charles Dibdin (1807), and appeared in cheap print in Britain many times in the early 1800s.[181] References to earlier printings (e.g., in Percy's R eliques) and several of the British broadsides of "The Willow Tree" are doubtless to a different song of similar title. It also appeared in Grigg's 1834 Southern and Western Songster and in the American Songsters published by Fisher and Brother, by Kenedy (1838), and by Marsh. Sharp reported a version collected in Hampshire by George B. Gardiner.[182] If it has been collected in North America, it has eluded me.

Similar Songsters
Remarkable as they were, the FMNSs were not totally different from other publications of the era. There were several pocket-sized songsters of the 1830s and 1840s whose contents overlapped the FMNS considerably, and also held a significant number of songs and ballads that have been found in oral tradition-though not so high a percentage as the FMNS (about 50 percent). The formats of these songsters are almost identical to those of the FMNSs, except that they have no illustrations. Where the same traditional songs are used, the texts are generally identical from one songster to the next, suggesting that their publishers borrowed freely from one another and among their own stable of songsters. A few examples are noted here.

The American Songster
Example 1. The American Songster, Containing a Choice Selection of about One Hundred and Fifty Modern and Popular Songs as sung by. ... By John Kenedy. New York, 1838. Of the 126 songs, thirty-five appear in the FMNS repertoire and thirty-three occur in oral tradition.

Example 2. The American Songster, A Collection of Songs, as Sung in the Iron Days of 76. Fisher and Brother: No. 8 South Sixth St., Phila; No. 74 Chatham St., New York; No. 71 Court St., Boston; 64 Baltimore St., Balt. Reprint: Norwood Editions, 1974; says reprint of 1840 edn. 256 pp. In spite of the attributed date of the Norwood reprint, this volume includes the song, "Yankee Lads," which mentions Santa Anna and Houston, so it must be after 1845. Based on the publishers' addresses, it is probably from the early 1850s. Of the 155 songs, twenty-three appear in the FMNS repertoire and twenty-nine occur in oral tradition.

Example 3. The American Songster Containing a choices election of eighty-three songs, including Tyrone Power's favorite songs. W . A. Leary, Philadelphia, 1845. 192 pp. [CPM SP-085048] Thirty-eight of the songs appear in the FMNS repertoire.

Example 4. The American Songster. A collection of songs a s sung in the iron days of 76. Fisher and Brother, Phila.; New York; Boston; Baltimore, n.d. 256 pp. [CPM WP-085044] Twenty-six of the 158 songs appear in the FMNS repertoire.

Example 5. American Songster. Songs of the ocean: the most popular collection of sea songs published. New York: n.p., n.d. [CPMS P-085276] Forty-one of the 141 songs appear in the FMNS repertoire.

The Eolian Songster
Example1 . Eolian Songster. A choice collection of the most popular songs with music. A choice collection of the most popular sentimental, patriotic, naval, and comic songs. 252 pp. U. P. James, Cincinnati, 1832. [CPM SP-085014] Twenty-eight of the 220 songs appear in the FMNS repertoire.

The Forecastle Songster
Example1. The Forecastle Songster Cornish, Lamport and Co., 267 Pearl St., New York, 1851 ("Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1847 by George W. Alexander ... New York.") 286 pp. [CPMS P-085112] Thirty-seven of the 151 songs appear in the FMNS repertoire.

"Breakout" Songsters
In the late 1840s, some publishers (Nafis and Cornish in particular) took a few selected pages from the FMNS, slapped on a new cover, and retitled it as a new publication. These are identifiable because the original page numbers were not altered, so one finds a songster with nonsequential pagination. An example is The Blackbird Vocalist (New York: Nafis and Cornish; Philadelphia: John B. Perry), consisting of twelve songs from the FMNS: "Soldier's Dream (63-64)," "Bunch of Rushes" (65-66), "Kelly the Pirate" (75), "Capt. Glenn" (76-78), "The Mermaid" (79), "Green Mountain" (80-81), "Major's Only Son" (82-85), "Jemmy and Nancy" (86-92)," Capt. James"(93-95), "Rambling Boys of Pleasure"( 96)," James Bird" (97-99), and "New York Trader" (100-101), or thirty-one pages in total, not counting the contents page and wraparound cover.

Another example is the same publishers 'The Buc[c]aneer Songster. It contains: "Loss of the Albion" (35-37), "Major Andre's Death" (38-40), "Brave Wolfe" (45-47), "Sailor Boy's Dream" (48-50), "Rocks of Scilly" (51-53), "Taxation of America" (55-62), "Bold Dighton" (67-71), and "Charles Gibbs" (72-74), or thirty-one pages of text. The third of which I am aware is The Lady's Own Song Book. In this case the contents are: "A Penny's Worth of Wit" (119-26), "Ellen the Fair"( 141), "Barbara Allan" (142-44), "Kate and her Horns" (145-47), "The Blackbird" (148-49), "George Reiley" (150-52), "The London Apprentice" (153-57), "Banks of the Brandywine" (158-60), and "Female Sailor" (161-63), or thirty-one pages of text.

Altogether, these three small publications account for pages 35-40, 45-53, 55-101, 119-26, and 141-63-without overlap-of the same publishers FMNS. It is tempting to speculate that there are other similar breakouts that contain the missing pages.

It would be easiest for a publisher to take one or two complete gatherings (signatures) for the breakout (in which case the booklet would consist of thirty-two consecutive pages or two sets of sixteen consecutive pages), but the choice of these particular pages is not wholly obviousexcept for the necessity of a number of songs that took up the requisite number of pages. Needless to say, the pages include the illustrations from the publishers' FMNS. What did purchasers think when they examined the numbered pages in these thirty-two-page booklets? Would they have considered themselves shortchanged, as a modern book buyer would when s/he discovered the volume just purchased was identical with an older publication except for change of title? Did the eye-catching handtinted cover wood engravingc ompensatef or such practices? (Sometimes Nafis and Cornish simply used a FMNS illustration as cover for another songster: such was the case with their Thistle Songster, which sports a hand-tinted version of their wood engraving for "Barbara Allen" but none of the FMNS songs except for the widely printed "Star Spangled Banner." I have no proof that the Thistle followed, rather than preceded, the FMNS, but that seems more likely to me.)

The same publisher executed similar maneuvers with the American Songster: for example, Cupid's Songster consists of pages 38-48, 74-86, and 236-42 from the latter, and The Belle Songster consists of pages 178-208 from the same. The Thistle Songster, consisting of pages 34-37, 49-73, and 211-12, even carriest he running title AmericanS ongster.[183]

Lord Bateman Again
I cannot resist returning to the ballad of Lord Bateman, H. M. Belden's discussion of which opened this study. In the same year of Belden's publication, Phillips Barry published a series of articles in the Journal of American Folk-Lore consisting mostly of ballads and songs that he had transcribed from oral tradition in New England.[184] However, one item among his collection was a transcription of a broadside:

"Lord Bakeman, who was taken by the Turks and put in prison, and afterwards released by the jailor's daughter, whom he married. Printed by Nathaniel Coverly, Milk-Street, corner Theatre Alley, Boston." Barry stumbled upon the broadside in the preceding October in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, to whom it had been given in 1814 by Isaiah Thomas; it therefore was printed in, or shortly before, that year."

Coverly, whose name has appeared in connection with a few of the ballads in the FMNS, included many traditional ballads and songs among the broadsides he published in the early 1800s. His texts are usually close to those of the songsters, but not identical-a distinction that can be accounted for by several alternative explanations, including sloppy copying or an independent immediate source.

By 1929, when British Ballads from Maine was published, Barry had considerably more to say about this ballad-in particular, he had by then believed he had found two still earlier American broadsides, namely: A very old broadside in the Harris Collection of American Poetry, Brown University Library, Providence, R .I. Imprint: "Sold wholesale and retail on Cross Street, near Mercantile Wharf, Boston." Small size; border; apparent date about 1790. This is not listed by Ford, nor is another, very similar in appearance, without any imprint, but perhaps an old Providence, R.I., production in the same collection.[185]

According to the entries presently in Brown University's library catalog, the former was printed by William Rutter between 1829 and 1834 (based on the publisher's address), and the latter is probably the one published by Henry Trumbull between 1826 and 1836, based on similar information. This, the best available information to date, establishes the Coverly broadside as the oldest known American imprint. All of these American texts, as well as some others in the Brown collection dating from the same period, are of essentially the same text as the Coverly/FMNS type, and of a form different from any Child had published. As Barry observed,

All [of these, those received by mail from Mrs. Marston, and Mr. DeCoster; two taken down orally from Mrs. Young's and Mrs. Stanley; the Forget-me-not Songster text and the broadsides,] represent a version not found in Child, who has but one English version, the other fourteen being Scotch. Child unfortunately missed a version printed in Boston, perhaps in origin as early as his earliest text, and quite unlike anything he knew.
For the copy in the Forget Me-not-Songster is only a very inaccurate rendering of either the Coverly broadside or of a still earlier one. ...It is this broadside which is responsible for the name "Lord Bateman," or "Bakeman," by which the ballad is known in New England and for the opening line, "In India lived a noble lord."[186]

One other broadside text deserves mention in this discussion: an incomplete sheet in the Library of Congress collection containing four songs, one of which is the same "Lord Bakeman," lacking either publisher, place, or date, but no earlier than 1775 (based on one of the four songs, "General Gage") and possibly considerably later.[187]

It appears, then, that this particular ballad was quite widely reprinted in early nineteenth (and perhaps late eighteenth) -century America, and several collected texts are derived from this group. Based on the identifying first line, "In India lived a noble lord... "this variant has been recovered in Nova Scotia, Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Virginia, and California.[188] At least two of these were taken directly from the FMNS. If there was an English source that served as antecedent, it has so far eluded discovery. More likely we have an anonymous American poet to thank for modifying the received text.[189]

Conclusions
The Forget-Me-Not Songsters are a fascinating series of song collections written during times of great social ferment, of which they take no notice. The long fuse threatening to ignite a national explosion was already burning, yet the songsters make no mention of race relations, of slavery, abolition, or native American issues; nor is there any hint of temperance, women's suffrage, political campaigns, the West, or conflicts with Mexico. Rather, these collections look backward to a more tranquil era of American history. While there is no longing for the days of political domination by England (indeed, there is considerable pride taken in the victories of the War for Independence and the War of 1812) there is an underlying fondness for the British cultural inheritance.

The songsters were widely distributed in the 1840s and 1850s, especially in the northeastern United States, and their contents contain a wealth of songs and ballads that have since been found in oral tradition. We don't know for certain the identity of the first compiler of the songster-quite possibly it was Robert Elton of New York in 1841. If so, he very likely was influenced by the earlier American Songster published by John Kenedy in 1838, but Elton's work was soon imitated by other publishers. In some cases, it appears that the prolific publishing firm of Nafis and Cornish provided plates (or printed pages) for other publishers to distribute; in other cases, publishers copied the contents of existing texts to generate their own variants. It is not clear at present whether the various compilers of the songsters relied on oral sources at all, but it is quite possible that they worked entirely from earlier printings, in particular broadsides originating in Great Britain or the United States. If the sources of the songsters are uncertain, their impact on oral tradition is still more problematic.

Folk music being, by most definitions, inherently the product of oral transmission, it is a challenge to assess the folksongs of a community when we have no oral sources on which to rely. Students of American folksong look to the early twentieth century for the first examples of field recordeds ongs, ballads,a nd tunes. In Britaino, n the otherh and, we have comparable material from a century or two earlier. To bridge the miles and years separating these two traditions we must turn to second-rank sources such as manuscripts and cheap print. In the former category are such documents as the Stevens-Douglass, the Larkin, and the Gernsey manuscripts of the 1840s-1860s, and the numerous ships' logs examined in detail by Huntington(and occasionally cited in this study).

In the realm of cheap print are the broadsides and songsters upon which this study has focused. Yet the methodological problems besetting the reliance on cheap print are daunting. In a collection such as the FMNS a large fraction of the songs and ballads have since been recorded from oral tradition: we have no hesitation in accepting them as folksongs. Another handful have no oral analogs but have been mentioned in newspaper accounts or magazine articles as having been sung noncommercially at particular occasions.

Is it too fragile a conjecture to assert that they, too, were once common in oral tradition? And what of the remainder of the songster repertoire for which we have no corroborative evidence at all? Can we suspect an oral tradition that has left no footprints, not because there were none but because the trails have since been overgrown with later foliage? Indeed, students of oral tradition must often ply their skills without the benefit of the statistical factors that make the physical sciences successful. When we find two wisps of a song from traditional singers we are in a weak position to extrapolate to any broad statement about erstwhile currency. When we tally 500 recoveries of "Barbara Allen" we have no doubts about the song's vigorous tradition, but for a great many songs our recoveries number in the twos and threes.

Perhaps it is more useful to accept what we have and pose the question whether we can see any pattern that accounts for some of the songs in the FMNS repertoire occurring often while others, if not absent, seem at best to be rare. The evidence at hand suggests that there is a significant tendency for those ballads that are in the common broadside ballad style of the period (that is to say, late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) to survive, while pieces that are excessively individualistic tend to disappear. If this is indeed the case, and not just an artifact of the biases of the collectors, then it further suggests that the influence of print is not sufficient to compensate for a song that stylistically is simply not memorable (in its own day, at least). Oral tradition, in other words, is oral. Print serves only as a crutch, not an artificial limb.

The Forget-Me-NoSto ngsterss tand at the head of a group of publications whose contributions to oral tradition cannot be overlooked without seriously undermining our understanding of traditional balladry. For example, scholars have long assumed that a hallmark of oral tradition is the existence of textual variants. This study has uncovered several instances of textual variation in printed sources that are not explicable by
oral transmission. I have seen a similar pattern in popular songs of the latter half of the nineteenth century: cases where more than one version of a song was published by different authors, some of whom must have "borrowed" from others. We must conclude that contemporary notions of originality and plagiarism were alien to nineteenth-century writers.

Almost as often, anonymity has been assumed to be an indicator of folk authorship; yet in nineteenth-century cheap print it was not uncommon for the works of well-known authors to be published without attribution. One of the most cogent questions regarding the role of the songsters concerns the sources of their texts: were they copied from older cheap print (e.g., imported broadsides), or did printers and their apprentices tap oral sources? We can rarely assert the latter with certainty. When a text copies an earlier broadside except for a few words, it is impossible to attribute the variation to oral sources rather than the careless typesetting that marked these cheap publications. If a songster text shows textual idiosyncrasies identical with those of earlier cheap print versions, then it seems safe to assume a print-to-print transmission. However, wherever an argument is forced to posit an untraced older printed text, we cannot rule out an oral source. It would be gratifying to know enough about the practices of colonial print shops to resolve this issue, and perhaps one day that will be possible.

Recordings and field collections are the twin pillars of the twentieth century upon which rest our conception of folksong. There are none we can rely upon when we move back in time into the nineteenth century. Have we no recourse? As the Forget-Me-Not Songster's subtitle proclaims, these were the songs our grandmothers sang; and, we can confidently add, also their grandmothers, and their grandmothers before them.

Cohen
Appendix A:
Complete List of Songs
Following is an alphabetical list of songs that appear in the standard FMNSs. In the third column are some identifiers. A bracketed word or letter in the title indicates a variant spelling of some songsters. An A or a B indicates probable American or British origin (for the text), respectively. Author and/or publication date are given if known; authors' names preceded by an asterisk are as credited in one or more of the songsters. All tune references are from one or more or the songsters. A less-than symbol (<) indicates either that the song was published by the given year, or in the given year but may be still older; a greater-than symbol (>) means there is evidence (generally historical) that the song is no older than the given date. A question mark indicates that the author/date are for a song of the same title, but whether for the same song hasn't been verified. Traditional ballads catalogued by Child or Laws are given the catalog numbers of those references. a In the fourth column are the songster types in which the song appears.













Appendix B: Songster Types and Some Distinguishing Characteristics

Type I
92 songs, 256 pp. Cutlass Kelly frontispiece verso (i.e., facing title page). Title page: block text with wood engraving of two people in chairs, facing. Cruikshank-derived illustration for "Lord Bakeman." Alphabetical table of contents. In the Elton songster, four songs have signed Elton wood engravings: "American Soldier," "Rosanna," "Loss of Albion," and "Noble Lads of Canada." Apart from this one, these songsters are all issued by Nafis, Nafis and Cornish, or their successors, and retain the "Elton" signature only in the first three of these songs. Some songsters have "150th Thousand" below "Embellished with Numerous Engravings." There are fifty illustrations, excluding some very small decorative fillers on some pages. The running header is "Popular Songs."

Type Ia
92 songs, 256 pp. The contents and typographic features are the same as Type I but the table of contents is at the end.

Type II
90 songs, 256 pp. The contents are arranged very differently from Type I; additionally there are the following differences: The songs "New York Fireman," "Tall Young Oysterman," "Turkish Lady," "Sailor Boy's Dream," and "Sheffield Apprentice" are absent; added are "Bonny Barbara Allan" (i.e., in addition to "Barbara Allan"), "Jockey to the Fair," and "Roving Pedlar." All the wood engravings are different from Type I. Hatchet Kelly frontispiece. Title page has block lettering and wood engraving of two people in side-by-side chairs. "Lord Bateman" has wood engraving of guitar player and woman. Alphabetical table of contents with two cupids wood engraving. "Rose of Ardee" is on p. 77 but not listed in table of contents.

Type IIa
90 songs, 256 pp. Same songs as II. The table of contents is the same as II, but the actual arrangement is different, so page numbers of many songs are incorrect. "Rose of Ardee" is on p. 77, but missing from the table of contents. Hatchet Kelly frontispiece. Title page as in Type II. Non-Cruikshank-type illustration for "Lord Bateman." "Reily's Trial" (p. 250) and "Reily's answer, releasement, and marriage, &c." (p. 253) listed separately in table of contents (pp. 248 and 251, but page numbers of these-and many other songs-are incorrect.) Alphabetical table of contents. One Elton wood engravings, unsigned. There are forty-two illustrations. The running header is "Popular Songs."

Type III
90 songs, 256 pp. The contents are like those of Type II except that "The Mermaid" is lacking, and "Lightly May the Boat Row" is added. Hatchet Kellyfrontispiece. Open block letters for "Forget Me Not" in title. Title page wood engraving: two people side by side in chairs. No illustrations for any of the songs. Alphabetical table of contents at end. The running header is "Popular Songs."

Type IV
96 songs, 256 pp. The songs are like Type I except for the addition of "The Heart that Never Sighed," "I Languish for My Love's Return," "I Love to Gaze upon that Face," and "Jessy on a Bank"; the contents are rearranged N. o (surviving?) . Unique title page Cruikshank-type illustration for "Lord Bakeman." Alphabetical table of contents at end. Two Elton wood engravings, one signed. The title page has no illustration.

Type V
99 songs, 224 pp. (Unless the last signature is missing from the unique RBN copy, this is the only songster with fewer than 256 pages.) The contents differ extensively from the preceding songster types, suggesting a completely distinct editor/edition. Hatchet Kelly frontispiece. Block-text title page with wood engraving of two people side by side. No "Lord B ateman." Unpaginated numerical table of contents.

Type VI
122 songs, 256 pp.; includes all the songs of Type V but with an "addenda" with separate contents listing on last page. Hatchet Kelly frontispiece. Title page as in Type V. No "Lord Bateman. "Numerical table of  contents. No Eltonwood engravings. Page 223 given as 923. Thirty-two illustrations. The running header varies: "Popular Songs" (pp. 9-128, 234-55), "Old Ballad Songs" (129-91), "Pirate's Songs" (192-233).

Type VII
124 songs, 256 pp. It appears that this songster was compiled by starting with Type I and removing all the songs containing violence or suggestions of improper sexual activity and replacing them with more modern lyric songs. Cutlass Kelly frontispiece. Block-text title page with wood engraving of two people in chairs, facing. Cruikshank-typeil lustrationf or "Lord Bakeman."Alphabetical table of contents. Uses three Elton wood engravings but only "Loss of the Albion" is signed. Forty-two illustrations. The running header is "Popular Songs."

Type VIII
125 songs (124 listed in table of contents), 256 pp. Same songs as in Type VII except "Billy Barlow" on p. 163 instead of last page of "The Female Sailor." Cutlass Kelly frontispiece. Gothic title page with wood engraving of a child. Cruikshank derived illustration for "Lord Bakeman." This and the similar subtypes VIIIa and VIIIb all lack the first stanza and song title of "American Soldier" (p. 20), which are supposed to be under the wood engraving. Similarly, all have page 193 misnumbered as 391. Three Elton wood engravings are used, but without his name. Alphabetical table of contents. Apparently this songster was compiled from plates of Type VII, but there were some damages incurred (pp. 20, 163, 193 at least) in the production. Forty-three illustrations. O n some songsters the frontispiece is recto rather than the usual verso (facing the title page). The running header is "Popular Songs."

Type VIIIa
125 songs (124 listed in table of contents), 256 pp. Appears identical to Type VIII except cover (but not title page) reads "The Old Forget Me Not Songster." On some songsters the frontispiece is recto rather than the usual verso (facing the title page).

Type VIIIb
125 songs (124 listed in table of contents), 256 pp. Same as Types VIII and VIIIa except title-page wood engraving: two people in chairs, facing.

Type IX
125 songs (124 listed in table of contents), 256 pp. Same songs and same layout as in Types VIII/VIIIa/VIIIb except "The Merry Widow" on p. 163 instead of last page of "The Female Sailor."

Type X
138 songs, 256 pp. Hatchet Kelly frontispiece; title page very much like Type III. A unique and extensively revised collection with fifty-eight songs not appearing in any of the previous types. The only example is by Fisher and Brother, (only at) Philadelphia, but no street address is given. Lacks one of the forty-four "ubiquitous" songs ("Rinordine"). No illustrations past the title page.

Appendix C: Songsters Used in This Study
Descriptions, including bracketed dates in roman text, areas described in owner's catalog. Comments in italic type are my conjectural additions. Abbreviations: CPM = Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University; Cray = Ed Cray collection, Santa Monica; LC = Library of Congress; NC = author's collection; Patterson = Daniel Patterson collection, Chapel Hill; RBN = Brown University Library; R oud = Steve Roud collection, Sussex.

Type I
1. CPM 085108: Elton, Publisher and Engraver, 18 Division St., New York [1841?] [1841].
2. Washington University (M1628.E1841 848): Elton, Publisher and Engraver, 18 Division St., New York [same as preceding].
3. CPM 085122: N. C. Nafis, 278 Pearl and 98 Catharine Sts., New York / John B. Perry, 8822 N. 2nd St., Philadelphia [1841-42].
4. RBN( FO683b; Microfilm FH B60 3089.3)N: . C. Nafis, 278 Pearl and 98 Catharine Sts., New York / John B. Perry, 88?2 N. 2nd St., Philadelphia [1841-42].
5. CPM 085009: Nafis and Cornish, 278 Pearl and 98 Catharine Sts., New York / John B . Perry, 881/2 N . 2nd St., Philadelphia [1842-43].
6. CPM 085128: Nafis and Cornish, 278 Pearl and 98 Catharine Sts., New York / John B. Perry, 88?2 N. 2nd St., Philadelphia [1842-43].
7. RBN( F721331 842?; Microfilm FH B60 3033.12): Nafis and Cornish, 278 Pearl and 98 Catharine Sts., / John B. Perry, 88? N. 2nd St., Philadelphia [1842-43].
8. Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University (M 1628.F72): Nafis and Cornish, 278 Pearl and 98 Catharine St., New York/ JohnB . Perry8, 8? N. Second St., Philadelphia; 1842? [1842-43].
9. Harvard Hollis 002966855 (Widener Depository 25254.12.10.3H; NBVRJ):  Nafis and Cornish, 278 Pearl St and 98 Catharine St., New York / J. B. Perry, 8822 N. 2nd St., Philadelphia 1842? [1842-43; Gift of Phillips Barry].
10. CPM 085115: Nafis and Cornish, 278 Pearl St., New York / John B. Perry, 198 Market St., Philadelphia [1844-49?] [1844-50].
11. CPM 085120: Nafis and Cornish, 278 Pearl St., New York / Nafis, Cornish and Co., St. Louis / John B. Perry, Philadelphia; n.d. [1848-49].
12. NC: same as preceding.
13. Patterson:s ame as preceding [frontispiece missing].
14. CPM 085129: Nafis and Cornish, 278 Pearl St., New York / Van Dein and MacDonald, St. Louis / John B. Perry, Philadelphia; n.d. [1849-50] (= Norwood, Folcroft reprints)[ "150th Thousand"].
15.R BN( F721331 846?;M icrofilmF H B60 3034.1)N: afis and Cornish, 278 Pearl St, New York / John B. Perry, 198 Market St., Philadelphia [1844-50].
16. CPM 085127: Nafis and Cornish, 267 Pearl St., New York / Nafis, Cornish and Co., St. Louis / JohnB . Perry, Philadelphia; n.d. [1848-49].
17. LC M1628.F72 1840: Nafis and Cornish, New York 184-?
18. CPM 085121: Cornish, Lamport and Co., 267 Pearl St., New York, 1851 ["150th Thousand"].
19. CPM 085124: Cornish, Lamport and Co., 267 Pearl St., New York, n.d. [1851-52].
20. LC M1628.F72 1840b: Cornish, Lamport and Co., No. 267 Pearl St. New York [184-?] [1851-52].

Type Ia
University of Rochester (Sibley Lib M1628 F721) New York, Richard Marsh, 374 Pearl St., New York [185-?] [1846-481.

Type II
RBN( F0683 1840?aM; icrofilmF H B6 03034.9):T urnera nd Fisher,1 5 No. 6th St.,
Philadelphia / 74 Chatham St., New York [1844-491.

Type IIa
1. CPM 085020: Turner and Fisher, 15 No. 6th St., Philadelphia / 74 Chatham  St., New York [1844-49].
2. CPM 085125: Turner and Fisher, 15 No. 6th St., Philadelphia / 74 Chatham St., New York[ identicawl itha bove].
3. LC M1628.F72 1840a: Turner and Fisher, 15 No. 6th St., Philadelphia / 74 Chatham St., New York [184-?] [1844-49].
4. NC: Turner and Fisher, 15 No. 6th St., Philadelphia / 74 Chatham St., New York; but cover says "Fisher and Brother" [1849-55].

Type III
1. Johns Hopkins University Eisenhower Library (M 1628.F72 1840z): Fisher and Brother, No. 8 So. 6th St., Philadelphia;6 4 Baltimore St., Baltimore; 71 Court St., Boston [1850-52?].
2. CPM0 85123: Fisher and BrotherN, o. 12 6th St.,P hiladelphia/ 64 Baltimore St., Baltimore [1855-59?].
3. NC: Fisher and Brother, No. 9 No 6th St., Philadelphia / 64 Baltimore St., Baltimore [1855-59?].

Type IV
CPM 085132: Richard Marsh, 374 Pearl St., New York, 1847.

Type V
RBN (FO6831 840?b Microfilm FH B60 3035.1): Turner and Fisher, 15 No. 6th St., Philadelphia / 74 Chatham St., New York [1845-49].

Type VI
1. CPM 085119: Turner and Fisher, New York and Philadelphia [no street addresses].
2. NC: Turner and Fisher, No. 15 No. 6th St., Philadelphia. / No. 74 Chatham St., New York [1845-49] [Missing pp. 128-32].
3. Harvard Hollis 004840780 (WidenerD epositoryX M9 16, HNCACS): Turner and Fisher, 15 No. 6th St., Philadelphia / 74 Chatham St., New York [184-?].

Type VII
1. CPM 085118: Cornish, Lamport and Co., 267 Pearl St., New York [1851-52].
2. RBN (F0683 1851; Microfilm FH B6 03084.2): Cornish, Lamport and Co., 267 Pearl St., New York[ 1851-52][ possibly identical with above copy].
3. Dartmouth College (Rauner 1926 Coll. F65): G. W. Cottrell, Boston.
4. Wilson Library, University of North Carolina( V784.8F 721). Cornish, Lamport and Co., 267 Pearl St, New York.

Type VIII
1. University of Chicago PS593.L8F7N: ew EnglandN ews Co., 41 Court St., Boston (Missing pp. 163-74, 177-92).
2. LC M1628.F72 1800 (Case): New England News Co.
3. CPM 085117: Locke and Bubier, 34 and 36 Cornhill, Boston [after 1861?].
4. CPM 085131: Locke and Bubier, Boston. Frontispiece recto.
5. NC: Locke and Bubier, Boston. Frontispiece recto.

Type VIIIa
1. CPM 085016: J. S. Locke and Co. [Successors to G. W. Cottrell], 34 and 36 Cornhill,B oston. [Frontis piece missing.]
2. CPM 085126: J. S. Locke and Co. [Successors to G. W. Cottrell], 34 and 36 Cornhill,B oston. [Frontispiecvee rso.]
3. NC: J. S. Locke and Co. [Successors to G. W. Cottrell], Boston [this and two preceding appear to be identical]. [F rontispiecree cto.]
4. Roud: J. S. Locke and Co. [Successors to G. W. Cottrell], Boston [probably same as preceding three].[ Frontispiecvee rso.]
5. Dartmouth (Rauner 1926 Coll. F66): J. S. Locke and Co. [successors to G. W. Cottrell][ after1 861? ]. [Frontispiecree cto.]
6. Eisenhower Library,J ohns Hopkins University (M 1628.F72): Locke and Bubier, Boston [missingp p. 121-22]. [Frontispiecree cto.]
7. Roud: Locke and Bubier, 3 4 and 36 Cornhill, Boston. [Frontispiecree cto.]
8. Harvard Hollis 004842633 ( Widener Depository X P3 907; H NLKAN): Locke and Bubier, Boston [after 1863 based on ad f or "Wayside Inn" bound in spine].

Type VIIIb
1. CPM 085116: G. W. Cottrell, 36 Cornhill, Boston [1855-61].
2. CPM 085130: T. W. Strong, 98 Nassau St., New York.
3. Cray: T .W . Strong, 98 Nassau St., New York [not identical with preceding; this one has some unnumbered pages that the preceding doesn't have].
4. RBN (FO6831 84-?; Microfilm F H B6 03034.8): W .A . Leary, J r., 8 ? So. Delaware Ave, Philadelphia.
5. Harvard Hollis 004841806 ( WidenerD epository XM 917;H NCACT-H): G .W. Cottrell, 36 Cornhill, Boston.
6. Princeton University 3 588.354s: Cottrell, Boston.
7. NC: W. A. Leary, Jr., 82? So. Delaware Ave, Philadelphia.

Type IX
1. RBN-7( FO683cM; icrofilmF H B60 3034.7): G. W. Cottrell, 36 Cornhill, Boston [1855-61].
2. NC: G. W. Cottrell, 36 Cornhill, Boston [missing pp. 15-16;frontispiece lacking, perhaps torn out].

Type X
RBN-9 (FO 683a; Microfilm FH B6 03034.6): Philadelphia: Fisher and Brother, n.d. [1851-59?].

NOTES
I am grateful to Ed Cray, Archie Green, D an Patterson, and Steve R oud for reading preliminary drafts of this paper and offering suggestions or corrections. I have also made extensive use of Roud's immensely helpful electronic databases, Folksong Index and Broadside Index, 2002 editions.

1. Henry M. Belden, ed., Ballads and Songs Collected by the Missouri Folk-Lore Society (hereafter BSM)(Columbia: The University of Missouri Studies, 1940; r pt., 1955); Belden and Arthur Palmer Hudson, eds., Frank C . Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, vol. 2, Folk Ballads from N orth Carolina, and vol. 3, Folk Songs from North Carolina(Durham: Duke University Press, 1952)( hereafterN CF2 and NCF3 ).

2. Henry M. Belden, "The Ballad of Lord Bakeman, "Modern Philology 2 (1904): 301.

3. Ibid., 301-5.

4. Remarkably, one edition of the Forget-Me-Not Songster(paper, 25c, published by Kenedy) was still in print as of 1902, according to Marion E. Potter, The United States Catalog: Books in Print1 902 (Minneapolis: H. W. Wilson, 1903).

5. Albert H. Tolman," SomeS ongs Traditionailn the United States, "Journal of American Folk-Lore(JAF) 29 (April-June 1916): 1 55-97; Tolman and Mary O. Eddy," Traditional Texts and Tunes," JAF 35 (Oct.-Dec. 1922): 335-432; George Lyman Kittredge, "Various Ballads," JAF 26 (April-June1 913): 174-82, and "Ballads and Songs," JAF 30 (July-Sept. 1917): 283-369.

6. Head note to "Young Beichan,"N CF2 :50-51. I assume Belden wrote this note, though nominally he and Arthur Palmer Hudson coedited the volume.

7. W. Roy Mackenzie, Ballads and Sea Songs from Nova Scotia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928; rpt., Hatboro, Pa.: Folklore Associates, 1963); Phillips Barry, Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, and Mary Winslow Smyth, British Ballads from Maine (hereafter BBM) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929).

8. G. Malcolm L aws Jr., American Balladry from British Broadside As: Guide for Students and Collectors of Traditional Song (ABBB), Publication of the American Folklore Society Bibliographical and Special Series 8 (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1957). The two songsters h e cited were published b y Fisher a nd Turner (Philadelphia and New York, n.d.) and by Nafis and Cornish (New York, n.d.).

9. Tristram P . Coffin, The British Traditional Ballad in North America, Publication of the American Folklore Society 2 (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1950; rev. 1977 with supplement by Roger DeV. Renwick). By "Child ballads" are meant the 305 British ballads catalogued in Francis James Child's monumental The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-89). Coffin cited the two mentioned in the preceding endnote as well as one by Sadlier (New York, n.d.) and the other by Locke (Boston, c. 1842).

10. For example, Eloise Hubbard Linscott, Folk Songs of Old New England (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1962), 131-34, used the FMNS to supplement her text of "Captain Kidd."

11. Ed Cray," 'Barbara Allen': Cheap Print and Reprint," in Folklore International: Essays in Traditional Literature, Belief, and Custom in Honor of Wayland Debs Hand, e d. D. K. Wilgus (Hatboro, Pa.: Folklore Associates, 1967), 41-50.

12. Guthrie T . Meade Jr., with Dick Spottswood and Douglas S. Meade, Country Music Sources A: Biblio-Discograpohfy C ommercialRlye cordeTd raditionaMl usic( ChapelH ill: University of North Carolina and John Edwards Memorial Forum, 2002). Spottswood and Douglas S. Meade labored many hours to put the late Meade's manuscript in publishable form.

13. By "traditional" or "folksong" I mean songs that, whatever their origins, enjoyed currency i n oral tradition. They range from the works of musically talented tradespeople or farmers which were never formally published to those of professional (or at least, skilled) men of letters which, if originally distributed commercially via sheet music, broadsides, chapbooks, and so on, survived orally when the commercial media were no longer available. By "older popular favorites" I mean commercial songs that enjoyed a long vogue (more than a generation), and by "contemporary compositions" I mean recently written and still current popular songs.

14. In these publications," alphabetical index" means alphabetized by first letter of first word, and then in numerical order by page number thereafter.

15. Described in Frangcon L. Jones, "A Study of American 'Forget-Me-Not' Songsters of the 1840s and 1850s," thesis, Brown University, May, 1948.

16. Robert Shoshtek, Flowers and Plants: An International Lexicon with Biographical Notes (New York: New York Times Co., 1974), 109-10; Marina Heilmeyer, The Language of Flowers: Symbols and Myths (New York: Prestel, 2001), 86.

17. See, for example, S .E.P.," Forget me not," Peterson's Magazine( Dec. 6, 1845); Catharine H. Waterman", Forget-Me Not," The Casket 15 (1839): 102; or "TheF orget-Me-Not," paraphrased from the French, by E A. S., Godey's Lady's Book 54 (1857): 157.

18. Forget-me-noat : Christmas, New Year's, and birthday present (London:R . Ackermann, 1822).

19. The forget me not, a New Years' gift (Philadelphia: Judah Dobson, 1828); The Forget-Me-Not, a gift for 1846 (New York: Nafis and Cornish, c. 1845).

20. Ralph Thompson, American Literary Annuals and Gift Books, 1825-1865 (New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1936); Frederick W . Faxon, Literary Annuals and Gift Books (Ravelston, England: Private Libraries Assn., 1973; rpt. from 1912 ed.).

21. Folklorist/entrepreneurK ennethG oldstein had a thumb in both of these reprint publishing pies; I assume that one of his songsters was used for the reproduction and that furthermore he provided the CIP data.

22. The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman (London: n.p., 1838).

23. As Frank acknowledged in an email letter to me later. Stuart M. Frank, The Book of Pirate Songs (Sharon, Mass.: Kendall Whaling Museum, 1998).

24. A tally of 200 titles from Nicolas Trubner's Bibliographical Guide to American Literature: A Classed List of Books Publishedin the United States of America During the Last Forty Years  (London: Trubner and Co., 1859)suggests that 80 percent were unambiguously dated.

25. Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business, The First Four Hundred Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) 2, 25.

26. Henry M. Brooks, in his Olden-Time Music: A Compilation from Newspapers and Books (Boston: Ticknora nd Co., 1888; rpt. New York:A MSP ress,1 973), 149, reprinted an advertisement for the Columbian Songster("we believe, one of the earliest collections of secular music published in this part of the country") taken from the Columbian Sentinel of 1798. Selling for one dollar, this was rather expensive for the time. However, it appears that it included music as well as lyrics, which would make it a songbook--not a songster in the more limited sense that the term is now used.

27. Patrick W. Gainer, in Folk Songs from the West Virginia Hills (Grantsville, W.V. : Seneca Books, 1975), describing broadside ballads, noted, "In America such books as The Forget-Me-Not Songster were often carried into rural areas by itinerant peddlars" (xvii).

28. Harry B . Weiss, A Catalogue of the Chapbookins the N ew York Public Library(N ew York: New York Public Library1, 936),3 -7; Weiss, American Chapbooks, 1722-1842 (New York: New York Public L ibrary, 1945), 3 -9.

29. Weiss, American Chapbooks. 4

30. Richardson Wright, Hawkers and Walkers in Early America(New York: Ungar, 1927; rpt., Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1965), 50.

31. Ibid., 52.

32. Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America (1810; rpt., N ew York: Weathervane Books, 1970).

33. Norton's LiteraryA dvertiser(1 5 Dec. 1851)1 :8,1 61. The diary passage is taken from the transcription of 1998 by Gloria J. Helmuth, which was displayed on the website of Colorado College's Tutt L ibrary, where the Jackson papers are deposited.

34. I am grateful to Jason D. Stratman at the Missouri Historical Society Library for making a copy of this available to me.

35. OrvilleA . Roorbach, Bibliotheca AmericanaA: Catalogue of American Publications, including Reprints and Original Works,from 1820 to 1852, inclusive. Together with a List of Periodicals Published in the United States (New York: Orville A. Roorbach, Oct. 1852).

36. See John J. McCusker, How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Commodity Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the UnitedS tates (Worcester, Mass.: A merican Antiquarian Society, 2001).

37. Richard J. Wolfe, Early American Music Engraving and Printing (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 205-6.

38. Nancy R. Davison also points out that pieces of the relatively expensive sheet music "were one of the few presents a young man could give to a young lady without offending the proprieties." See her "The Grand Triumphal Quick-Step; or, Sheet Music Covers in America, "257-94, in Prints in and of America to 1850, ed. John D. Morse (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1970).

39. Trubner, Trubner's Bibliographical Guide to American Literature, lxxxix.

40. Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1947; rpt., New York: R. R. Bowker, 1960).

41. Quoted by James D. Hart in The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 93.

42. "Notes on Books and Booksellers,"in TheA mericanL iteraryG azettea ndP ublisher's Circular(1 5 June 1863):1 00-101.

43. John Tasker Howard, Stephen Foster, America's Troubadour (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1934), 244, 267.

44. Lyle H. Wright," A Statistical Survey of American Fiction, 1774-1850, "Huntington Library Quarterly 2 (1938-39): 309-18.

45. Trubner, Trubner's Bibliographical Guide to American Literaturex, c.

46. "British origin" refers to the nationality of the writers of the texts, even when tunes are American. In the case of traditional songs of unknown authorship, British origin is assumed for those songs that were collected from oral tradition in Britain unless there is convincing evidence to the contrary.

47. More similar to the Forget-Me-Not Songster in proportion of traditional materials are the American Songsters, like the former extant in different versions with different contents. The proportions of traditionals ongs in two copies I have examined are approximately 30 out of 150 and 30 out of 120.

48. Ada Sterling, ed., A Belle of the Fifties (New York: Doubleday, Pate, 1904), 25-26, as cited by Nicholas Tawa, High-Minded and Low-Down: Music in the Lives of Americans, 1800-1861 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000), 163 n.65.

49. This may not have been true for the 10 to 15 percent that included instructions for the tune to be used.

50. The songs omitted, all but the last two of which exhibit violence or sexually explicit details, include: "Captain James" (sadistic brutality), "Bunch of Rushes" (threatened rape), "Fanny Blair" (rape accusation), "Rambling Soldier" (story of a rake), "Butcher's Daughter" (would-be seducer outwitted), "Penny's Worth of Wit" (life of deception), "Banks of Ban" (implied sex), "Handsome Harry" (seduction, suicide), "Dawning of the Day" (seduction, marriage refused), "Sarah Maria Cornell" (seduction and murder), "Rosanna" (seduction and murder), "Gosport Tragedy" (seduction and murder), "Banks of Inverary" (past history of seductions), "Distressed Maid" (seduction, marriage refused), "Bloody Brother" (threatened incest, sorroricide) "Green Bushes," and "Crooked Rib."

51. Brooks, Olden-Time Music, 180.

52. Ibid., 181-82.

53. "Uncle Peter," in The Lowell Offering (April 1845): 82-88; "A Visit in the Country," The Lowell Offering (July 1845): 147-49.

54. Harriet H. Robinson, Loom and Spindle or Life Among the Early Mill Girls (1898, rpt. with corrections, Kailua, Hawaii: Press Pacifica: 1976), 20.

55. Harold W. Thompson, ed., with Edith E. Cutting, A Pioneer Songster: Texts from the Stevens-Douglass Manuscript of Western New York, 1841-1856 (Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1958).

56. Barry, Eckstorm, and Smyth, BBM, 414.

57. Mackenzie, Ballads and Sea Songs from Nova Scotia, 218. The source was probably the songster labeled Type I, as discussed below. Not so incontrovertible but worth investigation is the case of Charles Tillett of Wanchese, N.C., who gave Louis Chappell (see Folk-Songs of Roanoke and the Albemarle [hereafter FSRA] [Morgantown, W.V.: The Ballad Press, 1939]) thirteen ballads and songs that are from the FMNS: ("Lord Bateman," "Captain Ward and the Rainbow," "The Mermaid," "Paul Jones," "The Pirate" [Capt. Kidd], "Charles Gibbs," "Loss of the Albion," "The Queen of Russia and the Prince of Whales" ["Coast of Barbary"], "Captain Glen," "Mary and Sandy" ["Mary's Dream"], "Rinordine," "My Parents Raised  Me Tenderly" ["Girl I Left Behind"], and "Sheffield Apprentice"). Many are fragmentary, so if there was a songster involved it was many years before Chappell encountered Tillett. He sang several other songs that appeared in the FMNS for Frank and Anne Warner, which are given in Anne Warner, Traditional American Folk Songs from the Anne and Frank Warner Collection (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1984).

58. See Sidney F. and Elizabeth Stege Huttner, A Register of Artists, Engravers, Booksellers, Bookbinders, Printers and Publishers in New York City, 1821-42 (New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1993), 82.

59. Harry Dichter and Elliott Shapiro, Early American Sheet Music: Its Lure and Lore, 1768-1889 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1941), 15.

60. See Bruce A. Rosenberg, Folksongs of Virginia A: Checklist of the W PA Holdings, Alderman
Library, University of Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969), 2.

61. See G. Malcolm Laws Jr., Native American Balladry: A Descriptive Study and a  Bibliographical
Syllabus, rev. (Philadelphia: Pubs. of the American Folklore Society, 1964), 1:243.

62. Thompson, ed., with Cutting, A Pioneer Songster, 90-91.

63. Both broadsides may be viewed on the website http://memory.loc.gov.

64. Vance Randolph, Ozark Folksongs, vol. 4 (Columbia: State Historical Society of Missouri, 1950), 281; the recording, sung by Charles Ingenthron, was issued on the CD Ozark Folksongs (Rounder 1108, 2001); Gale Huntington, Songs the Whalemen Sang (Barre, Maine: Barre, 1964), 160; Jennifer Post Quinn, Index to Field Recordings in Flanders Ballad Collection at Middlebury College (Middlebury, 1983), nos. 175-76.

65. Available on the website, http://memory.loc.gov.

66. Beadle's Banner Songster, American Series, no. 2 (1865) ,as cited in Albert Johannsen, The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels,v ol. 3 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962).

67. See Robert Latham and William Matthews, eds., The Diary of Samuel Pepys, a New Complete Transcription(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 7, 5, where the editors refer to British Museum H. 1601 (226) G 309 (66).

68. NCF 2:111. A one-page typescript in the Barry collection at Harvard's Houghton Library (box 13), signed PB., outlines the argument, but it was never published.

69. Cray," 'Barbara Allen."

70. Allan Ramsay, Tea Table Miscellany (Edinburghr, pt. 1750), 343, quoted by Albert B. Friedman, The Viking Book of Folk Ballads of the English-Speaking World (New York: Viking, 1956), 88; Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry 3, vols. (Philadelphia: 1823, and other editions), vol. 3, no. 7.

71. See Ruth Ann Musick," The Old Album of William A. Larkin," JAF 60 (July-Sept. 1947): 201-51.

72. For example, The American Songster (N ew York: N . C. Nafis, 1839 [CPMS P-085046], and New York: Nafis and Cornish; Nafis, Cornish and Co., and John B. Perry, n.d. [CPM SP-085047]).

73. Rosenberg, Folksongs of Virginian, o. 68: "The Battle of Baltimore" and "The Siege of Baltimore."

74. Georges-Denis Zimmermann, Songs of Irish Rebellion (Hatboro: Folklore Associates, 1967), 119ff.

75. See http://erols.user.com/olsonw/.

76. Richard J . Wolfe, Secular M usic in America 1, 801-1825: A Bibliography, 3 vols. (New York: New York Public Library, 1964), 1 :78; Oscar George Theodore Sonneck A, Bibliography of Early Secular American Music(18th Century), rev. and enl. by William Treat Upton (1945; rpt., New York: DaCapo, 1964), 43;  Irving Lowens, A Bibliography of Songsters P rinted in AmericaB efore1 821 (WorcesterM, ass.: American Antiquarian Society,1976), 100.

77. American Songster (N ew York: Nafis and Cornish,1 839), 200.

78. Randolph, Ozark Folksongs 1,: 420; Family Herald and Weekly Star(Montreal), Old Favourites section, July 16, 1902, and August 18, 1955, as cited in Roud's folk-song index.

79. Quoted by Mackenzie, Ballads and Sea Songs from Nova Scotia, 216.

80. Thompson,e d., with Cutting, A Pioneer Songster, 107-10.

81. John Anthony Scott, The Ballad of America: The H istory of the United States in Song and Story (New York: Bantam, 1966), 102-4.

82. Huntington, Songs the Whalemen Sang, 205.

83. Other New World recoveries include Helen Hartness Flanders, Elizabeth F. Ballard, GeorgeB rown,a nd Phillips Barry, New Green Mountain Songster (1939; Hatboro: Folklore Associates, 1966), 111; Elizabeth Bristol Greenleaf and Grace Yarrow Mansfield, Ballads and Sea Songs of Newfoundland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933; rpt. 1968), 168; Cecil J. Sharp, English Folk-Songs from the Southern Appalachians ed, . Maud Karpeles (London: Oxford University Press, 1960 [1932] 2 :245 ("Boney's Defeat"); Pamela McArthur Cole, "Fragments of Two American Ballads," JAF 14 (1901): 139; and Tolman and Eddy, "Traditional Texts and Tunes," 335.

84. Scott, Ballad of America, 102-4.

85. Greenleaf and Mansfield, Ballads and Sea Songs of Newfoundland, 170; Helen Creighton, Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia (SBNS) (Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1932; rpt., New York: Dover, 1966), 140; and Mackenzie, Ballads and Sea Songs from Nova Scotia, 188 (two texts).

86. Ola Elizabeth Winslow, American B roadside Verse from Imprints of the 17th and 18th Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930; New York: AMS, 1974), n o. 61; Worthington The Forget-Me-Not Songsters 215 Chauncey Ford, Broadsides, Ballads & c. Printed in Massachusetts, 1639-1800, Massachusetts
Historical Society Collections 75 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1922), nos. 1157-60.

87. See Laws, Native American Balladry, for references.

88. See Emelyn ElizabethG ardnera nd GeraldineJ encksC hickering,B alladsa nd Songs
of SouthernM ichigan( 1939;r pt., Hatboro:F olkloreA ssociates,1 967),4 77.

89. Bulletin of the Folk Song Society of the Northeast (Cambridge, Mass.), no. 6 (1933): 10-13. See Laws, Native American Balladry, 155, for a discussion of "Canaday I O" [C 17] and references.

90. William Chappell, ed., Roxburghe Ballads (1869; 1877; rpt., New York: AMS Press, 1966), 8:141.

91. W.H . Logan, A Pedlar's Pack of Ballads and Songs (EdinburghW: illiamP aterson,1 869), 47.

92. Ford, Broadsides, Ballads & c., 403.

93. Mackenzie, Ballads and Sea Songs from Nova Scotia, 239-40. The text is word for word identical with the text of the non-IIa editions.

94. Creighton, SBNS, 111; Chappell, FSRA, 61.

95. Mackenzie, Ballads and Sea Songs from Nova Scotia, 278-82.

96. C. H. Firth, Naval Songs and B allads (N.p.: N vy Records Society, 1908), 134-37; Carleton Sprague Smith, "Broadsides and Their Music in Colonial America," in Music in Colonial Massachusetts, 1630-1820, vol. 1, Music in Public Places, ed. Frederick. S. Allis Jr., Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 53 (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1980), 358.

97. Mackenzie, Ballads and Sea Songs from Nova Scotia, 278.

98. Firth, Naval Songs and Ballads, 347.

99. Mackenzie, Ballads and Sea Songs from Nova Scotia, 362.

100. Boston Post, Feb. 27, 1849, 1.

101. See Laws, A BBB, 159, for references. To those, add Chappell, FSRA,5 4 (fragment); Kenneth Peacock, Songs of the Newfoundland Outports (Ottawa: National Museum of Canada, 1965), 3: 837; Carrie B. Grover, A Heritage of Songs (Bethel, Maine: privately printed by Gould Academy, n.d.; rpt., Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions., 1973), 34; and Frank, Book of Pirate Songs, no. 14.

102. Helen Hartness Flanders, Ancient Ballads Traditionally Sung in New England, vols. 1-4 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960-65),4 :264; Frank, Book of Pirate Songs, 26.

103. Firth, Naval Songs and B allads, 25-31; Chappell, ed., Roxburghe Ballads 6, :426.

104. The Coles broadside was reproduced in The Euing Collection of English Broadside Ballads( Glasgow: University of Glasgow,1 971), 108-9.

105. Chappell, e d., Roxburghe Ballads 6, :405.

106. Thompson, ed., with Cutting, A Pioneer Songster, 25 -29. Altogether this manuscript contained nine of the forty-five songs in this survey, most in versions so close to the songster texts as to strongly suggest the latter as a source.

107. Barry, Eckstorm, and Smyth, BBM, 351ff.

108. Ibid., 355. The Coverly broadside is cited by Ford, Broadsides, Ballads & c., no. 3006.

109. "The history of the Songster text is yet to be written"-p. 361.

110. For references to American field-collected versions, see Coffin, British Traditional Ballad in North America(1977 ed.), 155-56 and 279. To these add Kittredge, "Ballads and Songs," 332. The earliest is the text given in The Green Mountain Songster, a manuscript compiled by a Vermont Revolutionary War soldier in 1823.

111.F landersB, allardB, rown,a nd BarryN, ewG reenM ountainS ongster8,2 . Theb roadside
was cited in Tolmana nd Eddy," TraditionaTl extsa nd Tunes,"3 63.

112. See Laws, A BBB, 262, f or references, which include recoveries from Missouri, North Carolina, West Virginia, Minnesota, Ohio, Vermont, Mississippi, Michigan, Massachusetts, Nova Scotia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and New York. Vance Randolph recorded a version from Charles Ingenthron that was issued on Library of Congress LP AAFS L 14: Anglo- American Songs and Ballads.

113. Thompson, e d., with Cutting, A Pioneer Songster, 60 -61; Huntington, Songs the Whalemen Sang, 137-41. Other North American recoveries are given by Laws, ABBB, 262. Available British traditional recordings include Belle Stewart, Topic 12 T138; and Packie Byrne, EFDSS LP 1009 ("Blooming Caroline").

114. See Rosenberg, Folksongs of Virginia, no. 77, 23 stanzas, collected in 1941 in Virginia; and Chappell, FSRA, 54, a fragment of two incomplete stanzas, collected in 1933 in North Carolina.

115. Mackenzie, Ballads and Sea Songs from Nova Scotia, 122; Thompson, ed., with Cutting, A Pioneer Songster, 48.
116. J ohn Moulden," The Gallant Female Sailor Ann Jane Thornton," in Irish Folk Music Studies Eligse Cheo Tlire- 56 (1986-2001): 299-346; Diane Duga, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

117. A ship, "Commerce," sailed to Pictou County, N .S., in 1803, but there is probably no connection with this piece.

118. Reprinted in Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, plate 8.

119. Collected by Helen Creighton from Ben Henneberry of Devil's Island and published in SBNS, 68; reprinted in Kaye Pottie and Vernon Ellis, Folksongs of the Maritimes (Halifax: Formac Publishing. Co., 1992), 26.

120. In Family Herald and W ekly Star( Montreal), Old Favourites section (15 Oct. 1941), according to Roud, song index.

121. Interesting life and wonderful adventures of... A. J. Thornton, the 'Female Sailor'... written by herself. For details, see Moulden, "The Gallant Female Sailor." See also Hugh Shields, "Some Bonny Female Sailors, "in Ulster Folklife 10 (1964): 35-45.

122. English Minstrelsie: A National Monument of English Song (Edinburgh: T. C. and E. C. Jack, Grange Publ. Wks, n.d. [1895]), 1:xxx-xxi and 84.

123. From The Lowell Offering (Lowell: Powers and Bagley, 1 842), 251-52; quoted by Tawa, High-Minded and Low-Down, 197.

124. Mary O. Eddy, Ballads and Songs from Ohio (1939; Hatboro: Folklore Assocs., 1964), 195.

125.R obertW .N eeser,e d., AmericaNn avalS ongsa ndB allad(sN ew Haven:Y aleU niversity Press, 1938), 149-51.

126. See ibid., 241-51.

127. William Chappell, The Ballad Literature and Popular Music of the Olden Time 2, vols. (1859; New York: Dover, 1965), 708-11.

128. See his balladry website, http://erols.user.com/olsonw/.

129. American Songster (New York: Nafis and Cornish, 1839), 46.

130. Wolfe, Secular Music in America, 326.

131. See Laws,NativeAmericanB alladry, 121 [A5]; also: Shoemaker, Mountain Minstrelsy of Pennsylvania, 3d ed. of North Pennsylvania Minstrelsy (Philadelphia: Newman F. McGirr, 1931); 159. PhiloL P1 020:S ara Cleveland; Max Hunter Collection, nos. 0004 and 1504 (www. smsu.edu/folksong/maxhunter); W. K. McNeil, Southern Folk Ballads (Little Rock, Ark.: August House, 1987),1 :38-41; 0. J. Abbott, Folkways LP FE4 018, Songs of the Great Lakes (1964); Ivan H . Walton with Joe Grimm, Windjammers Songs of the Great Lakes Sailors (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 104ff., and accompanying CD. The song appears in the Gernsey manuscript, a songbook written by George W. Gernsey, Ohio, between the 1840sa nd '60s (see Gardner and Chickering, Balladsand Songs of Southern M ichigan, 479.

132. From the recording by O. J. Abbott of Hull, Quebec, issued on Folkways FM 4018: Songs of the Great Lakes, 1964.

133. C. B. Galbreath, "The Battle of Lake Erie in Ballad and History," Ohio Archeological and Historical Publications 20 (1911): 415-56, and "The Ballad of James Bird: Its Authorship," Ohio Archeological and Historical Publications 26 , no. 1 (Jan.1 917):5 2-57. King, "More Light on the Ballad of 'James Bird,' " New York Folklore Quarterly 7 (1951): 142-44. Charles Francis Richardson and Elizabeth Miner (Thomas) Richardson, Charles Miner: A Pennsylvania Pioneer, reprinted with slight changes f rom P roceedings of the Wyoming Historical and Geological Society 14 (1916). See in particular 68-76.

134. In Katharine D. Newman's Never Without a Song: The Years and Songs of Fennie Devlin, 1865-1952(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 166-68.

135. Mackenzie, B allads and Sea Songs from N ova Scotia, 213.

136. Two from Nova Scotia, collected and published by Mackenzie, Ballads and  Sea Songs from Nova Scotia, 213; another from Nova Scotia, sung by David Slauenwhite (1950), and published in Helen Creighton, Maritime Folk Songs (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1961), 151, also on the companion phonograph album, Folkways FE 4307: Maritime Folk Songs from the Collection of Helen Creighton (1962); and the fourth recorded by Edith Fowke from O. J. Abbott of Quebec in 1957 (Folkways FM4 051: Irish and British Songs from the Ottawa Valley [1961]).

137. Shoemaker, Mountain Minstrelsy of Pennsylvania, 177.

138. Frank, Book of Pirate Songs, nos. 23, 61-62, and 113.

139. Belden and Hudson, eds., NCF 3:268.

140. Gardner and Chickering, Ballads and Songs of Southern Michigan, 480.

141. Wolfe, Secular Music in American, o. 5316 et seq, 518-9.

142. Smith, "Broadsides and Their Music," 182.

143. Described in Worthington C. Ford, "The Isaiah Thomas Collection of Ballads," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 33, pt. 1 (1923): 34-112, nos. 158 and 284.

144. See Helen Creighton and Doreen N. Senior, Traditional Songs from Nova Scotia (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1950), 124.

145. Thompson, ed., with Cutting, A Pioneer Songster, 153-55.

146. American Songster (New York: Nafis and Cornish, 1839), 31.
147. The Deming broadside can be viewed at http://memory.loc.gov. Collected versions are given in Laws, Native A merican Balladry, 162.

148. See website www.wikipedia.org.

149. See website www.bermuda-triangle.org.

150. The latter was printed in Luce, Naval Songs, 2d rev. ed. (New York: Wm. A. Pond, 1902), 46; both are given in Neeser, e d., American Naval Songs and Ballads, 144-49. The latter song also appeared on a broadside by Leonard Deming, Boston, under the title, "Naval Triumph."

151. Printed by Frank Moore, Songs and Ballads of the American Revolution (1855; rpt., Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1964), 316-21.

152. Winslow, American Broadside Verse from Imprints, 156-57.

153. Halpert, "Some B allads and Folksongs from New Jersey," JAF 52 (1939): 62; Anne Lutz, "The Ballad of Brave Spaulding and the Spy in the Ramapo Valley, "New York Folklore Quarterly 10, no. 4 (Winter1 954): 2 79-84; from a handwritten copy.

154. Eddy, Ballads and Songs from Ohio, 2 58; Ethel Moore and Chauncey O . Moore, Ballads
and Folk Songs of the Southwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1964), 269-71.

155. Grigg'sS outherna nd WesternS ongster( PhiladelphiaJ: . Grigg,1 833),4 3.

156. Thompson, Body, Boots, and  Britches: Folktales, Ballads and Speech from Country New  York (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott,1 939; rpt., New York: Dover, 1962), 349-52.

157. Thompson, ed., with Cutting, A Pioneer Songster, 127-30.

158. George Cary Eggleston, American War Ballads and Lyrics, 2 vols. (New York: Putnam's Sons, 1889), 183; Chappell, ed., Roxburghe Ballads 8, :3323, 33; Winslow, American Broadside Verse from Imprints, no. 74; Ford, Broadsides, Ballads & c., n o. 3004.

159. "An American Frigate," by New Jersey singer Everett P itt, recorded by Anne Lutz in 1945 and issued in 1987 on Marimac 9200 [cass]: Up Agin' the Mountain.

160. American versions are given in Grover, Heritage of Songs, 16-17; and Warner, Traditional American Folk Songs, 364-66; collected from Eleazar Tillett in 1951 in North Carolina under the title, "The Snow Is on the Ground." Warner reprinted the version from the FMNS for comparison. The recording can be heard, in part, on Folktrax CD 926, "Tink" Tillet and Outer Banks Singers.

161. Frank Kidson, Traditional Tunes, supplement to William Chappell, Old  nglish Popular Music (1893; rpt., New York: Brussel, 1961), 170; Harry Dichter, Handbook of American Sheet Music (Philadelphia: Harry Dichter, 1947).

162. Jones, "A Study of American 'Forget-Me-Not' Songsters."

163. For other collected versions, see Laws, A BBB2, 56, to which add Grover, Heritage of Songs, 14. The ballad is in the American Songster (1839), 191.

164. Flanders, Ballard, Brown, and Barry, New Green Mountain Songster, 64 -66. The Coverly ballad is listed in Ford, "Isaiah Thomas Collection of Ballads," 34-112, no. 218.

165. A vailable recordings by traditional singers include Anne Briggs, Topic 12T207, and Margaret MacArthur, Living Folk F-LFR-100.

166. Lowens, Bibliography of Songsters.

167. Creighton and Senior, Traditional Songs from Nova Scotia, 200; Mackenzie, Ballads and Sea Songs from Nova Scotia, 140.

168. Thompson, ed., with Cutting, A Pioneer S ongster, 85.

169. See Rosenberg, Folksongs of Virginia, 13, as a version of "The B rown Girl" (Child 295). Arthur Palmer Hudson, Folksongs of Mississippi and Their Background (Chapel H ill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936), 129-30.

170. See Roud no. 2816. This and most of the other English broadsides cited in this study can be found (and seen) on the Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads website, www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ballads/ballads.htm.

171. Joseph Muller, comp., The Star Spangled Banner: Words and Music Issued Between 1814-1864--An Annotated Bibliographical List. (1935; New York: DaCapo, 1973); Joseph Muller, Bibliography of Francis Scott Key's "The Star Spangled Banner" (New York: G . A. Baker,1 935); Oscar G . T. Sonneck, R eport o n "The Star-Spangled Banner,"" Hail Columbia," "America," "Yankee Doodle" (1909;r pt., New York: Dover, 1972);O scarG eorgeT heodore Sonneck, "The Star Spangled Banner" (1914; rpt., New York:D aCapo,1 969);D r. George J. Svejda, History of the Star Spangled Banner from 1814 to the Present (Washington, D .C.: National Park Service, 1969); P. W. Filby and Edward G . Howard, Star-Spangled Books: Books Sheet Music, Newspapers, Manuscripts, and Persons associated with" The Star Spangled Banner" (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1972).

172. Moore, Songs and B llads of the American Revolution, 1-17; Lydia Bolles Newcomb, "Songs and Ballads of the Revolution, "New England Magazine 19, no. 4 (Dec. 1895): 501-13.

173. For other references, see Eggleston, American War Ballads and Lyrics, 1:60; Thompson, ed., with Cutting, Pioneer Songster, 101.

174.S ee Gardnera nd Chickering,B alladsa ndS ongso f SouthernM ichigan4, 77.

175. For example, the 1844 sheet music published by W. C. Peters, states, on the title page, "A favorite ballad as sung by Mrs. Webster and Mr. Duffield. The melody by Mozart. Arranged for and dedicated to J.S . Masby, Esqu., by his friend W. C . Peters. "See Richard D . Wetzel," Oh! Sing No More that Gentle Song: "The Musical Life and Times of William Cumming Peters (Warren, Mich.: Harmonie Park Press, 2000),N o. 182; see also broadside by Andrews on Library of Congress website, American S inging Nineteenth-Century S ong  Sheets. See also Universal Songster, or, Museum o f Mirth (London:J ones and Co., [1832?], 1 :124.

176. See Family Herald and Weekly Star( Montreal), "Old Favourites" section, 26 April 1911, as cited by Roud, Songindex, No. 2674.

177. Harry Dichter, Handbook of American Sheet Music (Philadelphia: Harry Dichter, 1947).

178. Lester A . Hubbard, Ballads and Songs from Utah (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1961), 274; Creighton, SBNS, 134-35.

179. Sonneck, Early Secular American Music (New York:D a Capo, 1964), 472. It begins, "Oft as on Thame's banks I stray."

180. See Sharp, mss Folk Tunes, 1685; cited in Roud, Songindex.

181. Fore xample, Songster's Museum (1824, pp. 60-61). Logan, A Pedlar's Pack of Ballads and Songs (pp. 349-50, "The Willow Tree") reprint edit from an undated Liverpool broadside.

182. Grigg, Southern  and Western Songster (Philadelphia,  834), 66; Cecil Sharp, English County Folk Songs: Songs and Ballads (London:N ovello, 1908-12; rpt., 1961), 113-15.

183.C ontemporary analogies for the practice of repackaging textual or recorded material are common, but rarely is it done as crudely as it was with the songsters of the 1840s.

184. Phillips Barry, "Traditional Ballads in New England. II," JAF 18 (1905): 191ff.

185. Barry, Eckstorm, and Smyth, BBM, 112-13.

186. Ibid., 113.

187. The sheet is available on the Library of Congress's American Memory website http://memory.loc.gov/ under the title of the first song, "Betsey Baker."

188. Nova Scotia: Mackenzie, Ballads and  Sea Songs from Nova Scotia, and Creighton and Senior, Traditional Songs from Nova Scotia; Vermont: Flanders, Ancient Ballads Traditionally Sung in New England, 5  texts; Maine: Flanders, Ancient Ballads Traditionally Sung in New England 2,; Barry, Eckstorm, and Smyth, BBM,3 ; New Hampshire: Flanders, Ancient B allads Traditionally Sung in New England; South Carolina: Charles W. Joyner, Folk Song in South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1971),2 8-30; Virginia: Arthur Kyle Davis Jr., Traditional Ballads of Virginia Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1929), 158-71, and Chappell, FSRA; and California: Library of Congress Archive of Folk Culture recording AAFS 3811 A1/A2/A3.

189. Professor Belden eventually did learn the identity of his battered publication:  In the preface to Ballads and Songs Collected by the Missouri Folk-Lore Society he notes that "I have from Miller County a copy, or rather parts of a copy, for it has been worn out in service, of Nafis and Cornish's Forget-Me-Not Songster, published in New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis from 1935 to 1850." This would make his remnant a Type I songster, but the other publication details, offered without benefit of the title page, must have been his conjecture.