Bluegrass Messengers

The Singing South: Folk-Song in Recent Fiction Describing Southern Life
by Arthur Palmer Hudson
The Sewanee Review, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1936), pp. 268-295

THE SINGING SOUTH Folk-Song in Recent Fiction Describing Southern Life

TWO recent developments in literature and scholarship in the South cannot fail to impress the intelligent reader. One is the efflorescence, within the past decade, of fiction descriptive of the Southern scene. The other is the considerable production of research in the folk-lore of the South, particularly folk ballads and songs. Both, perhaps, are fruits of the same tree, conscious regionalism.

It is not the purpose of the present article to undertake a survey of either. The one is a matter of common knowledge, or of knowledge easily gathered. The other has been done admirably, within brief compass, by Professor L. W. Payne.[1] Neither does it lie within the scope of such a paper as this to inquire into the nature and philosophy of regionalism. This is the subject of illuminating exposition or lively controversy in half a dozen easily accessible books or articles.[2] As a student of folk-song for the past ten years and as an in terested casual reader of Southern fiction, I have found a double pleasure in many stories?a pleasure arising from recognition of an old ballad that I love, and of a writer's artistry in adapting or transmuting it to the purpose of a story. Several years ago, for reasons which will be further explained, my reading of Fiswoode Tarl'eton's short story "Curtains" suggested interesting possibilities for a study of points at which prose fiction and folk-song converge in Southern stories. In the summer of 1933, a reading of Olive Tilford Dargan's Call Home the Heart, in which they

1. Recent Research in Balladry and Folk Songs", Publications of the Texas Folk-Lore Society, vol. VIII (1930).
2. See, for example, E. A. Botkin's "We Talk about Regionalism", in The Frontier, May, 1933; Donald Davidson's "Sectionalism in America", Hound and Horn, July-September, 1933.
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THE SINGING SOUTH 269

impressively coalesce, precipitated a resolution to try the theme. Search for further examples has not been sweeping or very sys tematic. The results of a search so conducted would, I was sure, be unmanageable, especially for presentation in a short article. I therefore limited to the decade 1923-1932 the period to be ex amined, and proceeded, so far as the novels were concerned, on the principle that "Gold is where you find it". For short stories,[3] I sought in the wilderness a somewhat more systematic path that, I trusted, would lead me to representative findings. The O'Brien and the O. Henry Award collections for the period offered a cross section of American short stories from competent critical points of view. As fairly representative of the best type of periodical short fiction, the files of the Atlantic, Harper's, and Scribnier's for the years 1923-1932, inclusive, were at hand.

Even as this study makes no pretense to being comprehensive, so does it make none to being statistical. But a few figures may be of interest as indicative of the amount and (with reference to the short story) the proportion of fiction containing folk-songs.
Of about one hundred novels of Southern life examined, twenty five, by seventeen novelists, were selected for study because they contain notable use of folk-songs. Their authors are: Sherwood Anderson, James Boyd, Maristan Chapman, Olive Tilford Dargan, Lucy Furman, Paul Green, DuBose Heyward, Mary Johnston, Harry Harrison Kroll, Rose Wilder Lane, Margaret Prescott Montague, John Trotwood Moore, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Dorothy Scarborough, T. S. Stribling, Thomas Wolfe, and Stark Young.

The O'Brien and the O. Henry Award collections, containing 225 short stories, have ten with Southern locales exhibiting folk-song or tags. Of an estimated number of 1,500 short stories in the ten year files of the three magazines, about 125 have Southern settings, and of this latter number 22 contain folk-song material. The short stories found in all sources named, 32 in all, were written by: Sherwood Anderson, Roark Bradford, Dorothy Walworth Carmen, Ada Jack Carver, Merle Colby, Arthur Huff Fauset, Paul Green, DuBose Heyward, Percy MacKaye, John J. Niles, Pernet Patterson, Louis Reed, Eleanor Risley, Elizabeth Madox

3. With the assistance of two graduate students, Mr. Dean B. Armold and Miss Eunice MacKay, to whom I make grateful acknowledgment.

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270_by ARTHUR PALMER HUDSON

Roberts, Lyle Saxon, Wilbur Daniel Steele, Fiswoode Tarleton, and Malcolm Vaughn. In short, the fiction chosen for study consists of 47 pieces by 31 different writers.

What is a folk-song? The answers vary. I have therefore applied to the song material contained in this body of fiction a rather liberal adaptation of Professor Louise Pound's criteria:* a song that, from the point of view of the author using it, and of mine observing it, seems to be marked by (1) anonymity of origin (unconsciousness, on the part of singer and audience, of author ship and provenience amounting to the same thing); (2) textual fluidity; (3) vitality through a fair period of time. If such a song tells a story, it is considered a ballad. It is to be borne in mind that the characteristics of a piece.sung in a story, as represented or implied by the fictionist, might be one thing and the actual characteristics from the folkloristic point of view might be another. As a matter of fact, I suspected that several of the authors of the novels or short stories wrote a few of their songs, and that most of them were indifferent to the character of a song except as their use of it was concerned. Such songs, whenever they adopt the manner of the folk-song and are represented or suggested as sustaining the relationship of a folk-song to singer and audience, I have treated as folk-songs. Most of the pieces, however, I recognized as variants of pieces in well-known collections of Southern folk-songs.

Looked at from the point of view of numerical content of folk songs quoted as wholes or as tags, or referred to by titles and features, the 25 novels were found to have 161; the 22 short stories, 46. The 47 titles of fiction, then, by 31 writers, yielded 207 illustrations enough, if sought for another[4] purpose, to provide ample data for an anthology and study of Southern folk song per se.

Definition of material and working criteria has anticipated some account of a final step taken in collecting data. This consisted in writing letters to eighteen of the authors specially concerned. Identifying the particular passage that interested me, I requested permission to quote it, and a statement concerning the author's knowledge of folk-song and its importance as a fictional resource.

4. American Ballads and Songs, New York (Scribner's), c. 1922, pp. xii-xiii.
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THE SINGING SOUTH 271

Fifteen replies were received, including two from the executors of authors who have died recently. All of the replies from living authors expressed a desire to be helpful. Most of them were. But what they contain can best be considered in connection with the stories themselves.

These, for the purpose in hand, I have divided into four groups, with reference to the general modes of use to which the folk-songs in them have been put in their depiction and interpretation of Southern life:

I. Historical fiction using folk-songs as bits of color or pictorial media appropriate to the settings and the characters?9 pieces of fiction containing 54 songs, tags, titles, allusions.

II. Fiction of contemporary life using folk-songs as an important device or material descriptive of character and local color 31 titles, 116 songs.

III. Fiction employing folk-song as an essential thematic, structural, or atmospheric medium; 8 titles, 37 songs.

IV. Fiction exhibiting the influence of special scholarly in terest in folk-song or theoretical knowledge of in terest in folk-song or theoretical knowledge of it; 5 titles (counted in I, II, III), no additional songs.

I.
The historical novels of Mary Johnston, which have delighted two generations of readers with their pictures of the great epochs of life in the South, would alone offer an ample basis for restricted study of the subject. One, Croatan (1923),1 will be described in its general features of folk-song use; another, The Great Valley,
will be taken for specific exemplification of the theme.
Croatan begins where, according to Professor Arthur Kyle
Davis, the history of balladry in America begins2?with "Captain
John White's ship the Lion going wTith settlers to Virginia." A
farewell song, with the burden "Old England is a merry land" and
"Virginia is a fair, merry land":3 sailor chanteys, Here we go,, oh,
here w\e go! Out sail!"4, the lullaby of "Littling" in the new land;5
Boston (Little, Brown & Co.).
^Traditional Ballads of Virginia, Cambridge (Harvard University Press), 1929,
pp. 22 ff.
8Croatan, p. 4
'Ibid., p. 23.
BIbid., pp. 55-56.
272_by ARTHUR PALMER HUDSON
old ballads about King Arthur evoked by strainge adventures;6
English May games and songs in the Virginia wilderness;7 a
Robin Hood ballad in celebration of escape from the Indians;8
"Lulla, Lull a . . . the falcon hath borne my mate away" by Tom
Darnel to Virginia Dare;9 the poignant "Harne! Hame, bauld
hunter" of the "gray Palmer", sung by the lost and homesick
colonists:10 these thread the tragedy, ending on the note of nostal
gia borne by the minor chords of English and Scottish folk-songs,
of the lost colony of Croatan.
The technique of The Great Valley?1 a story of a Scottish family
that set out, about the time of the Seven Years' War (1765) from
Virginia, across th(e Blue Ridge, to their new home in the west,
shows the old ballads as part of the mental furniture of the sturdy
but homesick Scots. Thus, when these pioneers pause at a point
beyond Richmond, they see the new country as "a fairy world",
and the child Elizabeth whispers, "That is belonging to the Queen
of Fair Elfland, that Thomas Rhymer rode with,
'Her skirt was o' the grass-green silk,
Her mantle o' the velvet fine,
At ilka tett of her horse's mane
Hung fifty siller bells and nine . . .'
',12
When "the grapevine had flowered six times since the crossing of
the Blue Ridge", the family gather around the hearth one cold
November evening and listen to Elizabeth sing "The Bonny Earl
of Murray", father and mother joining or commenting.13 On
Elizabeth's and Conant's wedding journey, the lovers pause "by
the two hills that the Ulstermen had named Bessy Bell and Mary
Gray" and sing the old ballad of the two unfortunate lasses who
"bigget a bower".14 In their log house Mother Dick sings, "in a
cracked voice . . . still sweet", the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick
Spens.15 Forest fires and Indian raids are discussed to the ominous
6Ibid., pp. 140-141.
7Ibid., pp. I53-IS9.
*Ijbid., p. 250.
Hbid., p. 263.
10Ibid., pp. 269-270.
"Boston (Little, Brown & Co.), 1926.
The Great Valley, pp. 38-39.
13Ibid., pp. 72-74.
uIbid., p. 112,
"Ibid., p. 161.
THE SINGING SOUTH 273
chorus of "Fire in the mountains";18 Elizabeth's captivity by
Indians is preluded by "The Twa Sisters"17 and comforted by old
spirituals and "Hind Horn",18 the latter prophetic of escape.
Miss Johnston comments to me as follows in parit:
Certainly folk-song interests me ... In all my work if
I have not to hand the actual line or stanza that suits my pur
pose, I invent it . . . Sir Walter Scott's Anon., in short. In
Croatan, for instance, [the two lullabies] are my own in
vention . .. The samie applies throughout my work to snatches
of Negro spirituals. Some are genuine?perhaps the most?
but others ground into me.19
These words and the examples, whether genuine or fabricated,
show not only sympathetic appreciation of folk-songs but a keen
sense of their value in heightening a narrative situation or sug
gesting a mood. Without their songs, Croatan and The Great
Valley would lose much of their finest pathos and humanity.
In plot and characters a close parallel to the last named novel,
Elizabeth Madox Roberts' The Great Meadow90 contains a number
of folk-songs (twenty in all) which are more clearly of American
ized tradition. Futhermore, the songs appear more casually, though
they serve much the same uses. Sam Hall, brother to Diony, the
central character, in an early scene sings the first stanza and frag
ments of other lines of "The Golden Vanity".21 Suggestion of at
mosphere and characterization are clearly the ends served by the
sdene. Thus too with several following singing and fiddling scenes,
including "How Moss Caught His Mare", described as "an ancient
song that carries a strange and monotonous tune", and quoted in
full;22 "Young Ladies", one stanza of which Diony sings to Sam's
fiddle accompaniment;23 and "Young Beichan", the first stanza of
which is rendered in the same way, in honor of Nathaniel Barlow,
who has come for a visit, and, later, another corresponding to the
seventeenth stanza of Child 53 A.24 While Diony's people, like
16Ibid., p. 209.
17Ibid., pp. 244-245.
18Ibid., p. 274.
"Personal letter, July 8, 1933. The writer of this letter died in May, 1936.
20New York (The Viking Press), 1930.
*Ibid., pp. 3-4.
22Ibid., pp. 17-24, 41-42.
"Ibid., p. 64.
"Ibid., p. 64.
2
274_by ARTHUR PALMER HUDSON
those in The Great Valley, are crossing the mountains of Kentucky,
Diony falls into conversation with a cripple, Old Bethel, who says:
I recollect one summer a man went by named Hannibal.
I made up a song when he was gone on his way, to call to
mind what manner of man he was.
'Oh Hannibal Hane of the Northern sea,
Where were you borned, in what countree?
*?fe ?tftre^ . r T?tper t?ft?e . ^??? s. ^ype.r T?tper tp^??r& . ?te
'Hannibal Hane, where will you die?
On the gallows limb when the law comes nigh.'25
This is a curious but profoundly true touch of folk psychology?
having the old man sing an adaptation of "Hind Horn" and
naively claim it as a mnemonic device of his own invention. "Sir
Lionel (Bangum and the Boar)" is sung by Evan Muir as he
watches the pack animals over a pass;26 "If I had known before I
courted", in camp;27 and "Bangum and the Boar" again, and
Pappy's gone to get a skin", and "Come hither, come hither, my
youngest fair", all as nursery songs, in the settled life of the
Great Meadow.28
Writing to me for her sister, Miss Ivor S. Roberts states : "Of
the ballads, our grandfather sang 'Bangum and the Boar' and our
grandmother sang 'How Moss Caught His Mare', quoted in
'The Great Meadow'".29 More will be said of Miss Roberts'
practice in a later division.
In his stirring novel of the American Revolution, Drums, James
Boyd enlivens already uproarious tavern scenes at Edenton with
"a hoarse drunken chorus?
Fill up the bowl!
Empty the butt,
God save King George,
The lousy scut!"30
and the capital Burnsian drinking song "Rum Puncheon".31 One
of Paul Jones's fighting men on the Bonhomie Richard, the hero
25Ibid., pp. 145-146.
26Ibid., p. 151.
271 bid., p. 159.
28Ibid., p. 220 ff.
20Personal letter, July 15, 1933.
20Drums, New York (Charles Scribner's Sons), 1927, p. 56.
81Ibid., p. 204.
THE SINGING SOUTH 275
hears "Farewell and adieu to you, fine Spanish ladies".82 Johnny
Fraser's descendant, James, hero of Marching On, epic novel of
the Civil War, tired from a long day behind the plow, wakes up
in the middle of the night and drowns a chorus of frogs with the
fiddle piece about Miss Terrapin and Miss Toad,33 and, later, at
a square dance, "sets his own fiddle under his chin and strikes up
'Leather Breeches':
Mammy sent me off to school.
Leather breeches and a lop-eared mule.
I lit on a stump when the jinney shied
But leather breeches saved my hide".34
Of these and other songs, Mr. Boyd writes me:
As far as the words of 'Rum Puncheon' (Drums) and
'Leather Breeches' (Marching On) go, I made them up my
self. There is a jig tune, 'Leather Breeches', which is often
played at N. C. fiddlers' contests, but I have never heard any
words to it . . . Though I am fairly familiar with both negro
and mountain songs I found it hard to pick out a song' that
would give precisely the effect I wanted at these particular
moments, and was reduced to composing on my own hook.
In addition, as you know, the words of a folk-song often fail
to convey the rhythm?it has to be sung. When it is to be
printed it may give a truer effect to write lines that swing
themselves without the aid of music. But of the defensibility
of the practice I must leave you to judge.35
John Trotwood Moore's Hearts of Hickory, A Story of Andrew
Jackson is an effort; "To histrionize fiction and not to fictionize
history". In an early scene, soldiers in a home-coming parade
after the Creek War "caught up the fife notes with their lips" and
sang "the old marching song":
Home ag'in, home ag'in^
Now we'll drink old Tennessee gin.
Old Zip Coon, Turkey in the Straw,
I'd ruther go to hell than go to war!
March on, march on,
There's one more river to cross,
March on, march on,
I'd swap my gun for an old blin' hoss.88
"Ibid., p. 395
^Marching On, New York (Scribner's), 1927, pp. 23-4.
S4,Ibid., pp. 87 and 151-152. Other songs, 319, 413, 425.
^Personal letter, July 22, 1933.
S6Nashville (Cokesbury Press), 1926, p. 18.
276_by ARTHUR PALMER HUDSON
Other variations of "Old Zip Coon" are sung by Davy Crockett
at a dance. Old Sam Williams, General Jackson's bugler, who
"blowed hell an' damnation from the Tennessee River to the
Horseshoe Bend", composed this song?"made it myself to fit) the
bugle"?and sang it:
Ole Gabri'l wuz standin' by the gate,
An' a-watching' down below-ah,
Dah's jes' one minute fur to wait
To heah dat bugle blowah, etc.87
At Davy Crockett's dance the players sing an old play-party song,
"This is the Way to London Town".88
In Stark Young's Heaven Trees a charmingly whimsical tale
of a pre-Civil War family of Panola County, Mississippi, occurs
a scene illustrative of a common practice among gentle-folk all
over the South. Randall Oliver, a Memphis lawyer, sings "Lord
Randall" as a parlor song, to the accompaniment of his sweetheart,
Georgia, Clay/0 The setting softens the elemental tragedy of the
haunting old balladand the ballad infuses Old World melancholy
into the scene.
Two examples of folk-song in the historical short story must
suffice. Percy MacKaye's "The British Lady or Singing Willie's
Tale"41 contains a ballad telling the story of a lovely lady who
followed her soldier sweetheart to "Amerikee", all dressed up in a
"fine reddy coat", calling as she sought him through the forest,
"O sweet, sweet, William". One of Braddock's men, William, has
fallen in the bloody forest. His true love becomes a redbird
(cardinal), and still seeks him, whistling the plaintive call. Sing
ing Willie also sings "The Wagoner Lad", as he cracks the "whip
lash made of the strings of his heart". Another song is a version
of the old English "Harm Link", beginning "I git on Ole Smoky
all kivered with snow". Merle Colby's "The Half Quarter Sec
tion"*2 contains a satirical song which, the author remarks, was
"Ibid., p. 18.
z8Ibid., p. 22.
**Ibid., p. vol.
*?New York (Scribner's), 1926.
"Ibid., pp. 54-55.
^Atlantic Monthly, vol. 144, p. 166.
THE SINGING SOUTH 277
sung all up and down the Mississippi in the early nineteenth cen
tury. Of the numerous stanzas, one will serve:
Fer nineteen years I have not eat
Of pork, ner beef, ner civilized meat;
I bought me a clock with a heifer-cow,
And the clock don't run, but the clock tax do.
Woman, old woman, draw the latch string in.
I reckon as how I'm yankied again.
The relation of these songs to the technique of the short story pre
sents nothing new in principle. The main difference is quanti
tative. Space considerations, so pressing in the economy of the
short story, naturally minimize the number of songs and the
length of pieces.
Broadly considered, the songs in these historical novels and
short stories are employed in the interest of historical realism.
They serve a purpose similar to that of notations on dress, food,
arms, customs, religious belief and feeling, political events and
opinions, and actual historical happenings. They are, for the
most part, songs that the particular people in the given settings
could or would have sung. Some of tjiem serve a realism that is
little more than external. Some, for example, as in Miss Johnston's
Croatan, release an emotion implicit in a given situation, or, as in
the same author's The Great Valley, point a natural scene. Handled
by experienced story-tellers, they are usually invoked or evoked in
accordance with sound psychology. The workings of mental as
sociations educe most of them. Only a few, for example, one or
two in Croatan, seem to point to worked-up situations. On the
other hand, as, to take another example from the same author, in
The Great Valley, many naturally suggest the mental equipment
and habits of the characters. The "Hannibal Hane" ballad of
Old Bethel is a splendid instance from The Great Meadow.
II.
It is the deepening and broadening of the last-named tendency
that justifies separation of fiction of contemporary Southern life
from historical fiction of the same region. Fiction being what it
is and the practitioners often cultivating both types, there could
be no marked differences in kind. Elizabeth Madox Roberts, for
278_by ARTHUR PALMER HUDSON
example, is the author both of the historical novel The Great
Meadow and of such studies of recent or contemporary Southern
life as The Life of Man and My Heart and My Flesh. The scenes
depicted and the human nature delineated in all three are much the
same. Indeed, the people of The Great Meadow are the ancestors
of those in the other two novels, and Miss Roberts describes them
in terms of first-hand knowledge of their descendants, using two
songs traditionally current in her own family. But Miss Roberts
and the other fictionists to be considered in this group know their
people and their setting in time at first hand. Hence they are
more able to penetrate beyond exteriors, to< enter into the inner
lives of their characters, to describe scenes in terms of a reality
perceived and imaginatively assimilated rather than merely created
out of data obtained from reading. Their material is stamped
with the living images of the source whence itsprings. It is more
thoroughly assimilated to American tradition.
The most interesting and artistic use of folk-song in the fiction
of this group is that which serves description of the inner, imagi
native lives of the characters. Indeed, we often listen to a song
hovering in the sub-conscious and emerging only in phrases and
snatches, like the verbal substance of dreams.
The Time of Man1 is the story of a Kentucky tenant-farmer
family living in the latter half of the nineteenth celntury. Ellen
Chesser, sitting on a stone in the middle of the creek bed, muses :
And a story about a horse could talk and one about Fair
Eilender, "0 mother, O mother, come riddle my sport, Come
riddle it all as one. Must I go marry fair Eilender?" Eilen
der, that's me. And people a-dyin' for grief and people a
dyin' for sorrow ... I know a right smart o' pieces
. . .2
Searching for a turkey hen which had failed to bring her brood
back to the pasture, Ellen "began to sing a song she had heard
Ben sing:
Oh, little Blue Wing is a pretty thing
All dressed out so fine.
Her hair comes a-tumblin' down her back
And the boys can't beat her time.3
*New York (The Viking Press), 1926.
2P. 38.
8P. 91.
THE SINGING SOUTH_279
Continuing her walk, she slips into another song, a medley:
Liddy Margaret died like it might be today,
Like it might be today, like it might be today,
And he saw the bones of a thousand men.*
Later, at a party where she is a wallflower, she sees Jim Townley,
who plays the guitar, look at her. Suddenly she is no longer sad
about her torn shoes or her lonely nights.
'I can sing a song'. 'Well, sing it', Mr. Townley said. 'I
can sing "Lady Nancy Belle"?that's a story my mammy
taught me a long time ago, one she learned offen her grannie,
I can sing "Lucy is a mighty Generous Lady"?whichever
you'd rather'. 'Sing both'. She sang?'Lord Lovel he stood
by his castle wall'.5
The seven other genuine folk-songs (dance or play-party pieces,
"Sourwood Mountain", "Joe Bowers", a traditional version of the
song out of which Burns wrought "Red, Red Rose"), though per
fectly adapted, are of more or less extrinsic relation to Ellen's
story.6
The remainder of the letter (already quoted in part) pertinent
to Miss Roberts' practice is as follows:
The folk elements in the work of my sister, Miss Elizabeth
Madox Roberts, are derived directly from the folk. Most
of the songs mentioned or quoted were sung in my family.
(The popular songs, especially of 'My Heart and My Flesh',
were heard on all sides at the time they were being sung.)
Of the ballads . . . grandmother sang 'Barbara Allen' and parts
of the Lady Nancy Belle ballad. My sister used Josephine
McGill's 'Folksongs of the Kentucky Mountains' to refresh
her memory of the songs, but she used no song that was not
heard either in her family or among the people about her.
Exquisite psychological synthesis marks the use of folk-songs
in the novels of Maristan Chapman. The Happy Mountain, a
twentieth-century story of the Kentucky mountains, has for its
central character Waits (Wait-Still-on-the-Lord) Lowe. Waits
?p. 92.
6I bid., pp. 114-115.
8Pp. 145, 149, 257, 324. My Heart and My Flesh (1927) has six songs or tags,
of more recent origin, but all popular. "Down she came as soft as silk" (p.
270) shows fine adaptation, and the "peasecod" piece (283) is charming.
280_by ARTHUR PALMER HUDSON
has just announced to father and mother his resolve to see the
world beyond Glen Hazard. He
loped down to the spring to fill his bucket, and his heart
was light thathis mother had made no matter against his
going. His voice rose, lilting from among the laurel ... :
Far* y' well, my mother dear,
Far' y' well to barn and byre;
*N' far' y' well, my pretty girl,
That kindles my mother's fire.7
Discussing his wanderlust with Dena, his sweetheart, Waits says:
What I crave is the kind o' words that fits in with the world.
I guess maybe it's being so crazed over the lilting smooth
sounds of life. When I can dance 'n' sing I feel good, because
I'm all part of the dancin' V singin'; and when I come out
of it, I think "Now efn I had words like that I'd be all of a
piece instead of all torn up". Words ought properly to be
lilting sounds, which those I got ain't.8
The numerous other songs quoted,
seven (including interesting
versions of "The Gypsy Laddy" and "Dives and Lazarus"), show
fine adaptation to the inwardness of character and situation.8 One
song in the same authors' The Weather Tree, sung by Thelma
Lane, a young mountain woman who is hanging out quilts to dry,
is an example in point:
She'll be driving six white horses
Gin she comes, gin she comes,
She'll be driving six white horses
Gin she comes, gin she comes.10
Asked who "she" is, Thelma replies,
"
It is no "She" but White
Oak Creek' ?.
For her literary partnership, Mrs. Chapman writes me the fol
lowing delightful comment on the songs in the Chapman stories:
. . . The mountain people do a great deal of singing because
it is a natural emotional outlet. As singing, it leaves much
to be wished, for it is usually committed in a plaintive minor
whine. Its sincerity of purpose and its vigor make up for the
7The Happy Mountain (Viking Press), 1928, p. 8.
Hbid., p. 33
*Pp. 22, 24, 35, 61, 101-102, 131, 300.
The Weather Tree, New York (The Viking Press), 1932, p. 152.
THE SINGING SOUTH 281
lack of voice, and this type of "ballet moanin" grows on one,
like a taste for olives. It endears itself to the sympathetic
and is ear-wracking to the unacquainted?like the bagpipes
of Scotland.
As to the sources of our song material,
... I must confess
a lack of system. When anyone in our stories starts singing,
she sings the most likely song, or the first thing we happen to
remember. The sources of our material are no more than a
good memory for the fragments that our friends are apt to
sing. The endless adaptations and personal and local 'twists'
given to familiar ballads make a puzzling trail for the re
search student. A good general rule is to be careful not to
take too seriously the variants and oddities. Right in the
middle of 'She's comin' 'round the mountain', one evening a
child's voice roared above the rest with this :
She'll be drivin' a pee-wee Austin
Gin she comes, gin she comes,
She'll be drivin' a pee-wee Austin
Gin she comes, etc.
The lad had seen an Austin go by on the highway that day?
the first such creature he had ever laid eyes on, and he thought
'hit'd be fine in the ballet'. They seize upon anything and
stuff it into the songs quite casually, and wewriting folk use
whatever comes handy, just as casually.
Did you know that the mountain songs went well with the
drum as well as the fiddle and that there are 'master drum
mers' in the land?
Singing, fiddling, drum-beating and dancing are the natural
expression of human nature the world over, and cannot be
dragged in simply to bolster up a work of fiction. Perhaps
they do not mean as significantly much as scholars would
have us believe.11
In a number of novels folk-songs are represented not only as a
part of the inner personal lives of the characters but also as a
deeply realized element in consciousness of family and race.
Rose Wilder Lane's Hill-Billy placed in the Ozark hill country
and the nineteenth century, is the story of a family whose back
ground extends to North Carolina and Tennessee in the seven
teenth and eighteenth centuries.
Little old Granny Baird . . . told of the long journey west
"Personal letter, August 23, 1933.
^ew York (Harper & Brothers), 1926.
282_by ARTHUR PALMER HUDSON
ward from Tennessee ... of the fiddling and the dancing and
the old tunes ... In her cracked voice she used to sing
. . .
There was a little ship sailed for North Amerikee,
Oh, the lowland, lonesome sea!
And she went by the name of the Merry Golden Tree . . .
For Granny's people, long and very long ago, had come over
the lonesome sea. There had been a great man, a lord of the
old country . . . Lord Raleigh. He had brought people from
across the sea ... an' their descendants yet abide now in
North Caroliny
. . .
They come to Tennessee . . .
They
brought their old English speech, their old ballads.15
The story of Granny's family is beautified by seven folk-songs,
most of them play-party songs of American origin, used to de
scribe social atmosphere.1*
"My knowledge of these songs", Mrs. Lane writes me, in
an interesting letter too long to be quoted at length, "has
been gained by hearing them sung ... As to the importance
of folk-song in fiction dealing with the South, I think it can
hardly be over-emphasized . . . All Americans sing, ex
press themselves in song, and color their lives with it, more
than anyone would guess from American fiction . . . The
truth is that Americans sing as much as Italians . . . What
may be called genuine foxk-song has lingered in the South
because the South has clung longest to an agrarian culture;
a culture that continued to live, in spite of its surrender at
Appomattox Courthouse ... In general, I would say that no
fiction truly expresses the life, the character, the spirit of a
place and people without using song as part of its material.
Song is as characteristic as speech, and folk-song is an es
sential characteristic of the South".15
In The Mountainy Singer by Harry Harrison Kroll, occurs
this passage descriptive of a character's realization of the meaning
of the songs he has just heard:
It came to Danny as visions occur to a dreamer, and he
felt the high exultation of a great discovery, that the songs of
his people, compared with much of the jazz he grew accus
"Ibid., pp. 3-5, 30.
""Coonie in the holler," p. 43 and pp. 55 and 68; "Lips a-like a cherry", "Get
along, Cindy", pp. 185-187; dance songs and calls, pp. 189, 190-204.
"Letter, August 14, 1933.
16New York (William Morrow & Co.), 1928.
THE SINGING SOUTH 283
tomed to around school, towered far above the popular titles
of 'Hot Mama,' 'You Can't Two-Time Me,' 'You Gotta Stay
in My Bed Every Night'. His lips curled in scorti for such
as this. The butterfly of jazz, as he saw it, had gaudy wings
of but one shade: the lurid color of sex jealousy and sex
rage . . . On the other hand, the songs of his own people had
found the God in it all, for they rang with the abiding emo
tions of man's heart and soul. Even in the crudities of these
songs was the spontaneous power of sincerity. The tragedy
of fickle young love; the decay of old age, and coming back
home to die; the desolation of the forgotten wanderer; home
and kin; the poignant memory of the unlearned lessons in
life; the mother in milk with her first-born, crooning in the
twilight?of such spiritual fabric were cut the patterns of
the hill songs.17
The novel quotes or makes allusion to a dozein or more such songs,
known and sung by the Cumberland Gap people. Concerning
them, Mr. Kroll further writes, in a personal letter to me:
As for the sources of this material, and knowledge of it,
all I could say is that I grew up among backlanders and hill
billies and cotton-patchers, and know their music by heart
because it's a part of my heritage. When reading your letter
it came to my mind how little this type of thing has been used
in a dramatic way in Southern fiction. There ought to be
great possibilities in fiction with a musical motif. All the
more so now, as I'm told the radio is making the type ex
ceedingly popular, especially up North. And the recent song,
'I Love Mountain Music'?or some such title?would in
dicate that Tin Pan Alley has aroused itself from banging out
tunes from sardine cans and turned to a more virile and
native source.18
The remaining novels selected to illustrate this phase of the sub
ject must be passed over hurriedly. All exemplify in varying de
grees and ways the use of folk-song to point scenes, heighten situ
ations, interpret the spirit of a social group, reveal the inwardness
of individual character, illuminate the processes of emotion and
thought.
In Sherwood Anderson's Dark Laughter John Stockton runs
away from his wife and goes for a cruise down the Mississippi.
"Ibid., p. 294. For examples, see pp. 20, 234, 149.
"July 15, 1933.
284_by ARTHUR PALMER HUDSON
Sitting in the shade of a tree by the river, he hears Negro rousta
bouts :
Oh, ma banjo dog,
Oh, ho, ma banjo dog.
An' I ain't go'na give
You none of ma jelly roll?
a song which is repeated elsewhere in the novel, with variations.19
"These ballets, folk-songs, etc., are picked up in all sorts
of odd places", states Mr. Anderson, "and remain in the mind
as spots of color. Often, as you know, they reflect the sad
ness, longing, or gayety of people.
"But, to a wanderer like myself?not
a musician?-and yet
a man who does not take notes, it is hard to remember exact
sources. It happens I do remember the source of the song
'Banjo Dog'. It sprang up among the Negro stevedores on
the old steamer Peerless, on the service between Selma and
Mobile, Alabama. I used to half live on the boats and the
river. There was an old Negro woman who used to come to
a landing to sell pies to the Negro levee men. She had a
little dog named Banjo, and the workmen used to tease her
by threatening to steal the little dog. One Negro would
coax the dog away and the others would imitate the barking
of the dog. The song sprang up?'Oh, my banjo dog', etc.
"There was more to the song that I do not remember".20
In his Teeffallow,a vigorously told tale of the raw! life of the
one-horse farm, the small town, and the construction camp of
contemporary Tennessee hill folk, T. S. Stribling makes effective
use of five folk-songs. In a letter, Mr. Stribling states that "The
sources of this material have been simply what I have heard here
among the hill folk all my life", and that he is neither a musician
nor a student of folk-song.21
Four novels of contemporary life in the Carolinas make use of
a score of folk pieces. Olive Tilford Dargan's Highland Annals,**
a mountain idyl of the Unakas, elaborates a woman's interest in
the songs of her hired man, tenants, and neighbors, quoting from
half a dozen. "Free As a Little Bird" describes the nesting of a
19Dark Laughter, New York (Boni & Liveright), 1925, pp. 73, 85, 113.
^Personal letter, undated, but received in July, 1933.
^Tee ft allow, Garden City (Doubleday, Page & Co.), 1926, pp. 37, 66, 83, 96,
287 ff.; quotation from personal letter, July 9, 1933.
^ew York (Scribner's), 1925.
THE SINGING SOUTH 285
bird.
"
'The verses' ", observes the singer,
"
'are all alike 'ceptin'
the tree is different ever' time. That little bird builds its nest in
nineteen trees, 'fore the song is done; an' it's 'lowable for you to
put in more if you want to an' can think of 'em' ".2a DuBose Hey
ward's Angel** has for its inciting moment a play-party with much
singing, and his Mamba's Daughters'* is rich in Negro spirituals
and secular folk-songs. Paul Green, who is noted for his use of
songs in his plays and is the author of a ballad opera, Tread the
Green Grass, makes characteristic use of six such songs in The
Laughing Pipneers.*6 Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel,*7 an
impressive first-novel of the World War generation, has, to the
author's expressed surprise, a number of folk-songs along with
others of the recent popular variety. "My feeling about the value
of songs of any kind ... is very strong", he writes. "I think they
have a tremendous evocativepower in our memory of the past
and of our childhood".28
Margaret Prescott Montague's comments upon her songs in
Up Eel Riz/er29 are as amusing as that fantasy itself:
. . .
though 'Tony Beaver' is a genuine myth in a certain
part of West Virginia, almost all the material in my book
. . . was made up by myself. This is true also of nearly all
the songs you are interested in, with the exception of those on
pp. 6 and 45. The first one is an adaptation of an old song
I used to hear in the mountains of West Virginia . . .
Go for to milk, and milk it in a gourd,
Set it on the bench and cover it with a board?
That's the way they do in the Tuckahoe crew.
The last line I imagine is applied to any locality that the
singer holds in especial contempt. 'Tuckahoe' happens to
be a hollow in my neighborhood at White Sulphur Springs
which is especially looked down upon by its neighbors. If,
say, Chapel Hill had any special university which it re
garded with aversion, should they sing this song they would
^Ibid., pp. 104-105; other songs, pp. 18, 82,-83, 168-170, 200-201.
^New York (George H. Doran Co.), 1926.
^Garden City (Doubleday, Doran & Co.), n.d., pp. 11, 12, 53, 58, 181.
aeNew York (Robert M. McBride & Co.), 1932, pp. 20, 60, 78-79, 93, 108,
144-145.
^New York (Scribner's), 1929, pp. 24, 55, 94, 168, 233, 283,
^Letter, July 11, 1933.
^ew York (Macmillan), 1928, pp. 1, 5-6, 45, 112, 136, 144-145, 148-49, 186.
286_by ARTHUR PALMER HUDSON
substitute the name of the undesirable university for Tuck
ahoe in the last line. I personally know of no university
where they milk into a gourd, but everything is allowed in
poet's license. The second song you mention on p. 45 is also
a well known bit of folk-song; but who the original owner of
the ox was I have temporarily forgotten, though I cheerfully
stole it for 'Tony Beaver.'30
Nineteen of the twenty-two short stories selected for study81
show the use of folk-song as an important device for the further
ing of plot and the description or suggestion of character and set
ting. The abundance of folk-songs in these stories with Southern
focales, in comparison with the scarcity of them in those treating
other regions, would suggest that the practitioners of short fiction
are more alert to the Singing South than Mr. Kroll thinks.
The. songs in these short stories are ballads of the traditional or
"popularesque" type, Negro spirituals, "Jailhouse Blues", and
occupational and play-party pieces. The smallest group is the
ballads, only four of which, and those contaminated, are Scottish
and English. As the songs appear in the stories they impress an
alert reader as being integral rather than merely decorative. Often
the writer, by recording one of the characters in a moment of song,
transmits more of local mores than by several paragraphs of direct
exposition. Lyle Saxon remarks of a song by one of the characters
in "Cane River": "It's ungodly. After you are baptized, you must
give up your sinful ways, and play and sing hymn tunes or spirit
uals, or 'ballots', or 'jump-up' songs about folks in the Bible".
Again, the inclusion of folk poetry helps powerfully to establish
80Personal letter, July 12, 1933.
31They are: Roark Bradford's "Child of God", Harper's, 154:554, "Cold
Death", Harper's, 157: 215, and "River Witch", 0. Henry Memorial Award Prize
Stories, 1928, p. 115; Dorothy Walworth Carmen's "Every Thursday", Harper*s,
154: 250; Ada Jack Carver's "Cotton Dolly", Harper's, 156:33; Arthur Huff
Fauset's "Symphonesque", 0. Henry Mem., 1926, p. 109; Paul Green's "The
Devil's Instrument", Atlantic, 134:82; DuBose Heyward's "Crown Bess", 0.
Henry Mem. 1925, p. 192; John J. Niles's "Hill Billies", Scr?bner's, 82:605;
Pernet Patterson's "Conjur", E. J. O'Brien ed. Best Short Stories of 1929, p. 206,
"Shoofly", Atlantic, 145:523, and "Buttin' Blood", Atlantic, 142:361; Louis
Reed's "Joe Taylor's Emergency", Atlantic 148:751, "Episode of the Pawpaws",
ibid., 149:572, "God Helps the Poor Man", ibid., p. 783, and "Ghosts of Poca,
River", ibid., 150:97; Eleanor Risley's "Shady Cove", ibid., 145:205; Elizabeth
Madox Roberts' "Children of the Earth", Harper's, 157:753; Lyle Saxon's "Cane
River", 0. Henry Mem. 1926, p. 213; Malcolm Vaughn's "Exit Mammy", Scrib
ner's, 80:406.
THE SINGING SOUTH 287
mood, as, for example, "Cry Some More" in Arthur Huff Fauset's
"Symphonesque", or the "Jailhouse Blues" song "Thirty Days in
Jail" in Roark Bradford's "Child of God". Many of the tags
have a foreboding content, as Aunt Runa's "Chil-ly water" in
Pernet Patterson's "Conjur". In short, the artist, conscious of
the severe demands of his pattern, makes organic use of folk
poetry. For writers who specialize in a certain locale, folk-songs
are an inevitable element of material. Iluminating examples are
afforded by the work of DuBose Heyward, in which Catfish Row
and the Sea Islands are ever-recurrent settings. In the ballads,
spirituals, and other less classifiable releases, Mr. Heyward re
produces intensively the traits of characters as they are related to
their peculiar environment.
Notwithstanding the capital examples which these stories yield,
the number of the stories themselves is comparatively small.
American writers are rather indifferent to the possibilities of the
material. Even among Southern writers, who use the material
most often, only about one story in seven uses folk-song.
III.
Eight of the pieces of fiction chosen for study, besides making
use of folk-song for all the purposes hitherto described, employ it
for even more essential and organic purposes: They use it to
define the main theme, or to mark the plot structure, or to do both.
Of The Quare Women, A Story of the Kentucky Mountains,1
Lucy Furman says, "The atmosphere of this story, its background,
and even many of its incidents, arise from the author's connection
with the Hindman Settlement School, in Knott County, Ken
tucky".2 "The quare women come in from furrin parts and sot
'em up some cloth houses", preliminary to founding the school,
and begin community health work. They import Isabel Gwynne,
promptly dubbed "The Singin' Gal", from the Blue Grass, to as
sist in Settlement singing. Against a social background still feudal,
in both the original and the Kentucky senses, with its ballad-sing
ing Aunt Ailsie Pridemore and Fuit Fall?n, is set the love story
aBoston (The Atlantic Monthly Press), c. 1923.
2Ibid., p. viii.
288_by ARTHUR PALMER HUDSON
of "The Singin' Gal" and the feud leader. Of the ten or more
ballads described or sung (most of them sung, at length),
with
minute accounts of the manner of singing or the effects, the ma
jority are used to motivate action or to mark the phases of plot.
Fuit and Isabel first become acquainted and mutually interested
through an exchange of songs including the former's "Turkish
Lady" and "Barbara Allen".8 To the former Isabel "listened, in
expressibly charmed. 'Do you realize . . . that that ballad goes
way back to the time of the Crusades?'
"
Later, Fuit remarks, of
Isabel's taste,
"
The older they are, the better she likes them?
them old way-back ones that come over from old England and
Scotland long time ago' ". He sings her "Lady Isabel and the
Elf Knight" because her name is "in hit", and, in the words of
the author, "many another ancient ballad . . . forgotten by the
more fortunately placed, to become to the mountaineer, in his iso
lation, the sole outlet for imagination and fancy, the chief source
of inspiration and ideals". Soon,, "Isabel felt as if, in his person,
Romance itselfj
. . . was advancing swiftly toward her from the
veils and shadows of bygone centuries".* Fuit mistakes her feel
ing for him and proceeds to woo her in accordance with his "chief
source of inspiration and ideals". In fact, he abducts her, ex
plaining and justifying his action in terms of ballad logic.6 Re
conciliation is effected through a gorgeous ballad tajbleau enter
tainment at the school?"scenes from the old ballads", to accom
pany which "Fuit sang the ballads", including "The Turkish
Lady", "Barbara Allen", "Jackaroo", and "Lord Lovel".9 The
total effect of Quare Women closely resembles that of a ballad
opera.
To a less extent, this is also true of the same author's The Lone
some Road? which gets its title and theme from the song of the
same name, and uses stanzas in order to mark plot structure.
Two of Dorothy Scarborough's novels, Can't Get a Redbird and
The Wind? illustrate almost exactly the same principles. The
?Pp. 77-79.
4pp. 107-131.
?pp. 188-202.
epp. 203-205.
'Boston (Little, Brown & Co.), 1927.
8New York (Harper's), 1929 and 1925, respectively.
THE SINGING SOUTH 289
former, however, owes little more than theme and title to the
play-party song in particular. The latter is an elaborate applica
tion of two songs to the telling of a story. Letitia Mason, a Vir
ginia girl, orphaned, comes to live with relatives at Sweetwater,
Texas, marries, and is driven to marital infidelity, murder, and
madness by nostalgia and the ceaseless wind of the plains. The
meeting on the train between Letitia and Wirt Roddy, who.is to
be her fate, is rendered ominous by the latter's singing of the first
stanza of "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie".9 Her first impression
of the vast bleak spaces, the sand and the wind, reminds her of an
old spiritual, "I run to the rock for to hide my face".10 These two
songs, though there are others used for atmosphere, bear the
burden of mood and mark inciting moment, climax, and catas
trophe. The young wife kills Roddy, finds "No hiding-place" for
herself or the body, and, in her madness, imagines she hears the
corpse singing, "But they buried him there on the lone prai-rie".
Olive Tilford Dargan's Call Home the Heart,11 exuberant and
beautiful story of present-day life in western North Carolina,
makes partial use of songs as thematic and structural material.
At least two pieces, one of great technical value to the novel, ap
pear to be the author's own, composed in the manner of the folk
song.12 The others are traditional. Call Home the Heart tells of
the lovemaking, marriage, toil, marital infelicities, and eventual
reconciliation of Britt and Ishma. Both are distinguished singers
in a singing community. They make love in song, mark the
rhythm of their field labor by song, play and sport to song, find
their varied emotional releases in song, and kiss and make up in
song. The fine d?nouement scene, of which more later, is woven
about a ballad spontaneously composed by their neighbors.
In a somewhat different way, Harry Harrison Kroll demon
strates the "possibilities in fiction with a musical motif3 in his
own The Mountainy Singer. Uncle Dave Saxon, "the Moun
tainy singer", brings home to Danny Hubbard and Shoon West
brook the meaning of their racial and cultural birthright, and con
?Ibid., p. 23.
10P. S3
nNew York (Longmans, Green & Co.), 1932. See pp. 28 and 175-177.
^See pp. 48, 68, 136, 138 (probably also of the author's composition).
13Previously cited.
3
290_by ARTHUR PALMER HUDSON
scious pride in those homebred values out of which a good life can
be built.1*
Two short stories will suffice to illustrate similar use of folk
poetry in that genre. Wilbur Daniel Steele's "Satan Am a
Snake"15 derives title, theme, and a climactic signal from a song of
the same name. Onecharacter described another in the words of
the "good song":
Satan am a snake,
An' he lay in de grass,
An* always he wait
Whar de Christian pass.
Satan am a liah,
An' a cunjur too,
Ef you don't watch out
He conjur you.
At the appropriate moment the last stanza rings out triumphantly:
Satan am mad,
An' I am glad.
He done los' a soul
He thought he had.
"Curtains", by the late Fiswoode Tarleton,16 has for its setting
a Southern hill town on election day. The Valentines challenge
the forces of law and order. High Sheriff Jett characterizes as
"a ballard sung by a skunk" a popular poetic celebration of their
defiance, of which this stanza is a sample:
'What air you a-waitin' fer, Brant Valentine?'
'I air awaitin' fer steam train a-tearin' tha night'.
'0 what you a-goin' to do, Brant Valenine?'
'Air a-goin' through train like hell in sight'.
The sheriff takes up the gage, is desperately wounded, and car
ried home. His fellow-citizens, inspired by his courage, rise up
and wipe out the gang. As the sheriff is returning to consciousness,
he hears the hill men, riding by his home singing a spontaneously
composed ballad telling the whole story:
14See p. 294.
^Harper's, 157:305.
16Dark and Bloody Ground, A Cycle of the Southern Mountains, New York
(Lincoln MacVeagh: The Dial Press), 1929.
THE SINGING SOUTH 291
High Sheriff Jett braved twelve bad men,
Jett afeard o' nothin' we-uns could see.
Stood like Dan'l in ol' lions den,
Faced Killer Brant purty as you please.
Bad Brant's body air a-swingin' from tree,
Body up high an' soul gone down.
Hit's a black night, but Lord can see;
Lord fotched kiver fer bloody groun'.
IV.
In several of the works already referred to in other connections,
the authors' employment of ballads for fictional purposes seems
to be modified by some knowledge of ballad history and theory.
It is not the purpose here to decide whether this knowledge is
accurate or not. It will be enough to show that such knowledge
actually affects technique.
The most elaborate and interesting example occurs in Call Home
the Heart. Ishma has deserted Britt, eloping to a mill town with
Rad Bailey. Preacher Siler has just "churched" Ishma. Britt,
having waited outside the church during excommunication pro
ceedings, invites Siler, no mean fighting man, to unfrock himself.
In the fist-and-skull which follows, Britt wins, and the preacher
loses both fight and breeches.The sequel can best be presented
in Mrs. Dargan's own words:
While Alec was heading the rescue, Si Welch called two or
three men
apart?Si was the best ballit-maker . . . and the
men he singled out were good seconds. By the time the
preacher was gently picked up and set in Uncle Samuel
Wayne's buggy to be taken home, the ballit-makers had put
something together that would do to begin with . . . They
set Britt on a stump, and a circle was formed about him.
'I'll sing the first verse and chorus', sing it to Lovir? Babe.
Everybody knows that tune. Whoever wants to can be
makin' words up. . . .'
Twas on the forks of Ivy, Boys,
A Sunday fine in May,
Our preacher throwed his long coat off,
A fighting man is he.
Then come, my dear, aw come, my dear!
Come give me yore right hand!
For I have seen the purtiest fight
Was ever fought in the land.
292_by ARTHUR PALMER HUDSON
(Si was in such a tilt that he pitched into the next stanza
without waiting for the chorus.)
The preacher lost his breeches, sirs,
An' Britt he's lost his shirt,
They soak in blood, they pound the mud,
But never they'll bite the dirt'.1
'Now', he said, 'I want ever'body here to make up lines for
this ballit an' git 'em to me by nex' Saturday night. We'll
meet at my house. But howsomever long
. . . it's goin' to end
this away:
'An Ishmer she was cryin' that night,
Cryin' to Rad Bailee,
"I wish I's home with my oP true boy,
A-sittin' on his knee" '.
Now, to anyone with only a casual knowledge of ballad theory,
this episode is a full-blown example of communal composition.
Every condition, every step in the process, every feature of the
result is present.
A small tribal gathering, assembled . . . for the purpose of
celebrating some occasion of common interest . . . The object
... is known to all . . . There is unity of feeling and a com
mon stock of ideas and traditions. The dancing and singing,
in which all share, are . . .
closely related . . . Here we have
the 'folk,' ... a singing, dancing throng subjected as a unit to
a mental and emotional stimulus . . .
Different members of the throng, one after another, may
chant each his verse, composed on the spur of the moment,
and the sum of these various contributions makes a song.
This is communal composition
. . .
This passage, with much more too familiar to require more ex
tensive quotation,is Professor Kittredge's exposition of Gum
mere's theory of communal composition.2 It is the best known of
all the expositions, but the theory has found its way into prac
tically all histories of English literature written in the past thirty
years, and has colored most popular accounts, encyclopedia treat
ments, and even dictionary definitions, of the folk ballad. Few
educated persons living to-day can have escaped contact with the
XPP. 175-177.
2English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Student's Cambridge Edition, edited by
Helen Child Sargent and George Lyman Kittredge, Boston (Houghton Mifflin
Company), c. 1904, pp. xix ff.
THE SINGING SOUTH 293
theory in some form or another. The author of Call Home the
Heart may have witnessed such an instance of communal com
position as that which she describes, or may have learned of the
process from other sources than books. But it seems highly im
probable, even under such a hypothesis, that she would or could
have treated her episode as she has done without additional the
oretical knowledge.8
The story of the hill-men who made a "ballard" of how "High
Sheriff Jett braved twelve bad men" and were singing it while the
Sheriff was regaining consciousness from the effects of his wound
will be recalled at this point. Here, however, nothing is said about
the actual process of composition, though it seems to be clearly
implied; yet the piece is certainly represented as the product of
spontaneous folk composition. Such a fictional episode seems
improbable without the assumption of something more than gen
eral knowledge, on the author's part, of the theory of communal
composition.
Other instances, in pieces of fiction before noted, of how a par
ticular technical effect turns upon some knowledge of the history of
folk poetry need only to be recalled in this connection. Much of
the romantic feeling about folk-songs cherished by the author
of Quare Women and shared with her characters grows out of
a knowledge of their antiquity and age-old associations. Of the
play-party songs we are told that Aunt Ailsie's "ancestors had
played them on village greens in Old England for centuries",*
and Aunt Ailsie herself is informed by one of the "quare women"
that "These old ballads you sing were made in England and Scot
land hundreds of years ago, and brought across the sea by your
ancestors". Fult's charm for Isabel, the motivation of his con
duct as a lover, and Isabel's consciousness of his ballad-hero psy
chology?these shadings of character and conduct spring from
the author's critical conception of ballads. Similarly, ideas about
the history of ballads and the ways of popular transmission under
lie this passage from Harry Harrison Kroll's The Mountainy
Singer:
30n this point, the author wrote me, "Some day I will try to answer your
question No. 2".
*P. 22.
294_by ARTHUR PALMER HUDSON
The song was not new to the hearers at all?the air was a
ballad tune that their forefathers had brought over the seas
from Scotland three hundred years before; and these fore
fathers had had the same tune from their forefathers prob
ably back to the days of the Vikings. Uncle Dave had
modernized the dungeon and made it into a jail; he had sub
stituted the rock pile for the prisoner's chain. He had placed
upon it the trimmings of mountain life instead of Scottish
highland life, and palmed it off as his own?as indeed it was,
and freely admitted by his audience.6
This latter trick at once reminds us of Miss Roberts' Old Bethel.
In The Great Valley, Mary Johnston imputes to her Scottish family
of the eighteenth century the well-attested historical fact that
secular ballads were frowned upon by strict Calvinists?a fact (no
doubt observed, however, in present-day life) mentioned by others
of our novelists.8
Further evidence in support of the point can be presented only
by allusion. Such writers as Mary Johnston, James Boyd, and
Margaret Prescott Montague freely state that they invent folk
like songs. Dorothy Scarborough is the author of a fine scholarly
work on folk-songs.7 Rose Wilder Lane writes that she is the
author of an unpublished article on "The Ozarks Play-Party".8
Elizabeth Madox Roberts freshens her memory of folk-songs by
consulting a well-known collection. All of these connections imply
scholarly contact. The consequences
are often self-evident. Even
in the fiction of those writers who expressly deny semi-scholarly
knowledge or critical interest it is evident by their use of folk
song that their consciousness of it has been stirred by general
information traceable ultimately to scholarly work in the field. In
the stories by many of those from whom no self-furnished state
ment has been obtained the strong probability of scholarly in
fluence has been suggested.
BP. 22. Few Scholars to-day would substantiate this association, and Lucy
Furman's (previously quoted), of ballads with a period so remote as that of
the Vikings or the early Middle Ages (see G. H. Ger?uld's The Ballad of Tra
dition, Oxford, 1932, and Louise Pound's Poetic Origins and the Ballad, New
York, 1921).
6Cf. the chapter "Devil's Ditties" in Quare Women.
^On the Trail of Negro Folk Songs, Cambridge (Harvard University Press)?
1921.
8Personal letter, previously quoted in part.
THE SINGING SOUTH 295
The "Little Bird" in Mrs. Dargan's hired man's song 'built its
nest in nineteen places 'fore the song was done'. Lest this study
attempt to emulate that busy fowl, it must be brought to its nesting
place.
The use of 207 folk-songs in forty-seven works of fiction de
scriptive of life in the South, by thirty-one different writers, is
a basic fact that alone attests the importance of folk poetry as
fictional material. The examples of this use have illustrated the
variety and the organic quality of the media afforded by the
songs: bright threads for the tapestry of history, elementary colors
for genre painting of folk scenes, and character-revealing high
lights and shadows for the chiaroscuro of individual personality;
thematic and choral music to suggest the moods and signalize the
stages of dramatic action; and the spirit and substance of action
itself. Specific practice, and express statements from one-third of
the writers represented, furthermore bespeak an interest in folk
song, sometimes scholarly and scientific, always intelligent and1
sympathetic. Judged in terms of its consequences in creative art,
the work of scholars in the field of Southern folk-song has not been
barren of fruit.
As to further conclusions, again in the words of Mrs. Dargan's
hired man, 'it's 'lowable forthe reader to put in more if he wants
to an' can think of 'em'.