CHAPTER VI
BALLADRY IN AMERICA
American interest in ballads and in other folk-songs has arisen mainly as an aftermath of the quest of Old World traditional texts on this side of the Atlantic. Some impulse has come from other sources. The collection and preservation of many popular songs and ballads of the Revolution and of the Civil War is to be credited to historians, although no consistent effort was made at the psychological time to assemble and to preserve such pieces. Of leading importance was the impetus given to the recovery of American folk-song by Professor Francis James Child. He accumulated a vast number of broadsides and orally preserved texts in the Harvard University library, and since his death material has been added steadily through the vigilant personal interest and the stimulus to others of Professor G. L. Kittredge. Professor Kittredge has encouraged the gathering and identification of traditional texts from various parts of the United States for many years, and students of folk-song are deeply in his debt. Another historic name among scholars is that of W. W. Newell, a pioneer collector of the songs and games of American children and a founder of the American Folk-Lore Society.
In recent decades, many regional collectors have gathered material, especially along the Atlantic coast, in the South, and in the Central West, and the realization has arisen that there is a picturesque body of orally preserved song on this side of the Atlantic. Such traditional material is of interest to the lover of poetry for the occasional flashes of quality which it exhibits and for its contrast to book poetry. It is of interest to the student of literature for the value as social documents of the pieces it preserves, and for the evidence which they give concerning the development and transmission of folk-songs. Enough material is already available to throw light on many points of geographical distribution, and of song history, and to establish some main lines of grouping.
I. OLD-WORLD BALLADS AND SONGS IN AMERICA
Of the types of folk-song existent in America, the legendary and romantic ballads of England and Scotland, large numbers of which have emigrated to the New World, are those which have been recovered and examined with the greatest interest. They have found many enthusiastic collectors.[1] If they have not quite monopolized the foreground in discussions of American folk-song they have nearly done so. They constitute the folk-pieces most archaic in style and having the longest history. They are those most easily sought and identified by the average searcher for traditional material, since they are to be found in printed collections, and there is no little mystery concerning their origin. They have reached this country in various "ways. Some surely were brought over by the early colonists and were handed down by their descendants. Others may have been brought over not long after by sailors or returned travellers. Still others enter from time to time with newcomers from the British Isles. The process of importation has not quite ceased.
Old World ballads in the United States are, on the whole, best recovered from regions where the songs and song modes of the past have not been displaced by the entrance of later songs and song modes. At times such texts come to light in cities, but much more characteristically they are salvaged from remote and isolated communities unsupplied with later popular songs and relying still upon the entertainment of song, instead of upon the variety of present devices available for passing the time of young and old. Outlying rural districts, particularly mountain communities, yield especial results. The best hunting grounds for collectors have been the North Atlantic States and the Southern mountains, like the Cumberland mountains — the Appalachian region in general; that is, those regions of the United States which were earliest settled. In the West, villages and isolated farms and ranches yield an occasional Old World ballad, but a text is likely to be recovered wherever some newcomer from an older community has settled, or, especially, some immigrant to the New World; or where the descendants of such newcomers have good memories for their parents' songs. A few traditional ballads have lingered as nursery songs; for example Lord Randal, The Two Brothers, and Larrikin.
Texts or fragments of nearly 80 of the 305 ballads included in the Child collection have been recovered in the United States,[2] mainly from oral sources, sometimes from manuscript books. As regards distribution, the Southern mountains and the New England states have yielded the greatest returns, though some texts have been recovered from the central West and even from the far West. Leading in popularity among them is Barbara Allen's Cruelty: —[3]
'Twas in the merry month of May
When the green buds were a-swelling
Sweet William on his death bed lay
For the love of Barbara Allen.
Another widely current favorite is Lord Lovel, sometimes transformed to Lord Lover, whose hero goes on a journey after bidding farewell to his sweetheart, returns, and finds her dead.
"0 where are you going, Lord Lovel? " she said,
"O where are you going?" says she.
"I'm going, my lady Nancy Bell,
Strange countries for to see, see, see,
Strange countries for to see."
Another popular importation is the ballad of Lord Bateman (Bakeman, Bayham, etc), the Young Beichan of the Scottish ballad, who is rescued from a Turkish prison by his captor's daughter. She follows him seven years later to his own country, arrives on the eve of his wedding to another, and herself becomes his bride. The Two Sisters, one of whom pushes the other into a mill stream where she is drowned, and Geordie, also have considerable currency. Lord Randal roams the country under many aliases. As recovered in a Colorado railway camp [4] the song tells the tragic story of Johnny Randall.
"Where was you last night, Johnny Randall, my son?
"Where was you last night, my heart's loving one?"
"A-flshing, a-fowling, mother make my bed soon,
For I'm sick at my heart and I fain would lie down."
He becomes Jimmy Randall in Illinois, Jimmy Ransing in Indiana, Johnny Ramble in Ohio, and Johnny Randolph in North Carolina. Most of the Old World ballads preserved in the United States are upon themes of romantic love, of tragedy, and adventure. Little Harry Hughes, deriving from Sir Hugh and the Jew's Daughter, is a legacy of the mediaeval superstitions against the Jews. A riddle ballad remains, The Cambric Shirt, which bears some relation to The Elfin Knight, and a few sea pieces survive, like The Three Sailor Boys, related to The Mer maid, and The Golden Vanity, or The Lowlands Low.
What has happened to these Old World pieces in the New? Have they improved or decayed from their English and Scottish originals? Some are spun out by repetition and iteration and lose their cohesion in garrulousness. Most are made over to agree with a democratic environment and with the horizons of their singers. The Child ballads have to do with the high born. They tell of the adventures of kings and princesses and nobles, combats, the chase, clan feuds, the domestic tragedies of aristocrats. These pass in America into plebeian narratives of homelier setting; the unknown, in names, or objects, or descriptive terms, is made over into the known, in the folk-etymological manner. Localizations are changed, as well as names and characters. Serious events are often vulgarized or made commonplace. The romantic aristocratic elements are dimmed. Lord Randal's metamorphosis has been mentioned. In many American versions, Sir John and Sir Hugh of The Two Brothers become two little schoolboys. Sometimes the supernatural is lost, as when the devil in some versions of The Ship's Carpenter becomes a returned lover; or when, as in some versions of The Farmer s Curst Wife, he disappears. A few have been utilized as game or dance songs, as Barbara Allen's Cruelty and The Two Sisters. The Two Brothers in its Nebraska version, seems to be turning into a Western song: —
"0 what shall I tell your true love, John,
If she inquires for you?"
"O tell her I'm dead and lying in my grave,
Way out in Idaho."
Each ballad may be accommodated to a variety of melodies; it is a safe generalization that the texts of ballads are more constant than the melodies. Occasionally ballads cross or become disordered and a new amalgam song emerges.[5] Rarely mannerisms of the English and Scottish ballads spread to indigenous pieces. On the "whole, the degenerative effects of oral preservation are well exemplified by the mass of Old World pieces which have been recovered in America. Not brought over, or dying out early if they were brought over, are heroic tales and border ballads, and songs turning on local customs, as harvest songs, carols, and the like.
But the legendary English and Scottish ballads reaching America are not the only ballads to be imported. In later British balladry commonplace characters replace the aristocrats and other styles the minstrel style. British ballads of this later type, on the themes of the broadside press of the last two centuries, have far greater currency in the United States than do the legendary and romantic ballads. Of this type is The Butcher's Boy, in one text of which a girl from Jersey City loves a butcher's boy, but he deserts her for another "because she has more gold than L" At the close of the song the girl hangs herself, leaving lines pinned on her breast. It is related to the British A Brisk Young Lover. The Boston Burglar, or Charleston, is related to A Sheffield Apprentice. The speaker says that he was brought up by honest parents but his "character was taken" and he could not be cleared. He was sent as the " Boston Burglar" to Charleston.
And every station I would pass
I'd hear the people say,
There goes a Boston burgular,
See he's all bound in iron.
Jack Williams is a boatman by trade. For the sake of a girl be took to robbing and was brought back to Sing Sing (Newgate) : —
On Bowery (Chatton) street I did reside,
Where the people did me know,
I fell in love with a pretty girl,
She proved my overthrow.
Of greater interest is Betsy Brown, which derives obviously from colonial days.[6] A woman's son, Johnny, loves Betsy the servant. The mother takes Betsy to the seaside where she sells her across to "verginny." Her son dies and the mother repents her act too late. This ballad has been recovered from New England, the central West, and the far West. A Nebraska text is in manuscript form and preserves the story pretty completely.
O son, O son, your love's in vain for we sold Betsy cross the main;
My son, my son, my son, says she, your bringing scandal on you and me,
I would rather see your corpse lie dead than to marry betsy a servant maid.
Older still, in all probability, is The Death of a Romish Lady which has also reached the central West. It tells the story of a lady who became a convert to Protestantism, possessed a Bible, and would not "bow to idols." For this her cruel mother had her brought before the priests and burned.
There lived a Romish lady
Brought up in proper array,
Her mother oftimes told her
She must the priest obey.
This is to be identified with the Elizabethan "It was a lady's daughter, of Paris properly," introduced into Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle. The earliest text preserved is a reprint from the times of Charles II.[7] The American texts have been shortened a little, in three centuries, and show simplification, but the original narrative is well preserved.
Of Old World provenance is also the widely diffused Willie and Mary or the Bedroom Window, sometimes known also as The Drowsy Sleeper. It hints a tragedy not carried out in most texts.
"O Mary dear, go ask your father
If you my wedded bride can be.
If he says nay then come and tell me,
And I no more will trouble thee."
"O Willie dear, I dare not ask him,
For he lies on his bed of rest,
And by his side there lies a dagger
To pierce the one that I love best."
Songs of the pirate Captain Kidd and of Turpin the highwayman still have currency in American folk-song. Father Grumble, or Old Grumble, has many aliases and is a song of Old World pedigree, but the same story is always told. Father and Mother Grumble exchange tasks for the day and the former comes to grief.
Father Grumble he did say,
As sure as the moss round a tree,
That he could do more work in a day
Than his wife could do in three, three,
That he could do more work in a day
Than his wife could do in three.
Other importations are The Farmer's Boy, the story of a poor boy who comes to a farmer's door, and in the course of time marries the farmer's daughter and inherits the land, The Soldier, who when eloping with a lady with a fortune is met by the father and armed men, The Banks of Claudy or The Lover's Return, The Prentice Boy or Cupid's Garden, The Rich Merchant of London whose daughter drinks poison because loving against her father's wishes, the tragedies of Lady Caroline of Edinboro Town, and of Mary of the Wild Moor or The Village Bride, and the familiar songs, Babes in the Woods, Billy Boy, and The Courtship of the Frog and the Mouse.
The foregoing pieces will serve to illustrate the imported material, its diffusion, persistence, and the types of plots and the patterns of song which have lingered in the popular consciousness. Among Old World importations, it is the sensational story song, and the humorous ballad or song, which have shown the greatest vitality.
II. INDIGENOUS BALLADS AND SONGS
Alongside importations from the Old World, many types of indigenous song have developed in America. There are picturesque songs of pioneer and Western life, songs of criminals and outlaws, of soldiers and wars, of tragedies and disasters, songs of the tragic death of a girl, dying messages and confessions, and songs of the lost at sea. Sentimental songs play an important role, and religious and moralizing songs, political campaign songs, humorous songs, and negro or pseudo-negro and Indian songs appear. Some of these are sufficiently narrative to deserve classification as ballads, and all should have interest for collectors. Generalizations concerning folk-song are thrown out of focus and are undependable when but one type of piece is sought out and studied. All types of songs are folk-songs, for the literary historian, which fulfill two tests. The people must like them and sing them — they must have "lived in the folk-mouth "— and they must have persisted in oral currency through a fair period of years. They must have achieved an existence not dependent upon a printed original. Questions of origin, quality, technique, or style, are secondary. Attempts at differentiating traditional songs into popular songs or songs made "for" the people, and folk-songs or songs made "by" the people, based on some hypothetical manner of origin or on the continuation of a mediaeval style, have been demonstrated many times, when applied to some body of folk-song, to be undependable and unsafe. Whatever has commended itself to the folk-consciousness and has established currency for itself apart from written sources is genuine folk-literature.
Before the American Revolution, most folk-song was probably imported, either orally or in broadside versions; but there were also historical pieces that were indigenous. Some early ballads popular in New England, the texts of which have not been preserved are: The Gallant Church, Smith's Affair at Sidelong Hill, and The Godless French Soldier.[8] Lovewell's Fight is the oldest remaining historical ballad composed in America of which texts are available. It records a contest with the Indians in Maine, May 8, 1725. A text put into print about a hundred years later begins —
What time the noble Lovewell came
With fifty men from Dunstable
The cruel Pequatt tribe to tame
With arms and bloodshed terrible —
This theme was treated by Longfellow in his early poem, The Battle of Lovell's Pond. Most of the songs and ballads nf the Revolution, as brought together by collectors [9] from newspapers, periodicals, and broadsides, and from the memory of surviving soldiers, are semi-literary in character, composed to be sung to some familiar tune of English importation. The favorite ballad of the Revolution with literary historians is Nathan Hale. Many surviving pieces are travesties, many express the dissatisfaction of the colonists, and some derive from older pieces, as Major Andre's The Cow Chace which is based on the familiar ballad, The Chevy Chase. Most of the ballads remaining from this period are satirical.
A few indigenous pieces may derive from the War of 1812, such as James Bird, a ballad of a hero shot for desertion, a camp song in ridicule of General Packingham, and some verses beginning —
Then yon sent out your Boxer to beat us all about;
We had an enterprising brig to beat the Boxer out. . . .
Then towed her up to Portland and moved her off the town
To show the Sons of Liberty the Boxer of renown. . . .
and some stanzas which are still sung by children as a marching song —
We're marching down to old Quebec
While the drums are loudly beating;
The American boys have gained the day
And the British are retreating.
The Texas Rangers, widely current throughout the South and West, one text of which opens —
Come all you Texas Rangers wherever you may be,
I'll tell you of some trouble which happened unto me. . . .
sounds like an echo of the fight with the Mexicans at the Alamo in 1833. It is modeled on and sung to the air of the British Nancy of Yarmouth.
Songs remaining from the Civil War are often sentimental in character, like When this Cruel War is Over, and The Blue and the Gray, which are of traceable origin yet have entered widely into oral tradition. They are songs not ballads. There were numerous camp songs on sieges or battles but these faded early. Best remembered in folk-song from the period of the Civil War are the pseudo-negro songs, many of them the work of Stephen C. Foster, Will S. Hays, or Henry C. Work, given diffusion by the old-time itinerant minstrels. Songs of this and related types from the period of the Civil War are far more persistent than songs commemorating battles or political events. The popular A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight, modeled by its composer on a Creole song and popularized during the Cuban War, does not reflect directly the war that "floated" it, and the songs universalized for England and America by the war of 1914-1918, Tipperary, Keep the Home Fires Burning, The Long, Long Trail, Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag, Over There, do not commemorate its leading events. In the days of newspapers, ballads or songs of battles or important political events are not in demand, and do not come into existence.
Much larger than the role played by songs of historical events or important movements is that played by sentimental romantic pieces or by adventure pieces, and by certain widely diffused songs, mainly humorous, their authorship and origin forgotten, which reflect emigrant and frontier life, especially the rush for gold in 1849. Such is Joe Bowers, onee a freighter's favorite. The song is supposed to be sung by a Missourian in California about 1849-51, who had left behind his hometown sweetheart, Sally Black.[10]
One day I got a letter,
'Twas from my brother Ike;
It came from Old Missouri.
And all the way from Pike. . . .
It said that Sal was false to me —
It made me cuss and swear —
How she went and married a butcher,
And the butcher had red hair;
And whether 'twas gal or boy
The letter never said,
But that Sally had a baby,
And the baby's head was red.
Here is to be grouped Sweet Betsy from Pike, a California immigrant song of the fifties, and that song of better quality, The Days of Forty-Nine.
Since the days of old and the days of gold,
And the days of Forty-Nine.
The Dreary Black Hills reflects the mining fever of one period in the West.
The Round House at Cheyenne is filled every night
With loafers and beggars of every kind of sight;
On their backs there's no clothes, boys, in their pockets no bills,
And they'll take off your scalp, boys, in those dreary Black Hills.
Stay away, I say, stay away if you can,
Far from that city they call Cheyenne;
Where the blue waters roll and Comanche Bill
Will take off your scalp in those dreary Black Hills.
Other sectional songs or humorous narratives or complaints are Cheyenne Boys, which has various aliases and changed locations, as Mississippi Girls, a narrative describing the ways of the "boys" and warning the girls not to marry them, The Horse Wrangler, who meets a cattle king and decides to try cow-punching, and Starving to Death on a Government Claim —
Hurrah for Lane County, the land of the West,
Where the farmers and laborers are ever at rest;
There's nothing to do but to stick and remain,
And starve like a dog on a government claim.
The three best known and most attractive pieces are all three adaptations, reflecting pioneer life. One is O Bury Me not on the Lone Prairie, sometimes called The Dying Cowboy,[11]
"0 bury me not on the lone prairie."
Those words came slow but mournfully
From the pallid lips of a youth who lay
On the cold damp ground at the close of day. . . .
Another is The Cowboy's Lament, also called sometimes The Dying Cowboy —
As I walked through Tom Sherman's bar-room,
Tom Sherman's bar-room on a bright summer's day,
There I spied a handsome young cowboy,
All dressed in white linen as though for the grave.
Beat your drums lowly and play your fife slowly,
Play the dead march as you bear me along,
Take me to the graveyard and lay the sod o'er me,
For I'm a young cowboy and I know I've done wrong.
This song exists in many variants, with changed names and localizations, and it has roamed pretty far from its eighteenth century original.[12] The third is My Little Old Sod Shanty —
The hinges are of leather and the windows have no glass,
While the board roof lets the howling blizzard in,
And I hear the hungry cayote as he slinks up through the grass,
Round the little old sod shanty on my claim.
The history of this song is sufficiently illustrative of the ways of folk-song to be worth recounting.[13] Like so many " Western" songs when their genealogy is followed out, it is not an indigenous Western piece but is an adaptation of an older song having great popularity, namely The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane by Will S. Hays, a negro melody of the type familiarized by Stephen C. Foster's My Old Kentucky Home, or by The Swanee River.
De hinges dey got rusted and de door has tumbled down,
An' de roof lets in de sunshine an' de rain,
An' de only friend I've got now is dis good old dog of mine,
In de little old log cabin in de lane.
The Little Old Sod Shanty was printed somewhere about the later seventies or eighties in many Nebraska newspapers, with the statement that it could be sung to the tune of The Little Old Log Cabin. Some old settlers remember having cards with photographs of a sod shanty on one side and on the other the words of the song. The parody adapting the negro song to Western conditions was written probably by some one in this region.[14] Most versions of the song recovered by collectors come from Nebraska and the Dakotas, one from Texas. To continue the history of The Little Old Log Cabin, it is said that Ira D. Sankey, the evangelist, adapted its well-known melody for C. W. Fry's religious lyric, The Lily of the Valley, or I Have Found a Friend in Jesus. In hymn number 105 of Gospel Hymns No. 5, widely used in the later decades of the nineteenth century, may be found the music, which served for the various songs, the negro melody, and the "Western" and the religious songs.
There is little "romance" in most of these Western American pieces but they reflect the life of the Americans who sang and who sing them as faithfully as the English and Scottish traditional ballads reflect the life and ways of mediaeval aristocrats. They are the most characteristically American of our folk-songs, and so wide is their diffusion that many are likely to survive for a generation or more. They exhibit the interests and tastes, the themes and song modes, of those among which they had currency.
Aside from these historical, frontier, and adventure pieces, there are now many short narrative pieces, orally preserved and apparently authorless, which may fairly be called indigenous ballads. And already they are marked in an instructive degree by fluctuation of text, variant versions, and local improvisations and additions. Most have a direct unsophisticated note and traces of rude power that lend them the appeal peculiar to folk song. An example of an indigenous ballad now current through the Middle West and as far Southwest as Texas is that of Young Charlotte who was frozen to death at her lover's side on her way to a ball.
Young Charlotte lived by a mountain side in a wild and lonely spot,
There was no village for miles around except her father's cot;
And yet on many a wintry night young boys would gather there —
Her father kept a social board, and she was very fair. . . .
"Such a dreadful night I never saw, my reins I can scarcely hold,"
Young Charlotte then feebly said, "I am exceedingly cold,"
He cracked his whip and urged his speed much faster than before,
While at least five other miles in silence had passed o'er.
Spoke Charles, "How fast the freezing ice is gathering on my brow,"
Young Charlottie then feebly said, "I'm growing warmer now." . . .
Investigation has shown that this ballad was the composition of a blind poet at Bensontown, Vermont, as far back as 1835. [15] The good fortune of its attracting an able investigator has cleared up for us its history. A second New England product which has roamed everywhere is Springfield Mountain, the tragedy of a young man mowing hay who was bitten by a "pizen serpent" and died. Texts of this have been recovered from regions as remote as Texas and Montana. Its historian was able to trace its composition to the late eighteenth century.[16]
Of untraced origin but of still greater currency is Poor Lorella (known also as The Weeping Willow, Poor Floella, Flo Ella, Lurella, Lorla, Lorilla, The Jealous Lover, Pearl Bryn, etc.). Down in the valley, under the weeping willow, lies Lorella in her "cold and silent grave." She died not from sickness or a broken heart, but was killed by her lover, who says that her parents will forgive him, since he expects to leave the country "never more for to return."
Down on her knees before him
She pleaded for her life,
But deep into her bosom
He plunged the fatal knife.
A similar piece, also untraced, is The Old Shawnee. A youth asks his sweetheart to take a walk, and talks of the day when their wedding is to be. She says she will never be his: —
From my breast I drew a knife,
And she gave a shrilling cry,
"O Willie dear, don't murder me,
For I am not prepared to die."
Then I took her lily white hands
And swung her around and again around,
Until she fell in the waters cruel,
And there I watched my true love drowned.
The Silver Dagger tells of a young man who courted a maiden, but his parents sought to part them on the ground of her poverty. When the girl learned this she wandered down by a river and stabbed herself with a silver dagger. Her lover heard her voice, rushed to her, found her dying, and killed himself with the same dagger.
To pass to illustration of American ballads of another type, Jesse James claims sympathy for its outlaw hero, an American Robin Hood. The ballad tells of his death through betrayal, killed by Robert Ford.
Now Jesse had a wife to mourn for his life,
His children they were brave;
'Twas a dirty little coward that shot Mr. Howard
And laid poor Jesse in his grave.
This song is of late composition and has wide currency but chance has failed to record its provenance. Texts and the melody have been recovered by many collectors. The Death of Garfield reflects moralizing delight in a criminal's repentance, a stock motive in eighteenth and nineteenth century popular song. Probably it is adapted from an Old World piece.
My sister came to prison to bid her last farewell,
She threw her arms about me and wept most bitterly;
She said, "My dearest brother, today you must die,
For the murder of James A. Garfield upon the scafel high."
Fuller and Warren tells of a fatal quarrel between rival lovers; Casey Jones, of the authorship of which there is clearer record,[17] of a fatal railway run. Once wellknown ballads, now occasionally to be recovered from oral tradition, are The Wreck of the Lady Elgin,[18] The Johnstown Flood, and The Burning of the Newhall House at Milwaukee. These may be termed ballads in that they are simple lyrical narratives handed down orally, though but for a short period, their authorship unknown to their singers. The sensational stories they tell have kept them alive for a while. Usually the tenure of life of a ballad is longer when it tells some tragic personal story.
As to modes of diffusion, these are many and varied, so far as can be determined by the collector. Fairs or circuses at which broadsides or sheet music are offered for sale have served as agents for diffusion in recent times, and still have itinerant vendors and entertainers of all kinds. Young Charlotte was probably given its impetus by its author as he journeyed from Vermont to Ohio and thence to Illinois, on his way westward, singing and selling his song as he went. Songs learned at school or in childhood stay in the memory with especial tenacity. Some of the texts of Jesse Jajnes were said by their singers to have been learned by them as school children, while others said that they had learned the song from farm-hands. Country newspapers have preserved many well-cherished pieces later pasted into scrap books which have been handed down. And, though rarely, song-lovers still copy favorite texts into scrapbooks, as in Elizabethan days. Wandering concert troups, Chautauqua singers, and minor singers of all types, stage stars especially, are great agents in popularization. The once popular negro minstrels helped to universalize many songs, like Old Black Joe and My Old Kentucky Home, and real negro singers like the Jubilee Singers and' the Hampton Institute Singers have kept alive many songs.
Those familiar stage' and parlor songs of the 1890's, After the Ball and Two Little Girls in Blue, the first of which was popularized all over the country by May Irwin and other singers, in Hoyt's farce, A Trip to China Town,[19] are still vigorous on Western ranches and in villages here and there, though they have long been dead in the circles and places where they emerged. Shortened Bread, which still has wide currency in folk-song, among both whites and negroes, was one of Blind Boone's songs. Johnny Sands belongs to the first half of the nineteenth century. It achieved enormous vogue by forming part of the repertory of the Hutchinson family, the Continental vocalists, and other singing troupes. It was printed in 1847. A striking melody, or a striking text or story, usually a personal story, given some strong impetus in diffusion, will linger in the folk-memory for decades, when not the faintest consciousness of its provenance remains. As with importations from the Old World, so with indigenous folksongs, a piece telling a sensational story, or turning on some comic situation, or built about some striking refrain, outlasts songs of other types.
III. THE SOUTHWESTERN COWBOY BONGS AND THE ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH BALLADS
That a body of folk-song exists in America which supports the theory of "communal" origin for the English and Scottish popular ballads is an idea which has made considerable headway since it was advanced not many years ago. Several writers have found analogy between the conditions attending the growth of cowboy songs in isolated communities in the Southwest, and the conditions under which arose the English and Scottish popular ballads. Said Mr. John A. Lomax, in a paper given by him when retiring president of the American Folk-Lore Society, at its annual meeting, "There has sprung up in America a considerable body of folk-song called by courtesy 'ballads,' which in their authorship, in the social conditions under which they were produced, in the spirit which gives them life, resemble the genuine ballads sung by our English and Scottish ancestors long before there was an American people" . . . "The Ballad of the Boll Weevil and The Ballad of the Old Chisholm Trail, and other songs in my collection similar to these, are absolutely known to have been composed by groups of people whose community life made their thinking similar, and present valuable corroborative evidence of the theory advanced by Professor Gummere and Professor Kittredge concerning the origin of the ballads from which come those now contained in the great Child collection." [20]
This view was first put forward by Mr. Lomax, who is the chief collector of Southwestern folk-song, in the introduction of his Cowboy Songs.[21] He notes when speaking of western communities, how " illiterate people and people cut off from newspapers and books, isolated and lonely — thrown back on primal resources for entertainment and for the expression of emotion — utter themselves through somewhat the same character of songs as did their forefathers of perhaps a thousand years ago." Professor Barrett Wendell[22] suggested that it is possible to trace in this group of American ballads "the precise manner in which songs and cycles of songs — obviously analogous to those surviving from older and antique times — have come into being. The facts which are still available concerning the ballads of our own Southwest are such as should go far to prove or to disprove many of the theories advanced concerning the laws of literature as evinced in the ballads of the Old World." Ex-President Roosevelt affirmed in a personal letter to Mr. Lomax [23] that "there is something very curious in the reproduction here on this new continent of essentially the conditions of balladgrowth which obtained in mediaeval England."
The parallel felt by these writers is worked out with more specific detail and greater definiteness by Professor W. W. Lawrence, in a passage prefixed to a discussion of the ballads of Robin Hood: —[24]
These men living together on the solitary ranches of Texas, Arizona, or New Mexico, have been accustomed to entertain each other after the day's work is done by singing songs, some of which have been familiar to them from boyhood, others of which they have actually composed themselves. . . . These cowboy ballads are not the expression of individuals but of the whole company which listens to them, and they are, in a very real sense, the work of other men than the author. . . . The author counts for nothing, it will be observed; his name is generally not remembered, and what he invents is as characteristic of his comrades as of himself. . . . Here we have literature which is a perfect index of the social ideals of the body of men among whom it is composed, literature which makes no pretense to literary form or to the disclosure of the emotions of any one man as distinguished from his fellows. There are few communities of the present day which are as closely united in common aims and sympathies as these bands of Western cowboys, hence there are few opportunities for the production of verse which is as truly the expression of universal emotion as are these songs.
Such Western ranches reproduce almost perfectly the conditions under which the English and Scottish ballads were composed.
It is obvious from these passages that their writers find a real parallel between the conditions leading to the the growth in our own time, in certain homogenous communities of the Southwest, of fugitive folk-pieces like those gathered by Mr. Lomax, and the conditions responsible for the rise in the Middle Ages of the traditional ballads of England and Scotland. It is the belief that certain types of American folk-song support the theory of "communal" composition of "genuine" English and Scottish ballads, as expounded in many places by Professor Gummere and Professor Kittredge, a belief upheld by their Harvard disciples, Mr. Lomax, Professor Walter Morgan Hart,[25] Professor W. W. Lawrence, and by others. That ignorant and uneducated people may fairly be said to have composed, or had a part in composing, some of the cowboy, lumberman, and negro songs, is held to be evidence that ignorant and unlearned peasants or villagers composed, or had a part in composing, the English and Scottish popular ballads, or at least that they established the type.
A good case can be made out, from examining such material as Mr. Lomax has cited or published, to exactly the contrary effect — namely that the American pieces which he finds to be communally composed, or at least to have emerged from the ignorant and unlettered in isolated regions, afford ample testimony, in structure, technique, style, and quality, that the English and Scottish popular ballads could not have been so composed, nor their type so established. Here, in summary, are the leading reasons for this affirmation: —
First. The greater part of Mr. Lomax's material in his Cowboy Songs did not originate among the cowboys but migrated among them, brought from different parts of the United States, or from the Old World. Especially, the better pieces among them are those most certainly not indigenous to the Southwest.
Second. The pieces which may fairly be said to be of spontaneous cowboy improvisation are not and never will become real ballads, lyric-epics, or stories in verse. They are easily the weakest and most structureless pieces in the collection. They have won and will win no diffusion; and many are probably already dead. Certainly they stand no such chance of survival as do certain pieces, not of communal origin, which have drifted to the Southwest from elsewhere, commended themselves to the folkconsciousness of that region, and retained vitality there as in other parts of the country.
Third. Even the pieces which may be called genuine cowboy pieces are no doubt largely adaptations, echoes of some familiar model, or built on and containing reminiscences of well-known texts or airs. For the most part they may be termed "creations " in a qualified sense only.
Fourth. In general, real communalistic or people's poetry, composed in the collaborating manner sketched out by Professor Gummere and Professor Kittredge,[26] is too crude, too structureless, too unoriginal, too lacking in coherence and in striking or memorable qualities, to have much chance at survival. If a piece is to win wide currency, to become fixed in the folk-memory, or get beyond the locality which produced it, it must have strong impetus behind it. This may come through its peculiar timeliness, or through its preoccupation with a notable personality. It may come as a result of tunefulness, a memorable story, or striking style, or, again, through some especially potent method of diffusion.[27]
But the impetus must be present if the piece is to get itself remembered, and to make its way over the country as a whole. Most of these qualities are what the well-attested communal improvisations, or creations, those upon which we can place the finger, always lack. They have little chance at securing the momentum necessary to "float" them, as compared with the songs of the old-time itinerant negro-minstrels,— for example, "Old Dan" Emmett's, Buckley's, the Ethiopian Serenaders', the Fisk Jubilee Singers',28— or even as compared with such popular par
lor airs as Juanita, Lorena, or to songs borne onward by some notable contemporary event, as was A Hot Time by the Cuban War, or Tipperary by the European War. Suppose that a piece communally improvised did win stability once in a while, the instance would be a rare case as over against the folk-songs in established currency which did not so originate. But who (and Mr. Lomax has not) has certainly, not conjecturally, pointed out for America a good ballad, i. e., verse-story, which did originate communally and has also obtained widespread diffusion?
Fifth. A hypothesis is surely questionable which sets up as standard-giving for the form, type, and genuineness of the mass of folk-pieces, and as accounting for their quality and diffusion, a mode of origin responsible, not for folk-song in general, but at most for a few highly exceptional instances.
It is time to examine a few well-attested communal pieces and to note what they are like. A certain percentage of the songs in the collection of Mr. Lomax are perhaps genuine cowboy pieces approached from almost any point of view. Those which are most typical are related very closely to the life of the communities which originated and preserved them. Some of these, the editor tells us, the singers themselves composed. There are songs dealing with the life of the ranch, of the trail, songs of stampedes, of the barroom; but chiefly they deal with cattle and the cowboys who have them in charge. There are a few passing references to their "bosses "; but songs which pertain to these, or to the ranch owners, songs of the lives of their employers or their families, do not appear. A few preserve the style of the ultra-sentimental or "flowery" period of American verse,[29] with doubtfully Westernized settings, a few are ascribed to personal authors,[30] and some are plainly built on or out of well-known songs. Of what may be termed the real cowboy pieces the following verses, cited as representative by Professor Lawrence also, will give a good idea: —
I'm a rowdy cowboy just off the stormy plains,
My trade is girting saddles and pulling bridle reins,
Oh, I ean tip the lasso, it is with graceful ease;
I rope a streak of lightning, and ride it where I please.
My bosses they all like me, they say I am hard to beat;
I give them the bold stand off, you bet I have got the cheek.
I always work for wages, my pay I get in gold;
I am bound to follow the longhorn steer until I am too old.
Ci yi yip yip yip pe ya.
Or —
Come all you jolly cowboys that follow the bronco steer,
I'll sing to you a verse or two your spirits for to cheer;
It's all about a trip, a trip that I did undergo
On that crooked trail to Holbrook, in Arizona oh.
Or —
Bill drove the stage from Independence
Up to the Smokey Hill;
And everybody knowed him thar
As Independence Bill.—
Thar warn't no feller on the route
That driv with half the skill.
The song specificially cited by Mr. Lomax, in his article,[31] as certainly of communal composition is The Old Chisholm Trail, a text of which is printed in his Cowboy Songs.[32] Here are its final stanzas:
"I went to the wagon to get my roll,
To come back to Texas, dad-burn my soul.
"I went to the boss to draw my roll,
He had it flggered out I was nine dollars in the hole.
"I'll sell my outfit just as soon as I can,
I won't punch cattle for no damned man.
"Goin' back to town to draw my money,
Goin' back home to see my honey.
"With my knees in the saddle and my seat in the sky,
I'll quit punching cows in the sweet by and by."
The rest of the piece is of the same pattern, or at least is no better. Few would dispute its cowboy composition.[33] Probably it too follows some model; but it is plainly enough the work of some one uneducated and untrained. It is crude, without structure or clearly told story, is flat and vulgar in language, and is without striking or memorable quality. It has not a single mark of the "good," or "genuine" ballads of the Child collection, supposed to have won their type, their peculiar quality and worth, from the very humbleness of their composers.[34] The Old Chisholm Trail is not and never will be anything like a Child ballad, or like any other memorable ballad. It is just about what we should expect from cowboy improvisation. Yet it is a piece definitely pointed out as furnishing "corroborative evidence."
The songs in Mr. Lomax's collection which do have memorable quality and have shown vitality, which afford the truer analogy for the Old World pieces, are of the type of Young Charlotte, The Dying Cowboy, The Lone Prairie, The Little Old Sod Shanty, and for these such composition cannot be claimed. [35]
Our Western cowboys are at least as intelligent and as generally gifted as the mediaeval peasant throngs who are supposed to have created the Old World ballads, and they make a more homogeneous community. When we note what they can do and are asked to believe what the mediaeval peasants did — for the older the Child ballads the better the quality — we meet insurmountable difficulties. The evidence offered for the supposed communal origin of the Child ballads is not "corroborative" but the contrary. We know definitely what is the best that the cowboys can do; but when we compare their products with the Child ballads there is almost unbelievable discrepancy.
One other piece has been definitely stated by Mr. Lomax to be certainly of communal origin, the negro song The Boll Weevil. It originated in the last fifteen years, he says, and was composed by plantation negroes. He quotes but one verse of it.
"If anybody axes you who writ this song
Tell 'em it was a dark-skinned nigger
Wid a pair of blue-duckins on
A-lookin fur a home,
Jes a-lookin fur a home."
Apparently the Ballet of the Boll Weevil is a loosestructured, shifting, drifting sort of piece, having like The Old Chisholm Trail, nothing in common with "good" ballads, and not likely to have. It is very much what we should expect of a song which emerged from unlettered negroes. And one would like to inquire whether it still lives, flourishes, and shows promise of improvement,[36] or whether it is already dead?
Once more, the very pieces pointed out as giving corroborative evidence are among the weakest in Mr. Lomax's collection. Always those upon which we can place the finger as pieces in the composition of which the folk had part are those relatively weak and flat, giving no promise of a future. The communal pieces generally have no definite narrative element, and they have neither the structure nor the poetic quality of the lyric-epics that constitute the Child collection.
If a piece which is of folk composition may occasionally show this poetic power it is because it adapts or follows closely some good model. But in such case it could hardly be said to be wholly a folk-creation, or to owe its good qualities precisely to the "folk " share in its creation. Once more, too, why should we suppose that human ability has so fallen since the middle ages that untaught throngs could then outdo the best produced by similar throngs upon which we can place the finger nowadays? If we keep our eyes on the evidence, the Child pieces are by far too good to have had their origin in any way parallel to that which produced The Old Chisholm Trail and The Boll Weevil.
Before leaving the matter of corroborative evidence, it may be well to bring up more support for the statement that the bulk of Mr. Lomax's pieces are not of cowboy composition but immigrated among the cowboys. Young Charlotte, The Dying Cowboy, The Lone Prairie, The Little Old Sod Shanty, The Rattlesnake, are not of cowboy composition but are immigrants. Bonnie Black Bess tells of the deeds of Dick Turpin, the highwayman, and is an Old World piece; and so are Fair Fannie More, Rosin the Bow, The Wars of Oermanie, and Love in Disguise. The Old Man Under the Hill is a variant of a Child ballad.[37] Jack Donahoo tells of an Australian highwayman and is obviously imported. A Rambling Cowboy and Lackey Bill seem to be the same piece, and to be identical with E. C. Perrow's When I Became a Rover, also of Old World importation.[38]
As for The Railroad Corral, which might seem so certainly a cowboy song, except that it is so well done, Mr. J. M. Hanson, writing from Yankton, South Dakota, to the Literary Digest, April 25, 1914, says that it was written by him to the tune of Scott's Bonny Dundee, was originally published in Frank Leslie's Magazine, and may be found in republished form in his Frontier Ballads. Mr. Hanson was somewhat surprised to find his poem counting as "folk-song." Another piece well executed for folk-song and dealing apparently with genuine cowboy material is The Ride of Billy Venero. But this, with a few localizings and adaptations, is unmistakably The Ride of Paul Venarez by Eben E. Rexford. Mr. Rexford also might well have felt surprise that his spirited narrative should count as anonymous folk-song. The Ride of Paul Venarez had wide currency, after its original publication in The Youth's Companion, and was long a favorite with reciters.
Another striking piece is Freighting from Wilcox to Glebe, having the burden "And it's home dearest, home, and it's home you ought to be," of W. E. Henley's Falmouth is a Fine Town (Poems, 1886), which in turn derived its refrain from a song by Allan Cunningham. Whoopee-Ti-Yi-Yo, Git Along Little Dogies owes its melody and the opening lines to The Cowboy's Lament of some pages earlier, which, as Mr. Phillips Barry has pointed out, is an Old World song adapted to plainsmen's conditions. Buena, Vista Battlefield was a favorite parlor song, and is not of cowboy composition. The Boston Burglar, Macaffie's Confession, Betsy from Pike, Jesse James, The Days of Forty-Nine, and many other of the most interesting and widely current or memorable pieces, cannot be claimed as indigenous to the Southwest (nor is this claim made for them) ; nor is there any real proof that any one of them is of communal composition. Many are not ready to concede such origin for them. The influence of Irish " Come all ye's" and of death-bed confession pieces is strong on pretty much the whole of Mr. Lomax's collection; and there are abundant reminiscences of well-known pieces, as We'll Go no More A-Ranging (compare Byron's We'll Go no More A-Roaming," itself a reminiscence), or The Last Longhorn, reminiscent of Bingen on the Rhine.[39]
Among the pieces cited by Mr. Lomax in his address before the Folk-Lore Society is Unreconstructed (included in Cowboy Songs under the title I'm a Good Old Rebel), which he cites as a " rebel war song," with the suggestion that the rebel songs were perhaps superior to those of the same class which were of Yankee origin. But this "rebel war song," or "cowboy song," is one of the best poems of Innes Randolph (1837-1887) who was for a time connected with the Baltimore American. Mr. Randolph wrote the song to satirize the attitude of some of his elders. A text of his poem, from which Mr. Lomax's folk-piece has lost but a few lines, is accessible in The Humbler Poets.[40] A volume of Mr. Randolph's verse was published after his death, edited by his son Harold Randolph.
Another piece cited which is of high quality is Silver Jack; and it tells a complete story dramatically; but Silver Jack[41] sounds, as Mr. Lomax points out, suspiciously like newspaper verse. It is not the work of one crude and uneducated but of an author trained and skilful. Similarly with a second piece, which is of better quality; it shows skilful use of dialect spelling and relative sophistication.
"I've been in rich men's houses and I've been in jail,
But when it's time for leavin' I jes hits the trail;
I'm a human bird of passage and the song I trill
Is 'Once you get the habit why you can't keep still.' "
That is verse of the school of the newspaper or dialect poet, not of the composition of the unlettered.
That a song is current in a certain community, or liked by a certain class, is not testimony that it originated among those who sing it, but pretty nearly the contrary.[42] It may have found its way among them in some such manner as The Railroad Corral and The Little Old Sod Shanty found their way among the cowboys; or as Casey Jones and Life's Railway to Heaven have been adopted by railway people.
To reiterate, in the body of Western American folksong, the pieces of proved vitality, most compact in structure and affording the truest analogy to the Child ballads, are not those which are the work of uneducated people of the Middle West or the South, in spontaneous collaboration. The few rough improvisations which we can identify as emerging from the folk themselves,— which we actually know to be the work of unlettered individuals or throngs, — are those farthest from the Child ballads in their general characteristics. The pieces cited specificially as "corroborative" are inferior, will soon be extinct, and offer no dependable evidence.
IV. BALLAD MAKING AS A "CLOSED ACCOUNT"
A final affirmation to be examined is that there "will be no more ballads," that "ballad-making is a closed account." The following, added to an interesting and well-written discussion of the mediaeval ballads, is a typical statement. "True ballads lasted long after the middle ages, but mainly by repetition or modification of those already made. With every century the chances for a new ballad were fewer, until now the ballad has long been extinct as a form of composition. There will be no more ballads; for the conditions under which they are produced are long passed." [43] "Conditions favorable to the making of such pieces," said Professor Gummere, "ceased to be general after the fifteenth century." The same scholar remarked in many places that " Ballads can not be made now, at least among civilized races," that "under modern conditions, ballad-making is a closed account." [44] Statements to the same effect by many others might be cited.
Unless style determines what are genuinely ballads and what are not, the making of ballads, i. e., short verse-narratives of singable form, is not a closed account; and there is no reason why it ever should be such. Nor is the making of "popular" or "folk" ballads extinct, meaning by this short lyric tales apparently authorless, preserved among the people, and having an existence which has become purely oral and traditional. The mode in balladmaking has changed and will change. There will be no more Child ballads, for they preserve a style established in bygone centuries. But styles change in folk poetry as they do in book poetry. There is a "history of taste" for folk poetry just as for book poetry. There are as great differences between the folk poetry of the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries as between the book poetry of the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries. Folk poetry is not a fixed thing to rise and die but a shifting thing.
The test of what may be termed folk-songs or folk ballads should not be the retention of a mediaeval style, and certainly it should not be some hypothetical communal-mystic manner of origin. They are folk-songs if the people have remembered them and sung them, if they have an existence apart from written sources, and if they have been given oral preservation through a fair period of years. As pointed out earlier, in treating balladry in America, attempts at differentiating traditional song into "popular songs," or songs made for the people, and "folk-songs" or songs made by the people, based on some hypothesis of distinctive origin or distinctive style, are undefendable and unwarranted. Such differentiation is borne out by the study of no body of homogeneous folk-song, whether regional or national.
When we contrast the older and newer in folk song it becomes obvious that the superiority for persistence in the popular mouth belongs with the former; nor is this to be wondered at. The older singer composed for the ear; otherwise his work was vain. The newer writes for the eye, both words and music; instead of professional musicians as agents of diffusion we now have printing. Skill in creating memorable songs is more likely to characterize composition of the first type than of the second. Much in modern song is unsingable and unrememberable; no one can expect it to make a deep impression on the popular mind. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries poets, whatever their class, were likely to be singers too. If we approach popular song from the side of musical history, it is clear enough that contributions to folk-song should be especially rich at a time when the connection between composition and delivery was very close. In the sixteenth century song was as nearly universalized as it is likely to be for a long time to come. Some musical proficiency was demanded of nearly everybody whether belonging to the upper classes or to the lower. The renaissance lyric, words and music, seems to have had its origin in the higher culture of the times but it attained unparalleled popularity. Acknowledgment that the period of the English renaissance had the most memorable style in folk-song is not the same thing, however, as acknowledging that only such folk-songs as exhibit this style are "genuine." Conformity to a mediaeval style may not logically be insisted upon as a test of what is truly a folk ballad and what is not.
Already there are in America many short narrative pieces current over the country-side, the authorship and the mode of origin of which are lost; and it is these, not the transient improvisations of cowboys or negroes, which form the better analogues for the English and Scottish ballads. From them a selection of texts and variant versions, with notations of parallels and Old World relationships, could be built up that would be of formidable and instructive proportions. Reference is made to pieces like Jesse James, The Death of Garfield, Texas Rangers, James Bird, Poor Lorella, Young Charlotte, Springfield Mountain, Johnny Sands, Casey Jones, and other floating stories in verse which were discussed at some length in a preceding section. There will always be, very likely, a body of short narrative poems, their authorship and origin lost, preserved in outlying regions. They will shift in style but they will ever be behind contemporary song modes by a generation or mora The style of present day traditional song over the United States is, on the average, many decades behind that prevailing in contemporary compositions. In eighteenth-century England and Scotland, the discrepancy was naturally much greater. A large body of song in the mediaeval style still lingered, alongside pieces on later themes of middle class life, in a later manner, and pieces of contemporary creation. The older style is the more memorable; it was of higher quality and it persisted longer than will its successors. But it should not be a test of the genuineness of a piece as folk-song that it continues the style of sixteenth or seventeenth century popular song — any more than some conjectural manner of origin should be such a test.
Why, as a general proposition, should something vague or romantic be so liked, when the origin of folk-poetry is in question? Is it a heritage from the romanticism of the period when interest in ballads arose and their origin was first made the subject of discussion? Here are some typical sentences from Andrew Lang:
"No one any longer attributes them to this or that author, to this or that date ... its birth [the ballad's] from the lips and heart of the people may contrast with the origin of art poetry. . . . Ballads sprang from the very heart of the people, and flit from age to age, from lip to lip of shepherds, peasants, nurses, of all that continue nearest to the natural state of man. . . . The whole soul of the peasant class breathes in their burdens, as the great sea resounds in the shells cast up from its shores. Ballads are a voice from secret places, from silent places, and old times long dead."
Yet more typical is this from Theodor Storm's Immensee (1851), formerly read so often in our schools that the view it presents was brought before thousands of student readers each year:
"[These songs] were not made; they grow; they fall out of the air. They fly over the land like gossamer, hither and thither, and are sung in a thousand places at once. Our inmost doings and sufferings we find in these songs; it is as though we had helped in composing them."
And compare Mr. Lomax's—
"They seem to have sprung up as quietly and mysteriously as does the grass on the plains."
This is not very solid ground and it is hardly likely that the next generation of scholars and students will linger upon it. Belief in the origin of the mediaeval ballads by communal improvisation in the dance, and belief in the extinction, with mediaeval conditions, of the ballad as a literary type, seem to the present writer to have emerged from and to belong to a period of criticism which deliberately preferred the vague and the mystical for all problems of literary and linguistic history — mythological explanation of the Beowulf story, multi-handed composition of the Homeric poems, mystical theories of the origin of language. These originate in romance but they readily fade in a literal, anti-romantic period like our own.
To what degree, one is tempted to ask, is the scholarly and critical enthusiasm for ballads of the last hundred years, or more, due to this romantic attitude? But for their fascinating mystery, would the learned world have preoccupied itself, in the same measure, with ballads? . Perhaps when the cloud of romanticism overhanging it has vanished utterly, we may again come to look on balladry as did the cultivated world in the days of humanism.
------------------------
Footnotes:
1. Some leading collectors are: H. G. Shearin and J. H. Coombs for the Cumberland mountains, Syllabus of Kentucky Folk-Song (1911); C. Alphonso Smith for Virginia (see infra, note 2); Reed Smith for South Carolina (see infra, note 2); H. M. Belden for Missouri, Journal of American Folk-Lore, vols. 19, 20, 23; A. H. Tolman for Illinois, ibid., vol. 29; Phillips Barry for New England, see many papers and texts in the Journal of American FolkLore, vol. 14 and following; Cecil Sharp and Olive Dame Campbell, Folk-Song of the Southern Appalachians (1917); Josephine McGill, Folk-Song of the Kentucky Mountains (1917); E. F. Piper for Iowa (unpublished); Louise Pound, Folk-Song of Nebraska and the Central West: A Syllabus (1915). By far the largest and most important collection is in the Harvard library.
Illustrative American traditional songs are accessible in the present writer's Oral Verse in the United States, 1921.
The discussion of balladry in America in the present chapter is indebted in scattered passages to the author's discussion of oral literature in the United States in the Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. m. Occasionally it uses the same material in illustration.
2. See especially Reed Smith, The Traditional Ballad in the South, Journal of American Folk-Lore, vol. 27, pp. 55-66; ibid., 28, pp. 199203. C. Alphonso Smith Ballads Surviving in the United States, The Musical Quarterly, vol. II, pp. 109-129.
3. Unless indicated otherwise, the texts of Old World songs quoted in the following pages are central Western.
4. By H. C. House. See Modern Language Notes, vol. 17, p. 6.
5. See H. M. Belden, Folk Song in America — Some Recent Publications. Modern Language Notes, vol. 34, p. 139.
6. C. H. Firth prints a text in An American Garland (1915), p. 69. this her cruel mother had her brought before priests and burned.
7. Accessible in The Roxburgh Ballads, vol. I, p. 43.
8 See Professor M. C. Tyler, History of American Colonial Literature, 1878.
9 Chief among them is Frank Moore, Songs and Ballads of the American Revolution, 1856.
10. Unless indication otherwise is made, the text quoted is central Western.
11. Adapted from a sea song, the words of which were by W. H. Saunders, the music by G. N. Allen, beginning —
"O bury me not in the deep, deep sea,"
The words came low and mournfully, etc.
with the refrain
"O bury me not in the deep deep sea,
Where the billowy shroud will roll o'er me." . . .
12 Mr. Phillips Barry has traced its history in The Journal of American Folk-Lore, vol. 24, pp. 341 ff. It is from a song popular in Ireland in the eighteenth century, The Unfortunate Rake. The refrain lines retain, somewhat incongruously, the suggestion of A military funeral appropriate enough in the original song.
13. See The Pedigree of a Western Song, Modern Language Notes, vol. 29, p. 30.
14. According to his friends, by a Nebraskan named Emery Miller, when occupying a claim.
15 See Phillips Barry, The Journal of American Folk-Lore, vol. 22, pp. 365-73.
16. W. J. Newell, Early American Ballads, The Journal of American Folk-Lore, vol. 13, pp. 105-120. Rattlesnake Song, printed among J. A. Lomax's Cowboy Songs, is obviously a somewhat maudlin descendant of Springfield Mountain.
17. See Railroad Men's Magazine, May 1908, November 1910, December 1911, April 1912.
18. By George F. Root.
19. See C. K. Harris, How to Write a Popular Lyric, 1906.
20 Published in the Journal of American Folk-Lore, vol. 28, January-March, 1915. For the quoted sentences, see pp. 1 and 16.
21 New York, 1910. Second edition, 1916.
22 Cowboy Songs. Introduction.
23 Ibid. Prefixed letter, dated from Cheyenne, 1910. See also Professor Charles S. Baldwin, English Mediceval Literature (1914) p. 19.
24 Medieval Story. New York, 1911.
25 Ballad and Epic (1907), Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, vol. IV. See also Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 21 (1906), and English Popular Ballads, 1916.
26 By Professor Kittredge in Introduction to English and Scottish Popular Ballads, pp. xxiv-xxvii. 1904. By Professor Gummere in many books and articles.
27. The Ulster ballad, Willie Reilly, which has gained considerable diffusion in this country, owed its wide currency to the circumstance that it was adopted as a party song. For the mode of diffusion of various other pieces, see p. 213.
28 Some idea of their vogue may be had from Brander Matthews's article, "The Rise and Fall of Negro Minstrelsy," Scribner's Magazine, June, 1915.
Some of the popular old-time minstrel songs have been ritualized into, or utilized as game-songs, or "play-party" songs, as the now widely diffused Old Dan Tucker, by Daniel Emmett, or Angelina Baker, by S. C. Foster, or many others. See Mrs. L. D. Ames, "The Missouri Play-Party," Goldy M. Hamilton, "The Play-Party in Northeast Missouri," and E. F. Piper, "Some Play-Party Games of the Middle West," printed respectively in The Journal of American Folk-Lore, vols, xxiv, xxvn, and Xxvin. Some of the English and Scottish ballads sung in America have been similarly ritualized.
29 By Markentura's Flowery Marge, p. 224; or the story of Amanda and Young Albon, p. 271.
30 Night-Herding Song, p. 324; or The Metis Song of the Buffalo Hunters, p. 72.
31 Journal of American Folk-Lore, xxvm, cvii, p. 16.
32 It should somewhere be said of Cowboy Songs that it was obviously put together rather with an eye to the picturesque and effective than with an eye to affording material for the solution of problems in literary history. Mr. Lomax points this out when he terms it "frankly popular." He seems to have drawn on sources of all kinds for his materials.
33 Usually local individual claims to the authorship of popular pieces of much diffusion should be accepted with especial caution. Those having practical experience in the collection of folk-songs need not be reminded that many pieces are claimed as of individual composition, in outlying regions, which had no such origin — unless for certain added personal tags, insertions, manipulations, or localizings. Mistaken affirmations of authorship are very common. For example, Starving to Death on a Government Claim, which has, and has had, considerable currency in the central west, was volunteered, as of his own recent composition, to a collector by a Dakota lad of fifteen; and his authorship was accepted by his community. Yet all he had contributed was the localizing of a few names. Breaking in a Tenderfoot, reported to the present writer as of local composition near Cheyenne, proved to be a rather weak variant of the wellknown The Horse Wrangler, too weak and garbled to have been by any chance the original text. A teacher once gave the present writer the familiar counting-out formula, "Wire, briar, limberlock, Three geese in a flock," etc. (really an importation from the Old World), as certainly of her own creation in childhood; —this in the sincere belief that it had so originated.
34. It is well to remember that not all humble composers are by any means either so unskilled or so wholly uneducated that expressions like "artistry" or "conscious authorship" are out of the question when their creations are considered. Burns himself was a ploughboy, the son of a peasant farmer.
35. For their origin, see pp. 207-209.
36. What songs will persist among the negroes? After hearing the Tuskegee or the Hampton Institute singers, one feels that My Old Kentucky Home, The Swanee River, Old Black Joe, and some of the comic songs of the older minstrelsy will have a far better chance at lingering among them than will the inconsequent creations emerging from the "communal improvisation" of the negroes themselves.
It is of interest to find among the songs and fragments of songs collected from the country whites and negroes of the South (see "Songs and Rhymes from the South," by E. C. Perrow, The Journal of American Folk-Lore, April-June, 1915), fragments or stray stanzas to be found in, and probably "floated" by, G. W. Dixon's Zip Coon (viii, 69), joined with a verse of T. Rice's old minstrel song Clare de Kitchen, Stephen C. Foster's Camptown Races, or Owine to Run All Night (vi, 16), De Boatman's Dance (vii, 26) sung by the Ethiopian Serenaders, and the former minstrel favorites Lucy Neal (viii, 62) and Lucy Long (viii, 70). The one-time popular song I'll Not Marry at All is represented in many stanzas, and there are bits of other popular songs, of Mother Goose rhymes, and of glee club and college songs.
37. No. 278.
38. " Songs and Rhymes from the South," The Journal of American Folk-Lore, April-June, 1915, p. 161.
39. Adaptation of something familiar is the first instinct in popular improvisation. Two recent examples from Nebraska may be cited. Well-known among the homesteaders of the Sandhill region is The Kinkaider's Bong, which tells of their life, and celebrates Congressman Moses P. Kinkaid, the author of the homestead law. The piece is built on and sung to the tune of My Maryland. For a second example, let an Omaha paper of July 7, 1915, be quoted:
"Joe Stecher, like the heroes of old, is now depicted in ballad. True, it is ragtime, and parody, at that, but ballad nevertheless it is. Here's one they're singing around cafes, using the music of / Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier:
Ten thousand fans out to Eourke Park went;
They will never go there again.
Ten thousand mat bugs' hearts are aching
From the sight of Cutler's gizzard breaking.
They all saw Joe Stecher,
They all dough had bet.
So through their sobs
We heard them cry:
They didn't raise Kid Cutler to be a wrestler:
They brought him up to be a real guy's toy.
Who dares to place a foot on the mattress
And spill our darling Joe-y?
Let would-be wrestlers arbitrate their troubles.
It's time to can that tiresome Bull.
There'd be no punk bouts today, now that the bunch can see
That they can't produce a guy to throw our Steche-r-r-r-rr.
There is also a song to the tune of Ballin' the Jack, and another to Wrap Me in a Bundle." The Kinkaider's Song and Joe Stecher afford quite typical examples of songs which are, more or less, of folk-composition. The former is the more creditable, and was made by some one of better education, while the Joe Stecher pieces are of the same general character and quality as The Old Chisholm Trail and The Boll Weevil.
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But is it likely that any of these pieces will live, or win foothold in other regions?
40. A collection of newspaper and periodical verse, 1886-1910, edited by Wallace and Frances Rice. Chicago, 1911. See p. 322.
41. A newspaper clipping of this piece, having as title Jack the Evangelist, is pasted in a scrap-book of newspaper verse made between 1885 and 1900 by N. K. Griggs of Lincoln. Mr. Griggs was the author of Lyrics of the Lariat, Hell's Canyon, and later unpublished verse, and it is possible that he composed Silver Jack. His wife and his daughter, Mrs. H. B. Alexander, recall his frequent recitation of it, but hesitate to pronounce it his, since the newspaper verses in the scrap-book are unsigned. Silver Jack has been found in Iowa, according to E. F. Piper of Iowa City, as well as in Michigan and Texas. He says that he has heard it attributed to the late John Percival Jones, United States Senator from Nevada. To Professor Piper is owed the identification of The Ride of Billy Venero with Eben E. Rexford's poem.
42 The songs of a new community usually enter by way of immigration. See, as a random example, Jamaican Song and Story, collected and edited by Walter Jekyl. Appendices, Traces of African Melody in Jamaica, C. S. Myers, English Airs and Motifs in Jamaica, Lucy E. Broadwood, London, 1907. The testimony of Mr. Myers (p. 284) is that: "The majority of Jamaican songs are of European origin. The negroes have learned them from hearing sailor's chanties, or they have adapted hymn tunes." And Miss Broadwood (p. 285) writes to the same effect. "By far the greater part of the Jamaican tunes and song-words seem to be reminiscences or imitations of European sailor's chanties of the modern class; or of trivial British nursery jingles, adopted as all such jingles become adopted."
43. C. S. Baldwin, English Mediaeval Literature (1914), p. 243. And so Professor Kittredge in his introduction to the Cambridge English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1904): "Ballad-making, so far as English-speaking nations are concerned, is a lost art; and the same may be said of ballad-singing." In 1915 he wrote (C. Alphonso Smith, "Ballads Surviving in the United States," The Musical Quarterly, January, 1916) that if he were again summing up the facts he would modify his statement that ballad-singing is a lost art, either in Great Britain or in the United States, evidence for its survival having come in in the last decade; but the statement that ballad-making is a lost art he did not modify.
44 The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. H, xvii, p. 448; Old English Popular Ballads, p. xxvii; The Popular Ballad, pp. 16, 337, etc.