These songs were deemed superior to the European ones that had long been used in music education, which was probably true. Led by John and Alan Lomax, and involving Charles Seeger, Robert Gordon and a band of enthusiasts centered in and around the Archive of Folksong at the Library of Congress, they organized an effort to inject hand-picked "folk songs" into public consciousness, and also into elementary music curriculums across the country. In an effort that spanned roughly two generations, for the most part ending with my own, dozens and possibly hundreds of artificially-inseminated folk songs, collected from scattered individuals, were put into the bloodstream of American folk music in a type of Jurassic Park experiment. This had the effect of disturbing and profoundly altering the actual transmittal processes, and instead of being passed on from a neighbor or family member, these songs took a very different route into all the people who subsequently learned them. Though the goal was to locate, document, archive and share what they found, a sizable chunk of this orally-transmitted folklore that was supposedly being celebrated for its ability to spread around among the people, was instead deliberately moved into quite different information streams. They also put some of the songs into books and curated record albums, often editing, consolidating and modifying them as they saw fit. More haphazardly than systematically, working either independently or with a library or university, these "songcatchers" collected, labeled, transcribed and archived the songs they found into a number of private and public collections. The results of their efforts are still important and relevant, especially because what they recorded were genuine things that real people actually did. Perrow, John Jacob Niles, John and Alan Lomax and others did extensive collecting. Dorothy Scarborough, Mellinger Henry, Lawrence Gellert, Natalie Curtis, Cecil Sharp, Howard Odum, E.C. It became a new sport to travel around rural areas with one, befriend the local people and try to capture some important or exciting music. Thomas Edison developed his "phonograph" machine, that only weighed about 30 pounds, using blank wax cylinders that could capture close to 4 minutes of sound via the ear-trumpet horn that could be used for playback or recording. Sparked by the ground-breaking publication of the ten volumes of " English & Scottish Popular Ballads" by Francis Child beginning in 1882, the collectors were greatly empowered and assisted by the use of cylinder recording machines that conveniently showed up in the 1890s. For such a simple little song, it raises all sorts of interesting issues and questions.Įspecially in the first half of the 20th century, chasing the relatively new idea of the "archaic survival" of songs from the past in the memories of illiterate and rural people, dozens of academic and self-appointed folksong collectors excitedly rounded up a large number of American and British Isles folk songs using whatever tools they could. Let's try to understand what made that song surface from the huge pool of songs to take a similar form inside the heads of large numbers of people. We know almost nothing about what it did before about 1920, but since 1937 it has left all sorts of tracks. One of those is the simple children's lullaby, " Hush, Little Baby," where papa is going to buy the baby a mockingbird, a looking glass, a diamond ring, a cart and bull, a billy goat, or a dog named Rover. ![]() For the most part, we can't accurately trace songs backwards to figure out how they spread around or where they originated, but a handful of very well-known "folk songs" have left enough footprints that we can follow at least parts of their travels. A number of melodies and songs, like " Yankee Doodle," are genuine widely distributed folk songs, though they probably spread far more now by sound recordings than by one person hearing another person sing them. We don't know where " Liar, liar pants on fire" or " London Bridge is falling down" came from or why we know what they are, though this process in the 21st century is less connected to the distant past. ![]() Most of us have at least a basic understanding of the idea that jokes, slang terms, nursery rhymes, expressions and songs sometimes filter down on top of us like cultural volcanic ash. How did Annie Brewer's version of a lullaby become a well-known folk song that supposedly belongs to us all? Does it really belong to Brewer's heirs, to the folklorist who put a microphone in front of her in 1937, or to the library it sits in? Putting A Face on Folksong Sources: The Story of Annie Brewer's LullabyĪ common "folk song" has a surprisingly tangled story behind it.
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