Exploring American Folk Music

by Kip Lornell

  SOME NUTS AND BOLTS OF FIELDWORK

  Fieldwork involves technology as well as the human touch. In our modern world nearly everyone who formally interviews people, be it an anthropologist, newspaper reporter, Internal Revenue Service field agent, or ethnomusicologist, takes electronic “notes” of the meeting. Field notes used to be handwritten, but digital or video recorders are becoming nearly ubiquitous. The advantages of using recorders nearly always outweigh the problems they present (e.g., cost, availability, or the hassle of setting up the equipment).

  The famed novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston collecting folk songs in Florida, circa 1936. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

  If you are not able to or do not wish to tape-record an interview, then by all means do not rely solely upon your memory. The memories of human beings are often faulty and never 100 percent reliable. A small notebook is an invaluable tool, for it allows us to write down factual information, such as a name, address, or phone number, that would require tedious tracking down on the recorder. It can also be useful for quietly recording your own impressions regarding the situation, especially if the session includes or is a performance. These notes often prove to be important later because they can refresh your memory in recalling its ambiance, flavor, or details. In retrospect, trivial events sometimes loom more important as we become more intimately familiar with our subject. Notebooks also gather this information in one place, rather than having things written on small separate slips of paper.

  With the affordability of digital equipment, you will probably use a digital recorder of some type. The major uncertainty with today’s digital equipment is its long-term value as a storage medium; will DAT tapes last as long as, for instance, a well-preserved 78 rpm record? Only the passage of time can answer that question. Given the problems with Ampex reel-to-reel tape manufactured during the mid-to-late 1970s (a plague known to sound archives across the United States), one must always be weary of unforeseeable problems.

  Digital video recorders have become more prevalent and decreasingly expensive since their introduction to the general public in the middle 1990s. For interviews their main value is as a visual record of the person. Video recording interviews usually results in a static visual documentation with little use beyond archival storage. Musical performances inherently lend themselves more kindly to video recording. They allow us to review a performance in a format more closely related to its natural context. Video recording (both analogue and digital) often capture nuances—gestures, posturing, performance styles—that are not always easy to remember and permit the researcher to transcribe the words of songs, anointed speech, or other oral information.

  Still cameras remain among our most valuable tools and have been for many decades. They freeze images for us to savor in print—an important detail in itself. A digital camera is a versatile tool that can capture a simple, effective portrait of a musician or the broad panorama of a musical performance. It is easy to use, preferable in most fieldwork, and useful in a variety of situations. The results of a still camera can be utilized in a final class report, an exhibit of photographs, on the cover of a phonograph record, or to illustrate a magazine article. Which type of camera to use, or whether to shoot black-and-white or color images, depend on the specific ends of your project. Choosing the best media for visual documentation is also part and parcel of your budget.

  Written forms can also be useful for obtaining certain information. They facilitate the gathering of repetitive data and are particularly valuable for survey studies that sample many people. A survey form can also document basic factual information, such as names, instruments played, transmission of musical knowledge, and telephone numbers. A survey of musicians within a county, for example, is perhaps best undertaken by using a form or questionnaire. Such a form can also supplement a series of more intensive interviews within a specific musical community.

  Conducting fieldwork related to folk music is also partially determined by your goals. For a college student using this book as a text, the goal is probably handing in a final project for a class grade. You may wish to innovate and ask your instructor if a carefully edited video or audio documentary can be submitted as your class project. You might write a publishable article or mount a photographic exhibition in lieu of a term paper. Or you could simply submit photographs, taped interviews, or video material as an addendum to your written paper.

  Those with grander ambitions (college student or otherwise) might want to think about wider dissemination along the lines that I’ve already suggested. If the musician or musical group is talented enough, there may be commercial interest in the music. You might approach a public radio station about a series of documentary programs related to regional music. The local art museum may be receptive to a series of concerts by the musicians with whom you are involved. The explosion of cable networks and local access channels could lead to the visual presentation of the music you have explored. Or you may wish to post the material on a Web site and to take advantage of its multimedia capabilities.

  The Ardoin Family (1969) has been involved with zydeco music for several generations. Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Archive, Center for Folklife and Cultural Studies, Smithsonian Institution.

  FINAL THOUGHTS

  Fieldwork requires innovation, exploration, and a sense of carpe diem (seize the day). Students don’t always want to be (nor should they be) force-fed information. This kind of musical fieldwork underscores the fact that you are capable of adding to our body of knowledge through original efforts. Such work not only serves as an adjunct to library resources but also as a vital pathway to primary resources that are all too often missing from our knowledge of American vernacular music. A well-executed field project is also challenging and fun because it reveals a musical world that has been awaiting discovery.

  SUGGESTED READING

  Peter Bartis. Folklife and Fieldwork, rev. edition. Washington, D.C.: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, 1990. This is a valuable and free (!) monograph devoted to fieldwork and folk culture, including musical traditions. It is available by mail through the Library of Congress and is also posted on their Web site: WWW.LCWEBB.LOC.GOV/FOLKLIFE/.

  Gregory Barz and Timothy Cooley, eds. Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives For Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Barz and Cooley have edited a valuable series of essays by various authors on conducting fieldwork on folk and vernacular music across the world.

  Sandy Ives. The Tape-Recorded Interviews: A Manual for Field Workers in Folklore and Oral History, 2nd edition. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. Although Ives does not focus on music, he carefully discusses fieldwork in light of oral histories that are documented with tape recorders, photographs, and field notes.

  Bruce Jackson and Sandy Ives, eds. The World Observed: Reflections on the Fieldwork Process. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. The sixteen contributors to this volume reflect upon their own fieldwork experiences—most of which are quite interesting—but not all of which are directly related to music. Despite this caveat, it remains a valuable book.

  Bruce Jackson. Fieldwork. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. A pragmatic and theoretical guide to fieldwork based on the author’s own classroom and worldly experience, divided into four parts: “Human Matters,” “Doing It,” “Mechanical Matters,” and “Ethics.”

  George H. Shoemaker, ed. The Emergence of Folklore in Everyday Life: A Field Guide and Sourcebook. Bloomington, IN: Trickster Press, 1990. A series of essays about folklore and folklife research, some of which are specifically on music, but there are some useful words about fieldwork in general.

  Martha C. Sims: Living Folklore: An Introduction to the Study of People and Their Traditions. Logan: Utah University Press, 2005. Although not about music, per se, this handy volume addresses relevant issues such as the importance of rituals, the context of performance, and ethics.

  Jeff Titon, ed. Worlds of Music: An
Introduction to the Music of The World’s People, Shorter Version, 3rd edition. New York: Schirmer/Cengage Learning, 2009. An introductory textbook on ethnomusicology that covers music from Africa, eastern Europe, and the United States, which concludes with a fine chapter, “Discovering and Documenting a World of Music,” on musical fieldwork and accompanying CDs of music.

  Chapter 4

  ANGLO-AMERICAN SECULAR FOLK MUSIC

  • British Ballads

  • Broadsides

  • Native American Ballads

  • Singing Cowboys

  • Tin Pan Alley and Country Music Texts

  • Ernest Stoneman’s Repertoire

  • The Father of Bluegrass

  • Honky-Tonk

  • Western Swing

  • Final Thoughts

  Exploring American Folk Music: Ethnic, Grassroots, and Regional Traditions in the United States gradually exposes you to a wide variety of styles, some of which you’ve probably never before encountered. This chapter, however, focuses upon genres, such as bluegrass, that should be more familiar. Many of the figures discussed here are obscure, others are quite well known because of their exposure in the commercial media: Gene Autry, Bill Monroe, and Bob Wills, among others. Their music, ranging from cowboy songs to the Native American ballads celebrating train wrecks, are discussed in the following pages.

  This music largely developed here via emigrants from the English-speaking British Isles. Typically, the subject of ballads arises in discussions of Anglo-American folk song, and a small number of British ballads remain part of our culture. Even a few songs, such as the ballad “The Unfortunate Rake” (better known as the “The Streets of Laredo” or “St. James Infirmary”) and the fiddle tune “Paddy on the Turnpike,” are still played and sung by musicians on both continents. Much of this music eventually went into the brew that evolved into two commercially oriented strains: the “Nashville” sound and rock music in the post–World War II era.

  Mary McClain and her fiddle. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

  BRITISH BALLADS

  Ballads, frequently considered a “purer” literary folk tradition, exerted an important influence upon early Anglo-American music. These are the older British ballads, songs with a clear, usually linear story line. Certainly the later Tin Pan Alley writers were interested in storytelling, but the classic Old World ballads belong in a separate category because their antiquity and intent differs so greatly from the professional authors. The ballads in Francis James Child’s canon, for instance, generally migrated to the United States during our settlement. Child, an English professor at Harvard University, categorized these ballads of British origins in the late nineteenth century. He idealized these oral stories purely as products of the unsullied “folk” who preserved these songs as part of an ongoing oral process that was passed down from one generation of semiliterate (at best) folk to another. Many of these songs were transmitted by written means: texts printed in rough chapbooks, or copied by the singers themselves in notebooks.

  The early ballad singers generally performed alone and with no instrumental accompaniment. Scholars beginning with Francis James Child have generally been intent upon merely collecting the words to these songs. In recent years a more holistic approach has prevailed, with not only the text but also the tune and the context gaining more status among collectors of folk songs. Bill McNeil’s compilations, Southern Ballads, exemplify this trend as does Simon Bronner’s regional study. Bertrand Bronson’s important work with the tunes of Child ballads further adds greatly to our knowledge of the music associated with these venerable songs.

  By definition ballads tell a story, but they also contain other characteristics that make them different from other forms of narrative songs. Ballads are impersonal in tone and compress their action to focus upon the story’s highlights, usually the ones with plenty of drama, romance, and melodrama. They are usually told without commenting upon the event itself. In these regards a ballad is similar to a newspaper story, particularly a tabloid bannered with headlines about aliens, Elvis Presley, and wonder diets. Several well-known British ballads imported to this country would make impressive headline fodder: “Farmer Sells Wife’s Soul to Devil” (“Farmer’s Curst Wife—Child 278), “Cuckold Husband Mistakes Wife’s Lover for a Cabbagehead” (“Our Goodman”—Child 274), “Lover Wins Last-Minute Reprieve with Gold Offer” (“The Maid Freed from the Gallows”—Child 95), or “Enemy Ship Sunk by Greedy, Love-Crazed Cabin Boy” (“The Golden Vanity”—Child 286).

  Ballads invariably use plotted action. Typically there is an unsettled situation and its resolution, which makes for suspenseful drama. They tend to gloss over the unsettled early situation and concentrate on the more consequential action of the second section. Ballad scholars have labeled this leaping and lingering: leaping over the background details to linger on the powerful and dramatic scenes. But even the most climactic action unfolds in objective prose, while the most gruesome or emotional scenes are revealed dispassionately and without critical comment. They often unfold as though they are being recounted by a jaded, veteran court reporter who has seen it all dozens of times before.

  Lyric songs don’t present the same well-developed narrative as do ballads, but they share many of the same themes. These humorous, sad, or satirical songs often deal with love, work, death, and tragedy. Blues, many commercial country tunes, and most rock ’n’ roll songs provide good examples of lyric songs.

  While the British ballads in Francis James Child’s canon contain stories about Robin Hood, Northumbria, and England’s battles with European countries, such tales are not encountered in the United States. The Child ballads that survived into twentieth-century America contain more universal themes with generalized plots: the love of Barbara Allen, tragic events between two sisters, or the roguish charm of the Black Jack Davie. The basic appeal of such stories is apparent, especially in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America where so many people were closer to British culture and lacked the formal education to read and write. It is important to remember that ballads are not perpetuated only among the rural, illiterate poor.

  * * *

  MUSICAL EXAMPLE

  Ms. Ritchie comes from an exceptionally musical family in Kentucky. She has made many recordings of ballads, including this version of “The House Carpenter” from the middle 1950s. This popular British ballad easily jumped the Atlantic Ocean into the repertoire of American singers because of its treatment of romance and drama. The American edition displays many of the traits described above: (1) it leaps over superfluous details, concentrating instead upon action; (2) the narrative makes emotional sense; (3) the story moves briskly along; and (4) listeners are left wondering about details—What are the names of the people involved? Where in Italy were they bound? What caused the ship to spring a leak?

  Title “The House Carpenter” (Child 243)

  Performer Jean Ritchie

  Instrument one voice

  Length 4:16

  Musical Characteristics

  1. The a cappella singing creates a monophonic texture.

  2. The form of this ballad is strophic.

  3. You can hear very minor variations in melody and the occasional rhythmic inflections.

  4. Her voice is at ease and falls into the lower middle register.

  5. Ritchie uses a pentatonic (five-note) scale for this song.

  Well met, well met, my own true love,

  Well met, well met, said he,

  I’ve come from far across the sea

  And it’s all for the sake of thee.

  I could have married the King’s daughter fair,

  And she would have married me,

  But I have forsaken the crowns of gold

  And it’s all for the sake of thee.

  If you could’ve married a king’s daughter fair,

  I’m sure I’m not to blame,

  For I have married me a house carpenter

  For I’m sure he’s a fine young
man.

  Oh will you leave your house carpenter,

  And sail away with me?

  I’ll take you where the grass grows green

  Down in sweet Italy.

  Oh if I leave my house carpenter,

  And sail away with ye,

  What will ye have to maintain me upon

  When we are far away?

  Oh I have seven ships upon the sea

  Seven ships upon the land

  Four hundred and fifty bold sailor men

  To be at your command.

  She turned herself three times around

  She kissed her babies three;

  Farewell, farewell, you sweet little babes

  Keep your father sweet company.

  They hadn’t been sailin’ but about two weeks,

  I’m sure it was not three;

  When this fair lady begin for to weep

  And she wept most bitterly.

  Are you weepin’ for your house carpenter

  Are you weepin’ for your store,

  Or are you weepin’ for your sweet little babes,

  That you never shall see anymore?

  Not a-weepin’ for my house carpenter

  Not a-weepin’ for my store,

  Yes, I’m weepin’ for my sweet little babes

  That I never will see anymore.

  They hadn’t been sailin’ but about three weeks,

  I’m sure it was not four,