June 7, 2024
It is finally summer. My one small rose bush, that several years ago I thought had been killed by the winter, has come back year by year and is now covered with blossoms and flowers. I don’t know how it became a symbol of hope to me, but it did.
And perhaps it is this newsletter’s time for a summer break—a musical break, something a little different. With the end of school, I have finally had time to turn to a project I have not had time to get to for some years now, which is to look through a sadly unknown collection that has been sitting in the Rare Book Room of Ritter Library of my own Baldwin Wallace University for almost a century. Folk Songs of Rural Ohio is an enormous collection of songs—the Preface says 1484 of them, though I haven’t counted and suspect that number includes variants as individual songs. Still, it is huge, bound in 24 volumes—the PDF kindly provided for me some years ago is 3319 pages long—but in typescript, for this enormous labor of love was never published. From 1919 to 1952, Harry Lee Ridenour was a member of the English department in which I have spent much of my life, as student and faculty member. In the mid-1930’s, he and his wife collected songs that were in the memories of common people in Ohio, songs that the 317 contributors had learned from parents, grandparents, and other relatives in a line going back to around the Civil War. Yet Ridenour was for some reason incapable of editing it into some publishable form. In the Preface, Alwyn Ashburn, another English Department professor, recounts that the collection was put in his hands for editing when Ridenour died in 1966 at the age of 82. But all that Ashburn did, apparently, was supervise the turning of 4000 notebooks into typescript. No real editing was done—the whole thing is a disorganized mess—and I think I may know why. Ashburn was still an active member of the English Department when I arrived as a student in 1969, but I remember that he was almost completely blind. No doubt he did what he could, but any real editing would surely have been beyond him.
Why Ridenour himself never edited it, however, is a mystery to me. There is a rough scaffolding of sections numbered with Roman numerals with thematic titles such as “Lovers’ Laments and Broken Hearts” and “The Brighter Side,” but nothing is consistent, and background material from various historical sources is interpolated abruptly here and there without explanations and transitions. The whole thing is like a minor version of what happened to Coleridge, who lacked the architectonic gift of organizing hundreds of pages of jottings, brilliant paragraphs, tantalizing fragments into the vast encyclopedic schemes that he was constantly projecting. The Welsh poet David Jones begins his fragmented epic, The Anathemata, by saying, “I have made a heap of all that I could find.” That could be Ridenour’s motto too. But the good news is that his collection is still valuable, still a delight to browse around in, as in an old bookshop where, despite category titles over the shelves, entropy has triumphed over organization, and you might find anything anywhere. Not good if you’re looking for something specific, but a great pleasure for those of us who love wandering and who value serendipity. It does make me a bit melancholy, however, to think that I may very well be the only person to have looked at this collection in its entire existence—which is one of my reasons for writing about it.
Some years ago, the great singer-songwriter Richard Thompson devised a program called 1000 Years of Popular Music, a tour de force whose song list started in the Middle Ages and ended with Britney Spears. The first fact about the history of music in Europe and the United States has been the division between classical and popular music. Popular music is for entertainment, whereas classical music aspires to be art, which means that it develops a complexity, musical sophistication, and virtuosity that popular music lacks. While this is an oversimplification, it is not simply false. There are many forms of popular music, and a huge amount of interbreeding, but folk and blues—two genres whose fortunes have always been entwined—are distinct from the other varieties of popular music in that they are not commercial, at least in their origins. Folk music is exactly what its name says: it is created by the “folk,” the common people, rather than by an industry whose purpose is to make money through entertainment. That is not a put-down, and all these statements are additional oversimplifications, but they get at something real.
Interest in folk music by more educated people paralleled the shift in social class relations that began in the late 18th century as a prelude to the Romantic revolution. In “The Defence of Poetry,” Sir Philip Sidney treats his admiration for the old tragic ballad of “Chevy Chase” as a guilty pleasure:
Certainly, I must confess my own barbarousness, I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet; and yet is it sung but by some blind crowder, with no rougher voice than rude style; which, being so evil apparelled in the dust and cobwebs of that uncivil age, what would it work trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar? (231, lines 766-771).
The best he can manage is a backhanded compliment—“It’s deeply moving, but think how much better it would have been if it were actually well written”—because in the 1580’s an aristocrat was expected to prove his elite credentials by scorning whatever is “low.” But the decline of the aristocracy and the growth of democratic sentiments saw a new respect for the products of that “uncivil” age. The rise of folk music started with a series of famous collections of the old ballads: Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), which contains “Chevy Chase”; Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1st edition 1802, final edition 1830); and finally the Child ballads—305 ballads, with variants, collected and published by Francis James Child (1892-98, 5 volumes). The ballads were, and to some extent still are, the easiest folk music to admire from a high-culture perspective, because some of them, like “Chevy Chase” and “Sir Patrick Spens,” are heroic, tragic, and aristocratic in their characters and values.
But with the shift in sensibility that came in with Romanticism came a new appreciation for folk songs that were both by and about people of the lower social classes, an appreciation that extended to outright imitation when Wordsworth and Coleridge published the Lyrical Ballads in 1798. In his influential Preface to the volume, Wordsworth said that folk lyrics are a valuable model for literary poetry because they use “the language really used by men” instead of an artificial “poetic diction.” But some of Wordsworth’s contributions to the volume are revolutionary in content as well as style in that they praise people of what was condescendingly called “humble” origin. A group of them are about a girl called Lucy, who “dwelt among the untrodden ways,” so untrodden that the speaker is the only one to know about her. But now that she is in her grave, “oh, / The difference to me,” he laments. One of Wordsworth’s later poems, “Resolution and Independence,” makes a leech gatherer into a figure of quietly heroic endurance of the vicissitudes of human life. The implied egalitarianism was radical in its time. In Shakespeare’s comedies, characters from the lower class are comic butts, whose ignorance and naiveté are made fun of. It is not until his late romances that Shakespeare begins to question the class system by showing admirable commoners contrasted with aristocratic idiots and knaves.
The United States has been fertile ground, in all senses, for folk music because it is such a young country and was until fairly recent times largely frontier. Americans tend not to think about this historical disjunction. My English girlfriend in grad school had gone to Oxford, and gave me a photo of herself leaning against what she startled me by saying was a 1000-year-old wall, which means it was 700 years older than my own country. We did not exist in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and in fact were born out of the series of revolutions, both political and cultural, that produced the modern world and modern mythology around the time that Wordsworth and Coleridge were writing. Ridenour’s collection is called Folk Songs of Rural Ohio because, although collected in the 1930’s, the songs themselves were mostly composed or brought to Ohio at least a half century before that, when the state was still almost entirely rural. Ohio became a state in 1803, a chunk carved off the Northwest Territories, and was for a long time a region of homesteads, villages, and small towns, many of the latter now assimilated to nearby cities as suburbs, like my own North Royalton, founded in 1818. Part of our frontier legacy is that to this day Ohio only has four large cities (Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, and Toledo), and they are not really very large. So we have always been folk country.
Two famous works of literary criticism about the social mythology of the early United States are titled Virgin Land and The American Adam. The New World was sometimes touted in earlier writing as a new garden of Eden, unfallen, free of the corruptions of Europe’s long history, a place for a fresh start, especially if you were poor or suffering from religious or political persecution back in England, Ireland, or wherever. The Indigenous presence was of course simply ignored, and most Indigenous tribes had left Ohio by the time it became a state. Ironically, the name Ohio is from a Senecan word meaning “good river.” At the very end of the 24th volume, Ridenour records what seem to be musings about how his collection might be turned into a published work, and suggests that it might be titled Banks of the Ohio. That disconcerted me into doing a little research, because to modern folk music enthusiasts, “The Banks of the Ohio” is the title of a dark murder ballad that has been recorded by pretty much everybody, in which a young girl pleads for her life before her lover cold-bloodedly kills her. But it was clear that that was not what Ridenour had in mind, since he speaks of it as “a song that the people in London were singing about Ohio, the Land of Promise.” It turns out that there was another song, sometimes also called “Banks of the Ohio” but more often “The Lovely Ohio,” that amounts to a sales pitch encouraging people to immigrate to the frontier land. On a common-sense level, this is just an editorial anomaly, but on an imaginative level it mimics the story of American literature. The theme of the two volumes mentioned above is that the story of the New World, as mythologized by its great writers, is of a second Fall out of innocence and a paradisal nature. What the settlers brought with them was the human capacity for evil.
In fact, Folk Songs of Rural Ohio has a whole section devoted to murder ballads. It is hard to tell how many of the songs collected in Ohio were actually composed there, but at least one of the murders celebrated in a number of variants was the work of local talent. The song sometimes called “Post Boy Murder” and sometimes “Coshocton Town” recounts the actual murder in 1825 of a boy delivering the mail by a man named William Funston, who was apprehended and hanged in New Philadelphia, where my grandparents later lived. You can learn off the Internet that this murder inspired not only ballads but an unincorporated community called Postboy in Tuscarawas County, and a tunnel supposedly haunted by the ghost of the post boy, who is still trying to deliver somebody’s mail. Neither rain, nor sleet, nor murder shall keep the faithful post boy from his appointed rounds. Ridenour’s note after one variant reads: “In the four months between the time he confessed and his hanging, Funston is supposed to have composed the old Ballad, which came down through the years by word of mouth. Mr. Kirk remembers part of it from his childhood.”
To some people’s minds, however, what has spoiled the New World is not human evil but modernization and progress. One version of a satiric song sometimes called “In the Good Old Days” says,
Oh, things go now at a lightning speed, And they don’t do now as they used to did. And things is changed since I was little, When the only steam came from Granny's tea kittle. Oh, how I grieve, I grieve, For the good old days of Adam and of Eve!
But this rather silly, anti-steam nostalgia may have a point. One of the historic disasters recorded in several variants by Ridenour was of a steamboat, the Lady Elgin, which in 1860 hit another boat on Lake Michigan and sank, killing most of the 400 people aboard it. There is a really nice rendition of “Lost on the Lady Elgin” on YouTube by a group called the Lost Forty. The Lady Elgin may be lost, but her songs are not—a lesson we shall revert to later is that these songs, at least many of them, are not entombed in archival sources but are alive and circulating, still being performed.
The Ridenour collection is the recorded evidence of an entirely oral tradition. Few of the songs have known authors, and all of them have been passed on from one person’s memory to another’s down through generations in a way that I find amazing every time I think of it. There is one anecdote about a set of written lyrics discovered in an old wardrobe, but that is exceptional. Do we still have memories capable of a feat like that? I’m not sure. People do memorize unintentionally just by repeated hearings: when Richard Thompson, in 1000 Years of Popular Music, started singing Britney Spears’s “Oops, I Did It Again,” the audience laughed—but when he suddenly stopped singing, they sang the next verse alone, and then laughed at themselves for knowing it. Ridenour’s notes about the contributors and the circumstances of collecting are often as fascinating as the songs:
The old songs are not to be had for the asking. One must diligently search, memories must be started to working and when once started, perhaps nothing of traditional value will result, or perhaps it will bring forth a veritable treasure. Once the mind starts to work, stanzas often come to mind in the wee hours of the night. If the singer will arise and write them down then, the results are often gratifying. If not, often they have difficulty in remembering the next day. One of the very interesting methods of transmission has been singing the old ballads as lullabies. It seems to have been in Ohio at least one of the prime methods of providing a cache for the tunes. If not the entire ballad, at least some stanzas of many of them. Thus in the Fyler home, Captain Kidd’s notorious deeds lulled three generations to peaceful repose. In all truth, it must have been the often repeated “As He Sailed, As He Sailed” that had the desired soporific effect rather than the spilled gore of the murdered men.
That last had me laughing out loud, for I know “Captain Kidd” well, from a rousing version by the Newfoundland band Great Big Sea. Kidd’s father gave him a Bible as he left home, but he “shoved it in the sand,” and went on to a career of slaughtering people, verse by verse, until finally ending up on the executioner’s block. A nice, gentle lullaby for the wee ones.
Children were a means of circumventing the religious strictures against any kind of music but hymn singing in a state that was widely Methodist. It is because of the Ridenour collection that I now know what a “play party” was. The Methodists, like the Baptists elsewhere, forbade dancing and playing musical instruments, but some songs could be performed with clapping and various pantomiming hand movements at “play parties,” where the performances could be permitted as children’s games. Some very familiar songs, ones that are lighthearted and rather goofy, became play party favorites, including “Skip to My Lou,” “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight?”, “Pop Goes the Weasel,” and “Old Dan Tucker.” One of the few songs to have a known author, “Old Dan Tucker” was written by Dan Emmitt of Mt. Vernon, Ohio (where my brother now lives). Emmitt created one of the early minstrel troupes. Now offensive because of their performances in blackface, minstrel shows helped preserve some of the folk tradition. Speaking of silly, I was astonished to find that that annoying staple of long bus rides on school field trips, “100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” goes back to the days when the rides would have been horse-drawn sleigh rides:
In the winter, sleigh rides to a friend's home in the country, or to a Tavern in another town or settlement, and in summer hay rides, gave a wonderful opportunity for ensemble singing of favorite tunes. These, it seemed, were frequently of a similar type, not a long Ballad, but cumulative songs such as “Forty-Nine Blue Bottles,” short ditties as “Go Tell Aunt Rhoda” (or Abby) or “Goodby, My Lover, Goodby.”
The number of bottles has been inflated over time. And, no, Ridenour’s version does not say what was in the bottles. It is amusing that the Ridenour collection ended up in a university that was founded by a Methodist enthusiast, John Baldwin, and was until recently a church-affiliated school, given the extreme Methodist intolerance of any kind of frivolity. The note to one song says dryly,
The first one we heard was one from Miss Minnie Smith, Berea, Ohio….She learned it from her grandmother, Nancy Williams, who was born in 1796 in Amherst, Massachusetts and moved to Ohio about 1834. This remarkable woman lived to ninety-six, and almost to the last was the delight of her family circle because she could entertain the company at family reunions with her songs. Fortunately she was an Episcopalian and "believed in having fun" as her granddaughter said. From her Methodist kin, Miss Smith learned very few songs.
The straitlaced attitude combined piety, propriety, and prudery in equal measure:
One lady of seventy-eight, who has given us many good Folk Songs, said, “It was considered rude for a young lady to cross her legs in a mixed company, in fact, she was not supposed to have legs.” Mrs. Trollope further says, “A young German gentleman of perfectly good manners once came to me greatly chagrined at having offended one of the principal families in the neighborhood of Cincinnati, 1828, by having pronounced the word “corset” before the ladies of it.”
Ridenour’s annotations pull the collection away from being merely an edition towards being what Northrop Frye calls an anatomy, a work of literature marked by a zest for ideas and curious erudition. To a song in which a lover promises a woman a lap dog is attached the following, from a 1930 book on Elizabethan customs:
It is quite the passion for knights' ladies and countesses to cherish "sybaritical puppies, “to hold them in their bosoms, to let them sleep on their beds, lie in their laps, and continually to dandle these creatures supposed to satisfy the nice delicacy of dainty classes.
I take this as a suggestion, actually more than a suggestion, that sexual repression may take the form of finding surreptitious substitutes. The name Sybaritical Puppies is available to any marginal punk band that wants it.
What Frye calls the anatomy form’s magpie tendency to collect odd facts, to make a nest of random erudition, is also evident in the insertion of entire articles on folk music from Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most widely circulated magazine in the country during its heyday from 1830-1878. From a Godey’s essay on ballads from 1874 comes this example of lush, slightly genteel Victorian-style prose:
The Ballad themes are those of a simple and primitive life. Love and War, perilous ventures by land and sea, fairies and apparitions are their burden. We see in them the very form and image of a bold, hardy, credulous age. Legends and weird fancies are embalmed in them. It was an old prophecy that "A dead Douglas should win a field. " Accordingly, at Otterbourne the Douglas says to his page: " But I have dreamed a dreary dream, / Beyond the Isle of Skye / I saw a dead man win a fight, / And I think that man was I.”
It is a style that Ridenour inclines to himself, as in the following passage, in which he tries to answer the important question of what these songs meant to their singers:
In a day when self-expression of necessity was confined mostly to manual exercises, and in a time when artistic craving of the senses must be gratified by the sunsets on the lonely forest or stretches or by the beauties of nature alone, how the old songs must have been treasured. In the old log cabin as the pioneers and their children stirred apple butter, dried corn, wove bedspreads, or in the out house, labored over the laundry for a family of twelve with the most primitive of labor appliances, baked bread in a home-made oven, perhaps all the while filled with a nostalgia for the old home in Pennsylvania, or Connecticut, or Kentucky, or Virginia, what could have been more soul-satisfying than the memory of old songs taught by a grandmother back home. The entire gamut of human emotions and drama are found in a collection of early songs and ballads; love predominant, perhaps, (often a lonely love) pirates, war, death, farm life, city life, murder, children's lullabies, religion, we find them all.
We can hardly imagine a life so confined to physical labor, so cut off, not just from the larger world of events but from culture:
Professor E. S. Loomis, retired teacher of mathematics, told me that in 1866, 1868, 1869, he worked fourteen hours a day for a farmer in Holmes County. This man was considered a successful farmer and fairly well to do… His library, Mr. Loomis said, was, in his opinion, larger than most in that vicinity. It consisted of the Bible, a copy of the United States History, Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress, " Presbyterian hymnal, current almanac and a county paper once a week.
A school in Berea, the town in which Baldwin-Wallace College (now Baldwin Wallace University) is located, was at some point named after Loomis, whose building was later acquired by BW and housed its mathematics department until just a few years ago.
The impulse to collect folk songs beyond the few famous older collections mentioned previously derived from the belief that they belonged to an old way of life that was in the process of disappearing as an agricultural society became industrialized and urban. In England, in 1903, Cecil Sharp was visiting a friend and heard his gardener (named John England, preposterously enough) singing a traditional song called “The Seeds of Love,” a warning to young ladies against false lovers. Sharp was already interested in folk tradition, but this set him off collecting. His collection is housed today in the Cecil Sharp house, home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. Around the same time, in the United States, John Lomax was mentored at Harvard by the great scholar of early English literature George Lyman Kittredge, who had succeeded Frances Child at Harvard and who encouraged Lomax to collect American folk songs. He was eventually joined by his son, Alan Lomax, who carried on after his father’s death. By this time, collecting meant electronic recording rather than merely writing the songs down. There were other collectors as well, such as Carl Sandberg and, in Canada, Edith Fowke. So, when they embarked on their task in the 1930’s, Ridenour and his wife Louise Claspill Rinehart were second-generation members of a movement to preserve an oral heritage.
What is the value of the Ridenour collection today? It is possible that it preserves songs available nowhere else, or at least in versions available nowhere else, but that was not really the main purpose of the collection. Ridenour knew that many of the songs had been published elsewhere: in fact, part of the editorial apparatus consists of bibliographic reference to collections by the Lomaxes and others in which versions of the songs had been published. Today, a few random experimental searches lead me to suspect that there is not a lot in the collection that does not reside somewhere on the Internet. That was not Ridenour’s purpose, though, which was to show that these songs, in these versions, were being sung and passed on at this period of time in Ohio. As a historical survey, it provides valuable information about the way of life of our ancestors.
But what about the artistic value of the songs? Are they merely historical curiosities? The sizable number of Child ballads have always been recognized as great songs, but of course they are available elsewhere. As for the more mundane songs, worth depends on the value system by which you approach them. Older negative judgments about folk songs were, like Sidney’s, basically social: such works are “vulgar” in the original sense of the term, which meant “lower class” and therefore by definition inferior. The Modernist era of the early 20th century tried to replace the social standard with a strictly aesthetic one. Stylistically, a high value was set on precision of language and avoidance of formula, on a dense complexity that made writing difficult and inaccessible to a general public, and on originality. In short, some Modernist poets and critics tried to replace social elitism with an aesthetic elitism. Many are called but few are chosen to read Eliot’s Waste Land, for which its author felt impelled to provide footnotes, or Pound’s Cantos, which read as if they are a set of footnotes. It is a genuine question how greatly Modernist “high standards” are social judgments in disguise, applied by poets and critics who were elitists to the point of being reactionaries. T.S. Eliot changed his citizenship and became the British royalist from Missouri; Yeats admired what was left of the Irish aristocracy on the one hand and the Irish fascists on the other.
There is little in Folk Songs of Rural Ohio or any other folk collection that will look good when judged by the Modernist standards that became dominant at the time when the collections were made. Oral style in fact depends on readymade verbal formulas that can be plugged in when needed: the poets are judged by what they can do with the pre-fab parts. The inferior poets plug in formulas and rhymes clumsily, sometimes desperately, as in one of the versions of the “post boy” murder:
He murdered young Cartmell, a boy of renown, On the road from Freeport to Coshocton town.
“Renown” is dragged in because the poet needed something to rhyme with “town.” The boy was the opposite of renowned: he was a random victim, a kid trying to deliver the mail. Ridenour knows that the folk tradition does not always care for what Coleridge called “the best words in the best order,” and does not allow it to dampen his enthusiasm. About one exercise in randomness, he comments:
It will be quite evident from this, how little the words sometimes mean to the singer. The idea is there, and usually quite plain, but when they don't know the right word, they either put in what they think they have heard, or something of their own imagination. | This song is a splendid example of a Folk Song, no plot, just someone singing whatever comes to his mind. Stanzas without number could be added, and no doubt have been.
Occasionally, there is a surprise, a phrase or verse that seems to have come from another order of imagination altogether. Ridenour provides several versions of “The Golden Vanity,” Child ballad #285, in which a cabin boy sinks an enemy ship: he swam to it and “bore nine holes in its hull all at once.” In the version sung by Maine folk singer Gordon Bok, the next stanza is extraordinary:
And some were playing poker, some were playing dice, And some were in their hammocks and the sea as cold as ice And the water rushed in, and it dazzled to their eyes They were sinking in the lowland sea
And once in a great while, there is a whole mysterious, exceptional song. Ridenour records a song entirely about “nothing”:
Nothing will I sing And nothing will I say. Nothing will I call for And nothing will I pay. For the world sprang from nothing And scarce is the name, When times shall have a close And nothing is the same.
There are several more verses. The second stanza hints at more than mere wit, and Ridenour places immediately after it a song whose opening line unaccountably quotes King Lear, whose endlessly repeated key word is “nothing.” But such moments are rare—this song is like, well, nothing else in the collection.
There are occasions of emotional as well as verbal intensity. The Civil War poem “Somebody’s Darling” repeats the title phrase to powerful emotional effect: every anonymous soldier dying of wounds in the hospital was once “somebody’s darling.” But it is significant that this is actually not a product of the oral tradition but a poem by Marie Ravenel de la Coste, who was also a nurse. And its emotional impact is at least somewhat blunted by Victorianisms such as “Pale were the lips of a delicate mold.”
The same is true of another poem set to music in 1856, “Lorena,” which has a heartrending true story behind it, and an Ohio story at that. The author was a Universalist minister in Zanesville, Ohio, who fell in love with one of his parishioners. But the family put an end to the match because he was only a poor preacher, and he was so heartbroken that he left Zanesville, eventually becoming a Unitarian minister in Chicago (the two churches later merged to become the present Unitarian-Universalist church). He wrote a long, poignant poem about the love that was never to be, ending in near despair:
It matters little now, Lorena, The past is in the eternal past; Our heads will soon lie low, Lorena, Life's tide is ebbing out so fast.
Actually, he married, fathered four children, and lived another 40 years. A Modernist poet would have been sure to undercut what Ridenour at one point calls “the depths of lachrymose sentimentality” with a detached, ironic remark. Yet the song became a favorite of soldiers in the Civil War because it expressed the anguish they felt at leaving behind the women they loved to go to war. The claims of the heart sometimes overrule high standards. Ridenour collected quite a few versions of the song, which was recorded by John Hartford in an album of Songs from the Civil War.
Irony distrusts any kind of emotional excess, whether sentimentality, or, at the other end of the emotional spectrum, melodramatic sensationalism. But Dickens and Poe, in different ways, provided their audiences with a full-blown sensationalist binge. Ridenour records variants of a transplanted English song called “The Mistletoe Bough,” claimed by some to be based on a true story. A girl at Christmas plays hide-and-seek with her lover, but disappears and is never found again. Not alive, anyway:
At length an old chest that had long been lain hid Was found in the castle, they raised up the lid A skeleton form lay a-mouldering there In a bridal wreath of a lady so fair Oh, sad was her fate that in playfullest jest She hid from her lord in an old oak chest That closed with a spring and that new bridal bloom Lay withering there in a lonely tomb
Over the top? Yet the respected English traditional singer Kate Rusby included this bit of holiday cheer on an album of Christmas songs as recently as 2022.
That is one example of the most heartening moral I can draw from Ridenour’s neglected collection. At one point, he says, “Ohio is in the Indian summer of balladry. Some few traditional ballads will linger on, but in twenty-five years most of our typical ballad singers will have vanished from the scene.” But there is something he didn’t anticipate. If that remark comes from the mid-1930’s when Ridenour was doing most of his collecting, it would place the end of the tradition somewhere around 1960. Yet in fact, 1960 roughly marks the beginning of the “folk-blues revival.” By that time, Pete Seeger had already spent at least 20 years performing a huge traditional repertoire for a younger generation, showing that folk songs could be not just archived but sung, and sung by non-professionals—such as me, when I first taught myself guitar around 1969. Bob Dylan had proved that you didn’t have to have a good voice, and, musically, most traditional songs only require what country music called “three chords and the truth.” Our families did not sing these songs, but we found them on recordings, starting with Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music in 1952, whose 84 songs from 1926-1933 introduced the earlier, rough-hewn performers to those whose only knowledge of folk music had been enjoyable but clean-cut renditions by pop-folk groups like the Kingston Trio. Soon, we also had more modernized yet still authentic performances by the likes of Joan Baez, Tom Rush, Ian and Sylvia, and scores of others. Finally, after his first album, which was almost entirely traditional folk and blues, Dylan showed that new folk songs could be written, and invented the role of singer-songwriter.
Some people say that the folk-blues revival is now spent, that the younger generations’ attention has gone elsewhere. My response to this is to provide a link to a video of Muirreann Bradley playing an iconic folk song, Elizabeth Cotten’s “Freight Train,” which I learned from Peter, Paul, and Mary somewhere in the mid-60’s. Cotten was a Black woman hired as a maid by the Seeger family of eminent folk musicians, including not only Pete Seeger but his half-siblings Mike and Peggy. When it was discovered that this African-American woman had not only taught herself guitar (left-handed at that), and composed songs, they facilitated a performing and recording career for her. Muirreann Bradley, recently featured in Acoustic Guitar magazine, is Irish. She is also 18 years old. Yet she can perform a repertoire of fingerstyle country blues songs by people such as Mississippi John Hurt and Memphis Minnie with astonishing virtuosity and authenticity. Folk music will doubtless always be niche music. But I think there will always be people who discover that niche, and find that in doing so they join a group of kindred spirits that is now worldwide and also exemplifies Faulkner’s famous statement that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Reference
Sidney, Sir Philip. “The Defence of Poetry.” In Sir Phillip Sidney: A Critical Edition of the Major Works. Edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford University Press, 1989. 212-51.