The diverse scholarly songbooks that continued to appear through the Depression captured some of the decade’s cultural/musical dynamic. While much of the attention continued to focus on the South, folklorists were scattered throughout the country, finding older ballads and folk songs wherever they searched. For example, Margaret Larkin published Singing Cowboy in 1931. While she cautioned the reader that “Cowboy songs are not folk songs in the scholarly sense of the word. Nearly all of them are parodies of old ballads or of popular songs of their day,” but they should now be considered part of the folk heritage. She does note, however, “Radio singers and phonograph recordings have popularized cowboy songs, of late years, and have not been without their effect on the folk singers…. The authority of the record sometimes shakes the folk singers’ confidence in their local versions, but revives their interest in the old songs, and their belief in their worth and dignity.”
This would be a common problem for all collectors, trying to separate modern influences from traditional words and performance styles. While New England folk songs and ballads have not been particularly well known, compared to those from the South, numerouscollections were published, including Helen with George Brown, Vermont Folk-Songs and Ballads (1931); Phillips Barry, The Maine Woods Songster (1939); Eloise Hubbard Linscott, Folk Songs of Old New England (1939). Traditional songs were fading from vernacular culture, but could still be discovered by zealous collectors. As Jennifer Post has recently noted, in Music in Rural New England Family and Community Life, 1870– 1940: “By the 1930s and 1940s, musical standards for many people in this region [Northern New England] were set by national radio programs and the hillbilly song industry…. For many people these newer traditions became a source for family tradition, supplanting older practices.”
The New England collectors were joined by George Pullen Jackson, who produced Spiritual Folk-Songs of Early America (1937). George Korson documented coal mining songs in Minstrels of the Mine Patch (1938). The Midwest was now covered, for example, by Mary Eddy’s Ballads and Songs From Ohio (1939), and the numerous southern collections included Harvey Fuson’s Ballads of the Kentucky Highlands (1931). The government, through the Federal Theatre Project, issued Robert Gordon’s Folk-Songs of America in 1938, drawn from his earlier New York Times articles.
There were also scores of country and western songs appearing in sheet music and song portfolios, many of recent vintage, and featuring both popular and obscure musicians. The major performers, such as the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, and Gene Autry, had numerous printed collections, but seemingly so did every other performer. The M. M. Cole Publishing Company offered a wide range of songbooks, including Carson J. Robison’s World’s Greatest Collection of Mountain Ballads and Old Time Songs (1930), Elmore Vincent’s Lumber Jack Songs (1932), as well as compilations by the Ranch Boys, Doc Hopkins and Karl and Harty, Happy Jack Turner, and many others. American Music, Inc. also published a broad list of performers, such as the Drifting Pioneers, Al Clauser and His Oklahoma Outlaws, “Dude” Martin, Bill Boyd, and the Tennessee Ramblers. The sale of song folios was profitable not only for the publishers but also the performers, serving as their publicity. Most of their songs were newly written or arranged, thus supplying royalties for the composers or arrangers, as well as the publishers. Moreover, the proliferation of song folios indicated that the audience for folk music was not content just to listen to the radio or attend a concert, but was also singing the songs at home and/or with friends.
Folk Music in the United States During the Depression
