For example, Phillips Barry’s British Ballads from Maine, George Korson’s Songs and Ballads of the Anthracite Miner, Franz Rickaby’s Ballads and Songs of the Shanty-Boy, Joanna Colcord’s Roll and Go: Songs of American Sailormen, Fannie Hardy Eckstorm and Mary Winslow Smyth’s Minstrelsy of Maine, and Arthur Davis’s Traditional Ballads of Virginia. The Schirmer company published a number of intriguing songbooks, for example Bayou Ballads, Seven Negro Exaltations and Spanish Songs of Old California.
Field collectors were cautious in selecting who to interview and whatsongs and balladsto focus on. There were, for example, differences between the musical experiences and memories of men and women. Jennifer Post has recently made these distinctions in her study of traditional music in northern New England: “While women (and their music) dominated the kitchen during the daytime, men controlled the music performed there on a Saturday night, when families gathered for the local kitchen dances or men met for jam sessions. The parlor, on the other hand, was often used by men to relax in the evening and to share songs with their children, yet it was used by women in the afternoons for local work bees and other social gatherings where they sometimes sang songs and hymns.” Men mostly performed in public, women in private. And the songs they recalled varied in form and content, although often collectors did not register such differences. Another problem for collectors concerned songs with bawdy or salacious themes and words. Collectors often preferred to overlook such tunes, and publishers certainly refused to print any songs considered offensive.
“The prudery that prevented erotic folklore from being collected or published in the first pace, in the English-speaking world, has left a certain residual fuzziness as to why it is worth collecting and studying now,” Gershon Legman has written in his introduction to Vance Randolph’s Roll Me in Your Arms: “Unprintable” Ozark Folksongs and Folklore (1992). Randolph (1892–1980) moved to Missouri in 1920 and soon began his study of local folklore. He published Ozark Mountain Folks in 1932, and other studies quickly followed, culminating in the four volumes of Ozark Folksongs (1946–1950), but without any of the bawdy materials that he had picked up in his travels. “I made no special effort to collect lewd songs,” Randolph explained, “but my informants sang them anyhow, and I recorded bawdy pieces along with the other items.” Other collectors were much more cautious, and usually avoided such songs altogether.
Despite the selective nature of much collecting, the country overflowed with traditional songs and ballads. It appeared time for the federal government to get involved. On July 1, 1928, the Library of Congress established the Archive of American Folk-Song. Carl Engel, chief of the Library’s Music Division, appointed Robert Winslow Gordon as the collection’s first director. Previously a student of Harvard’s George Lyman Kittredge, Gordon had taught briefly in the University of California’s English department, but preferred to hang around the San Francisco waterfront. There he collected folk songs from the local denizens and hobos, which fueled his monthly “Old Songs ThatMenHave Sung” column in Adventure magazine (1923–1928). In 1925 he began collecting folk songs in North Carolina, and soon after in Georgia, before accepting the position in Washington. He published his findings in a series of 15 essays in The New York Times Sunday Magazine (1927–1928), which later appeared in his book Folk-Songs of America. Gordon lasted in the Archive until 1933. An erratic administrator, he yet established a basis for the collection of publications, field recordings, and films that would mushroom over the decades.
Folk Becomes More Academic and Popular
