American Interest In Folk Music

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 29024, 13 October 1959, Page 20

American Interest In Folk Music

During the 1890's John Lomax was being told by his English professor at the University of Texas that the cowboy songs be had heard and remembered from boyhood were worthless —only English and Scottish ballads had any cultural significance. He destroyed that early collection, but when he went on to Harvard University for graduate work, he discussed these songs with his professors there. They not only urged him to make an even larger collection, but facilitated his doing so with a fellowship. His “Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads” was published in 1910. the first American collection to include any music. Archive Set Up Lomax had to earn a living for his growing family. But he also found time to lecture in universities and colleges on folk music, and in 1928 he and other scnolars were effective in persuading the Library of Congress tc set up the Archive—of which both he and his son were later to be curators. In 1933, Lomax and his son. Alan, set off on a 16.000-mile trip through the Southern States, going to churches and schools, prison camps and penitentiaries, lumber camps and river docks. The songs and sounds they caught on their old recording machine formed the nucleus of the Archive’s present extensive collection. Long before Lomax died in 1943, others—among them the poets Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg—had begun to hunt out, the songs of the United States. They discovered how these varied from region to region, how many' of them stemmed from, or had I overtones of other civilisations— African, British, French, Slavic, Spanish; how words and melodies! had changed as one singer or one generation sang them to another; how each phase of American history could be traced in the songs of its trades, its politics, its wars and wanderings and sorrows.

Tape Recorder’s Advent But it was not until the advent' of the tape recorder and long-1 playing records that interest in folk music became really widespread in the United States. Amateurs as well as an increasing number of scholars began to that the field offered an

ilmost inexhaustible vein of musical riches, requiring only a tape recorder to mine. “Practically anyone,” says the “Saturday Evening Post,” now “can become a one-man recording company”— and many have. Their listeners may be only fellow enthusiasts, but they find them audience enough.

The archive has encouraged and continues to encourage the States to set up their own archives for the preservation of their regional folk lore and music. From these, in turn, has been generated the enthusiasm in various States ’out of which have come yearly folkfestivals of singing, dancing and story telling. More than 250 colleges and universities offer undergraduate courses in folk ballads (including the music) and the archive finds itself more and more being used as a resource by graduate students writing their theses on folk music.

About 300 new commercial recording companies have come into existence since long-playing records appeared on the market and several have specialised in less well-known forms of music. Indeed, over the years since it was established, the archive seems to have more than succeeded in its self-defined role of "encourager” of interest in folk music. “Today,” comments the "Library Journal.” a national magazine not connected with the Library of Congress, “our immediate musical experience can be expanded to include the whole world.” (Concluded)