“ Others, those who are sure that folk-song is dying out and therefore see the collector’s duty simply as that of retrieving the last bits of it, may greet the present collection as a new acquisition to the museums. Such a response would arouse in me no enthusiasm and little satisfaction; for I demur completely from narrow interpretations of the status, meaning, import, and destiny of folk-lore, folk-songs, these folk-songs. I do not participate in the pessimism of the folk-song fatalists.
The lore of a folk comprehends, as I understand it, the whole of its basic cultural accomplishments. ”

“ Son of God and man I am,
Mighty to redeem your race,
Jesus is your Savior’s name.
“Wide, ye heavenly gates, unfold,
Closed no more by death and sin;
Lo, the conquering Lord behold;
Let the King of glory in.” ”

“ In the literary field in Elizabethan times it would be difficult to find a play the fundamental material of which was not drawn from already existing sources. The word composer literally means the one who puts together a piece. The material of this piece may, or may not, be invented by such composer. These reflections would seem to explain and to justify the modest claims of the American singing-school book compilers to authorship of songs, and such thoughts should make us approach their labors, not with caviling, but with gratefulness for their invaluable service to American traditional song. ”

“ The tunes of the secular folk-songs came into the religious environment—into the folk-hymns and spiritual songs—with little change. What one could sing by himself to secular words all could sing in a gathering to religious words. The new surroundings made only one added demand,—that the singers indulge in fewer vocal liberties than they might have enjoyed when singing the same tunes in their homes and alone. I refer to those liberties in personal interpretation, a quaint characteristic of individual folk singing which has given the collectors their numerous variants of one and the same song. ”

“ The folk-tunes of America are not, in the main, built up on scales of the diatonic major and minor systems which, as is well known, have assumed their present form under the demands of harmony; but on a modal system which grew out of melodic exigences long before harmony made its conquest of the music of western civilisation. Nor do the folk-tunes of this country make use of all the tones of even these modal scales. ”

“ O tell me no more Of this world’s vain store,
The time for such trifles With me now is o’er.
A country I’ve found Where true joys abound,
To dwell I’m determined On that happy ground.
The souls that believe, in paradise live,
And me in that number will Jesus receive;
My soul, don’t delay, he calls thee away;
Rise, follow the Savior, and bless the glad day.
Four more stanzas of the text are given in the Revivalist. The tune was recorded “as sung by Rev. A. C. Rose” from whom it got its title. The oldest recording of the melody known to me is on page 38 of Ingalls’ Christian Harmony, 1805. ”

“ The last word in brevity of text is where simply one short phrase or sentence, sung over and over, is made to fill out the whole tune frame as a stanza. ‘Death, Ain’t You Got No Shame’, in this collection is one example among many. Such songs as this were too meager to be welcomed warmly into the old song books. They survive therefore chiefly in oral tradition. But meagerness of text is not, we must remember, any criterion of the worth of a religious folk-song. ”

“ By faith we know a world above,
Where all is peace and love.
I feel no way like getting tired,
I’m trusting in his holy word,
To guide my weary feet above,
Where all is peace and love.
The Sacred Harp, edition of 1911, has the following note: “H. A. Parris, who composed the words and music to the ‘Christian’s Hope’, resides at this time, 1911, at Helicon, Alabama. He is a great lover of the old Sacred Harp tunes.” Mr. Parris composed the song by assembling, happily withal, wandering distichs and melodic phrases from songs of much older times. ”

“ Along with the great variety in form which we meet among American folk-tunes, there are certain melodic formulas which seem to be favorites and reappear with unimportant variations as the tonal vestment of many different songs, so many indeed that they might well be looked on as wandering tunes (reminding one of the familiar wandering stanzas in folk texts) or, since they are not identical from song to song, tune families. ”

“ In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Puritan congregations of New England are said to have had music committees one of the chief duties of which was to go among the folk and gather attractive melodies to be used as hymns. And this was also the custom of the Primitive Methodists, both in Great Britain and in America. In writing of this usage at a later date, Chappell says: “The Primitive Methodists ... acting upon the principle of ‘Why should the devil have all the pretty tunes?’ collect the airs which are sung at pot and public houses, and write their hymns to them ... ”

“ From these observations we may assume that the American folk-singer does not like big intervals. [11] This assumption, based on recorded tunes, is strengthened when one listens to folk singing and notices their anticipatory slides or scoops in approaching a tone that is only a little higher or lower than the one just sung, a practice which may be interpreted as an anticipation of, and an attempt to master, that which is vocally difficult. But while the individual jumps from note to note are not as a rule great, the pitch compass of the entire tune is often surprisingly wide. ”

“ When time is no longer, the aged and younger,
Before the great Judge, in their trouble, will fall.
The Judgment decided, friends now are divided;
And all the ungodly are turned into hell:
But glory to Jesus! believing, He’ll save us,
With angels in glory his praises to swell.
The Olive Leaf arranger spoiled the tune’s apparent mixolydian purity by changing the d’s to d-sharps. As to title and source the editor says: “Reverend James Axley was one of the pioneer preachers of the Holston Conference, and a very holy, laborious, and successful minister. ”

“ Urban congregational singing depends on hymnals. Hymnals are made by successions of revision committees. These committees have been either hostile to, or incognisant of, American folk-hymns. The perusal of almost any protestant hymn-and-tune book will prove this. Thus we have the 22 strange anomaly: groups whose prime purpose is to induce more general singing by the masses, refusing recognition, in their books of songs, to the melodism of those masses and putting in its place the tonal products of individuals. ”

“ All who are familiar with the folk-dance revival in England realize the importance of Playford’s English Dancing Master in preserving a large number of tunes and dances that were no longer traditionally extant. The folk material embodied in the shape-note books is no less important and far more varied; it is, in fact, indispensible to all who desire a comprehensive knowledge of British and American folk-music. ”

“ The methods of song-text reducing are familiar. When the American youth sings
Found a horse-shoe, found a horse-shoe,
Found a horse-shoe, just now;
Just now found a horse-shoe,
Found a horse-shoe just now
he is not only following a practice of the early spiritual song makers and singers—his horse-shoe song itself is a parody of a spiritual in this collection—but he is singing in the infinitely older manner of his race. ”

“ American folk-tune collectors have had their troubles in the interpretation of modal melodies. I have had mine. Even such a life-long student of these things as Cecil Sharp met many a knotty problem in classifying his Appalachian tunes. In view of this difficulty I called on Hilton Rufty, a thorough musician and a reliable authority in the folk-music field, to lend a hand in the modal classification of these tunes. ”

“ Typical of the country singers of early American spiritual folk-songs is this group of their leaders in Winston County, Alabama. For over fifty years their Fourth of July singings have gone on uninterruptedly at Helicon, where this picture was taken in 1927.
The “big singings” take place at county seats and in even larger centers. Here the country folk join in song with those who, though they live in the cities, have grown up in the same rural musical tradition. The Alabama State Sacred Harp Singing Association was pictured in its 1929 summer session in the court house in Birmingham, Alabama. ”

“ The kinships already discovered, however, warrant the assumption that these spiritual tunes are part and parcel of the ancestral folk-melodism of the English-speaking peoples.
The worldly-religious tune comparison has also shed more light on the motives which led the revival folk to borrow from the store of secular melody and on the manner of that borrowing. We have indicated above our belief that one motive was the crying need for rousing and familiar tunes. ”

“ Halle, hallelujah,
Oh, there’s glory in my soul.
Ah, poor sinner, you run from the rock,
When the moon goes down in blood,
To hide yourself in the mountain top,
For to hide yourself from God.
Should earth against my soul engage,
And hellish darts be hurled,
Then I can smile at Satan’s rage,
And face a frowning world.
Let cares like a wild deluge come,
And storms of sorrow fall;
May I but safely reach my home,
My God, my heaven, my all.
The compiler of the Social Harp ascribes this song to J. A. & J. F. Wade and dates it 1854. The words, excepting those of the chorus, are by Watts.
228 No. ”

“ James Axley’s Song,’ in the same compiler’s Olive Leaf, he tells who the Rev. Axley was and how he, Hauser, came to record the preacher’s favorite tune. John G. McCurry gives a song called ‘Good-By’ in his Social Harp and tells that he put it down “as played on the accordion by Mrs. Martha Hodges of Hartwell,” Georgia.
Instances like these cited above are numerous. They all go to convince us of the great service rendered by the rural singing masters of yore in the preservation of a body of song, in the collecting and publishing of which no one else seems to have been interested. ”

“ For Christ, our loving Savior, our Comforter and Friend,
Will bless us with his favor and guide us to the end.
With streams of consolation, we’re filled as with new wine,
We die to transient pleasures, and live to things divine,
We sink in holy raptures, while viewing things above,
While, glory to my Savior, my soul is full of love.
This is evidently a marching tune and from the eighteenth century vintage. It occurs also OSH 153, SOC 216, HH 387. ‘Walking on the Levy’ (Newell, Games 67 and Songs of American Children, p. 231) has a similar beginning. Echoes of the text are found in Dett, p. ”

“ American folk-music, basing squarely on that of the British Isles, is purer, I assert, and more completely representative of the peoples among whom it has developed, and less representative of individual creative activity than is the folk-music of other Western peoples. As evidence of this I present this collection, commending it to the serious consideration of those interested in fundamental phases of American culture. ”

“ The melody which Johann Sebastian Bach, the great adapter of folk-tunes, made a peasant sing in his Cantata ‘Mer hahn en neue Oberkeet’ spread to England and became there the setting of a number of popular texts in the first half of the eighteenth century. One of these songs, dating from 1772, was ‘Farewell, Ye Green Fields and Sweet Groves’ which gave birth, probably also in England, to the religious song ‘Green Fields’, found in every old southern fasola book. ”

“ Should a missing tone be presupposed to make either a major or minor, perfect or imperfect, interval with the tonic, there arise at once ambiguities of modality. For purposes of harmonic treatment it is quite necessary to decide upon which particular mode a gapped tune suggests, but in studying the purely melodic aspects it is reasonable to accept the tune as an entity, considering it in its actual tonal structure and not with regard to its possible modal permutations. ”

“ We call for valiant-hearted men.
Fight on, ye conq’ring souls, fight on,
Until the conquest you have won.
I have some friends before me gone,
And I’m resolved to travel on.
Farewell, vain world, I’m going home,
My Savior smiles and bids me come.
I’ll tell you what I mean to do,
I mean to go to glory too.
The song bears the name of “Rev. J. K. Tinkham” as its purveyor to the Revivalist. A version of the spiritual song, as sung at about the same time (in the 1870’s) by the negroes, is in Marsh, No. 85, under the title ‘Down by the River’. Another by the same title is in Dett, p. 55 ”

“ The tune is a variant of ‘The Winter it is Past’, Petrie, No. 439.
137 No. 114
HOLY MANNA, HOC 122 Pentatonic, mode 3 (I II III — V VI —)
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Brethren, we have met to worship
And adore the Lord our God,
Will you pray with all your power
While we try to preach the word?
All is vain unless the spirit
Of the holy One comes down;
Brethren, pray, and holy manna
Will be showered all around.
Brethren, see poor sinners round you,
Trembling on the brink of wo;
Death is coming, hell is moving,
Can you bear to let them go? ”

“ The wind is in our favour, how swiftly do we move!
Though tempests may assail us, and raging billows roar,
We will sweep through the deep, till we reach fair Canaan’s shore.
155
The Southern Harmony gives the maker of this song as I. Neighbours, who may indeed have been the author of the text. This text is clearly a parody, and the tune a close variant, of ‘When the Stormy Winds do Blow’ or ‘You Gentlemen of England’, a song of seafaring which appears to have been widely sung in England over a long period. References to a ‘Stormy Winds’ ballad reach back to 1660. ”

“ Come to Jesus, come to Jesus,
Come to Jesus just now,
Just now come to Jesus,
Come to Jesus just now.
Subsequent verses are built up on: He will save you; O, believe him; He is able; He is willing; He’ll receive you; Call upon him; He will hear you; Look unto him; He’ll forgive you; He will cleanse you; He will clothe you; Jesus loves you; Don’t reject him; and, Only trust him. A negro version of tune and text is in Slave Songs, No. ”

“ Sure there was never love so free, dear Savior, so divine;
Well thou may’st claim that heart of mine, which owes so much to thine.
The text is one of those which rationalize religious rites; in this case, that of the communion. The tune is credited to Freeman Price. Its second part reminds of ‘The Merry, Merry Milkmaids’, Sharp, Country Dances, Set No. 5.
No. 69
TRIBULATION, MOH 46 Hexatonic, mode 2 A (I II 3 IV V — 7)
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Death, ’tis a melancholy day
To those that have no God,
When the poor soul is forc’d away
To seek her last abode. ”

“ It is not too much to hope that a revival of interest in this music may result in a general use of it in our churches, where its native vigour, unaffected straightforwardness and lyric beauty could go far in freeing us from the insipid banalities of much present-day church music. ”

“ The comparison of tunes shed no actually new light on the age of the tunes. But it made clear the fact that the folk’s stock of melodies is assembled from divers times. The tunes of two songs in this collection, ‘New Orleans’, and ‘Hark my Soul’, have tonal trends strikingly similar to that of melodies found in the eleventh and early thirteenth centuries respectively. From the early seventeenth century we find ‘Mourner’s Lamentation’ which was in those earlier times ‘Wae is Me for Prince Charley’, a Jacobite song about Charles II of England. ”