| Share page | Visit Us On FB |
|
Preface |
||
|
Only recently have artists and scientists seemed to care to know what the people thought and felt and believed, what and how they sang. With the development of the portable recording machine, however, one can do more than transcribe in written outline what they say. The needle writes on the disc with tireless accuracy the subtle inflections, the melodies, the pauses that comprise the emotional meaning of speech, spoken and sung. In this way folklore can truly be recorded. A piece of folklore is a living, growing, and changing thing, and a folk song printed, words and tune, only symbolizes in a very static fashion a myriad-voiced reality of individual songs. The collector with pen and notebook can capture only the outline of one song, while the recorder, having created an atmosphere of easy sociability, confines the living song, without distortion and in its fluid entirety, on a disc. Between songs, sometimes between stanzas, the singers annotate their own song. The whole process is brief and pleasurable. They are not confused by having to stop and wait for the pedestrian pen of the folklorist: they are able to forget themselves in their songs and to underline what they wish to underline. Singing in their homes, in their churches, at their dances, they leave on these records imperishable spirals of their personalities, their singing styles, and their cultural heritage. The field recording, as contrasted with the field notebook, shows the folk song in its three-dimensional entirety, that is, with whatever rhythmic accompaniment there may be (hand-clapping, foot-patting, and so on), with its instrumental background, and with its folk harmonization. A funeral service in the South, a voodoo ceremony in Haiti, a wedding in French southwestern Louisiana, or a square dance in the country may be recorded for future study; a "movie" would complete the picture.
It is always a dramatic moment for any one when his own voice comes back to him undistorted from the black mouth of a loud-speaker. He seems to feel the intense and absorbing pleasure that a child experiences when he first recognizes himself in a mirror. One old hard-bitten Mexican vaquero in the mesquite country of southwest Texas, when his song was played to him unexpectedly, said with soft amazement, "Madre de Dios!" then after a time, "Muy hombre!" A Negro prisoner, wishing to communicate his extravagant and uncontrollable surprise, fell flat on his back and lay there till his buddies picked him up. A mountaineer, when asked if he would like to hear his record played back, said: "I reckon so. Anything I'll do oncet, I'll do hit twicet." "Ain't men sharp?" he added, when the record-was finished. "A man can't stutter none talking into one of them things; got to stick to plain English. If he don't, it'll tell on him." On hearing
[xiv] |
||