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Preface |
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know that life is so much more ridiculous than anyone can ever hope to tell. These are the people who understand death, because it has been close to them all their lives. They have looked at the faces of young men whose lives have been torn from them in industrial accidents. They have been acquainted personally with young girls who killed themselves when they were deserted by false-hearted lovers. They have sheltered the families of men who were sent to prison for murder. These people make deep, slow jokes while they are waiting for things to happen, and they know that what a man isn't willing to fight for must not be true for him. These people have a lot to say and a lot to remember, and that is why this book is mostly in quotation marks.
These people have been wanderers, walking and riding alone into the wilderness, past the mountains and the broad rivers, down the railroad lines, down the highways. Like all wanderers, they have been lonely and unencumbered by respect for the conventions of life behind them. Remembering the old songs in their loneliness, throwing up their voices against prairie and forest track, along new rivers, they followed the instincts of their new experience and the old songs were changed so as to belong to their life in the new country. New songs grew up inconspicuously out of the humus of the old, thrusting out in new directions in small, but permanent, fashion. There grew up a whole continent of people with their songs as much a part of their lives as their familiar ax, gun, or silver dollar. It took them long to recognize that new lives and new songs had been made here.
Yet, in mass, the songs are perhaps more unconventional than the new lives. The songs are the product of the mixing or extension of several peasant musical stocks—British, African, Spanish, French, and German. They are sung in styles which offend the cultivated ear 5 they are accompanied, if at all, in various unpredictable ways on a number of "limited," inexpensive, and portable instruments. They are often repetitious 5 they are frequently trite and sententious 5 but, taken all together, they reflect the life with more honest observation, with more penetrating wit and humor, with more genuine sentiment, with more true, energetic passion than other forms of American art, cultivated or subsidized.
We have known country fiddlers who couldn't read or write, but could play two, three, or four hundred tunes. We have known white ballad singers who remembered one, two, three hundred ballads. We have known Negroes who could sing several hundred spirituals. We have shaken hands with a Mexican share-cropper who carried in his head the ttxty tunes, and stage directions for a Miracle play requiring four hours and twenty actors
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