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Preface |
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to perform. We have been in constant touch with people who felt that inÂability to improvise by ear unfamiliar tunes in three- or four-part harmony marked one as unmusical. Such artists with their audiences have created and preserved for America a heritage of folk song and folk music equal to any in the world. Such folk have made America a singing country.
We name the names of some of the best singers that we have met:
Mrs. Griffin, a "Georgy cracker" who "has done everything that an honest woman could do except lie and steal"—picked cotton, cleared land, danced in a minstrel show, raised twelve children, run her own sawmill; who came to northern Florida overland and on foot from southern Georgia; from whom seventy-five or more ballads and songs have been recovered, including one called "Lord Derwent-water."
Old Lize Pace of Hyden, Kentucky, from whom Cecil Sharp collected some of his best songs, and whose story is found on page 151 of this book.
Blind old Mrs. Dusenberry of the Ozarks, living in a little old log cabin in the hills, holding in her memory nearly two hundred songs and ballads.
Maggie Gant and her children, dispossessed east Texas share-croppers, whose story is found on page 156.
Mrs. Ward of the Wards of Galax, Virginia, a gentle-voiced and calm farmer's wife who has passed on a store of ballads and songs to a whole generation of her descendants.
Elida Hofpauir, fifteen, who knew a bookful of French and Cajun ballads, who worked in a tomato canning factory and wanted a dollar "store-bought" dress for a present.
Aunt Molly Jackson, who has filled seventy-five twelve-inch records for the Library of Congress with her songs and reminiscences about them, who was midwife to Clay County, the daughter of a coal miner and preacher, the wife of a miner, and a union organizer in her own right.
Johnny Green, rantankerous old Irish fisherman and lumberjack and lake sailor of Beaver Island, Michigan, who has "dug up" out of his own memory nearly three hundred come-all-ye ballads, the saga of his people in Ireland, in English wars, in American forests, and on the American lakes.
Elmer George, one-time lumberjack, now automobile salesman of North Monr-pelier, Vermont.
Dick Maitland, seaman of Sailors' Snug Harbor, eighty-odd, still as sturdy and foursquare as an oak ship, called by Joanna Colcord the best sea shanty singer she knows^
J. C. Kennison, scissors grinder, shacked up on the windy top of one of the Green Mountains in Vermont, holding proudly in his mind the memories of Young Beichan and his Turkish Lady and of Jim Fiske, "the kind of man would pat a dog on the head." |
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[xi] |
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