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Preface |
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Captain Pearl R. Nye, rotund and apple-cheeked, who claims to know the name of "every canalboat and every skipper that sailed the 'silver ribbon' of the Ohio ship canal/' who sent to us in the Library of Congress the texts of seven hundred songs and ballads once current on the canal, copied out on scrolls of cheap yellow paper —songs he said had "bobbed up" recently out of his memory. (Captain Nye remarked once, "My mind is canal.")
Alec Moore, retired cowpuncher, who sings everything from "Bold Andrew Barton" to "The Bloody Sioux Indians," whose present occupation is riding herd on an ice-cream wagon on the streets of Austin, Texas.
The Sheriff of Hazard County, Kentucky, who gets re-elected each year partly by the speed, ferocity, and style of his banjo-picking at county meetings.
Woody Guthrie, dust-bowl ballad-maker, proud of being an Okie, familiar with microphones and typewriters, familiar, too, with jails and freight trains, "with relatives under every railroad bridge in California," who knows scores of the old songs and makes up a new one whenever he feels that one is needed about the Vigilante Mea or Pretty Boy Floyd or Tom Joad.
And now the names of some of the singers who have moved us beyond all others that we have heard between Maine and New Mexico, Florida and Michigan—the Negroes, who in our opinion have made the most important and original contributions to American folk song:
Aunt Harriett McClintock of Alabama, seventy-eight years old, who sat by the roadside and sang;
Poor little Johnny, poor little feller, He can't make a hunderd today;
Down in the bottom
Where the cotton is rotten, He can't make a hunderd today.
Aunt Molly McDonald, who sat on the sunny porch of her shanty and swapped sixty little songs out of the slavery days with Uncle Joe, her husband, and laughed heartily between the stanzas.
Iron Head, grim-faced prison habitue, who always claimed that his choice, aristocratic repertoire of songs all came from one fellow prisoner.
Big John Davis, who was the best man, the biggest drinker, the most powerful arguiier, and the best singer in Frederica, Georgia.
Allen Prothero, whose singing of "Jumping Judy" and "Pauline" is giving him posthumous fame, who "just nachully didn't like the place" where we found him, and died there in the Nashville Penitentiary of T.B.
Henry Truvillion, still leader of a railroad gang in the piney woods of No Man's Land between Texas and Louisiana, who each day sings and shouts his men
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