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Preface |
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his voice come back, an Alabama Negro exclaimed, "Dat?s pure hit! Dat's hit directly!" Another decided: "That machine can sho beat me singinV5 Aunt Harriett heard the sputter of the batteries, saw the spinning turntable. She didn't understand what was happening, but she pointed at the machine and said, "Stop dat ghost!"
Occasionally the singer's belief in the power of the recording he has made is pathetic beyond tears. In the Tennessee State Prison a young Negro convict came up to us shyly and asked to be allowed to make a record. When we asked what he wanted to record, he said, "Boss, I can beat on a bucket just as sweet as you please." All the prisoners present agreed that this was true. When the record was completed, he murmured, half to himself, "Well, I guess when they hear that up there in the White House, them big men sho goin' do something for this po' nigger."
There are now over four thousand aluminum and acetate discs by such singers in the Archive of American Folk Song, about two-thirds of them recorded in the field by ourselves. An order list of these records will be published shortly, containing over twelve thousand English titles, and foreign language supplements later on. A recent grant from the Carnegie Foundation for the installation of duplicating equipment will make these records available at cost to the public. We hope that the American people will learn from these records to know itself better, learn to sing its own folk songs in the rich and varied styles of our folk singers. It is possible to use some commercial records out of the groups called "hillbilly" and "race" to the same ends.*
This might seem to be the last book in the world which should owe its existence to the man who invented the L.C. card, Dr. Herbert Putnam. And yet, when one reflects that this same reserved and iron-willed Bostonian liberal also made the Library of Congress the only great democratic library in the world, it is not strange that he understood and wished to preserve— although he could seldom bear to listen to—the songs of the American people. Ruby Pickens Tartt and Genevieve Chandler, two intelligent and creative Southern women, explored the singing resources of their communities and welcomed us with our recording machine. Dr. W. P. Davis and his Bogtrotters of Galax, Virginia, introduced us to an unexplored and tune-packed section of the Virginia mountains, and it is with his kind permission that Galax songs are reproduced in this book. Dr. Harold Spivacke has been personally helpful and administratively generous throughout the
* A large mimeographed list of such records is available on application to the Archive of American Folk Song, Library of Congress.
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