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Preface |
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making of this volume. Acknowledgment is hereby made to the Federal Writers Project and the Historical Records Project of the Works Progress Administration, under whose auspices a number of these songs were collected. Aunt Molly Jackson spoke the lines that make up much of the continuity of Our Singing Country.
Our Singing Country: A Second Volume of American Ballads and Folk Songs, with many regrets for all the songs we have to omit, stands only for work (as noted in the headnotes) we ourselves have done and for our tastes and interests. It neither does justice to our collection, perhaps, nor, except in minor instances, draws upon work done, upon records made, or upon texts collected by any one else. We hope that the book is merely a foretaste of what may grow into a fairly complete collection of American folk tunes, and of the books, symphonies, plays, operas for which it should eventually provide material. Since the songs cannot be heard in all of their living quality, we have not hesitated to adopt certain means for conveying as much of their content as possible to the readers. We have in certain cases created composite versions of the texts of ballads or songs (as noted in the headnotes), so that the non-ballad-student among readers may quickly survey all the choicest lines that any group of song variants contains. We have not quibbled about the definition of folk song, but we have included whatever songs and ballads prove to have been current among the people and to have undergone change through oral transmission. To introduce the songs, we have generally used quotations from the records themselves. We have let the song-makers and the song-rememberers speak for themselves.
A. L. and J. A. L.
Washington, D.C. March, 1941 |
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