Our Singing Country

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	Music Preface
	the commonplace? Is "The Lexington Murder" cheap, and aLittle Willie's My Darlin3" sentimental? Is "Careless Love," or "Adieu to the Stone Walls," banal? In many cases I could, of course, vote an immediate No or Yes—No to a holler whose fluid tonal and rhythmic subtleties could on no stretch of the imagination be put into notation suitable for sight-reading; Yes to a ballad or spiritual or work song whose authenticity was unmistakable, and whose balance between the usual and the unusual made choice easy. But for the most part I gained a reputation for "thinking it over"—for wishing to post­pone decision until I felt I had heard a large enough body of these songs and had myself sung enough of them to gain some sort of feeling for the various idioms as wholes before attempting to pass judgment on individual adherence to or departure from them. Since we all felt that at least a majority of the songs should be of the sort which could be more or less easily sung, there was a great deal of singing in those sessions. And throughout the succeeding years, during which I sporadically transcribed the three hundred tunes from which the final hundred and ninety were selected, I continued to sing these songs and others like them. And found my tastes expanding. Interest in the unusual did not diminish—in a work song in meter, a Cajun tune consistently inthroughout, a Ravel-like banjoaccompaniment, a ballad of archaic tonal texture, a Bahaman part-song of contrapuntal bareness. But appreciation of the "nice and common" took root and grew strong, with promise of growing stronger as time goes on. And along with this growth have come surer answers to some of those questions of three years ago. "Careless Love" and "Adieu to the Stone Walls" are not sentimental, banal —that is, not if they are sung more or less in the manner in which the folk musician sings them. No one who has studied these or similar recordings can deny that the song and its singing are indissolubly connected—that the character of a song depends to a great extent on the manner of its singing. It is often to be noticed that the city person, unacquainted with folk idioms, will endow a folk song with manners of fine-art or popular performance which are foreign to it, and will tend to sentimentalize or to dramatize that which the folk performer presents in a simple straightforward way. I have heard "Careless Love" sung by a considerable number of folk musicians, but not once "dreamily," "with expression," "patetico," "con amore." Some sing it moderately fast, some fast. The tempo of one recording was very fast from beginning to end.
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