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II. 7. OLD-TIME LOVE SONGS
Ask a Southern ballad singer for "Barbara Allen" or "Lord Lovell" or another of the old ballads, and he will be likely to say, "Why, that's nothing but an old love song?1 This means: (i) The plot is, usually, a love story and was felt by the singers to have a close relationship with their lives and loves.^ (2) Strictly religious singers would not sing it or tolerate its being sung in their homes. (3) It was sung at "courtin' " parties, or in circumstances in which the song had a meaningful connection with the emotions of the singer. The people of America who preserved these songs and the rural people who still sing them have never felt that these ancient ballads, called by scholars English and Scottish popular ballads, were particularly ancient; nor have they valued them as such. Instead, as we have tried to point out in our notes, they have kept these songs because they felt the near and moving reality of them. |
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OLD BANGHAM
No record. Adelaide Hemingway, Washing-ton, D.C., 1939. See "Sir Lionel," Child No. 18; Sh, 1:54*, Da, p. 125 > Be, p. 29.
"My grandmother learned to sing 'Old Bangham} from her mother, who had traveled out to the Sioux Indian country from her girlhood home in western Massachusetts. She was a Longley} and the song must have been brought from England when the family came to Massachusetts in the early i6^oys. In 1866 my grandmother sailed round the Cafe of Good Hope in one of the last clipper ships to come to the Far East. She brought the song to the dry plains of North China, to her new home at Kalgan, the gateway to Mongolia, where she sang it to her six children, lulling them to sleep many a time as they swung along in a mule litter or jolted over the rough roads in a Peking cart.
"As a little girl I also was sung to sleep by the minor tones of 'Old Bang-ham* as our cart went bump, bump over even rougher Shansi roads which brought us gradually nearer to supper and bed in a willow-shaded Chinese inn or at home in our mission compound"
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