An American Singing Heritage offers highly detailed transcriptions of one hundred relatively widely disseminated English-language “folk songs” collected within the United States during the first few decades of the recording era. This nearly 600-page-long work represents the culmination of a multi-decade project launched by the late Anne Dhu McLucas, and ultimately brought to fruition under the leadership of co-editor Norm Cohen.
Via a rather arcane process – counting the frequency that titles appear in the 2009 edition of Steve Roud’s exhaustive Folk Song Index and adding to that how often they also occur among commercial “Hill Billy” 78s recorded between 1920 and 1950 and in the inventories of a few prominent field recording archives – 100 tunes designated “Best Known” were selected. The editors then searched for recorded examples using two major sources – the aforementioned “Hill Billy” 78s and major field recording archives. They then selected a single version of each song for transcription. In making these selections, what seemed most important was settling on musically interesting versions that had not been previously notated in detail. They also sought balance on such factors as region of artist origin, artist gender, and singing style (“rough” vs. polished).
The resulting repertoire is a rather interesting mix of well-known and lesser-known songs from a variety of genres – Child ballads, American ballads, children’s songs, work songs, nonsense songs, “play-party” songs, etc. Among the most widely known titles included here are “Barbara Allen, “Casey Jones,” “Devil and the Farmer’s Wife,” “Frankie and Johnny” “Frog He Went a-Courting,” “Hangman, Hangman,” “John Henry,” “Old Joe Clark,” “Pretty Polly,” and “Red River Valley.” Among the iconic roots artists whose recorded performances were selected for transcription are Clarence “Tom” Ashley, Dock Boggs, Cousin Emmy, Woody Guthrie, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Charlie Poole, Jimmy Rogers, and Ernest Stoneman.
One of the editors’ primary goals is to clearly illustrate variations in melody, meter, and note rhythm within performances. To achieve this end, the notation for each verse of a given song is assigned to a single staff, and the staves representing notation for all verses are lined up vertically on the page. To read the music for any given verse, one almost always needs to follow the staff across the break of two facing pages. And sometimes, completing a verse with its attendant refrain or chorus requires following a given staff onto a third or even fourth page. Putting aside its academic merit, this format cannot be described as user friendly!
Each tune represented here is accompanied by detailed notes. We are offered a general historical account and musical description of the song; detailed information on the recording selected for transcription and the recording artist; tune notes – including such factors as number of musical phrases, verse structure, and mode or tonal content – and musical instruments represented (if any). Finally, for many songs there is a substantial list of scholarly references.
Since it is often difficult to kindle enthusiasm for tackling detailed notation without first experiencing the beauty and complexity of the musical performance upon which it is based, I commend the editors for providing a companion website that features all the original source recordings. It must be pointed out, however, that there is only a single mention of this website in the volume – in very small print on the copyright page – making it all too easy for the reader to remain unaware of its existence.
As a spot check, I compared perhaps a couple dozen notations from this volume with the original sources. My sense is that the editors did a reasonably skilled notational job, but not one that fully captures the flavor and nuances of melody, rhythm, and style on a stand-alone basis (i.e., without the user having reference to recorded sources).
With the recording playing along for a given song, however, following the corresponding notation from verse to verse was a real pleasure; the notation proved to be an extremely helpful guide to picking up such factors as song structure, musical phrasing, and patterns in the lyrics. The editors also seemed to be quite adept at cutting through regional accents and poor recording fidelity in order to capture the words actually sung by each artist; this cut down considerably on the usual struggle one has trying to decipher lyrics on scratchy field recordings or period 78s.
I have a few other concerns about the notation. In the introductory material, the editors acknowledge that speed fluctuations in original recordings or subsequent replications can affect the perceived pitch of a piece by half a step or more. And yet, the choice was made to unduly challenge many readers by presenting some unaccompanied songs in keys with five flats or five sharps (and in at least one case, with six flats). I also found it odd that male voices were sometimes notated in the bass clef.
As a player of fretted instruments who is very comfortable reading and writing music for banjo, fiddle, and guitar, I often found myself wondering if the notated instrumental introductions and interludes in the book were actually playable. It would have made sense, for example, to employ notational conventions for the various instruments and learn to recognize commonly used rhythmic motifs. For example, when notating for 5-string banjo it is customary to present all notes with stems originating below the staff, and to distinguish notes played on the short fifth or drone string by affixing to each a second stem originating above the staff. And there is a very common banjo technique called the brush-thumb – a strum and plucked drone-string played in quick succession – that clearly shows up repeatedly on some of the recorded intros but does not appear in the corresponding notation.
These concerns aside, this truly ambitious work is certainly a great step forward in American folk-song scholarship. Given its overall size (ca. six hundred 12” x 9” pages), old-fashioned phonebook heft, and $350 price tag, the book does not appear to be aimed at the musician or general reader; but it certainly deserves a worthy place in university libraries with a folklore, musicology, or ethnomusicology focus.
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[Review length: 1009 words • Review posted on October 21, 2022]