While the stereotype of the folk song collector is the dandified fellow doggedly tramping through remote mountain fastnesses to hear and take down a folk song—picture Cecil J. Sharp accompanied by Olive Dame Campbell in the hills of Kentucky in 1916, or John A. Lomax snaring “crude and unpolished” cowboy ballads in Texas a decade or more before—the fact remains that significant numbers of folk songs have been solicited by arm-chair scholars or urbanites who hardly set foot in scrub brush or high timber.
There was Gavin Greig of New Deer, Scotland, writing in the Buchan Observer from December, 1907, to June, 1911, seeking old songs from his readers. In Northern Ireland, Sam Henry, a career civil servant, gathered some 800 ballads and songs from the readers of the Northern Constitution between 1923 and 1939. In the United States there was Robert W. Gordon, who would edit the “Old Songs that Men Have Sung” column for Adventure Magazine from 1923 to 1927, and gather literally hundreds of songs, including many bawdy, that would have otherwise been lost.
And then there was butter-fingers Percy Jones.
Dominie Jones was director of music for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne. He had agreed to take down the tunes of those who responded to a call for “old songs” that appeared in “Jonathan Swift’s” column, “Here, There, and Everywhere,” in the Melbourne Sun-News Pictorial. (“Swift” was the nom-de-plume of C. Spensely Waight.)
Waight solicited the songs, then published one- or two-stanza clips for four months from September, 1940, through January, 1941—dark years of retreat for the beleaguered British empire. (Waight’s patriotic motive, appealing to national pride, should not be discounted here, or in earlier examples cited.)
Swift-Waight published “snippets” (3) of the more than seventy-one songs readers sent in. So far, so good.
But Jones was hard-pressed with choral responsibilities. “Folk song was not high on his list of priorities” (3). He followed through on a scant twenty-eight.
So what happened to the remaining forty-three?
Until now, they have been part of Australia’s lost heritage of folk song. As McKenry makes so painfully clear in his introduction to this slim collection of reconstructions, in single-minded pursuit of “bush ballads” early collectors missed grand opportunities to snag any number of native ballads and songs, not to mention the vast number of songs from Mother England that had entered oral tradition.
Those early collectors were intent upon the purely authentic, colonial Australia: “songs of convicts, the goldfields, bushrangers and rural occupations, especially shearing and droving” (1). So the generations passeth.
Eventually, later collectors realized just how spotty folk song collecting across the continent was. Intent on the shearing sheds and diggings, they had missed the broadsides, the sentimental songs, the minstrel tunes, and so much more that constitute oral tradition in the English-speaking world.
Waight published only fragments of the songs sent to him at the Sun News-Pictorial; these bits and pieces led McKenry to identify fifty of the seventy-one with the aid of internet search engines. No surprise, twenty-four of the reconstituted songs and ballads in this slender collection are bush songs, native to Australia. Another twelve are equally Australian, but might be labeled “urban.”
Thirty-one display no particular Australian trait—other than an accent perhaps. They range in subject matter from sea to soldier, from patriotic to love to music hall fugitives. Three are distinctly American: “She’s Gone to Be a Mormonite,” first collected by Lester A. Hubbard from his mother, Salley, in 1946, and printed in his Ballads and Songs from Utah; and the cautionary “Baldheaded End of the Broom,” first printed in 1877; and the Carter Family’s “I’ll Be All Smiles Tonight.” All three exhibit the variations expected in a song widely collected in oral tradition.
In one sense, reconstructions or no, McKenry has given us a survey of the riches now lost that might, just might have been collected in Oz once upon a time.
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[Review length: 655 words • Review posted on September 29, 2010]