Foreword: A Few Personal Words about Ruth Crawford Seeger’s The Music of American Folk Song

Summary

As I read my mother's introduction to Our Singing Country for the first time, it puts me to thinking about what was going on in my life at that time and its influence on my direction since. A lot of the core issues dealt with here seem both familiar and basic.

I was about seven years old as this introduction was being written. Both my mother and father had gotten me started singing ballads and songs such as Barbara Allen a couple of years earlier. The singing really took. Not so the piano.

I remember my first lesson well, when my mother sat me down at the piano and tried to get me started. I couldn't stand the idea of “practicing” and wouldn't do it. Perhaps I was already absorbing my parents’ new devotion to traditional music and the informal ways that one can pick it up.

Also about the same time, either Charlie or Dio (childhood name for my mother) showed me how to operate the family record player that was used for transcribing all those field recordings. It was a black box with a hinged lid, and it was just large enough to have a variable-speed 12” turntable and about an 8” speaker. The needle that followed the grooves in the record could be removed by loosening a little thumbscrew, and there were two kinds of needles: a metal one that had to be replaced every few playings for commercial pressings, and a cactus one that played either commercial pressings or the aluminum field recordings that made up most of our family's recorded music collection. The cactus needle had to be sharpened after every playing of a side, or sound became dull or sometimes you’d play two grooves at the same time.

Our family collection consisted of a Wanda Landowska harpsichord record; a few commercial recordings of southern vernacular music such as Gid Tanner's Fiddler's Convention in Georgia (I almost wore it out); artists such as Sonny Boy Williamson, Fats Waller, Norman Phelps, Virginia Rounders, Billie Holiday (Strange Fruit), and Josh White; several off-center pressings of Ruth Crawford Seeger's String Quartet, Andante; and about 200 aluminum copies of field recordings by the Lomaxes, Sidney Robertson Cowell, Herbert Halpert, and my father. So I sat on the floor next to the piano playing those records and soaking up all that great music.