Historical Introduction: The Salvation of Writing Things Down

Summary

This is a small book about small things. Sharps and flats, ties, dots and rests, flags added to note-heads here not there, movable bar lines, tiny curved lines called phrases, words altered by consonants added or subtracted, breaths taken in and let out later rather than sooner.

Making decisions about such small things occupied Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901–1953) from about 1937 to 1941, as she prepared transcriptions based on field recordings collected by John and Alan Lomax for their second American folk music anthology, Our Singing Country (1941). As pioneering collectors of American folk music, the Lomaxes planned Our Singing Country as a sequel to their very successful American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934). Although the book did not sell as well as its predecessor (disappointing Alan Lomax in particular), Our Singing Country today commands indisputable stature in the literature of American traditional music. Crawford Seeger's superb craftsmanship in capturing what the composer Marc Blitzstein called “the alive musical moment” set standards for thoroughness and excellence which remain unsurpassed in twentieth-century anthologies devoted to this repertory. Blitzstein, who praised her “extraordinary precision and love,” noted how the complexities of folk style held “no terrors for her.”

Blitzstein was right about the quality of her work, but wrong about the terrors. The more she listened, the more she heard. The more she heard, the greater the aesthetic challenge loomed about making the right choices. “She was just going to do the absolute best job possible— whatever it required,” says Pete Seeger, witness to his stepmother's “fantastic determination.” “I remember one week she was asking everybody to listen to a certain work song—some guy was hollering out in the fields and she said, ‘Is that an A or an A sharp there?’ And we’d listen to it and she knew she had to put down one or the other, and you know, what to do, what would be the best thing.” How to make clumsy Western-music notation express the intricacies of oral tradition? How to capture what Alan Lomax later described as its “ultimate originality”? As Crawford Seeger traversed the minefields of African American spirituals, Caribbean part songs, cowboy ballads, Cajun lullabies, and Anglo-American fiddle tunes, a project which was supposed to take one year stretched into three.