"Burl Ives Presents
America's Musical Heritage"
114 Best Loved Songs & Ballads for Listening, Singing and Reading
A Treasury of American Folk Songs & Ballads
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Popular Songs:
Music Hall & Battlefield, 1800 - 1865
Introduction
Folk songs are best defined as songs from many sources, whose life history includes the period when they are taken up by a population and sung away from any printed source so that the imagination and memory of the singers work upon the songs to make them into something different. After 1800, there were not only the traditional songs brought from Europe by the settlers along with the currently popular European songs, but a growing number of songs created in the United States. This was true not only of the anonymous, individually written ballads, but of the songs created in the field of entertainment.
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Side One:
Unfortunate Miss Bailey
People from the British Isles were predominant in the first half of the century. As in the early 17th Century London music-hall ballad was written by George Colman, pokes fun at unfaithful lovers haunted by vengeful ghosts. It was immediately popular in the United States. Incidentally, the melody was used for Samuel Woodman’s “Hunters of Kentucky,” the Andrew Jackson song.*
*“Hunters of Kentucky” – Volume II
The Pesky Sarpint (On Springfield Mountain)
This song was originally written as a broadside of a true event, in 1761, as an clegy to the tune, “Old Hundred.” It tells of the sad death of Timothy Myrick, twenty-two and engaged to marry, who was bitten by a rattlesnake in Farmington, Massachusetts. The melody we find here was written in 1840, when the song was performed on the stage as a comic song, “The Pesky Sarpint, a pathetic ballad.” From the variety stage, the song went into the homes and across the land with the pioneers. From folk song to Music Hall – to acceptance as a folk song: a not unusual history.
Long, Long Ago
“Long, Long Ago” is just one of the many popular sentimental songs of the 1830’s and 40’s that existed, along with those in a comic vein. It has been handed down from generation to generation. To name some of the others of the same ilk, there were “Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep” and “Woodman Spare that Tree.”
Ben Bolt
“Ben Bolt” is another famous example of the sentimental song that became so popular after the 1830’s. Like most songs that gained wide currency, it had its quota of parodies.*
*“The Shady Old Camp” – Volume III
Oh, You New York Girls
The first polka appeared around 1830. This, one of the first to sweep New York, had great popularity as a “folk song of the sea” – its rhythm and subject matter made it particularly effective as a windlass chanty aboard ship. Moreover, it describes not only the pitfalls a sailor really faced on land, but names the notorious Martin Churchill who made his living by supplying unwilling sailors to sailing vessels.
The Blue Tail Fly
Legend has it that the minstrel song “The Blue Tail Fly” was one of Abraham Lincoln’s favorites. It is also one of the popular songs of today. What we sing is a folk version of Dan Emmett’s popular minstrel song. Dan Decatur Emmett, born in southern Ohio, of Irish extraction, not only wrote many famous minstrel songs such as “Old Dan Tucker,” “Dixie” and “The Blue Tail Fly,” but was also a great performer. His material was of the kind that exists in many forms as it passes from person to person, and thus much of it passed into the folk category.
Uncle Ned
Uncle Ned is another of Stephen Foster’s “Negro” compositions. It was popular in 1848, but is little heard today. Foster sold this song for a mere pittance to W.C. Peters, the publisher, who, of course, reaped a financial harvest from it. It should be contrasted with “Darlin’ Nelly Gray” and “Wake Nicodemus,” both of which were written out of a strong feeling against slavery.
Darlin’ Nelly Gray
This song, which is sung today as a sentimental ballad and was a “pop” song of its day, was a sentimental response to the active anti-slavery feeling of its time. The Nelly Gray in this story was a Negro slave who actually lived in 1856, at the time of the writing of this composition. She was taken away from her lover and sent to Kentucky. The composer, Benjamin Russell Hanby, was the son of a Westerville, Ohio man who ran an underground railroad which smuggled Negro slaves north.
Wake Nicodemus
One of the men who did most to crystallize anti-slavery sentiment was Henry Clay Work. Work’s father was a strong abolitionist who operated a station on the illegal “underground railroad” that helped slaves to escape to the North and freedom. Work never forgot the fear in the faces of the Negroes who slipped into the house in the darkness, nor did he forget the day his father was denounced and dragged off to jail for befriending the slaves. When he grew up he put these experiences into songs which helped to arouse the nation against slavery. One of his most effective songs was “Wake Nicodemus,” which looked forward to the “year of jubilee” when all men would be free.
The Abolitionist Hymn
With rising feeling, the New England churches began singing secular hymns against slavery much as they sang hymns against the British during the Revolution. This popular anti-slavery hymn was sung to the familiar melody of “Old Hundred.” It was not only in the churches but in the homes, at anti-slavery meetings and even on the stage.
Side Two:
Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen
Music had long been an outlet for the Negro slaves. The spiritual was a particularly deep expression, through religion, of the slaves’ feeling and condition. The North knew little about this Southern Negro music until after 1871 when the Fiske University Singers made the first concert tour. Here is one of the songs the Fiske Jubilee Singers made popular here and abroad.
John Brown
Innumerable versions and parodies have been written about this song, whose melody formed the basis of Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Like the “Abolitionist Hymn,” the words reproduced here, written by Edna Dean Procter, were sung in the churches around the land.
The Battle Cry of Freedom
George Root was one of the great songwriters of the mid-nineteenth century. Some of his songs are: “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys Are Marching,” “Just Before the Battle Mother,” “The Vacant Chair” and others. “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” made popular by the Hutchinson family, was immediately used as a marching song and a militant call to the standards of freedom.
Just Before The Battle, Mother
Tramp, Tramp, Tramp
When Johnny Comes Marching Home
The Bandmaster of the Union Army, Patrick Gilmore, adapted a rousing music hall song which soldiers and civilians sang all through the Civil War, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.”
All Quiet Along the Potomac
This song is one of the truest and most poignant expressions in song of a soldier alone on a battlefield. It has its literary parallels in Stephen Crane’s “Red Badge of Courage” and Eric Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front.”
In the early days of the war, North and South were stalemated on opposite sides of the Potomac River. The catch phrase of the time, “All Quiet Along the Potomac Tonight,” became the title of this song.
Goober Peas
Armies march and soldiers will gripe, as in “How Happy The Soldier” in Album I. Food was a problem to both armies during the Civil War. Peanuts (goober peas) grow easily in the South, and it became a wry joke to the Confederate soldier when he could find nothing else to eat.
The Bonnie Blue Flag
The excellent music of an Irish Variety-Hall tune, “The Irish Jaunting Car,” was put to use with contemporary words for the South by the Irish comedian, Henry McCarthy. This song was surpassed in popularity only by Stephen Foster’s “Dixie.”
Battle of Bull Run (Southern Version)
Here is the melody of the old English folk song, “The Three Crows,” used as a folk expression by the South to tell a brief history of the fortunes of war.
Little Brown Jug
This song was written by J.E. Winner in the late ‘60’s as part of the “return to normalcy” of a nation changing from war to peace. Like Winner’s other song, “Listen to the Mocking Bird,” this is still sung and its continuing informal popularity has put it in the folk song category.
Henry Clay Work, the composer of this song (1832-1884), was a Connecticut Yankee, Abolitionist and Prohibitionist. He is responsible for several well-known melodies composed in the late 1800’s, among them, “Marching Through Georgia,” the “Ship That Never Returned,” and one of the best known of all temperance songs, “Come Home, Father.”
