Folk Borrowings

Bob Miller is known as one of the most prolific early country music songwriters. He was also a significant blues composer in the 1920s, and his songs were recorded by several of the classic female blues singers from the early part of that decade-Clara Smith, Viola McCoy, Lizzie Miles, and others. His first "hillbilly" song, "Eleven Cent Cotton-Forty Cent Meat," became a Depression-era hit that was recorded by multiple artists including Miller himself. As a recording artist, he recorded many of his songs, but many were also recorded by early country greats such as Vernon Dalhart, Carson Robison, and Frank Luther. Like many country musicians from that early time period, Miller used numerous pseudonyms under which he both wrote and recorded, which can mask the true total of his output. While he did not write over seven thousand songs as he claimed, he did write a high number.


Part of what contributed to Miller's exorbitant number of songs was that he was adept at tweaking preexisting songs and making them his own. Much of his output was modeled after other songs. Like fellow one-time Memphian W. C. Handy, Miller referenced using "snatches" of folk music in his compositions. For example, "Duck Foot Sue," one of Miller's early hillbilly recordings, was rooted in a nineteenth-century English folk song. Likewise, his first published blues, "Uncle Bud," had roots in a folk song that circulated the South in the early twentieth century. But it is one of his biggest hits, "Eleven Cent Cotton-Forty Cent Meat" that has one of the most interesting origins. The song copyrighted by Bob Miller and Emma Dermer in February 1928 has roots in a poem that appeared in Southern newspapers in early 1927. There is conflicting information regarding the authorship of this poem. In some newspapers, this poem was attributed to a teenager named Virginia Brown; others attributed it to Mrs. S. C. Ford from Frisco, Texas. Analysis proves that Miller came across both versions of the poem. He then crafted what became an early populist country song that made its rounds at the onset of the Great Depression. This paper will correct inaccuracies in the narrative of Miller's life, while analyzing and discussing his borrowings in songwriting and the roots of "Eleven Cent Cotton-Forty Cent Meat."

Commentators on Benjamin Britten have tended to treat his engagement with English folksong--the seven books of arrangements, works like _The Golden Vanity_ and the _Suite on English Folk Songs_ entirely based on folksong, and the many folk references and episodes in his English-themed operas--as something highly personal and idiosyncratic, even _sui generis_.  Given that folksong in England was closely associated with Ralph Vaughan Williams and the "pastoral school," and that Britten viewed musical nationalism askance as something provincial and anachronistic, this is unsurprising.


A closer investigation problematizes this view, however, and shows that Britten was in fact directly influenced by the English Folk Revival.  Admittedly, some of this was negative, as he consciously challenged the mainstream promoted by Cecil Sharp, the hardline purist and acknowledged head of the Revival.  But much was affirmative too, as he engaged creatively with 'alternative' figures of the Revival like the composer Percy Grainger and the song collectors Frank Kidson and Lucy Broadwood.  All three were critics of Sharp, a fact often forgotten in the historiography of the Revival, and their broadminded and non-purist opinions about folksong origin and transmission gave Britten what he needed to reject Sharpian orthodoxy and express an alternative "Englishness" more to his taste.


This paper examines Britten's few essays touching on folksong and his editorial handling of folk materials in demonstrating his debt to this "forgotten" tradition of folksong research.  Ultimately, I seek to uncover links between this tradition and the use of folk themes by interwar British modernists like W.H. Auden and Tyrone Guthrie, associated with the Group Theatre and powerful forces on the young Britten.  Influenced by modern conceptions of myth taken from Frazer, Jung and the anthropological work of Malinowski, these artists extended the concept of "folk" well beyond earlier definitions, declaring that even literate segments of modern industrialized society embodied aspects of folk tradition.  Their capacious reformulation laid the groundwork not only for Britten's cautious embrace of select aspects of the Revival but also for his eventual creation, in his work at Aldeburgh, of a cosmopolitan "Englishness" rooted in the local and the particular.

In psychedelic rock of the 1960s, the role of world music appropriations as psychedelic signifiers is well established, but Indian and Moroccan culture are not the only touchstones that contributed to the idealistic alterities of the hippie aesthetic. This "visionary" music (Rob Young 2010) grew from the second British folk revival, which in turn was based upon nineteenth-century revivals by Cecil Sharp et al. Nineteenth-century folk revivalists' efforts to capture the _volksgeist_ of Britain and Ireland intertwined with medieval revivals, and folk music developed a veneer of the medieval that has persisted to the present, even though most surviving traditional British music is Early Modern. In this paper, I look at progressive and psychedelic folk artists of the sixties and how orientalism coincides with a Celtic other supported through neo-medievalism. Ethnomusicologists McCann and Ó Laoire identify the Celtic as "an internal other" for the UK ("Raising One Higher Than the Other," 2003), and through Derridean slippage, the perception of the Orient as an inherently spiritual Otherworld extends to shared traits of medieval, Celtic, Indian and Moroccan musics, in which open and parallel fifths, chanting, and the harmonic stasis of heterophony allow for musical signification of spirituality. 
To begin, I look at significant examples of neo-medievalism in the work of influential progressive folk artists Burt Jansch and John Renbourne, particularly how these medievalisms coincide with Celtic music. I explore how Celtic history is used to express familiarity and alterity simultaneously, vis-à-vis Göran Sonesson's model of _Alter_ ("you") and _alius_ ("it") in cultural semiotics, with examples from Donovan and the Incredible String Band. Finally, I consider how this Celtic alterity aligns with orientalism, where the exotic appeal of medieval Europe as an inherently spiritual, pre-modern place overlaps perceptions of India and Morocco as the same. Ultimately, it is not the Indian that signifies the psychedelic, but the capacity of Hindustani classical music to go on infinitely, which it shares with forms of early music, such as organum, or Celtic styles such as sean-nós. Better understanding of these topics will enhance genre studies in a key part of rock history.

Francis Gummere's theory of folksong origins didn't age particularly well. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Gummere was one of the more prominent American advocates of British balladry. Central to his appeal was the theory of "communal origins." In short, he asserted that each authentic ballad had originated, not with any individual author, but in a primitive process of group improvisation--that the songs had, in a literal sense, arisen spontaneously from the collective rhythms of the homogenous "festal throng." As the century progressed, scholarly developments rendered this theory effectively obsolete. Its wild conjectures of primeval cultural evolution--attempting to historically reconstruct, with almost no hard evidence, the socio-musical events of an imagined "primitive"--increasingly came off as speculative and patrician.
Histories of folk scholarship are quite effective in chronicling the demise of Gummere's theory: it being supplanted by approaches of anthropological diffusion and oral re-creation. But these histories tend to sideline aspects of the communal theory's enduring influence: in spite of its intellectual dismantling, the theory's _aesthetic_ frameworks have had a surprisingly long half-life. In this paper I assess Gummere's communal origins theory, not in the historical or anthropological viability of its premises, but in the type of aesthetic experience it conjured in the reading of printed folksong. I examine echoes of this experiential framework among a selection of published folksong popularizers from 1910–1930: John Lomax, Cecil Sharp, Dorothy Scarborough, and Robert Winslow Gordon.
This paper reveals a communalist aesthetic in which a printed folksong evokes not only a melodic story with its sequence of characters and actions; the text spurs the reader to imagine a premodern setting of song creation--to vicariously experience centripetal processes of social cohesion. Perhaps even more potently, according to Gummere, an authentic song allows a reader to actually inhabit the "primitive" mind--to cast off the dead-weight artifice of civilization, modern specialization, and individualist striving. Folksong popularizers capitalized on these antimodern sensibilities. In this way, the communalist approach helped shape the aesthetic stakes of folksong reception in the decades that set the foundations for mass-mediated American folk revivalism.