grandmother knew "Barbara Allen" and that the African Americans on her father's plantation sang spirituals, but not like the version in the class text. Such experiences convinced mold that Alabama was a state full of folksong, whose riches had nor been explored systematically.
The first important collector of Alabama folksong Newman I. White, taught at Alabama Polytechnic Institute (now Auburn University). Between 1915 and 1917 he gathered African American songs, some firsthand, but most from white college students who had learned the songs from African Americans. These comprise his collection, American Negro Folk-Songs (Folklore Associates, Inc., 1965). From 1934 to 1940, John A. Lomax intermittently collected songs in the state for the Library of Congress. He recorded many songs from African American convicts, some game song from schoolchildren, and a treasure trove of songs from the African Americans of the Livingston area. Here, guided and assisted by famed folklorist Ruby Pickens Tartt, he recorded Dock Reed, Vera Hall, and others who have found their way into Library of Congress recordings and the many editions published by John Lomax and his son Alan. mold's work was shortly followed by chat of Ray B. Browne, whose statewide collection, made in the summers of 1951, 1952, and 1953, is represented in The Alabama Folk Lyric (Bowling Green University Press, 1979). Browne published only the words of the songs, and he deliberately excluded ballads and African American folksongs. Arnold's is the only statewide collection of all types of songs including both words and music.
During the school year of 1945-46, Arnold carried on an e tensive correspondence with his singers and evidently received a great deal of new material from them, in the form of additional verses for songs already collected and whole collections of hand-written songs. All of this material has been lost. On a brighter note, Arnold somehow got three double-faced recordings of Callie Craven, the first and finest singer he had found, singing some of her very best folksongs. The timing of these sessions was particularly fortunate, because Craven became ill and died in the summer of 1946.
His first summer in the field caught Arnold the need for a good recording instrument to validate the texts and tunes he was copying down. The Research Committee granted him extra funds for a machine, and one was ordered in late August 1945. Supported by an extension of his research grant, but still without his long-promised and longdelayed recording equipment, Arnold set out on "another intensive folk song collecting trip ... during the second term of summer school 1946." In his October 1946 report, Arnold noted that this most recent excursion allowed him to venture into many more towns and to spend more time in rural areas. By visiting twice the number of communities as he had in 1945, Arnold added 226 new songs, bringing his collection to upwards of five hundred.
Arnold described famed folklorist Ruby Pickens Tartt as having "done more for the cause of folk music in the state of Alabama than any other individual."
During the second half of this period, Abernathy and the machine were left in Tuscaloosa, and Arnold made field trips "up and around Birmingham, over to Selma, Carlosville, Evergreen, Troy and down to Elba, working in many rural areas in between. This new territory was found to be very rich and many songs were collected." For this work, Arnold was paid the equivalent of his salary for one term of summer school--$325. He traveled for six weeks, half the time with a technician, on a budget of four hundred dollars. One day in Tuskegee he bought breakfast for $.35, dinner and supper each for $.85, and treated a guest to dinner for $.75.
During the 1947-48 academic year, the university received ten dollars for equity in the copyrights of two of the songs Arnold collected. As Katherine B. James, secretary of the Research Committee, noted in 1948, "This is the only project that has ever repaid one cent." At this point, Arnold had become something of an Alabama celebrity and was called upon to lecture on folksongs throughout the state. County folksong societies were being created, and James clearly expected that Folksongs of Alabama would have a fabulous sale when it appeared. Arnold asked for money to fund one last field and recording trip in the second half of the summer of 1948, after which he would spend his time preparing for the press the five to seven different volumes projected from his collection, which now included almost a thousand different songs. At this point, none of the songs collected between 1945 and 1948 had ever been published, but the volumes would never materialize.
Arnold resigned his position at the University of Alabama in the early summer of 1948 and took one at California State University in Los Angeles, where he began work on his Ph.D. in classical music at the University of Southern California. He took with him his magnificent Alabama folksong collection, but seemed to have never worked on it again after leaving the state. Arnold died in 1971 and in his will, left his folksong materials to the University of Alabama. They were returned to the university's library and finally published as An Alabama Songbook: Ballads, Folksongs, and Spirituals (University of Alabama Press, 2004).
The best folksingers deeply respect their material. Arnold noted that the songs in his collection "were sung quietly, naturally, never dramatically, and entirely without the mannerisms and clichés of the concert soloist." For instance, Callie Craven observed that sprightly professional renditions of "Barbara Allen" missed the point of the ballad: "I have heard [it] many times over the radio but they never get it right and I don't like it. It's a dwellin' song and must be sung low and mournful, dwellin' on the long notes." Arnold said time "it was as if each song, as I heard it, was a creation by the singer for the satisfaction of an inner compulsion." The true folksinger enjoys the songs and enjoys singing them. Mrs. Julia Greer Marechal of Mobile is a good example. When Byron Arnold met her in the summer of 1947, she was ninety years old, blind, and hardly able to walk. But she recorded thirty-three songs in a continuous three-hour session that Arnold confessed wore out both him and Abernathy. Marechal concluded the session by saying, "This has been so thrilling; I wish I knew more songs to record." And the true folksong audience is supportive, appreciative, and polite. Mildred Meadows admired her mother's singing and awaited her chance to perform:
It was always my ultimate objective to sing also, and my first opportunity came when I was five years old. lt happened that we were having ''prayer meeting" at our church and the minister asked that someone lead a hymn. Glad of the opportunity to lead a song, I began with a little song I had learned, "Go Tell Aunt Tabby Her Old Gray Goose ls Dead." No one laughed, but joined in the singing instead. I think of that little incident each time I am asked to lead a song of any sort.
Folksong are often divided into three types: ballads, folksong , and spiritual . Spirituals are defined by their religious subject matter but ballad are distinguished from folksongs on generic grounds; ballads tell a progressive story and folksongs lack chronological development. Thus the word folksong takes on two meanings. In its general sense it refers to all songs maintained in an oral tradition, including ballads and spirituals. In its limiting sense, it refers to non-narrative secular songs. The division of all folksong into these three types is not a perfect one, but it is helpful to editors and critics. It affects singers only in that there are some, like Isaiah Holmes and Dock Reed, who will sing only religious song.
Of the ballads in Arnold's collection, those most closely tied to the care are two cheerfully satiric songs composed by Bill Gross, and recovered in Guntersville from Janie Barnard Couch. Couch told Arnold that her grandfather, Robert W. Barnard, had built a three-room dog-trot log house near Guntersville, in the vicinity of Parch's Cove, a valley running down to the Tennessee River and one of the earliest settled valleys in north Alabama. There he raised his family and also provided sleeping quarters for his hired man, "Uncle" Bill Gross. Couch told Arnold that Gross "made up ballads on lots of things in the Cove and was known by my mother and father. Uncle Bill Gross made the song 'The Clerks of Parch's Cove' about a bunch of drunken young fellows who came down to the Cove in the absence of Colonel Sheffield and Uncle Charlie Carter, who owned the store, and sold out the entire stock." Any state would be proud to claim such a song.
Couch told Arnold that Gross "wrote a number of rollicking ballads. Since he has been dead only a few years, his wife may have the written songs." Following her suggestion, Arnold located Grass's widow in Scottsboro. She told him that her husband had indeed composed and written down a great many humorous ballads, but that after he "got religion" he figured such ballads were silly and burned the whole box of them. She could remember neither the tunes nor the words of any.
The very first folksong Arnold collected in 1945 was one of considerable importance. In Gadsden, the illiterate Callie Craven sang "The Soldier's Fare."
Although the soldier's complaints about military life are hardly novel, they are more numerous and much more vividly realized than those usually found in
such songs. Scholars believe, probably correctly, that the earliest versions of
songs were the longest and most detailed. As they pass from singer to singer in oral tradition, elements with which the new singer is not familiar, or which he or she does not consider important, are either forgotten or omitted intentionally. Though other, shorter fragments of this ballad have been found (including a four-stanza fragment from Mississippi), this appear to be the fullest and best version of "The Soldier's Fare."
Craven associated the song with the Civil War, and the presence of "Yankees" in the third stanza supports that, but the sixth stanza may call it into question, depending on the interpretation of "foreign land." The "grog" is a mixture of alcoholic liquor and water, and the skillful physician's "calomel" was the age's purgative panacea. Internal signatures, such as that in the last stanza, are rare in traditional song. Apart from the information conveyed by "The Soldier's Fare, ' nothing is known of J. P. Hite.
Dock Reed and Vera Hall are probably the most famous of Alabama's traditional singers. Their performances were earlier recorded by John Lomax and featured on Library of Congress albums. For Arnold they sang together the powerful
spiritual "Ah, Job, Job," with Reed chanting the stanzas and Hall lending her soaring voice to the chorus.
The spiritual reveals the singer's deep earthly compassion for the sorely afflicted Job. They see his strength as acceptance of God's will and faith in God's justness and power. Of particular interest in "Ah, Job, Job," is the explicit identification of Job's afflictions with the song itself, which draws the spiritual to exalted conclusion as his trials end with the defeat and incarceration of the devil.
In Alabama, a state rich in folksong tradition, Byron Arnold is the most important servant of that tradition. The story of one of the songs he collected goes back to the Middle Ages, and many of these songs are being sung today by different voices. Each song offers a "snapshot" of a performance identified by singer, place, and time. And each song is a part of a living traditional culture that belongs to us all.
"Uncle Bill Gross" had, according to his widow, penned a number of "rollicking ballads," but "burned the box of them" after finding religion later in life.
About the Author
and publishing on English Renaissance literature, the detective novel, and the macabre, in addition to folksongs. The University of Alabama Press published his edition of songs from the Byron Arnold collection, An Alabama Songbook, in fall 2004.
Halli has been honored for excellence in teaching and service-leadership by many organizations on and off the UA campus. He has served as President of the Southeastern Renaissance Conference, the University of Alabama Faculty Senate, the Association of College English Teachers of Alabama, and Sigma Tau Delta: The International English Honor Society. He previously served as the founding Dean of the Honors College at the University of Alabama.