Book Description
Sandburg was not only a poet but also a noted collector and performer of american folk music. This anthology contains words and music to 290 songs that people have sung in the making of americanca. New Introduction by Garrison Keillor; Prefatory Notes by the Author; Index.
Customer Reviews:
Bedrock of American folk singing .......2006-08-02
Back in the early 1960s when I was a high schooler getting into music, I took this book out of the library and took this book out of the library, and took this book out of the library.
People trying to find great folk songs with both wit and wonder and laughter, heart ache and beauty probably have been doing this since Sandburg published this book in the 1920s. Being so familiar with this book, back in the day, and still today, I can identify different folk singers who have a repertoire of traditional songs by the ones who like myself studied this book and learned to play its songs, and those who had learned from the Lomax Collections, though in all the big Lomax books, there were credits to the inspiration and work Sanburg put into this book, as well as songs taken from this book.
Sanburg wasn't a folklorist, but a poet and someone who liked to sing these songs and play the guitar. He includes a few songs that aren't folk by any description like the very funny "Horse Named Bill" written by a friend of Sandburg's named Sinclair Lewis whom you might heard of!
The legions of folkies who once had only this book and the Lomax collections have spewed forth generations of serious scholars of folk music in this country and the world. Specialized monographs can be found on Kentucky fiddling or the musics of Mali, on down picking banjo, and Black song before the blues. With the specialization that has developed over the decades, few would even attempt to write one book and call it the American Songbag.
Especially if you like to sing and play, this book will take you back to an easier time, with some good songs. You will be surprised at how many of them you know the tune to, even if you can't read the music!
Literature? Folk Song Anthology? Both!.......2003-09-09
An absolute classic of American arts and letters, the "Songbag" has been cited by traditional musicians including Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. It's a primary source of American cultural heritage.
Sucking Cider Through A Straw.......2003-01-02
Compiled with difficulty and a lot of elbow grease during the years when American master Carl Sandburg was also writing Rootabaga Stories, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and poetry volume Slabs Of The Sunburnt West, The American Songbag is one of the many valuable gifts Sandburg produced for the American people. A collection of 290 "songs, ballads, and ditties," each entry consists of the extended lyrics and "complete harmonizations or piano accompaniments."
These folk songs are grouped under loose headings such as 'Dreams And Portraits,' 'Pioneer Memories,' 'The Big Brutal City,' 'Picnic and Hayrack Follies, Close Harmony, and Darn Fool Ditties,' 'The Great Open Spaces,' 'Hobo Songs,' and 'Tarnished Love Tales And Revolutionary Antiques,' and 'Mexican Border Songs' among others.
Many, understandably, have a British origin - 'The Foggy Dew,' 'Barbara Allen,' 'As I Was Walkin' Down Wexford Street,' 'Pretty Polly,' and 'The House Carpenter' - while the origin of others, like 'The E-RI-E,' 'The Ballad Of De Boll Weevil,' and 'The Buffalo Skinners' seem to be distinctly American. 'Turkey In The Straw,' however, like "When The Curtains Of Night Are Pinned Back,' is a "classical American rural tune," and "as American as Andrew Jackson, Johnny Appleseed, and Corn-on-the-Cob." Sandburg provides a brief introduction to each song, many of which are informative, while others are humorous and so idiosyncratic that each only muddies the waters of clarity if taken at face value. American music lovers may believe that 'Shenandoah' is a wholly American creation, but Sandburg sensibly suggests that the original may have referred to the name of a foreign ship or an Indian chief, rather than to 'the Historic Virginia valley.' 'She'll Be Comin' Round The Mountain" was adapted by mountaineers from the "old-time negro spiritual" 'When The Chariot Comes.' 'The John B. Sails' has its origin in the West Indies. Sandburg seems to be underscoring the fact that most songs, like most people, come from somewhere else; origins are often hazy and partially a result of wishful thinking.
Musicians, educators, and youth leaders should have special interest in this book, which is as pure a piece of Americana as Duncan Emrich's Folklore On The American Land. The American Songbag will also thrill lovers of Americana and those searching for a legitimate, productive, and useful avenue into our country's history. Highly recommended for all audiences.
...a grain of salt.......2001-07-21
I purchased this book partly [because of what others ere saying.] The lyrics of the obscure selections from American popular music are of some value but the arrangements of the music and the tune transcriptions are terrible. This is not a book to buy if you are looking for music.
A Treasure.......1999-12-15
Sandburg's American Songbag is a national treasure. I suppose the words and music of these 280 songs, ballads, and ditties that people have sung forever could be found elsewhere, but where? This important work, which breathes life back into some of the most memorable old songs, was originally published in 1927.
Book Description
Music and lyrics for over 200 songs. "John Henry," "Goin' Home," "Little Brown Jug," "Alabama-Bound," many more.
Customer Reviews:
a few words on this edition.......2007-09-10
An inclusive collection of different American ballads and folksongs- a classic indeed. Lovely that it includes sheet music as well! Rather than just being a collection of the lyrics to different ballads, for special study (like the Child ballads collection, however admirable), it also operates as a songbook
An old favorite.......2001-03-19
My father has an original copy of this book that I grew up reading. I was so very glad to see it back in print. The way that the book is arranged (railroad songs, chain gangs, blues, reels, cowboy songs, etc.) makes it easy to navigate. The bulk of the songs cataloged are not the familiar ones that one is used to seeing in other collections.
An essential reference.......2000-08-21
This is not an exhaustive catalogue of ballads nor does it always contain the same version of a ballad that are published elsewhere under the Lomax name. The ballads are arranged by subject matter: Working on the Railroad; The Levee Camp; Southerrn Chain Gangs; Negro Bad Men; White Desperadoes; Mountain Songs; Cocaine and Whiskey; Blues; Creole Negroes; Reels; Minstrel Types; Breakdowns and Play Parties; Songs of Childhood; Vaqueros of the Southwest; Cowboy Songs; Songs of the Overlanders; Miner; Shanty-Boy; Erie Canal; Great Lake; Sailors and Sea Fights; Wars and Soldiers; White Spirituals and Negro Spirituals. Often there is a short story of the song in addition to the collection notes.
A decent introduction to the ballad form and its music precedes the collection. This is an essential reference to anyone interested in ballads in America.
On "American Ballads and Folk Songs".......1998-09-09
Not a bad book... Not the best, though. The Lomaxes put together a very complete and exhaustive volume of folk music, that's for sure. However, some of it manages to contradict their other books, or has some songs more or less complete than they are in those works. Some of their choices of songs as "folk music" are a little odd, too; "Beautiful" would be a good example of this. I would suggest Folk Song USA as a better reference, if you can find it.
Book Description
A devastatingly original work that plunges into the heart of the American psyche from America's beginnings to Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska."
The ballad has been part of American history since before the country had a name. In this book, Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus have assembled an astonishing group of writers and artists—Paul Muldoon, Stanley Crouch, R. Crumb, Jon Langford of the Mekons, John Rockwell, Luc Sante, Joyce Carol Oates, Dave Marsh, and more than a dozen other novelists, essayists, performers, and critics—to explore the ineffable power of the American ballad. In words and in drawings, the collaborators have tapped the veins of America's most imaginative and expressive form. From "Barbara Allen," one of the earliest, through "The Wreck of the Old 97," to contemporary ballads by Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, The Rose & the Briar presents a rich new patch of art and commentary—like the ballads, no two the same, but all of a piece, about stories, storytellers, and American death, love, and liberty. 25 illustrations.
Customer Reviews:
Oppenheimer?.......2006-08-15
So, what does this book have to do with J. Robert Oppenheimer losing his security clearance?
the roses are worth the thorns.......2006-04-16
There are some really amazing essays here, notably, Greil Marcus's envoi. Dave Marsh on "Barbara Allen" lifts a lot of ancient stuff out of the shadows and sets it in a clean, well lighted place. Sarah Vowell on "John Brown's Body" tells us a lot more about the ballad than we might have imagined. Cecil Brown on "Frankie and Albert" is a delight. Frankie's life is worthy of several ballads. R. Crumb's graphics make this a classic. His letter to the editor slaps a few of the other essayists out of the fetid air like horse flies. The graphics are fine, so I don't know what a previous reviewer was complaining about. Maybe he got a bad a copy.
There are some real clunkers here, however. Wendy Lesser's piece is lost at sea. This is such a dissappointment when there is so much to say about Dylan, and she is such a fine writer, and Greil Marcus has written such great stuff on Dylan. Stanley Crouch's essay is fine, but it has nothing to do with ballads. David Thomas is a high-fallootin intellectualizer. "An imperative that derives from a gestalt of geography, sound, and culture fixes and vitalizes and drives certain musics." Wouldn't you love to see this guy have a conversation with Bob Dylan? Would he know a ballad if he stepped on one barefoot?
A great idea but a disappointing and poorly produced book........2005-10-23
I could hardly wait to read this book when I learned about it since so little has been written about the long history of loving these songs. While the authors do a good job of talking about how they feel about the songs, they don't delve very deep. Most disappointing, though, is the production quality. Jon Langford's and R. Crumb's visual interpretations of their chosen ballads look as if they are very interesting but the reproductions of their drawings are so blurry that they are nearly indecipherable.
An extraordinary literary and musical adventure.......2005-06-16
This is a wonderful book. The explorations of various folk songs (and what comprises a "folk" song) range from intriguing academic insights to fictional interpretations of the histories and even biographies of various songs: wonderful and inventive and satisfying. It was given to me by a friend and I am buying it for at least three more. Incredible
Ballads As History........2005-04-07
In Sharyn McCrumb's novel, IF EVER I RETURN PRETTY PEGGIE-O, I first learned of the ballad, 'The Knoxville Girl.' Here in her cahpter about American Ballads, she's called 'Dear Little Girl.' She has that ballad mixed up with others making for confusion on all fronts. If I didn't know the song and its consequences, I would not have recognized "Nellie" as the Dear Little Girl in 'Pretty Peggie-O' -- "is with her beau, Jack, who turns into "Willie" who throttles the life out of her along the banks of some river (the French Broad). As with local "history" of a certain theater which left out the decade which meant the most to me, now her vagueness and omission of her own as she twists this ballad after calling the chapter 'Pretty Peggie-O', what a let down. You can hear this song in Betty Smith's 1977 'For My Friends of Song.' I have heard that the Louvin Brothers had a good version sometime and Elvis Costello sang it in the same aforementioned theater as 'The Knoxville Girl.'
Barbara Allen was the poor Scots-Irish theme of the Appalachians as parlayed by Dolly Parton. She is not a ballad singer, but hillbilly music of her own making.
'John Brown's Body' was used as a marching song for the 12th regiment in 1861. That John Brown had drowned while crossing the Shenandoah River on the way to battle. On March 1, 1862, it was sung at the spot wher John Brown, the abolitionist, was hanged by the Union. Up 'til now, I thought it had been written about him.
I have not heard of most of the featured 'ballads' even though I'd always said I preferred ballads to classical music. This book features many folk singers, but my ballads were by Eddie Fisher. A big difference!
The chapter by David Thomas combined 'The Wreck of Old 97' about a train wreck in the early 1900s and 'Dead Man's Curve' by Jan and Dean in 1964 about a car crash. Randy Newman who wrote 'Short People' also had ballads recorded by Dusty Springfield and his own 'Sail Away' which Enya croons.
This book gives intermittent history of America and the editors included a plethora of works published on various subjects. The best thing was the two-page cartoon by R. Crumb, but the black and white pictures and copies of old sheet music at the beginning of the 22 sections are almost as good.
I don't think they missed anything from a put down of Abraham Lincoln's 2nd Inaugural Address six weeks before his murder by John Wilkes Booth to Stephen Foster's 'possible' suicide at the age of forty, to Richard Speck's rampage in Chicago. A smorgasbord of strange incidents, not all musical. I grew up hearing my dad play his guitar and harmonica and sing the old folk songs, like 'Beautiful Beautiful Brown Eyes' and I'd always say, "but I love blue eyes." Still do.
Book Description
Children of all ages will enjoy singing "I've Been Working on the Railroad" and over 50 other songs including:
On Top of Old Smoky
Down in the Valley
Old MacDonald Had a Farm
Hush, Little Baby
Skip to My Lou
Buffalo Gals
Home on the Range
When the Saints Go Marching In
Oh Susanna
Let Me Call You Sweetheart
Row, Row, Row Your Boat
When Johnny Comes Marching Home
America, the Beautiful
The Star-Spangled Banner
This Old Man
Over the River and Through the Woods
Book Description
Although his story has been told countless times--by performers from Ma Rainey, Cab Calloway, and the Isley Brothers to Ike and Tina Turner, James Brown, and Taj Mahal--no one seems to know who Stagolee really is. Stack Lee? Stagger Lee? He has gone by all these names in the ballad that has kept his exploits before us for over a century. Delving into a subculture of St. Louis known as "Deep Morgan," Cecil Brown emerges with the facts behind the legend to unfold the mystery of Stack Lee and the incident that led to murder in 1895.
How the legend grew is a story in itself, and Brown tracks it through variants of the song "Stack Lee"--from early ragtime versions of the '20s, to Mississippi John Hurt's rendition in the '30s, to John Lomax's 1940s prison versions, to interpretations by Lloyd Price, James Brown, and Wilson Pickett, right up to the hip-hop renderings of the '90s. Drawing upon the works of James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison, Brown describes the powerful influence of a legend bigger than literature, one whose transformation reflects changing views of black musical forms, and African Americans' altered attitudes toward black male identity, gender, and police brutality. This book takes you to the heart of America, into the soul and circumstances of a legend that has conveyed a painful and elusive truth about our culture.
Customer Reviews:
Interesting historical breakdown, lousy incorrect politics.......2005-05-19
The strength of this book is the historical investigation of the blues/ballad Stagolee and its historical spread in Black and non-Black folklore. Many of the commonplaces and original wisdoms presented here about Black music and culture are intersting and worthwhile. For this reason, this book belongs within the libraries of those interested in Black folk culture and music in particular.
Unfortunately, when he tries to create some revolutionary political character to the song and a view of "the lumpen" which we all thought was safely buried when the Black Panthers became Democratic party ward heelers and sellers of codd pieces, Brown falls flat on his face.
There is no way to transcend the dominant culture except through politics. Stagolee, the lumpen as he preaches them, do not represent any new vision or revolutionary spirit of suffering African Americans, much less our struggle to liberate ourselves, but quite the opposite. They represent a group that even more than the average working person strives to achieve and obtain the goals and values of this corrupt and exploitative society. Rather, than some threat, they are quite useful to those who wish to retain power and vice versa.
What is also interesting is how, contrary to the life styles, Wall street morals, and Washington manners of the real lumpen like Stagolee, the song and the legend were given other clothing by Black working people, farmers, youth, prisoners, struggling for a way out of the racist hell hole of Jim Crow. Instead of a man who never found problems being "bad" and mean to African Americans, and never found much problems with the police, Stagolee is converted into the opposite. The more heroic the song and the image of Stagolee becomes, the more divorced from the reality of who he real was, and what the social scum he came from really represents.
That's the real political and social lesson in what Brown explains of the reality of the Stagolee story. The actual Stagolee was a pimp and hustler who exploited the bodies of Black women. His major interest came in his political pimping for the Democratic party whose task at the time was nothing less than the overthrow of whatever gains remained from Reconstruction and the establishment of Jim Crow segregation throughout the South and beyond. His antagonism with Billy Lyons was rooted in Lyon's attachment to a rival gang of pimps and thugs who preyed on Black people under the auspices of the Republican party.
The murder actually did reach its point after Lyon's alledged disrespect of the hat, an adoption by the lumpen of the ruling class's views that things are more important than people.
Rather than being seen as a challenge to White society, Stagolee was defended by the top lawyer in St. Louis. Even after he was convicted of murder, Stag served only a year or so before being released due to the influence of his friends in the Democratic party. In fact, Brown explains that Stagolee went on to murder another African American, was again convicted of a minimal sentence, and was in prison about to be released early again thanks to the Democrats of Missouri, when he died.
Despite, Brown's silly attempt to claim that the lumpen, or the image is some kind of revolutionary threat to dominance, the behaviors of pimps, theives, drug dealers, and other "lumpen" are if anything an extreme version of the dominant society's worst values. The basic idea is that getting money, having wealth, and using violence and ignoring the solidarity of Black people and other working folks is the road to power. That is nothing less than the thinking that the Rockefellers, the Duponts, the Bushes, and the Kerry's use to justify their exploitation of the rest of us and their barbaric wars against the peoples of the world!
As someone who was quite active in the civil rights and Black power movements, and knew and worked with leaders of the Black panthers in the Bay area and around the country, I never saw much of a response from this layer of the black community to the struggle on any level. On the other hand group composed mainly of African American students and workers like the BPP did ten to be taken in by these attitudes distracted from and turned away from the struggle and diverted into unprincipled deals with the the cops and the politicians, alcoholism, disrespect for women, thuggery against working people and students, drug addiction, and drug dealing, and receive rather serious blows against their ability to struggle for liberation.
In regard to the editorial questions raised previously, I think we are facing a crisis in publishing, even with academic publishing houses, publishing works like this by an academic. This is not the first book that I written on TODAY, where editorial misconduct and confusion is such that mistakes that take not an expert, but a normally literate person should be able to eliminate abound. The press to publish, the press to sell books, to get a book out quick and without too many resources, the tight budgets, and emphasis on promotion and sales and not quality that are more and more at the center of the publishing industry today is devouring the quality of non-fiction books as sources.
Brown can't be blamed for that. In this regard, he is the victim
Coulda been a contender.......2005-01-15
I loved this book, but I share Mark Forrester's distress about the absolutely abysmal editing. The reference to Leon Gross as "Archibald Cox" is just laughable. There's also a name misspelled in the acknowledgements; something I've never run across before. This in a book published by Harvard University Press, for God's sake.
I nevertheless recommend the book with only the one caveat, albeit a rather large one -- don't quote anything you find here as fact without checking it out yourself. It could be something the fact checkers missed...
Outlaw ISO Editor.......2005-01-01
I have to conclude that other reviewers have actually been reviewing their own ideas of what this book might have been. I wish I could give it such a favorable write-up myself. But despite the interesting information Brown provides about the historical background and recording history of this classic American song, the book itself is disappointingly repetitious, contradictory, sloppily edited and organized, and poorly written. At one point, Brown calls Grandmaster Flash's "The Message" (1982) the "first rap" record [page 92]; elsewhere, he speaks of rap's rising popularity "during the 1970s and 1980s" [222]. In one discussion, he attributes the same poem to both Margaret Walker [197] and Gwendolyn Brooks [199]. And in one paragraph, he claims both that "Madame Babe allowed May [Irwin] to adapt" a particular song and - two sentences later - that "May Irwin may have stolen" that song from Madame Babe [107]. Oh, and he extends New Orleans r&b pianist Archibald's stage name to "Archibald Cox," perhaps as a nod to the Watergate prosecutor [172]. Obviously, writing history based so extensively on oral tradition is going to be difficult, but virtually every other sentence in this book is qualified with a "maybe," "perhaps," or "possibly." Those qualifications are representative of Brown's approach to history, in which he bends the facts as best he can to fit his preconceived notions. Brown's study is filled with generalizations and over-simplifications, and his use of theory is heavy-handed and unconvincing. I'm glad that I read this book - I learned a lot about a subject that interests me, and I found many of Brown's speculations provocative - but, unless Brown is assigned a firm-handed editor for the next edition, I can only recommend it with an armful of caveats.
Who Was Stagolee?.......2003-08-01
If you listen to American blues, rock, or folk music, you've heard about Stagolee. The Grateful Dead, the Clash, John Hurt, and dozens of others told a story about the night Stagolee shot Billy in a bar fight. The words may have varied, and the story may have seemed archetypical, but there was something going on here. Cecil Brown has traced the story to its origins: a bar in St. Louis's red light district in 1895, when Lee Shelton gunned down Billy Lyons because Lyons had touched his hat. Brown has done the research and provides interesting insights into urban culture and race relations in a time and place not far removed from slavery. He reviews different variations of the song, looks into the lives of the real-life protagonists, and discusses why the story made such a good source for songs for the next hundred years.
Baad Dude Wins Again.......2003-06-21
Anyone with even a slight acquaintance with the blues knows that Stagolee killed Billy Lyons over a brand-new Stetson hat. Stagolee thus became the prototypic baaad dude, the player who would coolly kill a man over fancy headgear. Until now, however, no one knew the real story, and most of us blues fans wondered if either of the gentlemen existed. In truth, "Stack" Lee Shelton shot Billy Lyons in a barroom in the red-light district of St. Louis on Christmas Day, 1895. The ballad, now known in hundreds of versions, must have emerged soon afterward.
Cecil Brown has researched the full story--he even provides pictures of the death certificates. He situates the event in its full and rowdy context: the roaring, wide-open world of Mississippi River towns in the late 19th century, when liquor, prostitution, gambling, and violence were the order of the day. He goes on to trace the song through its long and chequered history; central to the blues, it has been enthusiastically adopted by hillbilly and folk singers, rockers, and many more.
Good studies of folklore have been rare lately. The glorious days of the 1960s folk revival are long over. It is thus doubly rewarding to see a really fine study of folk tradition. This book focuses on the literature side; it does not deal with the music (someone should write a companion volume). Brown does an excellent job of interpretation, bringing in just enough theory, not too much. His generalizations are useful and interesting. (I don't agree with "Publisher's Weekly"'s sour comments at the end of their note.) The world needs more books like this. I not only got stuck in it and read it in one sitting--I then sought out my worn old record of Long Cleve Reed and Papa Harvey Hull's superb performance from the 1920's, and played it three times over.
Right on, Cecil Brown.
Book Description
The compelling oral history of a remarkable woman's life and political struggle
Customer Reviews:
A MUST READ BOOK!!!.......2005-08-09
This book brought tears to my eyes and its worth reading especially if you or your family are immigrants. It will shed some light to what some immigrants had to go through when they came to the United States looking for a better place to live and raise their children.
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American Ballads and Folk Songs
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Our Singing Country: Folk Songs and Ballads
Parades and Panoramas: 25 Songs Collected by Carl Sandburg
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