Spring 2002 Volume XXXI, No. 2

Meditations on Coltrane's Legacies by Salim Washington Reminiscing on Ruth by Bess Lomax Hawes New Music Notes by Carol J. Oja An Amy Beach Discography by Adrienne Fried Block ISAM Matters Reviews Celebrating Jelly Roll by Jeff Taylor Listening to Beach by Liane Curtis Transcribing the Folk by David Evans Our Singing Children by Jane Palmquist ISAM Home

Transcribing the Folk by David Evans The Music of American Folk Song and Selected Other Writings on American Folk Music, edited by Larry Polansky with Judith Tick (University of Rochester Press, 2001; $45), contains Ruth Crawford Seeger’s previously unpublished 75-page essay intended to be an introduction to John A. and Alan Lomax’s original 1941 edition of Our Singing Country. Crawford Seeger was the music editor and did the tune transcriptions for this volume of folk songs, most of them collected in the field by the Lomaxes. Macmillan’s refusal to publish such a lengthy essay, a stand supported by the Lomaxes, resulted in Crawford Seeger’s “Music Preface” being shortened to eight pages. Three other short essays by Crawford Seeger are added to the present volume, but they pale in significance when compared to “The Music of American Folk Song” and largely serve to reinforce points made there. The book also contains brief forewords by Pete, Mike, and Peggy Seeger, a “Historical Introduction” by Judith Tick (Ruth Crawford Seeger’s biographer), and an “Editor’s Introduction” by Larry Polansky. Polansky’s editorial work is excellent. He created this edition of the main essay out of four manuscript sources, one of which has become the main portion of the text although it was incomplete. Polansky supplies 137 endnotes discussing editing problems, commenting on certain statements by Crawford Seeger, providing references to related literature and published recordings of the songs, and remarking on other relevant topics. Crawford Seeger’s essay itself is divided into two parts, “A Note on Transcription” and a lengthier “Notes on the Songs and on Manners of Singing.” The former deals with problems and general methods of transcription, while the latter might be characterized as an introduction to American folksinging style. An ambiguous statement by Pete Seeger about the failure of this essay to be published in Our Singing Country is quoted or cited several times here: “Ruth suffered one of the biggest disappointments of the last ten years of her life. It just killed her.” As much as we might wish in retrospect that the essay had been published in the original 1941 edition, it is easy to understand why it was not. Leaving aside the fact that Crawford Seeger had strained her relationships with the Lomaxes and Macmillan by delaying the publication of the book for a couple of years through constant revision of her transcriptions and time spent on writing this essay, the work was simply too detailed for a book whose main purpose was to provide a collection of folk songs to appeal to a mass urban audience and get them singing. It was also too long and would have taken up about twenty percent of the entire book if printed. Over sixty years later, the questions must arise: is this essay worth publishing now, and does it have anything to teach us today? The answer to both is yes. Ruth Crawford Seeger was an important musical figure in her day, both as a composer and a musicologist. This essay was quite advanced for 1941 and still has much to teach us about transcription and about American folk song. Crawford Seeger’s consistent method of transcription, constant attention to detail and nuance, insistence on the importance of hearing the music in order to understand the style, and favorable comparison of folksinging to fine art singing are laudable. Her original concepts of song norm (pp. 22-23), majority usage (pp. 23-25), and model tune (pp. 26-27) are important contributions to the field of transcription. Given the fact that her transcriptions were intended to be both descriptive and prescriptive, she was wise to choose a middle course between complexity (printing all the details) and simplicity (an outline). Crawford Seeger’s insightful observations on style (e. g., lack of dynamics and dramatization, metrical irregularities, tone attack and release, blue notes, etc.) resulted in generally very good transcriptions throughout the book, and allowed her to convey in notation the ornate vocal technique of “Pauline,” the metrical complexity of “Belle,” and the dense multi-part organization of “Dig My Grave.” Despite the sympathy and enthusiasm we should feel for this essay, it does have its weaknesses. Crawford Seeger had an agenda to document the “complexity” of American folk music so as to deny its reputation for “simplicity.” She was herself a modernist composer who explored dissonance in her works. Tick makes a virtue of this fact (p. xxii) and suggests that Crawford Seeger found parallels between American folk music and the work of modern composers and theorists (pp. xxv-xxvi). Polansky also supports Crawford Seeger’s relentless pursuit of “complexity” and the “difficult,” an opinion shared by ethnomusicologist Anthony Seeger (pp. xxxiii-xxxiv). In the twenty-first century, when American class lines are thankfully more blurred, this argument seems beside the point. What we really need to do now is abandon the simple/complex dichotomy and find other bases for identifying good music. Crawford Seeger’s concern for intricacy led her to introduce needless metrical complications into some of her transcriptions. For example, “Choose You a Seat ‘n’ Set Down” (pp. 51-54) has only one irregular measure, whereas she recognizes four. “Ain’t Workin’ Song” (pp. 50-53) is transcribed in a strange 9/8 meter, when it is actually duple. Oddly enough, she recognizes and even prints the more accurate meters of these two pieces but rejects them in her search for greater complexity. Similarly, her transcription of “Go Down, Ol’ Hannah” in 3/4 meter (p. 3l) would have been better without any metrical signature. Her treatment of rhythm also sometimes displays problems. Although she is aware of swing triplets, she generally chooses to notate them as dotted quarter and eighth notes (or dotted eighth and sixteenth), giving them too much of a lilt. Crawford Seeger’s constant stress on the unity of “American folk song” results in an exercise in musical nation-building. Admittedly, this unity was implicit in the approach of the Lomaxes and was part of the spirit of the times in the New Deal era. To her credit, Crawford Seeger recognized some degree of variety within this unity, but the diversity that most scholars would recognize today is seldom stressed. African American and Anglo American styles tend to be lumped together, although this is due in part to the Lomaxes’ favoring of southern sources for their material with its resultant display of acculturated styles. Needless to say, the concept of “American” excluded non-English-language material, with the exception of a handful of Louisiana French examples. (Inexplicably, the Lomaxes also included one Mexican and several Bahaman examples.) Crawford Seeger might have been able to recognize more of American folk song’s diversity if she had done fieldwork. Her essay, for example, would be a very useful text for ethnomusicology graduate seminars in transcription or American folk music. Yet lacking field experience, she willingly made generalizations about style and processes of transmission, learning, and composition. For example, her statement that tempo is usually constant from beginning to end of a performance (p. 33) contradicts the readily observable acceleration in a great deal of African American performance. We should admire Crawford Seeger’s work, both as a product of its time and for what it can teach us now. But we should not be seduced by the belief that “the ears of a composer” (p. xxii) are necessarily the ones best suited to hear the character of American folk song or to transform oral performance into written notation. Composers bring certain skills to the task, and their contributions are to be welcomed, but they can also bring the baggage of their art music training and background. What we all need to strive to acquire are the ears of a musically sensitive member of the folk community along with the necessary symbols to represent the music in print. Ruth Crawford Seeger appears to have been striving for such “ears,” as she continued to immerse herself (and her family) in folk song and its performance in her subsequent career. –University of Memphis