The Ballad Collectors of North America by Scott B. Spencer (ed.) (2012)

The 1960s were a decade of massive change, no matter what subject we pick, be it Civil Rights, the arts, medicine, the conquest of space or what have you. Some of the most compelling changes took place in popular culture, particularly where music was concerned; here a number of new genres were created, such as beat, garage, surf music, psychedelia among other styles.

And “something funny” happened too: a return to the heritage of American music, that is also rooted deeply in folk music on a broad scale, thus paving the way to the protest songs of the 1960s while using this kind of approach as a unique history of life, working conditions, social inequality and everyday problems from an era long past.

One of the many changes this new interest in past local, regional and most of all truly American music and lore put into the center was a fresh way of music appreciation.
With it went the respect and praise for the many authors and composers whose names we will never know since two of the key features of this music were “variation and improvisation,” two aspects not exclusively present in forms of African American music. Meaning that lyrics and harmonies of individual songs were circulating and received distinct arrangement and lyrics changes, depending of the musician presenting the songs.

So the musical (and the political) influence of musicians as Dylan and Baez, to mention but two of the big names, was deeply rooted in both the familiarity of the harmonies and melodies people had listened to for decades and their policy-making content.

The reviewed title The Ballad Collectors of North America covers that and much more.
Nevertheless, the full title of Scott B. Spencer’s books reads How Gathering Folksongs Transformed Academic Thought and American Identity and this says it all.
The volume is devoted to the researchers, “song-catchers,” folklorists, collectors and reporters who in long journeys sometimes to the most remote parts of the U.S. collected tales, songs, and even dialect and variations to gather data for future surveys of the folklorist wealth of the country.
While naturally mentioning the findings and achievements of the “field agents,” Spencer’s book, first of all, takes a closer look at the agents themselves, and so the volume is the first of its kind to get into detail on the individual histories of the great men and women who collected all this precious data. Because “… the songs they collected and the books they published have become instrumental in the collective consciousness of our ideas of ‘folk’ or what it is to be American … and the impact of their efforts had on larger social movements – are mostly unsung.”
Some collectors’ names pop up time and again (if we consider blues research that name would be ‘Lomax,’ for example) others are more or less forgotten nowadays. Any lover of pop music today – and I here refer to the Western world – should forever be grateful to the folklorists who were quickly recognizing and recording – although sometimes merely sketching – a way of life, a dialect, a dying form of song as well as the social condition and ways of communication vastly changing with the advent of electricity, the phonograph and mass media. There is a sad truth about jazz research one may read rather often and that is also true in the face of any music research: “a song not recorded is a song not existent,” describing the void a missing link in the development of a song, a regional style or the personal evolution of a certain musician leaves open.

Many of the researchers portrayed in The Ballad Collectors of North America left the beaten paths (quite literally) to explore rural regions often days away from the next village, with no roads, no telephones or doctors around in case of an emergency. They gained their reputation by collecting the most diverse kind of folklore, so that what little we know today about the origins of blues styles, bluegrass music, the huge body of cowboy and country songs, work songs and chain gang songs, we owe to Franz Boaz, D. K. Wilgus, the Lomaxes, Austin and Alta Fife, R. W. Gordon and most importantly James Francis Child.

As already stated above, the modern forms of popular music are naturally connected to the ancient folklore and ballads; it should be clear that songs such as “Franky and Johnny,” “The House of the Rising Sun,” Black Betty,” or “See See Rider” (to name some of the more popular songs that hit the U.S. charts) were not written in the 1960s but were sometimes created decades earlier, often by authors unknown today and thus being labeled “traditionals.”

While there were as many different approaches to collecting and transcribing as there were individual researchers, their results differ enormously, while shifting in focus from melody collecting to lyrics preservation, dialect comparison or song evolution.
For any scholar of popular music, folklore, vernacular, dialect and most of all oral history and oral culture the folklore thus printed, recorded and stored serves as a precious cultural archive. Scott Spencer’s book is a way to pay respect to the forefathers of that archive.

Review by Dr. A. Ebert

Scott B. Spencer (ed.) The Ballad Collectors of North America: How Gathering Folksongs Transformed Academic Thought and American Identity (American Folk Music and Musicians Series), Scarecrow Press, 2012, 246 p.