Song

Songbag

Minstrels of days gone by lived their lives, traveled the highways and byways, sang their songs, died and were forgotten. So, too often, were the songs they sang, simple, singable songs that came from the people and belonged to them. Happily for the survival of the homely, story-telling songs of the U. S., Carl Sandburg, modern minstrel, has changed the order of things. For years he has trekked from one end of the U. S. to the other, reading the rugged poems that have made his name, poems of smoke and steel and corn-husking smarting with truth and vitality. Poems have been first part on his programs but songs have come before the end. He pulls up a chair, takes his guitar, strums a measure or two and then will come the woeful, repetitious story of a moaning Carolina Negro, the whoopees of a rancher. Some will come to him after the recital, and ask him if he has ever heard "the other version of that last one he sang," or tell him he should go down to the end of the town and "hear the old nigger lady who moans 'em by the hour." Mr. Sandburg has always gone, always listened. He has kept a notebook, jotted down the words and the tunes in strange hieroglyphics comprehensible only to himself. Now he presents them as The American Songbag.* There are some 280, and, like the family piecebag, they are of all colors and patterns. There are songs of sailors, of miners, of lumberjacks, of loggers, of hobos, of prisoners and pick & shovel men, of washerwomen, bandits and railroad gangs. They tell stories, of pioneer memories, of the Mexican border, the "big, brutal cities," the Southern mountains, of five different wars. This one came from a Santa Fe buckaroo, that one from the Leavenworth penitentiary. Mr. Sandburg places them all, gives in his thumbnail introductions vivid pictures of the times and the people that produced them. "Drivin' Steel" comes from the mountaineers of East Tennessee. It is a working class song straight from men on the job, uttered to muscular body rhythms. One can almost hear the ring of steel on steel. There is a heave of shoulders, deep breath control, the touch of hands on a familiar well-worn hammer handle.

If I could drive steel like John Henry I'd go home, Baby, I'd go home. And later: This old hammer killed John Henry. Can't kill me, Baby, can't kill me. Torchlight processions of Republicans in the summer and fall of 1860 sang "Old Abe Lincoln Came Out of the Wilderness": Old Abe Lincoln came out of the Wilderness, Old Abe Lincoln came out of the Wilderness, Old Abe Lincoln came out of the Wilderness, Down in Illinois. "Man Goin' Roun' " came from Columbia, S. C. A homely, black woman sang it: There's a man goin' roun' takin' names, There's a, man goin' roun' takin names,

An' he took my mother's name, An' he leave my heart in pain, There's a man goin' roun' takin' names.

There is "The Hearse Song" from the World War:

The old Grey Hearse goes rolling by, You don't know whether to laugh or cry, For you know some day it'll get you too. And the hearse's next load may consist of--you. They'll take you out and they'll lower you down, While men with shovels stand all around; They'll throw in dirt and they'll threw in rocks, And they won't give a damn if they break the box. The worms crawl in and the worms crawl out, They crawl all over your chin and mouth, They invite their friends and their friends' friends too And you look like hell when they're --through--with you. There are long narrative songs, of

Jay Gould's daughter from the 1880's

when the Goulds and the Vanderbilts were big names in railroading, of circus barkers, of deserted damsels, and of Outlaw Jesse James. The poems are all real, all primitive, good reading. But the Songbag is a music book, to be kept on the piano. There are harmonies more tempting than any of the verses. They fairly cry to be sung and the arrangements come from such composers as Leo Sowerby, Henry Joslyn, Alfred G. Wathall, Edward Collins, Ruth Porter Crawford, Lillian Rosedale Goodman. Some of them, to be sure, are a bit elaborate for the earthy tunes that inspired them but for the most part they are well adapted. Any complaints will come from the specialist in ditties and native folk music. They will mourn omissions, but the minstrel's own apologia must answer them: "I should like to have taken ten, twenty, thirty years more in the preparation of this volume."

*THE AMERICAN SONGBAG--Carl Sandburg-- Harcourt Brace ($7.50).