Treasury of Song

No fathoms off the starboard bow

Look out, Skipper, pull her to the side.

You gonna bus' your bow and split

your hide.

Oh, Great God, I done run aground.

De skipper gonna chase me with a big

bloodhound.

Mark twain, Mark twain.

In skintight black jeans and green sport shirt, Singer Harry Belafonte riveted his audience in Las Vegas, where he opened last week, with Mark Twain -- based on the cry of the man with the lead-line on a towboat. This song, and many another in Belafonte's repertory, represents a draft on a treasury in Washington, D.C. that to many a scholar and singer is more important than Fort Knox.

The treasury is a small, dim office stacked high with files and catalogues of tapes and recordings, in Room G156 of the Library of Congress. Next door is a recording studio and a small listening booth. This is the physical plant of the Folklore Section of the Library of Congress. The secretary of this treasury -- as well as collector, personnel manager and salesman -- is a quiet, greying scholar of 47 named Duncan Black Macdonald Emrich, author of, among other things, Who Shot Maggie in the Freckle?.

Souls of Dead Miners. Duncan Emrich, whose parents were Congregationalist missionaries, was born in Turkey and lived in Istanbul until he was 16. He went to Phillips Academy and soon began picking up degrees -- from Brown University (A.B.) and Columbia (M.A.) in English, from the University of Madrid (D. en L. ) in Medieval Spanish and Arabic, from Harvard (Ph.D.) for a thesis on the Arabian philosopher Avicenna. In 1940 he moved to the University of Denver as an assistant professor. This changed everything.

Denver offered little that was stimulating in Emrich's hobby of Arabic but much in the field of folk music. Drinking in the splintery, bare saloons of the lonely valley towns, he heard and delighted in the hoarse old songs of the gold prospectors and the mining camps:

Pick, pick, pick -- Has someone behind

us knocked?

Pick, pick, pick -- No, 'tis the souls of

dead miners locked

For they're locked in the earthen wall

...

Folk songs, as Emrich has since discovered, cover a multitude of sins -- historical and otherwise. To the accompaniment of fiddles, banjos, guitars, dulcimers, bottles, tin cans and washboards, one can hear love songs, laments and domestic satires:

They done some brave shooting down

to Greeg Moor's

They come so close it was almost a

draw,

But I le bet ten dollers there is nothing

can

Equil that iron-clad boat, my mother-

inlaw.

Homemade Ballad. One night in the Bucket of Blood saloon at Virginia City, Nev., Emrich heard a miner bellow, "Who shot Maggie in the freckle?" Back to his room he went to compose a ballad of his own that was eventually brought back to him from Australia as an original:

Who shot Maggie in the freckle,

Who shot Maggie on the divide,

Who shot Maggie near Gold Hill

And ran away to hide?

Maggie . . . never showed her freckle

To anyone but me, her Bill.

But she must have let someone see it,

Because there isn't a freckle any more;

The Johnny who shot her in the freckle

Made a perfect bull's-eye score . . .

One day after World War II (in which he wound up as a major and an official U.S. historian at SHAEF), Emrich wandered into the Folk Song Section of the Library of Congress to browse through the collection. By the time he left, he had been talked into applying for the job as chief of the section--vacant since 1944.

Armed with tape recorders, Emrich and his assistants labored to gather an impressive collection of assassinations, ship disasters, train wrecks and the exploits of Jesse James. Sometimes a tobacco-chawing farm hand would sound off with a song like Barbara Allen which delighted Samuel Pepys (Emrich has 100 different versions) or a fossil from 16th Century England like Lord Bateman:

Lord Bateman was a noble lord,

He held himself of high degree

He would not rest nor be contented

Until he'd voyaged across the sea.

This is Emrich's tenth year as head of what has been expanded to include all folklore--arts, crafts and legends as well as songs.

But the recordings are the keystone of the collection; when Emrich came to the library there were some 30,000 songs and tales on records; today there are well aver 60,000. Among the 400-odd collectors who have shared their collections or talents with the library are Prince Peter of Greece, Composer Percy Grainger, Judge Learned Hand (singing The Iron Merrimac and Phil Sheridan), Burl Ives, Carl Sandburg and Jelly Roll Morton. At least one original creator of a folk song has been turned up by the library: Cowboy Harry Stephens, who wrote the Night-Herding Song.

Death in Laredo. Since 1940 the library has issued 23 albums of 78-rpm records (now also on LP) and 24 long-playing records, but the budget is so meager that only a tiny fraction of the potential can be made available to the general public, and then only to those who write or apply in person to the Recording Laboratory.

One small segment of the collection sure never to be released is the so-called "Delta Songs" -- lyrics of miners, sailors, lumberjacks and cowboys not for public consumption. Scholars often use the Delta collection to trace the source of a famed song that is really a cleaned-up version. Erie Canal, for instance, could never have been published as the canal men used to sing it. And The Streets of Laredo, now the story of a cowboy dying of a gunshot, was originally the saga of a British soldier dying of syphilis.

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