English Folk Songs in America

Buck Creek Girls
By Appalachian folk singer Hobart Smith
(Below is more information on Hobart Smith)

Here is a track listing of the album where Buck Creek Girls appears.

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A reader posted this comment on Vaughn Williams and Holst's English Folk Songs.

Complementing RVW's [Ralph Vaughn Williams] and Holst's harvest of English folk song in the period were songcatchers, like Cecil Sharp, founder of the English Folksong society and instigator of the Morris Dance revival, who spent a couple of summers during World War I tramping Appalachia in search of pristine specimens of ancient English and Scottish folk song. Sharp was to collecting and preserving the northern British tradition as RVW and Holst were to the southern. You're right--the charm of folk song derives from its link to the landscape. American traditional and mountain music expresses the same appreciation and longing for the land--and, as it turns out, since those tunes find their roots in the old world, it's the same landscape, made even dearer by the singer's distance from it.

Here is more information on the "songcatchers" Cecil Sharp, and how he built a repertoire of English folk songs in America:

Hobart Smith (May 10, 1897—January 11, 1965) was an American old-time musician. He was most notable for his appearance with his sister, Texas Gladden, on a series of Library of Congress recordings in the 1940s and his later appearances at various festivals during the folk music revival of the 1960s. Smith is often remembered for his virtuosic performances on the banjo, and had also mastered various other instruments, including the fiddle, guitar, piano, harmonica, accordion, and organ...

During the years of the First World War, Sharp found it difficult to support himself through his customary efforts at lecturing and writing, and decided to make an extended visit to the United States. The visit, made with his collaborator Maud Karpeles during the years 1916–1918, was a great success. Large audiences came to hear Sharp lecture about folk music, and Sharp also took the opportunity to do field work on English folk songs that had survived in the more remote regions of southern Appalachia, pursuing a line of research pioneered by Olive Dame Campbell. Travelling through the mountains of Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee, Sharp and Karpeles recorded a treasure trove of folk songs, many using the pentatonic scale and many in versions quite different from those Sharp had collected in rural England. Generally, Sharp recorded the tunes, while Karpeles was responsible for the words.

Sharp was greatly struck by the dignity, courtesy, and natural grace of the people who welcomed him and Karpeles in the Appalachians, and he defended their values and their way of life in print.

Sharp's work in promoting English folk song dance traditions in the US is carried on by the Country Dance and Song Society

The excerpt below is Hobart's account of his musical beginning. It appears to come from this source: Smith Hobart: "I grew up into it" DB no. 22 (1 sept, 1973), 18-22, Short autobiography, originally accompanying Folk-Legacy Records FSA-17. The link provides the rest of the narrative:

I Grew Up Into It
As Told By Hobart Smith:
I started playing the banjo when I was seven years old. When I was three, I commenced playin' on an old fire shovel. I was raised in an old log house that had a fireplace and my mother had a bar that went across the fireplace with hooks that came down to cook her stuff in the pots and then she had a big oven and lid and she'd bake her bread and pull out those coals with that shovel — cover it up with red-hot coals, you know — and bake her bread thataway. We didn't have any cook-stove at that time. They said I was just three years old, I'd get that fire shovel and just pick on it; and they asked me what I was pickin' and I just said "Sour Colics!"[Read the rest of the narrative here].

Despite the sad themes of many songs, the melodies appear less plaintive, and more confident, than the Irish melodies I wrote about here.

Next stop, Wales, then Scotland!

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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat