THE AMERICAN FOLK-SONG.

JT was declared in a recent number of a well-known American 1. magazine that " rag-time " was the folk-music of the white population of the United States. The writer should have remembered the strong negro influence in "rag-time," but it is not surprising that he was unaware of any other folk-music. No one knows about it. The music-shops are puzzled if asked for American folk-songs not of negro origin ; even such libraries as the Boston Athenaeum contain no books on the subject that ore of any real value except Frazer's on the music of the Ojibway Indians and the Hiawatha legend, and an exhaustive article by Philip Hale in the Journal of the American Folk-Lora Society. Attention has been so focused on the beautiful negro melodies and the rather barren discussion of their origin that no enthusiast has searched elsewhere and familiarized tho musics! public with the results of his investigations.

Those days are now at an end. Enough has been found during the past few years to warrant the statement that there are three or four fields rich with promise. A volume of habitant" songs from Quebec appeared recently, and I understand that a great many fine Spanish-American songs have been collected and may soon be published. Among the "poor white" mountaineers of Kentucky there has been found a store of songs, many of them Elizabethan in origin, which have not yet been driven from favour by the ubiquitous gramophone. One of these, preserved in all probability since the days of Ralegh, has haunted my memory over since I heard it a year ago in New York. It is a singularly beautiful version of " The Lowland Sea " which has survived among a people who knew of the sea only so much as might be gleaned from travellers' tales t In this field Cecil Sharp has done valuable work in the publication of two volumes of words and melodies from the Appalachians.

To the same stock belong the English, Scottish, and Irish songs which have been preserved in the New England states.

In the West I heard snatches, remembered from a boyhood in Vermont, which were strangely familiar to my ears, while in Vermont itself Mrs. Warren Sturgis has collected some fifty songs, twelve of which, tastefully arranged and carefully anne. toted, have been published under the title Songs from the Hills of Vermont. But all these are of alien origin, and to me the most interesting songs are those which were wrought and sung in log cabins by pioneers and frontiersmen.

One meets with these in strange places, as often in Now York as in Wyoming, but wherever they have been carried by the movement of population never do they lose the peculiar frontier quality. The war indeed introduced many Britons to the sad tale of Casey Jones of the Santa Fh ; even the splendid " Cow- boys' Lament" has been heard in our messes. This latter is highly characteristic of the cowboy songs (it hails from Texas) ; but " Frankie," especially in its original form, is more dramatic. There are several versions of this song, all restrained in substance but horribly profane in expression. All, that la, except that for which my thanks arc duo to the Y.W.C.A., as the girl who sang it had learnt it at one of their Conferences in the Middle West. The air is simple and no less effective than the words :-

" Now Frankio was a good woman as everybody knows.

She saved up all her earnings just to bey her Albert clothes.

Chorus :— He was her man, that's right he was, and he done her wrong.

And Frankio went to the corner saloon to get her a glass of beer. And Frankie says to the bar-tender "S my Albert bin in hero ' An' the bar-tender says : ' Miss Frankie, I bain't goin' ter tell no lie,

Yor Albert was in here 'bout 'n hour ago with a woman as looked

like a spy.'

Then Frankio she went home, but she didn't go for fun,

She reached down in her stocking and pulled out a '44 gun. And Frankie shot that gun once (Bang !). And Frankie shot that gun twice (Bang I Bang !). The third time that she shot that gun she hurt her Albert so. [This probably corrupt, because of rhyme.)

Thierat :-

He was her man, that's right he was, but she done him wrong.

Oh, turn me over easy and turn me over glow. The third time that you shot that gun you hurt your Albert so.

Chorus :- He was her man, that's right he was, but she done him wrong."

There is another frontier area which has produced songs of its own—the Yukon. But while it is hard to find the songs of the Colorado and New Mexico cowboys, it is luck indeed to hear the songs of the Northland unless you search in the remotest places of Alaska, and even then there is for the most part a new and

a different generation. In the West there are ex-saloon-keepers who remember the days of the Strike and of the " Virginian " and their songs ; there are even ranch hands who learnt some of the songs from survivors of the old days ; so that in a year a man might collect material enough for a volume. The men of Bonanza and Dawson City are gone to the ends of the earth, and the songs of their trails, of Soapy Smith's saloon and the Forty Mile road-house, have gone with them.

It was my good fortune, however, to meet in New Hampshire one who was in Alaska and on the Yukon for five or six years, a survivor of the old guard who were there before the great rush. During the greater part of the winter months he was driving dog-teams, and so it was that when one evening he sang to us as we eat in the snow round a huge camp fire it was mostly of the trail that he sang. What we heard that night could not easily be forgotten, and convinced me that an ardent collector would surely find much to repay his efforts.

For the verses quoted below from " The Dog-Drivers " I am indebted to Mrs. Lunt of Concord. They are sung to a fine tune with a complicated rhythm and a splendid cry in it, and seem to have been well known from the very early days.

" Oh You dog punchers all, with your yip and your yawl, By the crack of the whip in the morning I drive to the West where the Kloochmen are best And the Hooch is as strong as my yearning.

For I come with my dogs in the long winter night From the land where the lone wolf wails, From the sea which lies white in the bright northern light, The haunt of balooka (f) and whales.

Now here is the law of the dog-drivers free, The men at whose mercy this whole country be, And whether you travel by land or by sea Remember to keep it alway.

Be true to your pardner, be true to your word.

All else as nothing be,

For all the laws of God or man Stop South of Fifty-three.

You may talk of your fairies and Indian queens Who whirl in the dance hall till morning, But your dog-driver's free, lads, to pick where he may,

And his choice is as fair as the dawning.

And when your work on the long trail is done—

You have taken your pleasure, now pay for your fun. For down into hell, lads, you'll go with a run

And bum for ever and ever."

The similarity of sentiment to that of some of Mr. Kipling's

ballads is remarkable—to " ship me somewhere East of Suez " and to " Gentlemen rankers. . . damned from here to eternity." There was much more in the same vein telling of a return to civilization and respectability, and of how when

things went wrong you would be drawn back to die in the North-

land. This song ended with a verse probably of the singer's own composition :— " So longs my heart for the Northland, For the hunger, the cold and the pain, The bright firelight and the long, still night Will never come back again."

He was right. Frontier work on the American Continent has lost or is losing its peculiar fine, aristocratic quality, but at least we can make sure that some of the best of its music and its lore

in song and story will be preserved. M.