In the Garret Author:Carl Van Vechten General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1920 Original Publisher: Knopf Subjects: Music Musical criticism Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Mil... more »lion-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: The Folk-Songs of Iowa A romance in the picaresque manner OF late years considerable energy has been expended by those interested in such matters in the research of the folk-song in America. Stimulated, no doubt, by the example of England, a country which, not so very long ago believed herself folk-songless, but which discovered to her own astonishment that she had as many folk-songs as Sweden or Italy, collectors have ranged over these United States in a desperate effort to capture whatever specimens of the art of the people may still have lingered in these unwelcoming environments. Cecil J. Sharp, indeed, in a trip through the Southern Appalachian mountains, through the states of West Virginia, Kentucky, North and South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia, found this region more profitable for the collection of old English and Scottish folk-songs than their original habitat. For in England only the old sing the songs nowadays, and they only after much persuasion, but in the southern mountains, far from the railroads, the young sing as well as the old; many of them have large repertories. Even before Cecil Sharp with his unusual scholarship undertook the chase Josephine McGill had collected folk-songs in the Kentucky mountains and Loraine Wyman and Howard Brockway had found their lonesome tunes in the same locality. Frances Densmore collected her Indian folk-songs, published by the Bureau of Ethnology, in Minnesota. Charles F. Lummis gathered a group of cowboy songs. William Francis Allen, Charles Packard Ware, Lucy McKim Garrison, E...« less