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Music

Observing and Collecting (2023; preprint)

Profile image of Jeff Todd TitonJeff Todd Titon

2025, The Cambridge Companion to Folk Music, edited by Ross Cole, estimated 2025

Abstract

Euro-American intellectuals began by thinking of folklore as relics from a pre-modern era, showing our own nostalgic anti-modernism. Paradoxically, we then subjected folklore to the information control mechanisms of modernity: identification, observation, investigation, collection, classification, analysis, comparison, interpretation, and evaluation-all in service to science, expertise, universities, and the knowledge production industry. Today, we challenge the inscription of folklore studies into the epistemology of modernity and its institutional power structures, especially in terms of its consequences for minorities and people of color. In this essay I construct a brief history of folksong observation and collecting chiefly in the United States, the region I know best. I attend to how and why the consensus among American folklorists changed over time concerning who are the folk (if not peasants, then who?), what constitutes folksong, and how folksong is to be studied and understood. [Written in 2023; at the proof stage as of July, 2025; awaiting publication later in 2025.]

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References (57)

  1. Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960.
  2. See Jeff Todd Titon, 'Reconstructing the Blues: Reflections on the 1960s Blues Revival'. In Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, edited by Neil V. Rosenberg, 220-240. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
  3. But see Arthur F. Raper, Preface to Peasantry. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1934.
  4. Dan Ben-Amos, 'Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context'. Journal of American Folklore 84, 331 (1971), 13.
  5. Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt. New York: Penguin Books, 1983, 49.
  6. Unsigned, 'On the Field and Work of a Journal of American Folk-Lore'. Journal of American Folklore I, 1 (1888): 3-7.
  7. See Cole, The Folk.
  8. See Richard Bauman, 'Toward New Perspectives in Folklore'. Special issue, Journal of American Folklore 84, 331 (1971): v-169.
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  10. Helen Roberts, 'Suggestions to Field Workers in Collecting Folk Music and Data about Instruments.' The Journal of the Polynesian Society 40, 3 (1926): 103-128.
  11. Dorothy Scarborough, On the Trail of Negro Folk Songs. Hatboro, PA: Folklore Associates, 1963 [1925], 3.
  12. See Melville Herskovits, 'Some Next Steps in the Study of Negro Folklore', Journal of American Folklore 56, 219 (1943), 1.
  13. Roger A. Abrahams, 'Foreword' to Dorothy Scarborough, On the Trail of Negro Folk Songs, i-ix. Hatboro, Pennsylvania: Folklore Associates, 1963, vi-vii.
  14. William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, Slave Songs of the United States, New York: A. Simpson & Co., 1867.
  15. J. B. T. Marsh, Story of the Jubilee Singers, with their Songs. New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1881.
  16. Howard W. Odum, 'Religious Folk Songs of the Southern Negro'. American Journal of Religious Psychology and Education III (1908-09): 263-365 and 'Folk Song and Folk Poetry as Found in the Secular Songs of the Southern Negroes'. Journal of American Folklore XXIV, 93 (1911): 255-296; 94 (1911): 351-396.
  17. These later were expanded into two books co-authored with his colleague Guy B. Johnson: The Negro and His Songs and Negro Workaday Songs.
  18. Scarborough, On the Trail.
  19. See D. K. Wilgus, Anglo-American Folk Song Scholarship Since 1898. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1959; David Evans, Tommy Johnson. London: Studio Vista, 1971; Spottswood, Ethnic Music on Records: A Discography of Ethnic Recordings Produced in the United States, 1893-1942. 7 vols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990.
  20. Comparative musicology began in Germany in the 1880s; it involved the analytical study of folk and 'primitive' (Indigenous) music all over the world.
  21. Frances Densmore, Chippewa Music. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 45, 1910.
  22. George A. Herzog, 'Study of Native Music in America,' Proceedings of the Eighth American Scientific Congress, 2 (1942): 203-209.
  23. E.g., Phillips Barry, 'Folk Music in America' Journal of American Folklore 22, 83 (1909): 72-81; Phillips Barry, Hardy Eckstorm and Mary Winslow Smyth, British Ballads from Maine. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929.
  24. Wilgus, Anglo-American.
  25. See Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009 [1983].
  26. Kodish, 'Introduction' to 'Folk-Songs of America': The Robert Winslow Gordon Collection, 1922-1932, ed. Neil V. Rosenberg and Debora G. Kodish. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1978, 3.
  27. John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, American Ballads and Folk Songs. New York: Macmillan, 1934.
  28. Abrahams, 'Mr. Lomax and Mr. Kittredge', 108-112.
  29. Nevertheless, many women collectors who were contemporaries of Gordon and the Lomaxes, women such as Dorothy Scarborough, Helen H. Roberts, and Frances Densmore, gave the lie to this stereotype, traveling and collecting music in conditions as difficult, if not more so, than those that Gordon and the Lomaxes encountered.
  30. Mark A. Davidson, 'Recording the Nation: Folk Music and the Government in Roosevelt's New Deal.' Dissertation, University of California at Santa Cruz, 2015.
  31. See Marybeth Hamilton, In Search of the Blues. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.
  32. Kenneth S. Goldstein, A Guide for Field Workers. Hatboro, Pennsylvania: Folklore Associates, 1964, 6.
  33. Wilgus, Anglo-American, 156-167.
  34. Bruno Nettl, Study of Ethnomusicology. New York: The Free Press, 1964, 7.
  35. Bruno Nettl, Nettl's Elephant: On the History of Ethnomusicology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010, 143.
  36. Alan Lomax, John M. Bishop, and Worth W. Long, The Land Where the Blues Began. 1-hour, color documentary film, 1979. www.folkstreams.net/films/ land-where-the-blues-began
  37. Barry Dornfeld, Jeff Todd Titon, and Tom Rankin, Powerhouse for God. 58- minute, 16 mm, color documentary film. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources, 1989, and www.folkstreams.net.
  38. Goldstein, A Guide, 6.
  39. See James P. Spradley and David McCurdy, The Cultural Experience: Ethnography in Complex Society. Chicago: Science Research Associates, 1971, and James P. Spradley, The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979.
  40. Clifford Geertz, 'Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.' In Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 310-323. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
  41. Marcia Herndon and Norma McLeod, Field Manual for Ethnomusicology. Norwood, MA: Norwood Editions, 1983, 72-7
  42. Bruce Jackson, Fieldwork. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987, 66.
  43. Jackson, Fieldwork, 65.
  44. Such as Henry H. Glassie, Passing the Time in Ballymenone: Culture and History of an Ulster Community. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.
  45. Jennifer Post, Mary Russell Bucknum, and Laurel Sercombe, A Manual for Documentation Fieldwork & Preservation for Ethnomusicologists. Bloomington, IN: Society for Ethnomusicology, 1994, 7.
  46. Kip Lornell, Introducing American Folk Music. Madison, WI: Brown & Benchmark, 1993, 10.
  47. Peter Bartis, Folklife and Fieldwork: A Layman's Introduction to Field Techniques. Revised and expanded edition. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1990 [1979].
  48. Bartis, Folklife, 23.
  49. Robert Baron and Nicholas R. Spitzer, Public Folklore. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute, 1992.
  50. See Burt Feintuch, The Conservation of Culture: Folklorists and the Public Sector. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988; Mary Hufford, Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994; Jeff Todd Titon, 'Music and Sustainability: An Ecological Viewpoint'. The World of Music 51, 1 (2009): 119-137; and Cooley, Cultural Sustainabilities.
  51. Titon, Powerhouse for God.
  52. Luke Eric Lassiter, The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
  53. Aaron S. Allen and Kevin Dawe, Current Directions in Ecomusicology. New York: Routledge, 2016.
  54. Jeff Todd Titon, 'Knowing Fieldwork', in Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, edited by Timothy J. Cooley and Gregory F. Barz, 87-100. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, 87.
  55. Timothy J. Cooley and Gregory F. Barz, Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, 4; see also Titon, 'Knowing Fieldwork', 93-7.
  56. See Gerald Davis, 'I've Got the Word Within Me and I Can Sing It, You Know': A Study of the Performed African-American Sermon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987, and Mellonnee Burnim, 'Culture Bearer and Tradition Bearer: An Ethnomusicologist's Research on Black Gospel Music.' Ethnomusicology 29, 3 (1985): 432-447.
  57. Lisa Gilman and John Fenn, Handbook for Folklore and Ethnomusicology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019.

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