I spent much of today reading through Carl Sandburg’s landmark 1927 folk song collection American Songbag,  all 500-plus-pages of it. It’s not the first time I’ve looked into the book, and indeed I’ve paged through it or jumped to songs I was interested in before. But next month I’m planning a trip to Sandburg’s boyhood home in Illinois and to Iowa City where I will be taking a look at some papers relating to early 20^th century poet and professor Edwin Ford Piper who was one of the sources of folk song material used in Sanburg’s anthology.*  So, looking at the book in full seemed a good grounding for this trip.

I’ve made the case before here, such as this post from a year ago, that besides being a somewhat deemphasized Modernist poet these days, Sandburg is a primary model for the American Folk Music Revival, which eventually produced in the second half of the 20^th century several genres of popular and semi-popular music.**  Here’s the matrix that Sandburg built in the 1920s, a hundred years ago:

• American folk music can be appreciated like art music
• It will be associated with literary poetry
• It expresses, or can be adapted to express or accompany, progressive/left-wing causes
• It’s multi-ethnic, and the contribution of Afro-Americans will be substantially acknowledged
• Humor and funny stories will be part of its presentation

Sandburg was including segments of folk music performance as part of poetry readings before American Songbag.  AFAIK we don’t have any transcripts or recordings from that era, but all these things are demonstrated for the record in the 1927 book. Sandburg is not the only American doing any of these things a hundred years ago, but he’s doing all of them at once,  and he’s doing it with a degree of fame and cultural acclaim that was significant.

I was aided in my rapid march through American Songbag  by already knowing many of the songs it contains, and as I encountered them I remembered hearing them in my half of the 20^th century performed by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and many of those other “folk singers” that surrounded them.***  The Sing Out magazine and Jerry Silverman folk songbooks of the Sixties that are my foundation, are successors to Sandburg’s work, right down to the touch of  using vintage B&W line drawings as interspersed decorations.

Sandburg often includes little stories about the collector (Piper was one of a group who collected the songs “in the field” for Songbag)  and for those he collected himself he says a few words about how, where, and with whom he first heard the song. Here’s one of the most engaging of those stories I came upon today in the book:

Once when the night was wild without and the wintry winds piled snowdrifts around the traffic signals on Cottage Grove Avenue, Chicago, we sat with Robert Frost and Padraic Colum. The Gael had favored with Irish ballads of murder, robbery, passion. And Frost offered a sailorman song he learned as a boy on the wharves of San Francisco.

The song Frost sang for Colum and Sandburg? A subtle wry ballad of farming? A nuanced lyric of nature cooly observed? No, it was this one. Some will know it from its latter association with the Assassin’s Creed video game franchise:

.

*Besides the folks songs Piper contributes, Sandburg even quotes a part of a poem from his contemporary Piper’s Barb Wire  poetry collection in Songbag.

**Besides the Folk Scare of the 50s and 60s, the American “Rock Music” that extended Rock’n’Roll to FM radio, college campuses, and rock critics was generally formed from folks who had connections with the just preceding folk revival. Modern Americana and roots music links to the same strains and connections that Sandburg was personifying 100 years ago.

***Guthrie composed music for Sanburg poems later. Ruth Crawford Seeger (Pete’s step-mom, Mike and Peggy Seeger’s birth mother) was one of the composers who created harmonized music for the folk songs in Songbag,  and she also set Sandburg’s page poems to music. When the young Bob Dylan started to expand the poeticism of his song lyrics, he decided to pay a visit to Sandburg, briefly meeting him unannounced in North Carolina at Sandburg’s farm. Other folk luminaries connected? At least a couple songs collected from Leadbelly by John Lomax are included in Songbag.  Lomax is credited, but Leadbelly isn’t, though Leadbelly’s more general public career hadn’t yet started. Let me just say that Lomax’s relationship with Leadbelly is complicated. Just this month I was reading a recollection of a performance by Spider John Koerner (who first performed in the mid-century Minneapolis folk music scene along with Dylan) where he told a humorous story about a farmer who fed his pig by lifting him up to the branches of an apple tree. That’s a story Sandburg also told. I’ll also note that when I came upon several songs in Songbag,  the rendition I recalled from the Folk Scare of the mid-century was by Dave Van Ronk, a wonderful performer and a mentor to Dylan when he arrived in New York.