As the jazz age spiraled into the Depression years and a renewed focus on the situation of the “common man (and woman)” emerged, songbooks like Carl Sandburg's The American Songbag and my father and brother's American Ballads and Folk Songs began to appear alongside the familiar hymnals, opera chorus excerpts, and the popular song collections of Gilbert and Sullivan, Berlin, and Gershwin. The typical songbook of the period included lyrics, an outline of the tune in musical notation together with full piano accompaniment, and occasionally guitar chords. The idea was to gather around the piano and sing the songs en famille, and I remember when everybody I knew used to do just that on Sunday afternoons.

The folk music collections contained a potpourri of Appalachian ballads, sea chanteys, African American spirituals, blues, and work songs, and now and then a Spanish dance tune and miscellaneous city song. While transcriptions of basic melody lines and harmonic accompaniments proved invaluable for us Sunday crooners who wished to sing the songs ourselves, the increasing popularization of the recording machine in the 1930s inevitably led to a teasing problem. What bits of the tunes got written down hardly ever really sounded like what you could hear with your own ears when you finally listened to the field recordings as performed by the original singers. And sometimes the written music seemed a pale reflection, or even a totally different version, of what was coming out of that Victrola horn.

Composer Ruth Crawford Seeger was one of the first Americans to grapple with this problem in a serious and systematic fashion. Her marvelously descriptive musical introduction to the 1941 collection Our Singing Country is an early and admirable attempt by a classically trained musician to figure out how to cope with other peoples’ musical languages. The book itself was composed of songs gleaned from the original recordings of black and white singers made by my father and brother while they crisscrossed the southern states during the 1930s. For me it has always been my family's purest, most creative work, and they themselves wanted very much to make it available.