An Alabama Songbook: Ballads, Folksongs, and Spirituals Collected by Byron Arnold (review)

In 1950, Byron Arnold published a collection of 153 songs entitled Folksongs of Alabama (University of Alabama Press). Based on only one six-week summer expedition, it was nevertheless a remarkable publication. Arnold divided his book into a large section of general folksongs and a smaller section of spirituals. Within each section, however, the book was organized by region—northern, black belt, southern—and then by singer. For a number of the singers there is a one-page essay, each with a small photograph, interview extracts, and information about the singer's experience with music and song. While there is much that is not in the book—blues and white sacred music, for instance—some remarkable material is included, such as information about parlor songs and other types of music that, while not folk-songs in the usual sense of the word, seemed in the opinion of Arnold to operate as part of the folklife of the community. Arnold collected over 250 songs in that first summer, writing each one down by hand. This experience showed him how important it was to make audio recordings, and he subsequently set about obtaining equipment. By the time he left his position at the University of Alabama for a teaching job and further graduate work in California, the collection had grown to about a thousand recordings of traditional song.

Robert W. Halli has returned to the Arnold collection for An Alabama Songbook. He has included over two hundred songs, divided into three roughly equal sections: ballads, (other) folksongs, and spirituals. Because he wished to represent the whole surviving collection with its much wider array of genres, he abandoned the organization by singers. Appendix A, however, retains the biographical essays from Arnold's volume, and the index of names enables the reader to reassemble a singer's repertoire, insofar as it is included. The introduction covers the history of the collection and the range of its content. There, Halli pays tribute to Arnold's fieldwork and to the accuracy of his transcriptions but points out that there are sometimes textual errors or oversights in the 1950 printed versions.

At first, I thought that this was but another conventional state or regional song collection, but I soon realized that Halli had approached his task with discernment and imagination. The first chapter in part 2 ("Folksongs," a chapter devoted to the songs of the Civil War) includes the relatively rare "Old Abe's Elected" and "The Soldier's Fare," as well as a unique minstrel survival, "Before This War Broke Out." Another chapter lines up five very different offspring of the "On Top of Old Smoky" song family. The chapter of railroad work songs includes material often overlooked. Four chapters focus on children's songs. In one such chapter, a version of the game song "Three Dukes a Riding" changes the dukes to hog drovers, but they reappear as dukes in another version. Two further chapters consist of material that would especially appeal to children. Vaudeville and parlor songs round out several chapters, to give the full flavor of certain types of song as they were sung in those contexts.

Part 1, "Ballads," includes a unique "Barbara Allen" (Child 84) and a textually unusual "Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight" (Child 4). It also includes songs rare in the American tradition, including "Old Robin Gray" ("Auld Robin Grey") and "Logan O. Bucken" ("Logan o' Buchan"). In this section, too, a sprinkling of vaudeville and parlor ballads confirms that Alabama folk after World War II had a taste for a wide range of narrative songs.

Songs from both African American and European American traditions appear in all three parts of the volume. As is to be expected, for some of the songs from the black tradition, the source of the song is a white person who learned the...